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Alex Greene

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  2. Alex Greene

    Mysteries

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    Mystery novels are among the most popular genre of literature. TV dramas, police procedural series, and true crime documentaries follow the exploits of investigators as they track down the criminals behind shocking and fiendish murders. Yet how do you run a mystery in a Mythras game?
    Running Mysteries
    Mysteries in tabletop roleplaying games involve asking questions, observing scenes for clues, deduction, and finally identifying a culprit to bring them to some form of justice. Presenting a mystery to a gaming group which is used to a more simplistic hack'n'slash, arcade style of adventure, however, can be difficult. Some players might jump at the chance to play a sleuth, even an amateur one, while others might sit back, utterly bored that their Barbarian with his grand massive two-handed battleaxe has no enemies to behead.
    Some games, such as GUMSHOE, focus entirely on investigations. In contrast, the Mythras Core Rulebook has less than a page to discuss the matter. Page 282 of the Core Rulebook has this to say.
    Some scenarios rely more on research, mystery, intrigue, and detective work than on the use of the weapons.
    It also adds:-
    The most vital aspect of well designed scenarios is that they have alternate means of reaching their conclusion. A scenario, especially one centred upon investigation, should never come to a juddering halt if a crucial clue is not discovered.
    It is important to the flow of the game to let the Adventurers acquire evidence during the course of a mystery investigation, to forestall the bane of all investigative scenarios - boredom.
    Start With The Crime
    When preparing the mystery, always begin with the crime which draws in the Adventurers. Most likely, it's a murder, but there are many different kinds of crimes:-
    Apparent Accident - An accident which is not what it seems. A body has fallen from the top of a tall tower. Did they jump? Were they pushed?
    Apparent Suicide - The body looks as if they ended their own life. Or did they?
    Robbery - Mysterious masked thugs beat up an Adventurer, or a friend, and make off with something they were carrying. What was so important about that item they were carrying? Why was the criminal desperate to take it? Or was it a random attack?
    Theft - The prototype, magic item, or MacGuffin has been taken right from under the Adventurers' nose! Where is it now? Who took it, and why? Also, how can they get it back?
    Abduction - Someone has been taken - spirited away. Can they find and rescue this person before the crime becomes murder and the mission one of recovery?
    Blackmail / Extortion - Some unknown person is threatening dire consequences for someone if their demands are not met. What terrible evidence do they hold? What secret are they threatening to expose?
    Assault - Nothing has been stolen. The miscreant just wanted to beat up the victim, either as a deterrent or warning, or simply because the victim was in their way.
    Make Someone The Characters Have Met A Victim
    Don't just have the Adventurers roped into investigating a crime committed to Lord Edgecase, someone unknown to them. Make Lord Edgecase someone they know - either as an Ally, Enemy, Rival, or Contact, or as a friend of the family, or some other connection common to all of the Adventurers' backgrounds. Perhaps they all bumped into the victim at some point in their lives - either as a ruthless foe, or a close family friend, or a kindly stranger, or even someone who robbed them five years ago.
    Your investigators could prick up their ears and pay attention if they recognise the name as a recurring figure in their game: particularly if they are confronted with that person's murder.
    What's At Stake
    What is usually at stake with an investigation? The Adventurers might not have any kind of stake in working out whodunit. It won't matter to them if Rando A killed Rando B, if they knew neither of the Randos.
    Rope Them In - The Adventurers are deputised and assigned the job of investigating. At stake is their reputation for closing cases and catching bad guys.
    Thicker Than Water - The Adventurers are pushed into investigating by a visiting dignitary, or the head of their family, or the boss of the department they work for. The victim was one of their own.
    Reputation - The Adventurers have been taunted by the perpetrator. Or a Rival has taken on the case, and the race is on to prove whose mettle is stronger.
    Wrong Place, Wrong Time - The Adventurers stumble upon the crime in progress, or its immediate aftermath. They turn out to be "Johnny-on-the-Spot," and as the first responders, it is now their case.
    Prepping the Suspects
    Assuming you want the Adventurers to achieve victory through sleuthing rather than a swift arrow to the fleeing miscreant's back, you will need to keep the identity of the suspect hidden until they are revealed through the Adventurers' keen powers of observation.
    The best way to hide a suspect is among a host of other suspects. That means creating a list of possible prime suspects, and possible ordinary suspects, not to mention one or two red herrings. This is important, because the Adventurers' job will be to reduce that suspect list to just one - the actual perpetrator (or group of perpetrators).
    Means
    The means is the how - the method of killing. Stabbing, strangulation, poison, a shove off a cliff, blunt force trauma to the back of the head.
    Major hint: Don't make the answer magic, or psionics, or the spirits, or Cthulhu. Even if you are running a fantasy milieu where a sorcerer villain is known to use a damaging spell such as Smother, or some spell to summon an elemental or deadly spirit, make it clear that the bad guy in this case used ordinary, mundane methods to kill - sword, dagger, bullet, poisoned chalice, garotte, fire, and so on.
    This is murder, not fantasy combat or arcade game slaughter. The purpose of this scenario is to find the tangible, real clues left at the scene which point the finger of guilt to the perpetrator.
    Motive
    Just as important to the scenario is motive. This answers the question of why the perpetrator committed the crime in the first place.
    Think of a motivation. Greed, jealousy, hatred, rage - these are four compelling reasons to drive someone to crime. Ignorance, bigotry, fear, and vengeance are four more.
    Vanity is one of the worst, because few things are worse than a monster who acts out of the mistaken belief that God is on his side and everything he does is right by his God. The vain will never confess, because they will justify their misdeeds as righteous. The only way to stop such criminals is to catch them in the lie and let them commit a fatal error such as blurting out something incriminating.
    Don't Go for The Insanity Plea
    Don't go for "possession" or some form of insanity as the motivation. Harnworld has a kind of spirit entity called the Umbathri, which are said to drive people to distraction from just looking at them. Don't use "The Devil made me do it" or "I was mind controlled by a witch's spell" as motivation to kill. Don't use mental illness, not even sociopathy.
    Oh, and please do not use "I have multiple personality disorder and it was my evil alter ego, The Beast, wot done it" as your motive either. Dissociative Identity Disorder is a real thing, and while some people's alters can be scary, the scary personas are only scary to the sufferers. They're as likely to take up knitting as try to murder people.
    And for the record, "schizophrenia" is not a motivation either. In fact, get into the DSM-5 before even coming close to understanding insanity. The insane commit fewer crimes to others than sane people driven by cognitive malice. Don't go down the road of trying to make the bad guy nuts.
    Opportunity
    This is the what, where and when. The opportunity is the key element. Who does not have an alibi for the time the crime was committed? Who was absent from the room when it occurred? Who was present, and trying to stay hidden?
    Who was doing what when the lights went out, or the big distraction occurred out at the back? Do the Adventurers realise that it was a distraction to start with, or do the clues reveal this fact in the course of the investigation? Who staged the scene? Who is framing the innocent patsy?
    If you have the means, and you know everybody's motive, the opportunity is the big chance for the Adventurers to lock down which suspect out of the whole list is the perpetrator, because they are the only ones who could not be accounted for at all once all the evidence collecting is done.
    Tangled Webs
    The trail does not have to run smoothly from the victim straight to the perpetrator. Nor does it have to be so cut-and-dried as having the apparent perpetrator trying to leave a house, clutching a bloody murder weapon in their hand or holding the magic MacGuffin which was supposedly snatched away from under everybody's noses.
    People Lie - People lie all the time. Sometimes, they lie because they hate the cops, or the Adventurers if they are the closest thing to a legal authority in the area. Sometimes, they lie because they are covering for someone whom they suspect to be the criminal, or because they just love being obtuse, or because they know exactly who the criminal is and they want to extort cash or favours from the perps some time down the road.
    People Conceal - As much as they lie to cover up the crimes of others, or out of spite against the law and those who investigate crime, people also like to hide the evidence, or even throw it away or destroy it. Sometimes, the passer-by who sees a body on the ground will steal the dead person's stuff first, and later alert the authorities.
    Trails Get Washed Away - The best Track skill can be made less than useless by rain, snow, or time. Trace evidence, tell-tale blood stains, and dead bodies all get worn down by time and predation, to the point where one can only identify someone by their skull, teeth, or items found near the body.
    Prepping Clues
    In order to lead the Adventurers to the villains, patsies, and red herrings involved in the case, you will need to prepare clues for them to follow, and to gather as evidence to build their case.
    Failed Checks
    The biggest bugbear is that the Adventurers roll a cataclysmic fumble on a Perception check, and completely miss the dagger protruding from Lord Edgecase's back. What do you do if each and every single Perception and Insight check the Players ever make is a fumble?
    Multiple Clues - Have multiple clues lying around to tell the Adventurers the same thing. If they miss the Post-It note bearing the time and place of a rendezvous at the scene of the crime, then let them find the same note in an email dumped from the victim's phone, or written on a body's skin. Wherever they find that clue, it automatically vanishes from all other places you might leave it - if a phone number is written on the back of a dead girl's hand, you can safely disappear the "just in case" entry in her undiscovered diary.
    Significance - The result of the Perception or Insight check determines how much significance the evidence has. If the Adventurers make a critical Perception check and discover a theatre ticket, you can decide that this is a clue that cracks the case wide open, because it puts the suspect in the theatre at the time of the murder, clearing them entirely of blame, unless  they sneaked out the back ...
    Conversely, if the check was a fumble, they might come away with a clue, but absolutely no idea as to its significance in the investigation. Is it crucial? Incriminating? Exculpatory? A red herring? As Games Master, you don't have to decide right away if it even means anything, until the Adventurers start to piece the clues together.
    Plain Sight - Any clues which are in plain sight can be discovered by the Adventurers. No checks are necessary to discover a murder weapon sticking out of Lord Edgecase's back, or the letter he wrote on his desk, or the smoking gun on the floor, or whatever is on top of the rubbish in the bin. If it's in plain sight, automatically give the clues to the Adventurers. Worry about their significance later.
    Piecing Clues Together - Insight checks might give the Adventurers a chance to work out the motive, and even the opportunity. Perception checks are essential for working out the means, as well as discovering hidden or concealed evidence, secret passages, hidden money, weapon, or drug stashes, and so on. And the Adventurers might be as clueless as mediaeval peasants or as clued-in as modern day CSIs with access to the latest laboratory equipment. But in the end, there is no check or Luck Point expenditure which can replace the Players' brain power. The job of deducing who the criminal is can only truly be done by the Players, thinking things through. The clues are hints, but it's up to the Players to see who the hints are pointing to.
    Confronting The Perpetrator
    The last part of any investigation involves confronting the perpetrator. Sometimes, this can be done simply by inviting all the suspects to turn up so the Adventurers can reveal who they think the perp is. The one who fails to turn up is the one the cops go and chase down.
    Case closed.
    Well, not quite that simple ...
    There are a number of different kinds of endgame confrontation scenes to consider.
    The Sherlock Holmes Ending - Where the Adventurer explains what all the physical clues mean to the startled police officer - the burnt match, the scratches on the door frame, the blood stain on the carpet, the words OH CRA- written in blood on the wall.
    The Poirot Ending - Where the Adventurers bring all the suspects together in a room and go through them all, until they expose the killer or criminal.
    The Scooby-Doo Ending - Where the killer's mask is pulled off, and they discover that the bad guy is, in fact, Walter Kovacs aka Rorschach.
    The Jessica Fletcher Ending - Where the Adventurer stages a scene which draws in the killer, by presenting them with an impossible situation which they can only resolve by coming to a scene which turns out to be a trap.
    The Law & Order Ending - The one where they barge into a meeting, or exhibition, and slap the cuffs on the suspect, hauling him or her out of the room to the stares of astonished onlookers.
    The Goren Ending - The ending preferred by Detective Goren from Law & Order: Criminal Intent, where they work out the bad guy's psychology and work at it until they break and confess, or slip and reveal something incriminating which damns them.
    The Columbo Ending - "And just one more thing, sir."
    The Taggart Ending - Where the Adventurers work out who the bad guy is, but so too have the local constabulary, and they turn up in a huge blue wave to apprehend the suspect halfway across town.
    Or you could have the Adventurers come at the final confrontation in a manner to which they have become accustomed - barging into a room, guns drawn and blazing.
    However they come to their grim conclusions, don't skimp on the closing confrontation. They would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for those meddling Adventurers.
  3. Alex Greene

    Making A Scene

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    Scenes are the building blocks of adventures. Scenes are exercises in set design, casting, and props. The act of assembling scenes together allows the Games Master to create something for the Players to enjoy at the gaming table.
    This week, we look at scenes, and how to use (and reuse) them creatively to provide endless variety in your gaming sessions.
    Sources
    I'll be referring to Plot Points Publishing's book, Encounter Theory, and also to Mutant Chiron Games' Republic. There are links to these titles at the bottom of the post.
    The Purpose of Scenes
    The point of scenes is to stage events which move the adventure forwards. Encounter Theory points out that scenes serve two basic purposes: the characters interact with the setting in some way (e.g. the environment, an object, a door), or they interact with a being in some way (any type of non-player character).
    Any other type of scene where the characters are interacting with neither the setting nor other beings in any way (such as a narrative scene where the Games Master is just describing something going on, and the characters are spectating), is a literally useless waste of time, and it can be dropped without it affecting the course of the adventure in any form.
    As Encounter Theory puts it,
    Everything is an interaction with the setting, or an interaction with another character ... the encounter, the unit of game during which these interactions occur, should be the centre of the adventure-designer's design.
    Where Design Meets Play
    Encounters are where design meets play. Every encounter - every scene - presents an opportunity for the Adventurers to do something meaningful, either to advance their own stories or to advance the plot of the current adventure.
    Four Principles
    Encounter Theory presents four Principles of Encounter Design: "Face The Player And Free The Player," "Present Problems, Not Solutions," "Use The Dungeon As Adventure Structure", and "Give Playable, Specific, Sensory, and Short Description".
    Face The Player And Free The Player
    The Players are the audience for this medium. Scenes should have something for the Players to give their Adventurers to do. Whether it be negotiating with a stranger to persuade them to enter an alliance or provide truthful intel; solving a puzzle lock; avoiding a trap; fighting a dagger-wielding foe; or summoning an allied spirit; each scene is about offering the Players something to satisfy them.
    You must only put something into the adventure that the Adventurers can discover, bump into, fight, and so on. If the scene is anything like Yaskoydray's legendary Eternal Monologue scene from the Classic Traveller scenario Secret of The Ancients, where the First Ancient turns up and monologues at the Travellers ... you should replace the scene with something else, such as the Travellers discovering something like stone slabs which allow the Travellers the chance to discover the story for themselves.
    Present Problems, Not Solutions
    Conflicts in a scene, whether they are with the setting or with encountered beings, should give the Adventurers situations which they can solve, using the skills and other resources they have to hand. Let the Players come up with their solutions, and run with them. An example: On their way through a forest road on horseback, escorting a wagon pulled by a mule, the Adventurers encounter a gang of thieves, who've felled a tree across the road. They defeat the rabble easily, but how to move the tree? It's up to the Players to realise that they all have Brawn skill, and they also have a very strong mule ...
    Oh ... the problems should be soluble. Do not create a Tomb of Horrors, or Kobayashi Maru. Your goal, as Games Master, is to enable the Players by enabling the Adventurers. It used to be the custom for Games Masters, or rather Dungeon Masters, to be fiendish, and present the Players with problems designed to be impossible to solve. That is not the custom now. Your job is to give the Players a great, and memorable, game, not cheat them with a total party kill out of nowhere, or bore them to tears with a twenty minute Yaskoydray monologue.
    Use The Dungeon As Adventure Structure
    I have a personal dislike of the word dungeon to describe the background of a setting. There are so many different kinds of sets you can use - tombs, crypts, halls, loggias, tunnels, T-junctions, stairways, bridges, piazzas, streets, parks, shorelines, rooftops, wood-bordered gardens, library reading rooms, laboratories with a stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling ...
    However, this principle is sound. The things and beings available in the scene should be there for the Adventurers to enjoy interacting with. How they interact is not entirely up to the Games Master. They could be meeting by moonlight, in a semi-secluded, partially-enclosed, corner of the garden bounded by a clematis-strewn trellis curving overhead, and an open space with a bench ... but what the Adventurers do when the Non-Player Character shows up is up to the Players, as long as it is fun.
    The purpose of the scene is to interact with the Adventurers, and have them interact with the scene / set / props / beings. A scene which just has three non-player characters talking with one another is probably best cut out and replaced with something where the focus is on the Adventurers instead.
    Give Playable, Specific, Sensory, and Short Description
    Keep your descriptions to the point. Also, keep the descriptions limited to the things, backgrounds, props, and beings with which the Adventurers can interact. If they can't chat with the guards, or try the door to see if it locked, or draw over the sleeping guard's face with a Sharpie, probably leave those out.
    This goes for anything which requires there to be a prop, or a specific skill, or a particular spell or magic item, or advanced tool. If you need it to solve the problem, or if it's going to cause a problem in the adventure, introduce it somewhere else or make sure to include it in the scene's description.
    Chekov's Gun is a thing for a reason.
    Theatre Terms
    A good way to think of how to describe the elements of scenes is to use the terms of the theatre - sets, props, and actors.
    Sets
    The sets are the places where the action happens, whether the action is a negotiation, or introducing a new element or being, or a straightforward combat. The nature of the set is important: a steel-walled enclosed room filling with water is going to involve a lot more problem solving and maybe checks of Brawn, Endurance, Swim, Engineering, Perception, or Mechanisms (and maybe even Luck Points spent) and not so much Customs or Seduction checks. And a scene set in an oak-panelled gentlemen's club, full of very old, very rich men sitting in upholstered armchairs is much more likely to involve quiet negotiations (Influence checks, not Oratory or, Gods forbid, Sing).
    Props
    The props are important tools and resources which the Adventurers can bring into play. A book of magic spells must have the correct spell for the Adventurers to chant out loud; a door lock must be opened with an actual key, or failing that an Adventurer's lockpick set. If an adventure involved possessing, say, a magic wand, then the Adventurer wielding that magic wand must get to use it at some time during the adventure - and it must work: say, a Wand of Flesh to Stone with a little carving of Medusa's head at the tip should work perfectly against the monstrous foe at the end of the adventure, even if it does expend all its remaining charges and break up into dust after one last discharge. The point being, the tool is there to facilitate the Adventurer's action.
    Actors
    These are the beings (people, non-human people, animals, AI, androids, holograms, spirits) with whom the Adventurers must interact. If there is a guard, she must challenge the Adventurer, to allow the Adventurer to use their Influence, or Insight, or Acting / Disguise, or magic, or Seduction checks.
    Again, bring in actors to allow the Adventurers someone to interact with in some way. Do not bring in actors with whom the Adventurers cannot interact; and don't leave out actors which must specifically be there for the Adventurers to interact with, such as, oh, using Influence on the guard (and possibly a hefty bribe) to get her to unlock the exit to allow the Adventurers through. In order to open the door, either the team's lockpick must have their lockpicking kit, or the guard with the key must be there.
    Putting Scenes Together
    What structure do you use for your scenes? This is a matter of personal taste. Games Masters have struggled with this since the first adventure modules sprang into being. Unlike writing or music, game scenes don't have to follow a linear path. As long as they do follow some sort of pattern, the Players can make decisions of what their Adventurers do, and create branch points at random linking one another in some weird pattern.
    Linear
    The simplest form of connective tissue - a scenario which goes from Scene 1 to Scenes 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ...
    Never satisfying, because it just leads the Adventurers down the line from one box to the next, by the nose. Also known as railroading.
    Stochastic
    Also known as Drunkard's Walk and sandbox, essentially the Players decide what their Adventurers do, and the Games Master makes up stuff on the spot to keep the momentum going.
    Matryoshka
    Named after the Russian nested dolls. Resolving the problem in the outer scenario unlocks the portal to the next tunnel, which unlocks the next, and so on. Each new level unlocks a new surprise, a new secret, a new depth to the story. Like unlocking levels of trance recursively, you just go deeper and deeper.
    Improv Theatre
    We've covered improv before. Here, improv is about the Games Master keeping a whole "prop room" and/or "set room" in the background, basically a collection of items and places in a journal, and inserting them with some moderately-tweaked attributes here and there into play. The Adventurers open the double doors of the crypt, possibly smelling fresh air through the keyhole, and find themselves in an open air garden, with a set which looks familiar (corner of the garden, trellis climbing overhead, partial enclosure) but which has been tweaked (no bench in the middle, no clematis) and which contains a prop - a scroll case containing a scroll and a little note, "Cast this spell next time you meet the Duke - he is not who he appears").
    Kinds Of Scenes
    Scenes, or encounters, are meant to break down the scenario into manageable chunks. Those chunks are there so your Players can run their Adventurers through the game, sampling and enjoying the delights of their game.
    Each scene has a point to it, whether it is introducing a new thing, or something the Adventurers do. Modularity is your friend. Reuse and recycle everything.
    Planning
    Start with a planning scene. Let the players make plans and pick a direction for the story. If a story stalls, planning scenes can allow the Players to take stock and regroup.
    Social
    These kinds of scenes allow the Adventurers to interact with NPCs meaningfully, so the characters can advance their agenda.
    Investigation
    Knowledge is power. By learning whatever the can about about their opponents, and developing their understanding of the current issues, the players can make changes in the direction the story takes. Investigation scenes are for learning new things, and exposing secrets.
    Action
    The Adventurers are up against some sort of immediate conflict, and there is little time to debate when there is something physical to be done, whether it be moving a corpse or trying to turn your opponent into one.
    Antagonist Reaction
    Whoever is opposing the Adventurers' agenda strikes here, requiring the Adventurers to respond to the challenge.
    Leverage
    This is an action taken by the Adventurers to get power or influence over something, which then enables you to get what you’re really after.
    Consequences
    What political ability a character uses determines how they get their way, but it can also have unintended consequences.
    Resolution
    In these scenes at the end, everything comes together.
    Closing Thought
    Scene design and structuring is very much like designing and writing a play. You describe sets, props, and actors. And like a theatrical play, all the words in the world are meaningless unless you get together to make the sets, props, and costumes, and to allow the players to read at least some of the script.
    Unlike the theatre, however, the audience and the actors are one and the same. It's like a script - the readthrough is nowhere near as satisfying as the finished performance. And for the Players, that means getting their hands dirty, via their Adventurers putting their lives on the line to make a difference to the world the Players are playing in - which is the world you are running for them.
    But if you keep thinking of each encounter, each scene, in terms of the Adventurers doing something in each one, either with whatever they encounter in the scene or with the scene itself, then you'll be able to provide the Players with keenly-remembered, well-structured adventures and stories, even if you are literally throwing the scenarios together on the spot.
    Links
    Encounter Theory can be found here. Republic can be found here.
  4. Alex Greene
    Mythras Core Rulebook has a resource on page 111 for Games Masters - Rabble, and Underlings. These are a great tool to fill a crowd scene with a "cast of thousands." 
    What Are Rabble And Underlings?
    Neither Rabble nor Underlings need much character generation. The Mythras Core Rulebook has the following to say about Rabble:-
    Rabble are foes who intimidate by their numbers but in actual fact have little prowess or willingness to remain in combat once blood is shed. They can take many forms from vicious beggars who set upon drunken characters when they stumble home from the tavern along dark alleyways; or the mindless adherents of a dark cult – eager yet incompetent.
    And this is what the Core Rulebook has to say about Underlings.
    Underlings are competent foes usually sent en-masse to harass Adventurers: thuggish bodyguards irregular troops in the opening stages of a battle, for example. Despite not being tracked as full characters, underlings can prove deadly if they catch their targets unprepared.
    Both are useful tools to pack a combat scene and to give the Adventurers something to hit. However, they are useful to Games Masters in plenty of other ways.
    Quick and Dirty Allies and Contacts
    An Ally (page 22, Mythras) is:-
    a friend, colleague or relation who shares the same cause as the character and will offer help and guidance when called upon. Depending on their personality the Ally may want a favour in return or might provide aid for free.
    Contacts (also page 22) are:-
    people of potential influence the character knows. A Contact is an acquaintance who can help, not one who will.
    There is nothing that says that the Games Master has to generate a full character profile for each and every Ally and Contact. They only need to flesh out enough to provide the service the Ally or Contact can offer to the frtiendly Adventurer - a Skill which the Adventurer does not have (such as Bureaucracy or a specific Lore), a resource such as a mob or a faction artefact, inside information about a faction, or assistance (such as opening the back door of a workplace of a guild which the Adventurers wish to infiltrate).
    Contacts need more persuading, and more upfront incentives, than Allies. A Contact may not necessarily believe in the Adventurers' cause, or be motivated to assist. They can, however, possibly be bought, bribed, influenced with incentives, plied with strong drink or expensive food, or taken out on dates if necessary to get them to help.
    Whatever the means of influence, however significant the efforts to get them to offer aid, Contacts can be treated the same as Allies - give them just enough stats to get the job done that your Adventurers hire them for.
    Instant Ship's Crew
    Suppose your Adventurers need to board a pirate ship filled with armed, dangerous, lowlife scum. Here you are. Have at them. Stat up their Move, Action Points, Hit Points, Initiative, and a Combat Style with a percentage. See below.
    Instant Backup / Rowdies
    Rabble and Underlings can be hazardous to Adventurers, except in one circumstamce - when they are on your side.
    There is a great delight in being able to call a mob to your aid, and have them suddenly appear as a great wall of people over the crest of a hill behind you.
    Acolytes and Congregants
    A ready source of Magic Points for Tap spells, Enslave, or to draw upon donated Devotional Magic Points (Mythras, page 180). Theists, in particular, can call upon a suitably large congregation for their Devotional Magic Points to power a Theist Miracle such as Behold, Propitiation, Consecrate and so on. Only a few Magic Points are needed, and each congregant need only donate one Devotional Magic Point; the rest probably go to feed the deity.
    Service Personnel
    This is probably where Rabble and Underlings come into their own - whenever the Adventurers need to speak with a bureaucrat, buy something from a shop, or generally pay for someone's services on a regular basis to the extent that they get to know the service provider's name, generate these minor recurring support characters as Rabble or Underlings.
    Household Staff
    For Adventurers who lack the subtle skills needed to run a household, anything from Mechanics and Engineering to Bureaucracy and Commerce, household staff are just the thing. Give each staff member a name, a smattering of personal details, and a decent level in a relevant skill or two (such as Craft (Cooking), Bureaucracy, Commerce and so on), and that is generally all you need.
    Troupe of Entertainers
    Whether you need a noisy, gaudy distraction out front while your gang sneaks in the back, or you need to infiltrate a stronghold under the guise of a wandering troupe of entertainers, nobody can pack the crowds in quite like a well-trained troupe of singers, street acrobats, street magicians, mummers or a band, with or without singers.
    Creating Rabble and Underlings
    Rabble and Underlings are average in every regard, unless you ve got a recurring Underling whom you might want to upgrade to a full-on recurring non-player character later on in the campaign.
    Used for combat, Rabble and Underlings have average Initiative and Magic Points, as well as a standard Move of 6 and the usual 3 Action Points. Rabble tend not to wear armour. Underlings can wear armour, and it's typically 1 or 2 AP if they are wearing armour at all. Their Hit Points are also about average, based on CON 11 and SIZ 13. As a rule of thumb, give Rabble 5 Hit Points and underlings 6.
    The last thing you need is to give them at least one relevant skill. For violent thugs sent to harass the Adventurers in a back alley encounter, give them a relevant Combat Style such as Thug. As for the skill rating, it is either 30% for incompetent rabble, 60% for competent rabble, 60% for incompetent underlings, and 90% for competent underlings. Rabble cannot use Special Effects. Underlings can. For the sake of completion, they have Evade, Endurance, Unarmed, and Willpower at the same percentage as their Combat Style.
    Care and Maintenance
    Both Rabble and Underlings aren't cheap. The "Goods and Services" section of Fioracitta, The Heart of Power provides a table for service costs and service providers. Use those costs as a basis for how much money you think the Adventurers should part with. Charge the going rate in SP for a relevant skill of 60%; halve the price for a relevant skill of 30%, and inflate the base cost by 1.5 for Masters with a relevant skill of 90%. Round up, every time.
    Promotion
    As Games Master, you can gradually move the Rabble or Underling non-player character closer to becoming a full-blown Non-Player Character or even replacement Adventurer over the course of the campaign. Keep careful track of all their relevant skills, and add no more than one new element (such as a skill) between adventures. For instance, a Loremaster might have a lot of Lores at 60%, and even more Lores at 30%, but you can add Teach at 90% at one point, and introduce this in a scene where the Adventurers stumble across their Loremaster teaching a very large class, or Swim if the Adventurers stumble across the Loremaster going for a dip in Lake Lascha, far from her usual stacks of dusty tomes.
    Journaling
    Making the Rabble and Underling characters recurring, particularly Allies and Contacts, gives you a chance to turn your Adventurers from cardboard heroes into full-fledged personalities, with likes and dislikes, and give them people in their lives and down times they can relate to between adventures.
    They can also provide a useful tool to allow you, as Games Master, to inject a little common sense into a situation. If the Adventurers are going to attempt something stupid, their tagalong rabble member can tell them when there's an alternative available (with an easier grade of skill and less chance of dying of a fumble).
    Journaling is the most efficient tool for keeping track of your Rabble and Underlings. Note down all the details for each person, and bring your journal with you to each game. Leave space on each page to add details as they crop up such as revealed skills, relatives, and so on. You need never forget an important secondary character's name again.
    Minor Players, Major Uses
    By using Rabble and Underlings, the Games Master can supply a host of throwaway characters for the Adventurers to interact with. You can produce them in a hurry without needing to spend an hour in character generation per person. These background characters can be presented as people, with their wants and needs, and they can be just as significant to the Adventurers as the full-fledged enemies they have to face in the course of their adventures.
  5. Alex Greene

    Next Blog Posts

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    Just to let you all know, the next few posts on this blog will be:-
    Making A Scene (2022-01-22, 10pm UTC)
    Rabble and Underlings - An Underrated Resource (2022-01-29, 10pm UTC)
    Mysteries (TBA)
    Creating Scary Horror Scenarios (TBA)
     
  6. Alex Greene

    Improv

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    No matter how well you plan and prepare your adventure or campaign, something will always come along which will throw your plans straight into the trash. Your player characters fight when you plan for them to run away; or they run away from a combat scene. You set them up for their first skirmish with the scenario's Big Bad, and somehow they manage to kill him; or you roll for a wilderness encounter, and a tiny party of kobolds somehow make critical successes and wipe out the party on their very first adventure.
    There are some useful game aids available which are intended to help you with the unexpected, including improvising when a game has to be put together from scratch for whatever reason, such as the scheduled Games Master suddenly being unavailable at the last minute.
    Don't Stop
    So the characters have just derailed the entire adventure, somehow. What should be your first act as Games Master?
    Your first act should be to carry on as if they'd just slain one more insignificant random mook. Try not to let the Players cotton on to the fact that the whole scenario may have just been upended. Your favourite dead non-player character should not have fallen in vain.
    Choose A Random Encounter
    Don't roll for a random encounter. Pick one, either from your list of pre-generated random encounter groups or just have a number of mook characters turn up, spoiling for a fight. Turn the scene into a combat scene immediately, to take the Players' minds off what they've just done.
    This is one time where my usual aversion to combat can be set aside. Combat scenes do have their uses - they allow the Players to focus their attention on the task at hand, and more to the point, they focus attention away from the more important matter at their feet.
    "That's Odd"
    If a combat scene out of nowhere does not sit well, call for immediate Perception checks in the area. Emphasise this check by saying "You notice something odd." Then allow them to ask questions, one at a time, and make a Perception check for each question.
    Closed Questions
    Closed questions have a "yes" or "no" answer. Examples: Is there something unusual here?, Does my character feel something is out of place?, Is this a trap? or Was this too easy?
    To answer this, you can consult a Yes/No Oracle. Some supplements exist which are designed to replace a Games Master ... but nothing says that a Games Master can't use these supplements too.
    An excellent instant oracle from an indie publisher, Ken Wickham, is called 100 Shades of Nay ... and Yea. This is a brilliant supplement to create random answers to closed questions, and they can catalyse the spinning off of the stalled adventure in another direction completely.
    Open Questions
    The six main open questions are Who?, What?, Where?, When?, How?, and Why?. Anyone can ask these questions at any time, including yourself as Games Master. But in the event of a completely derailed scenario, as Games Master you may need to come up with answers to these questions before the Players ask them.
    The best time to prepare such emergency answers is before the story begins. The next best time is right at the point of catastrophe.
    Keep Oracles Handy
    Bring along oracle-style supplements to every single session, and consult them heavily, even during those scenarios where everything is happening exactly as planned. 
    Pregame Prep: Contingencies
    Prepare contingencies for your encounters. If your non-player characters manage to kill off the entire party of Adventurers, bring them into a scenario you devised beforehand, where they wake up in a white room, stripped of all but the clothes on their backs. Set them the task of finding where their armour, weapons, gear, cash, treasures, and magic items went to, whilst escaping from random prison guards. Set them the task of wondering where they are (a prison), and how they escaped apparently being killed (they'd been hit by trank darts or something).
    At the very worst, this'll take up the rest of the game session, and give you time to bring them back on track in the next session.
    If they've managed to kill someone you did not want them to even fight until the final battle, then have the Adventurers notice something odd about the corpse. It's wearing a mask, or it was shapechanged from some lesser minion to resemble the Big Bad. Or it could be their twin brother, giving the real Big Bad added incentive to want to kill the Adventurers, out of revenge.
    The best way to avoid the Adventurers killing off the Big Bad too soon, however, has got to be to save the actual main Big Bad until the end. It's always an illusion, a deluded fool hypnotised into believing they were the Big Bad, or a hapless minion brainwashed into believing themselves into being the Big Bad.
    And the best way to ensure the Adventurers do not get wiped out by a random encounter is not to subject them to wandering encounters - not, at least, the sort which result in mindless arcade violence for the sake of it. The job of wilderness and wandering encounters is never to kill the Adventurers anyway, but to give them opportunities to learn things about the Big Bad before the main story - assuming, as I have been all this time, that the point of the scenario has been a simple dungeon crawl.
    Contingencies For Other Kinds Of Scenarios
    Up to this point, the thrust of the post has been on improvising on scenarios which are straightforward dungeon crawls. The Big Bad is sitting in his dungeon, practically waiting for the Adventurers to come along and do battle to the death, or something. Basically, the plot of The Hidden Fortress, The Guns of Navarone, or That George Lucas Movie From 1977 ...
    But there could be other types of scenarios, which are just as engaging.
    Diplomacy and Intrigue
    This is where Fioracitta, The Heart of Power comes into its own. But there are other game modules available which focus on intrigue, politcs, and treachery - such as Republic, by Mutant Chiron Games.
    The biggest improvisation you can make, if your favourite mover and shaker is unexpectedly killed, is to reveal to the Adventurers that the person they just destroyed was not, in fact, the main villain, but rather working for someone (or someones) higher up the food chain.
    Investigation
    Your Players' Adventurers are Investigators, for want of a better term. It doesn't matter if the game is set in Mythic Babylon or M-Space: they are tracking down some miscreant, either to prevent a bigger crime from happening or to bring someone to justice for a crime already committed.
    What happens if your Big Bad goes down in a hail of bullets at the end of the second act? Again, look to the "Diplomacy and Intrigue" solution above. If the story is set in the modern era, the Adventurers find a cell phone on the dead guy's person, with a video from someone else (holding a loved one in an undisclosed location), or they find incriminating texts and/or calls to and from somebody else: someone who is clearly, by the messages sent, calling the shots.
    Head of The Snake
    So the Adventurers have indeed cut off the head of the snake in the second act. What now?
    Now, the game changes. Now, as Games Master, you lead the Adventurers through the consequences. The Big Bad has contingencies set up to avenge his death, by sending capable assassins after his killers; or a succession war starts up, as ambitious Lieutenants and henchmen start squabbling, and ultimately going to war over, their little piece of the Big Bad's empire of crime. This is a scenario which would work great in a police procedural game, an intrigue game, even a modern game of espionage or superheroes such as The Design Mechanism's forthcoming Destined or Department M.
    Surprise!
    The Adventurers could have killed the Big Bad, only to find the same person standing in the very next room, as though he had never even died. It had all been an illusion, or even some sort of strange spell or psionic mechanism to make them all think they'd just defeated the Big Bad - and, in fact, even their presence in the next room is also just another illusion.
    One Last Thought
    There will never be a perfect scenario, because the Players are so ingenious in figuring out who the shot callers are, and hitting them with everything they've got. If the little person in the corner of the room starts chanting and waving their arms about, chances are they're preparing some dangerous spell, so every character with a ranged weapon is going to aim right for the little guy with the pointy hat the minute they've done a Perception check in the room. They always assume that the mage is always going to be the master tactician, and they'll select that target accordingly.
    If you find that your Players tend to think this way, and all you're doing is running arcade-style violence and dungeon crawling, the best arena in which to improvise is in the realm of scenarios where improvisation is practically a requirement: games where the objectives are dialogue, diplomacy, intrigue, investigation, and where surprises are practically expected - such as Raymond Chandler's famous solution to reader boredom, which involved a man bursting into the room, brandishing a gun. Just shoot back first, and ask questions afterwards. Just make sure there are clues in the dead guy's pockets, so you'll have someone else to ask questions to.
    If your little improvisation - a discovery of strange foreign coins on the bad dead guy's person, or a letter from a third party, or a text or email to the Big Bad from the real shot caller - keeps the Adventurers on their toes, gets them to think that there was more to this than just a fight in a dark alley or some catacomb, then you'll be able to manage to turn what could have stalled your adventure in its tracks into a pause in the action, as it shifts in another direction. If your Players don't read this post, they could go along with your improv and not even see the join.
    And if you make improv a part of all your stories, even the ones which are going smoothly and exactly according to your plan, then they may well never even realise how close they came to bringing your scanerio to an abrupt halt. Just carry on, and keep a straight face the whole time. You've got this.
  7. Alex Greene

    Hiatus

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    I regret that, due to a working commitment this week, the next entry in this blog will be delayed one week, until January 22nd. Apologies for any inconvenience.
  8. Alex Greene

    The Ties That Bind

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    Friendship is important to Mythras. Not only do the Players need to come together - so do their Adventurers.
    This article explores the nature of team friendship, and what it means to the success, or failure, of a Mythras adventure.
    Beginning with Session Zero, when the Adventurers are being generated together, the Games Master should bring the characters together, finding what is common to them or creating connections if they do not seem to have anything immediately in common.
    Backgrounds
    Cultures
    Adventurers can be connected together by their Cultural backgrounds. They might have a common Culture, or radically different Cultures -  a Civilised poet having to interact with two Barbarians and a Nomad, all from different Clans. It might be a challenge for the Games Master to get Adventurers to bond together if their Cultures have animosity towards one another, but even that can be doable, with a little tweaking of their back stories.
    Professions, Factions, and Cults
    Adventurers with similar Professions can be brought together very easily. The most common example is a team formed from Adventurers who served together under the same military unit, and who are now branching out as mercenaries for the same sponsor. However, Adventurers from different Professions can still be brought together to work as a team, if the Games Master works on the back story, such as Adventurers from different Guilds being brought together to work for the common cause of all of their factions.
    Background Events
    The Adventurers don't need to all have the same Background Events - but the Games Master can find a way of weaving the different kinds of background event into a single running narrative which links them all. An enemy who has been making one Adventurer's life a misery for years might be spreading that misery to a second Adventurer's family; the same woman might be an old flame to one Adventurer and a harridan of a Rival to another.
    Connections
    This has been covered in a previous article. Connections do more than bind the Adventurers to their factions or to significant non-player characters, including the antagonists: mutually significant Connections could bind the Adventurers' fates to each other, such as the entire party having the same Enemy, or every member forced to bind together in the face of an onslaught from a hostile Cult.
    Family
    If Session Zero includes the family generation stage, the Games Master can use a common element, or set of interlinked elements, to bind the Adventurers together. Perhaps the Adventurers' families are Allies to one another, or they serve together in the same unit, two military families with separate, yet joined, traditions of military service, fighting side by side.
    The Four Five Stages of Team Building
    This comes from a psychologist called Bruce Tuckman, who wrote a paper in 1965 about the path teams take when they come together for a specific task, designed to facilitate the best team performance.
    This process has a number of stages, usually four, with a fifth added later by Tuckman.
    Forming
    This is the phase where a new team forms. Individuals are unsure of the team's purpose, how they fit in, and whether they'll work well with one another. They'll be looking to the team leader for direction.
    This is the time where the Players bring up interesting facts about their Adventurers, and the Games Master brings them all together under the leadership of the party's leader. The Players, too, are busy trying to establish their Adventurers' viewpoints and ways of working.
    Storming
    This is the point where the party leader begins to establish each Adventurer's roles and responsibilities - who's responsible for what, and so on.
    The storming stage is where Players and Adventurers start to push against the established boundaries to make room for their Adventurers. Conflict can arise between team members as their true characters and preferred ways of working surface and clash against each other.
    Team members may challenge the party leader's authority or even the mission, and some individuals might begin to feel overwhelmed.
    Norming
    The storming phase is always temporary. The Players come to know each Adventurer, both their own and the others'. The team members start to resolve their differences, appreciate one another's strengths, and respect the authority of the team leader.
    Once they know one another better, they will feel more comfortable asking for help and offering constructive feedback. They'll share a stronger commitment to the goal of the adventure, and make progress towards achieving it.
    Performing
    At this stage, the team is working together in full flow, and performing to its full potential.
    The Fifth Stage
    This is the stage that comes at the end of an adventure. It might be a one-shot scenario, a multi-session single adventure, a mini-campaign, or a full scale campaign; but at the end of the story, the team is all set to split up, their job being done.
    The last stage, according to Bruce Tuckman, is often called Adjourning ... or even Mourning. In game, it usually means that individuals reach the end of their stories. They will have come to the end of their Hero's Journeys or Heroine's Journeys. They will have achieved their dreams, reached Apotheosis, or met a heroic, tragic, or grisly fate. And the survivors will have spent their last accumulated Experience Rolls, cashed in their last favours, and suffered the consequences of their dark secrets being revealed.
    All that will be left will be for the team members to dissolve the group, say their final goodbyes and mark the parting of the ways.
    The Lifespan Of A Group ...
    The life of a group is a single story. It doesn't matter if that story is played out in a single sitting, or over the course of a dozen years of weekly sessions: the campaign measures the life of the group, beginning at the forming stage, and proceeding through all the stages until the last act of the mourning stage.
    What makes this work is all the bonds formed by the Games Master and the Players, which keep the team working together, keeping it going even when team members have to be replaced, until the final ending which sees the Adventurers' ultimate triumph and final dissolution.
    Properly managed, those bonds can connect the team's fortunes, making it, and the adventures the team goes through, both unmissable and unforgettable.
  9. Alex Greene

    Calling Time

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    Sooner or later, it is going to happen. Your Players' favourite Adventurers are going to enter a battle too far, and one of them will receive a critical injury, which turns into a fatal one when they fail their Endurance check and bleed out on the cold, unforgiving ground.
    And you, as the Games Master, are going to have to tell your tearful Player that their beloved character has died.
    Character Death
    There are many ways a character can die. They can suffer a Serious or Major Wound in a critical Hit Location, and fail an Endurance check; they can contract a disease, or take poison; or they can suffer fatal blood loss, and even exhaust themselves to death. There are even magical effects which are fatal, such as the Transmogrify sorcery spells.
    The Combat section of Mythras, from page 86, outlines the most common form of character death. The book points out that combat is -
    - A very deadly business
    - Need not end in death
    - Both abstract and tactical
    - Exciting
    - Either gritty or cinematic
    Amid the fog of war, there are always bound to be casualties, and I have it on good authority that the aim of the game is to make sure that the casualties are all on the other side. However, sometimes one or more of the enemy may get in a good strike, and it can get very bad for the Adventurer who is the recipient of such a blow.
    As Games Master, what can you do to minimise the risk to your Adventurers?
    Peril, Not Automatic Mortality
    You do not measure death in Mythras as "being reduced to zero Hit Points." Page 94 of Mythras, Damage Reduction, provides your Adventurers with one possible mechanism to reduce damage, providing that they have something large enough to deflect the blow. Armour also helps to reduce damage, as do various spells.
    The Hit Locations section on page 109 goes into detail about what one can expect from a Light, Serious, or Major Wound in the various Hit Locations. Page 81 of Mythras details how long it takes to recover from injuries, and there is the possibility of an injury being permanent.
    As Games Master, you have the option of being able to keep your Players on tenterhooks, asking the questions Will my Adventurer die? and If they live, will there be permanent damage?
    Luck Points
    Adventurers have access to a resource mere mortals do not: Luck Points. Page 81 of Mythras describes the procedure for mitigating Major Wounds by spending a Luck Point to reduce one Major Wound to a Serious Wound.
    Ignore the "one Hit Point damage shy of a Major Wound" rule. Your Adventurer's Luck Point can be ruled as reducing damage sustained to a Light Wound. You're the Games Master. Every rule in the core rulebook is optional, except for the one about having fun.
    Worst Case Scenario
    So let's look at the worst case scenario. Your Player has their Adventurer engage with an opponent half their size. An easy match, but for the fact that the Player's dice just won't roll low - their rolls keep landing in the 96-00 range, even if they change the dice around. And the opponent, despite their clear weakness and poor stats, just keeps rolling crits.
    As a Games Master myself ... I've been in this situation. Nothing can prepare you for the howls of anguish, or the hurling of miscreant dice across the room as the frustrated Player vents their frustrations on those insubordinate little blobs of plastic.
    Remember - your Non-Player Characters aren't there to kill the Adventurers. Mythras is a simulationist game, not an Arcade style game. Even if the dice just aren't behaving for your Player, things don't all have to go the enemy's way. They can make mistakes, tactical misjudgments and be plain old sloppy.
    But even if you use NPC Bad Luck Points on your little hench characters, and still they manage to get the upper hand on the Adventurers, what can you do?
    Awareness Of Surroundings
    Ask yourself, as Games Master, what this encounter is supposed to accomplish. Is this combat scene something essential to the plot, a showdown with an important hireling of the bad guys, or just a random wandering monster encounter you just threw in?
    If it's the latter, that's the worst place to put in something that wants to kill the Adventurers and won't take no for an answer. Why throw in a random deadly combat just because the encounter tables tell you to? Again, random wilderness combats are just senseless in a simulationist game like Mythras. Save the deadly battle scenes for pivotal points which advance the story.
    And try not to kill the player characters with a random wilderness encounter. A TPK from a random group of kobolds is no victory for you as the Games Master.
    Access To Healers
    Adventurers who know First Aid and Healing skills, particularly those backed by a Lore skill such as Lore (Field Medicine) or Lore (Surgery) to augment the Healing and First Aid checks, can stave off the Angel of Death for a little while. Their fellow Adventurers can thank you later. Thing is, if you succeed in a Healing check, chances are they will be able to thank you later.
    Curtains
    If you have done everything you can to keep the Adventurer alive, and they are beyond even Luck Points, and it looks as though it's The End for your Adventurer, and not even a Games Master Deus Ex Machina can save them ("Wait a minute ... is that a bottle of healing potion underneath that dresser unit over there?") ... then you have the option of making the Adventurer's final moments count for something.
    Maybe there is an enemy force trying to beat down the door your Adventurers barricaded, and it looks as if they are about to get through it, and all your party needs is for someone to stay behind and buy a few lousy seconds for the team to escape through the secret door. Something like that. Your Adventurer can perform one last heroic action, as per the Heroic Last Actions section on page 111,
    Again, something to ignore - no need to have your expiring Adventurer burn a Luck Point. Assume they burn all their Luck Points, and that they automatically succeed with a critical roll. After all, if they are on their way out, they might as well make their exit a good one.
    Just ask Vasquez and Gorman.
    Conclusion
    Death doesn't have to be the end for an Adventurer. An encounter which turns fatal doesn't even have to end in death. As Games Master, you can always, always, set up some sort of twist - and bring the expired Adventurer back to rude health.
    That amulet they picked up from an adventure three sessions before might have the Hide Life sorcery power, which activates the moment the wearer reaches the end of their time. Or they might wake up in chains in the baddie's dungeon, with the baddie gloating at the inhuman pleasures she is about to indulge in, before that chapter fades to black, with the promise that the Adventurer will return some day ...
    ... after having probably played a lot of games of Backgammon with the baddie.
    What?
    Or you could pull a cutscene where the Adventurer thinks they are going to spend their last moments being heroic, only to wake up after the adventure is over, surrounded by the party, who'd risked their lives to come back and collect their fallen comrade because they leave nobody behind or something - and they'd found a healer who restored the Adventurer to full health. Or perhaps Atropos took pity on the Adventurer and stayed Her blades, keeping the threads of the Adventurer's Fate intact when they ought to have been cut.
    There is always something you can do, as Games Master, even for a Player whose Adventurer is facing certain doom. Until the Player themselves wants to bring their Adventurer to an end, of course - in which case, make it a good ending and give them a Viking funeral.
    The Adventurer, that is.
  10. Alex Greene

    The Hypnotic Art of Combat

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    Let's play "spot the difference."
    Intro 1: "You, er, enter a room. There are ten orcs sitting around a table, playing some sort of game of chance. They stop what they are doing and charge. Roll for initiative."
    Intro 2: "You follow the sounds of arguing to a room behind a closed door. Opening the door, you see a group of orcs in a room. They are arguing amongst themselves. They look like Greykin's orcs, and their armour bears the sigil of that foul wizard, your greatest rival.
    "You look at them; they look at you. You see them starting to shuffle and spread apart, and one of them goes for their sheathed weapon. The situation is going south, fast. Looks like they've been itching to lock horns with someone for a while. Guess that's you. Roll initiative."
    However much you may like it or not, combat scenes are going to happen in any roleplaying game, no matter what the setting. Fighting is inevitable in many settings, and Adventurers are typically created to be singularly gifted in the fine arts of combat, so they might as well put those weapons and Combat Styles to use.
    So how can you, the Games Master, elevate combat from mere number crunching to a scene of heartstopping action, thrilling suspense and intense danger? The same way you elevate all the other kinds of scenes - hypnotic language.
    Setting Up Combat
    The setup is as important as the execution. As the Games Master, you are responsible for putting the NPC and monster miniatures onto the board, whether it be a plastic hex grid sheet or a virtual desktop. You are also responsible for the opponents' tactics, actions, and reactions.
    This is where every roleplaying game's combat sections kind of fall over, because they always seem to assume that combat is always a 100% slaughterfest, and the only differences between one combat scene and any other are the number and size of the opposing force, the weapons they use and how many rounds it takes for the player character combat units to reduce them to kedgeree.
    This gives every Games Master the impression that all combat scenes must be like this - the first person shooter video game philosophy, where the opponents are only there to be cut down.
    Engagement
    Before moving on, please check out "You Know, This Isn't Necessary ...", "Death Is Not The Only Option", and "Killing Has Consequences" on page 284 of the Mythras Core Rulebook. They're there for a reason. Not every random encounter has to be a weapons fest.
    Now, having read that, let's go on to those encounters which are weapons fests - where the gratuitous violence is integral to the story. Your most perceptive character has determined, through Insight, that the foe is implacable and bent on your party's destruction; and the only way to the mission's objective is through these miscreants. Negotiation won't work - so it's time to draw weapons and have at it.
    Page 285 is a good page to read, for the "Pacing Combat Encounters" and "Action Points are Not the Be All and End All" sections. Games Masters and Players should read these sections, to enrich your enjoyment of combat scenes - they present options which increase the Adventurers' chances of surviving the battle.
    "Grading Opponents" on page 286 is a vital read for Games Masters. It helps to gauge how much effort the Adventurers must make to achieve victory, or just to survive a combat which is going against them.
    But beyond these considerations, and of course studying the entire Combat section of Mythras from page 86 to familiarise yourself with the combat mechanics, how do you use the linguistic stylings of hypnotic language to describe combat scenes?
    Opening Moves
    Here's a little hint to get the Players engaged mentally in the oncoming conflict. Ask them to get out their favourite combat dice and get them ready. Give them a moment to select their dice, and announce their readiness. Once the entire group has signalled their readiness, then call for initiative rolls.
    Players: Battle Dice
    Players, here's something you can do to get yourselves into the spirit, if you aren't already doing this. Have a set of dice specifically for combat: a dedicated d100 for Combat Style checks; a dedicated d10 for initiative; and whatever dice you need to roll for damage.
    Nothing gets you into the battle mindset more than opening your battle dice bag and drawing out those combat dice. Keep them in their bag until a combat scene is announced, and take them out to show that this just got serious, and your Adventurer means business.
    Combat Cards
    There is one other tool available from The Design Mechanism to help you with battle scenes - the Mythras Combat Cards. If you have them, it would be a good idea to bring them out at the same time as your battle dice. Everything in this "Turn Zero" is about preparing everyone to be in the right mindset for the combat scene.
    Running The Battle
    Show, Don't Tell
    The language you use; the words, your tone of voice; affects and influences your players' mindset and reactions. The Adventurers' actions should have an impact on the opponents, and vice versa. A successful blow could knock a foe back, staggered for a moment before they rally around and charge back, enraged. Even if a blow glances off the armour, describe the thump travelling up the Adventurer's arm.
    Use the second person singular (and occasionally plural) - "You duck, and the breeze of the sword narrowly missing your head brushes against your skin," "The jolt of the impact of your war hammer travels up your arm," "The weird, arcane power you just called leaps towards your foes, engulfing them in scintillating flames," for example.
    The Adventurers, also, can be affected by the actions of the foe. Describe the pain of the impact on a Hit Location. Don't just say "The foe uses Stun Location on your Right Arm Hit Location": describe the numbness to that arm from the impact. If the Hit Location takes damage from the successful strike, describe the pain - crushing, bruising, cutting, burning, numbness.
    The unconscious mind has access to engrams where it remembers the pain of injuries from various sources. Hypnotic language can encourage the mind to experience echoes of those feelings, as long as it is gently reminded that this is only play, not the real thing.
    Artful Vagueness
    Everybody's imagined experiences are different. One person might imagine a vast chamber as resembling the Hall of Moria scene from the first Lord of The Rings movie, but somebody else might imagine it looking like the interior of Chartres Cathedral, and a third might imagine an abandoned underground Roman tufa quarry with thousand-year-old chisel marks on the rough, sandy-textured walls.
    The way to keep the immersion going is to use artful vagueness. Describe the characters' lights flickering, but do not remind each Player what their Adventurers are holding to provide that illumination. Describe the tightness of the armour, but again do not specify what kind of armour - everybody's armour is going to be stiff somewhere, but some of them might be wearing different armour to the others, and not everybody is going to be wearing armour over every Hit Location.
    When invoking sense memory, just say "a foul odour, growing stronger," rather than "smells like orcs" or "carrion stench"; or "the texture of the walls" rather than specifying roughness, sandiness and so on - some might be imagining the walls to be of brick, others limestone, and yet others might be imagining sandstone blocks. Use artful vagueness to encompass as many of the Players as possible in the sensory immersion.
    Invoke Emotions
    Fighting evokes a slew of emotions - excitement, anger, fury, even fear. Again, the language you use can invoke those feelings - but it is better to allow the Players to experience those feelings on their own, and to let the unconscious mind keep rein on those feelings, again by reminding it that this is only play.
    Pausing and Wrapping The Battle
    Half-Time Oranges
    One of the most important things a hypnotic Games Master can do is set up safe words, if you will. Every Player can invoke the safe words at any time during play one, such as a "pause" safe word to pause the action; one, a "half time" safe word to allow a Player to drop out of the fight scene for whatever reason, and most importantly a "stop" safe word to bring all the Players back into the room.
    As Games Master, it is recommended that you invoke the "half time" safe word to pause the action at least once during a heavy battle scene. This brings the Players into the room for a few minutes to breathe, and perhaps to have some refreshments and take a comfort break before the battle resumes. This is particularly vital during the climactic battle of the scenario, when the action is at its most intense and the emotions are at their highest.
    Post-Battle Ritual
    The end of any battle scene is a time of heightened emotions and tension, particularly the climactic scene - if that scene involves a battle, either for supremacy or for survival. As Games Master, you need to know how to defuse those heightened emotions - and, if you have been doing your job right, there will be heightened emotions.
    Every battle scene should end with a post-battle ritual. It can be as simple as the Games Master invoking the "stop" safe word to tell the unconscious minds to bring the Players back in the room with a glowing dopamine rush; or you can keep the Players immersed, and encourage them to let off steam with some hearty cheering before bringing them back in the room.
    After the battle scene ends, give the Players a moment to reorient in the room, before going through the process of clearing the table and bringing out the refreshments, or - if you are online - give them time to clear their own tables and put aside their minis and dice, then go and grab whatever refreshments they have to hand.
    Breaking bread at the end of a battle scene, and at the end of every scenario, is one of the best ways of grounding after your minds have been Elsewhere. You may have noticed that it also bonds Players and Games Master together - sharing mealtimes together is probably one of the oldest community-forming exercises going. Make use of our human need to bond as a unit.
    Aftercare
    Conscious Aftercare
    There is more to wrapping up a battle than just totting up numbers. The Players will be vested in the welfare of their Adventurers, and every wound and injury to their Hit Locations, and they'll probably be experiencing anxiety if their characters have sustained damage. As Games Master, you need to provide reassurance. This is especially pertinent if a character is on the verge of death, or has already met their fate - a topic which will be covered in the next post.
    Unconscious Aftercare
    Everybody has an unconscious mind, which is a benevolent guardian, keeping body and conscious mind working. By gently reminding the unconscious that this is only play, and by caring enough to give your unconscious mind signals to let it know that the game is being paused, as well as when it's over, you can bring in the unconscious to the story and make it a truly immersive experience.
    Combat scenes are meant to be cathartic - a release of emotions, particularly after a stressful period of time. Learning to include the unconscious mind in the play is a challenge, but ultimately rewarding, because the active involvement of the unconscious mind is guaranteed to make combat encounters memorable long after the scenario and even the campaign are over.
  11. Alex Greene
    This blog post goes back to the topic of hypnosis, and its use in roleplaying games - and not merely Mythras, but many other roleplaying games. In this post, the focus falls once again on the Games Master, and on the fine art of telling a story, through which they can guide the Adventurers.
    Engagement
    The blog has already covered the topic of immersion. This time, the emphasis is on engagement. How can the Games Master draw in the players and make them feel involved in, and engaging in, the story or adventure?
    Once again, we turn back to the language used by the Games Master - specifically, hypnotic language, and how to tell a story hypnotically and compellingly.
    Communication
    Milton H Erickson once said "All successful communication is hypnosis." The Games Master's job is to communicate. As Games Master, you set up the scenario, the incidental and recurring characters which crop up in the adventure, and even the scenes where nothing much is going on beyond combat. Even in combat, the job of Games Master is to make the cut and thrust of battle compelling, enough to keep the Players on their toes, and on the edge of their seats, anticipating the enemy's actions and hopefully coming up with moves of their own that the enemy does not anticipate.
    But who are you communicating with?
    The Player's Ally
    Modern hypnosis is based on the understanding that the human mind is a mental iceberg. Only one ninth of it is visible: the rest of it is beneath the threshold of visibility, below the surface.
    That 1/9 is what is called the conscious mind. It is a filter - the place where reason dwells. Everything else, the vast bulk of human mental processing, is the unconscious mind - unconscious, because it takes place beyond the realm of the conscious mind, not because it only comes on when the person is unconscious.
    This is not the same as the debunked urban legend that we only use 10% of our brains. We use all of our brains, all of the time, and practically all of that functioning is going on behind the conscious mind. Which is a good thing, too, because if we needed to consciously breathe, the human species would be extinct.
    The unconscious is where most of the mind's real, deep mental processes come from. Lived experiences and memories are also processed and stored here, in short-term, working, and long-term memories. When a perception enters the mind, the brain processes these perceptions and draws upon the stored engrams to determine the person's response to the perception.
    For example, if someone accidentally stuck their hand in a fire, the brain would process the pain signals from the hand and draw upon the responses from similar pains in the past, accessing the pain response of jerking the hand away from the fire. This reaction would be as immediate as the nervous system would allow, and often too quick for the conscious mind to react.
    The brain also accesses engrams and responds to them, even if the input is imaginary - such as when someone is telling a story or a joke, or you are watching a TV show with an exciting fight scene, or you are daydreaming about a meeting with a person you like, or reminiscing about some remembered time. Memories, dream imagery, and creations of the imagination - fantasies - can spark real physical, physiological, and emotional responses. This is the appeal of books, media, and of course tabletop roleplaying games.
    Off The Peg Versus Bespoke
    Which are more powerful - images created by commercial artists for use in a book, or images drawn from one's own unconscious mind? Arguably, creations of pure imagination are stronger than other people's imaginations put into print or onto screens. Your own imagination is strong enough to draw on its own rich library of emotionally-laden images, and you experience the attached emotions and imagined or remembered sensory perceptions - the light touch of an ex on the cheek, the rough skin of someone who'd forgotten to shave, the smell of woodsmoke from a campfire, the chill stinging of raindrops on the head, and so on.
    It's the difference between watching a movie about a superhero, and imagining yourself as that superhero. The best movies use visual and storytelling cues to draw you, the viewer, into the story and see the world through the eyes of your favourite superhero. It is not the hero who is solving the crimes, punching the bad guys, and saving the day: it is you.
    Everybody has access to sensations such as these, transcribed into the hippocampus in the form of engrams (your experiences). And everyone's engrams are different, because they've experienced different lives and picked up those sensations from different places, under different circumstances, and so on.
    However, the words are symbols which trigger engrams, as a learned and common experience - so "you feel the breeze as the mace misses your head by a few inches" is a pretty universal symbol which triggers engrams in practically every player's brain, as if they'd engaged in a combat in person themselves.
    The Games Master's Ally
    You, as Games Master, have another ally, as powerful as the Players' unconscious minds: namely, your own capacity for emotion, creativity, imagination and ability to put the feelings and emotions into words.
    What people connect to are the emotions and meanings behind the words. Unless there’s emotion, unless there’s a person there, unless there are ideas there that really speak to you, there is no meaning.
    Your creativity, as Games Master, allows you to come up with situations and circumstances in your adventures which convey deep meaning to the players, their unconscious minds in particular. Unless there is a deep meaning that the unconscious can pick up on; unless there is something that the players' unconscious minds can read into; unless there is a why behind the what, who, and how; a game devolves into soulless number crunching, and you lose the interest of the players.
    But what if you can present them with a situation, such as a hostage situation, a heist, a raid, or a mission to locate and retrieve a missing person from some dreadful den of vice and iniquity? What if the stakes are high, such as a race against time to find a cure for a disease before a loved one dies? What if there is some emotional weight behind a scenario, such as the players entering a high-stakes big purse sporting contest against a rival team?
    There is an old formula much loved by hypnotists: Where attention goes, energy flows. Capture the attention - the imagination - of the players; give them stakes to pursue beyond the usual (Experience Rolls, drop treasure, a cash bounty); and you'll bring them into the game. You'll have succeeded in giving them immersion.
    Next week, we'll pick up on this thread, and focus specifically on one system - combat. Next week, we go to war.
  12. Alex Greene
    Skills are important to a Mythras game. Yet there is an opinion that some skills are less useful than others. Skills such as Acting, Bureaucracy, Customs, Ride, Swim, Seduction, and even Teach are regarded by some as being unnecessary, and only a handful of skills - Athletics, Brawn, Combat Styles, Evade, Endurance, Willpower - are essential for play. Even Unarmed has sometimes been neglected in the rush to make Adventurers as skilled as possible in an exceptionally narrow range of skills, suited for combat and dungeon delving.
    And yet there is more to adventuring than dungeon delving.
    Useful Skills
    Players want their characters to excel at their fields. And that means building their adventuring skills, preferably to at least 50%, preferably higher.
    For the most part, some players believe that this just means Combat Styles - and Athletics, Stealth and the resistance skills of Brawn, Endurance, Evade, and Willpower. The next most important are Perception and Unarmed. Skills such as Sing, Dance, Acting, Boating, Swim, Crafts, Musicianship, Seduction, Lore, Language, and Teach are practically ignored.
    What makes the "useful" skills useful?
    Survival Skills
    Of course, these skills are useful if the stories are all set in some sort of labyrinth through which the player characters must delve, for whatever reason. Each member of the party needs Athletics, Stealth, a healthy mixture of Combat Styles, and the resistance skills of Brawn, Endurance, Evade, and Willpower.
    Specialists within the party will also need their particular skills: locksmiths and engineers to use Engineering, Mechanisms and Lockpicking to defuse traps and open locked doors; First Aid and Healing, for the party's healer (why do they only have one?) and of course magic skills for whoever the party's magician is. Even out in the wilderness, specialists can be called on for their expertise in Locale, Navigation, and of course Survival, and Track; not to mention Craft (survival cooking).
    Skills such as Bureaucracy, Courtesy, Boating, Navigation, and Musicianship never seem to come into settings, and even Swim and Unarmed are not seen to be as being that popular among players, as compared to the Dungeon Survival Skills above.
    So let's look at some of these clusters of the more obscure skills, and see how they can come in handy.
    Entertainment Skills
    The entertainment skills are Acrobatics, Dance, Disguise, Gambling, Sing, Musicianship, Oratory, Sleight, and even Seduction if you want to go down that road. Characters who develop these skills are immensely popular in the community. They can provide a distraction, boost morale, and make people forget their woes, even if only for a little time. Townspeople are easily bored, and will pay handsomely for someone who can put on a fine show of juggling, a bit of street theatre, or recite some amusing poem or sing bawdy songs to get the crowd dancing.
    Stories centered around entertainers will naturally focus on their ability to entertain, which can provide a different style of adventure - one which can be as cutthroat as any courtly setting in the hallowed halls of power. But whether a character is an actor, an opera singer, a bawdy ecdysiast, an after-dinner orator, or a circus performer, the show must go on.
    Paper Skills
    How can Bureaucracy, Commerce, and Influence be useful in an adventure? Perhaps the Adventurers might need something from somewhere, and either have to haggle for it in a marketplace, bid for it at auction, or requisition it from a complex system of obscure and arcane rules. An adventure can drag the Adventurers into a place no player characters have ever been to before - a terrible nest of vipers, a den of iniquity and corruption, a bastion of treachery and betrayal simply known as ... City Hall.
    These skills can also come in handy if the character is helping somebody else. If they have really good Bureaucracy skills, for instance, they might get to reach the parts of City Hall that their Connections might not - and such influence can only lead to people owing the characters a favour down the road.
    People Skills
    Courtesy, Culture, Customs, Deceit, Oratory, and Influence are so useful for Adventurers in many aspects of the adventure. Adventurers can open up trade with travellers they meet; break bread with fellow travellers at night, and establish trust and good relations; they can make a good impression at court (Courtesy, Culture, and Customs can include knowledge of how to dress as much as how to act), Influence is always useful in swaying opinions, and Deceit can be useful for everything from harmless little white lies to defuse an overenthusiastic courtier's aggressive and clumsy attempt at a seduction ("Sir, I really shouldn't. I am spoken for, and my lover is both jealous and insanely violent") to outrageous swindles ("Give me money, and I shall set to work building a moat to protect this town!").
    Communication Skills
    Language and Literacy are the primary skills, though Deceit, Sing, and Seduction have their uses here, too. In the Mythras Core Rulebook, Literacy is separate from Language because of the assumption that the default fantasy milieu is some sort of Dark Ages, where literacy rates are low - as if low literacy rates were common to cultures which were not Civilised.
    They don't have to be.
    In the historical Middle Ages, literacy began to decline when the Romans retreated and civilisation declined in their absence. In the fantasy settings of your world, as Games Master, your world's history does not have to parallel this development. Perhaps the tendency of your pre-Iron Age civilisation is to develop the oral tradition to a fine art, meaning that Literacy is as much a verbal and mnemonic skill as a written one, and alphabets of symbols could serve as mnemonic keys to remembering huge amounts of information in memory palaces.
    In your setting, everybody might have access to the written world. Counting, calculation, arithmetic, higher mathematics, might not be the jealously-guarded province of the church and magicians, and the printing press might have made its way from the East a thousand years before it would have been "invented" in the West.
    In a world of a hundred nations, there might be a hundred or more languages; and for each, there could be a Culture, a Language, a Literacy, and a Lore.
    Perception Skills
    The two main perception skills are Insight and Perception. Insight is an undeservedly underused and undervalued skill, because it can be used to sense if a person is lying (Deceit), using wiles (Influence, Seduction) or they are genuinely trying to communicate with the character. Insight can disclose a gambler's intent to cheat, or gather that violence is about to break out, from examining people's changing expressions, tone of voice, and body language; Perception can spot the subtle movement of a hand to undo the peace knot on a sheathed sword, or to spot someone palm a card before dealing it. If the characters are conducting a discreet surveillance of a target, Perception can spot other spies in the crowd and determine that they might have been made; and Insight can tell them if the person they are surveilling has made them and is about to bolt.
    Creative and Artistic Skills
    There are a cluster of these - Art, Craft, Engineering, Mechanisms, and Lockpicking. For the most part, the skills a lot of Adventurers go for are Engineering, Mechanisms, and Lockpicking, for the purpose of spotting and defusing traps, finding secret rooms, and so on. However, these skills can be used for a far greater purpose in down time; they can provide the characters with a living.
    A character who is an artist, engineer, jewelsmith, and so on is likely to ply their trade and earn money during down time from a stream of steady customers seeking the products of their crafts. Even Craft (cookery) can find a use in a court, working in the kitchens - and who knows what juicy gossip might float about in the dining halls of power, and come to the ears of a humble servant providing the great and the good with their daily breakfast.
    A creative type can be called upon to create some sort of wonder, whether it be an intricate figurine carved from a rare wood, a statue carefully sculpted from a block of marble, a city monument or an entire building. The possibilities are endless, as are the adventuring opportunities as the creative sort travels far and wide in search of inspiration, or markets to buy building materials or expensive fabrics or dyes.
    Knowledge Skills
    Lore is the main knowledge skill - but Locale is often overlooked, even though it is about a very specific, practical kind of knowledge. Knowledge is power, whether it be Mathematics, Astronomy, Astrology, or Tactics & Strategy. Many a puzzle has been solved by a player who simply declared to their Games Master "I'm useless at puzzles, but my character Trinisca is a master of puzzles with Lore (Puzzles) 90%, so I roll to see if she works out what that gibberish on the door is supposed to mean."
    Transportation Skills
    Boating, Drive, Ride, and Seamanship might not have much use in dark, narrow dungeon corridors, but outside of those cramped environs they can be essential. Campaigns set in a Nomadic culture, for instance, can involve the characters travelling hundreds, even thousands, of kilometres over land and/or water to get to the next destination. They can face many different kinds of hazards, and not just hostile people. Landslides, natural disasters such as wildfires, mudslides, hard weather such as storms, snow, and tornadoes, and even earthquakes, volcanoes and floods, might take their toll on travellers, and characters' mastery of the appropriate transportation skills might be tested to the limit under such harsh environments.
    Physical Skills
    Acrobatics, Athletics, Dance, Ride, Seduction, Swim, and Unarmed, not to mention Combat Styles, are the last category to be covered here. These are the most immediate skills, they are physical, they generally require little mental effort, and they can all be useful for the most obscure reasons. A Master of Swim, for example, might be called upon to brave a treacherous strait to make their way across to an island on the other side in order to secure a rope for the rest of the party to use; an athletic character could be the only person able to climb up three storeys to get to an open window in an otherwise locked building.
    Useful Skills
    In the final analysis, every skill is potentially useful, either in an adventure or as a source of income during down time. As the saying goes, "Jack of All Trades, Master of None - but better that than a Master of One."
    Spread those Skill Development Points around. The more your characters come over as Renaissance people, the more they will be in demand, and the more likely they are to survive to a ripe old age (i.e. until their retirement at the end of the chronicle or campaign).
  13. Alex Greene

    The Call of Sorcery

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    [Image is "Summoning," by Joseph Springborg]
    Here is how Mythras, page 113, defines sorcery:-
    Sorcery is the manipulation of underlying laws that directly control the very fabric of creation. These formulae are complex equations: a mixture of mathematical, psychological, existential, and supernatural principals [sic] that allow the sorcerer to grasp a portion of reality and bend it to his will. Sorcerers do not need to rely on gods for their powers; nor do they need to engage with spirits to achieve their effects. Their manipulation of these metaphysical equations makes sorcery very powerful and very flexible.
    The powers of sorcery are potentially vast, and they are terrifying. They can remove the very souls from people, topple palaces, and summon freakish forces, all at the whim of an individual's will. The most powerful sorcerers can unleash dreadful storms, spy on people kilometres away, or weave phantasms to confuse and beguile even the wisest of people. Oh, and they could also turn people into frogs, pillars of salt, blocks of ice, or into solid gold at a touch.
    But what is it like to be a sorcerer in Mythras?
    Viewed With Suspicion
    The Mythras Core Rulebook outlines one possible downside to sorcery, namely that society does not approve of them:-
    However, it also means sorcerers are viewed with suspicion, and even fear and hatred by those who come by their magic through less direct means. And, because sorcerers have little need for gods or spirits, it is not uncommon for them to develop a certain degree of arrogance and disdain for those who choose to venerate such entities.
    That is one way of viewing sorcerers. There are others. You are not, as a GM, forced to consider this as canon. Your setting's views on sorcery do not have to be the same as they are in anybody else's settings.
    Solitary Calling
    Your Adventurer could be called to perform sorcery as a Solitary - without the aid of a group, Order, Tradition, or cult. Solitaries are, by definition, leaders of their own Traditions, and as such they are beholden to no higher authority within the group.
    Your Adventurer is free to define their own Tradition, its Vision, and its Methods. That means that, in effect, they are writing their own Grimoire, including inventing their own spells.
    As a GM, you can work with the Player to establish which new spells your Adventurer character invents, usually during down time, and then let them spend the requisite Experience Rolls to inscribe their new spell into their Grimoire. In some settings, these spells may be new and unique: nobody else may have access to them.
    Similarly, the sorcerer may be responsible for developing their spells' Intensity and broadening their access to Shaping Points, as well as creating the Shaping factors for use with their spells - Duration, Magnitude, Range, and so on. Initially, they may only know how to extend the Durations of their spells, and be forced to have to operate at Touch Range until they learn how to apply Range to their spells, and so on. Later on, they can learn how to Combine spells to take advantage of the Range and Duration - and then discover how to use Targets on more than one object or person.
    The life of a Solitary could be one of experimentation and exploration. They can bring in the Alternate Shaping Components from page 165 of Mythras, inventing and developing them as if they were brand new - and they may indeed be, in the setting.
    Found Objects
    The sorcerer-to-be may discover their talent for sorcery through a Grimoire, a found object covered in a strange inscription, even a book of magic squares or a text like the Codex Seraphinianus or Voynich Manuscript. Studying the object can turn out to be the catalyst which awakens the Adventurer's abilities as a sorcerer (in other words, they can spend a single Experience Roll to unlock each of Invocation and Shaping during down time, rather than the usual heavy toll as described in Mythras, pages 118 and 119).
    Guided to Power
    Animists are not the only beings who are touched by the spirit. Spiritual beings may recognise their fleshly brethren and guide the fledgling sorcerer through dreams and visitations until they discover the Willworker within and unleash their Legacy of sorcery. Such beings are as much spirit as flesh, and are highly likely to learn, stumble across, or even invent Evoke as their first sorcery spell - along with Imprison, Protective Ward, and Spirit Resistance.
    Peer Recognition
    The Adventurer may be approached by a member of an existing sorcery Cult, and presented with an offer. The Adventurer may be plagued with terrifying dreams, signs of their impending Awakening. Perhaps they belong to the group through a family connection - The Legacy may have skipped a generation or three, but the Adventurer's so-called Black Sheep from two or three generations past might have been a prominent member of their Order, and your Adventurer stands to inherit the Grandmaster's ceremonial sash, though they'd have a long journey to obtain it.
    And perhaps they may be drawn to the Cult through the symbols in their dreams ... just as their counterparts within the Cult may be drawn to the newcomer and potential Initiate through strange, symbolic dreams of their own.
    Tolerance By The Community
    Your sorcerer Adventurer may also be involved in some way with the community of ordinary people in which they live during down time. They may have an acceptance of, and tolerance for, sorcerers in their midst, and call upon them to heal wounds through their healing magics, or to protect individuals from harm.
    Some sorcerers may only have a limited repertoire of sorcery spells, or low levels of Invocation and/ or Shaping; but what they lack in magical power, they may well more than make up for with knowledge of a vast range of Lore, Culture, Language and Literacy skills.
    Because Knowledge is Power, and not all knowledge needs to be magical - a sorcerer with sensory spells (see below) can be called upon to seek out missing children, lost herd animals, or even sources of water in a drought; and a mage with Transmogrify (to Water) can likewise prove to be a lifesaver if they can transform barrels of dry dirt into lifegiving water during the same drought.
    Birth of A Cult
    Your Adventurer may, given sufficient Charisma and experience in Influence skill, advance both in power and in leadership in the community. If they come from a Solitary Tradition, they can develop their mundane Influence, Insight, and Teach skills to begin to teach others the power of sorcery, imparting their wisdom (or their folly) on fresh minds, and spreading The Word abroad.
    And not just Invocation, Shaping, and spells - that Teach skill can help impart the Adventurer's experiences with Lore, Languages, Customs, Locale, Culture, Insight and so many other skills at which the Adventurer excels.
    Your sorcerer can become a great teacher, and if their teachings include spreading messages of love, light, tolerance, and community, their reputation for enlightenment might spread further than their sorcery prowess.
    Craft of The Wise
    Magic is called "The Craft of The Wise" for a reason, and the Adventurer's career delving into ancient tombs and infiltrating rival mages' towers can pay off in their later years as new Adventurers approach the former tomb delver for wisdom and advice. If the sorcerer emeritus has learned anything, it is that some cultures need to be approached with respect and treated with dignity, lest they turn on the arrogant and tear their souls to pieces.
    The Four Pillars
    The real world's practitioners of magic each learn of The Four Pillars long before they are exposed to their first workings. The Four Pillars are:- To Know; To Will; To Dare; and To Be Silent.
    In a Mythras game, often enough those Four Pillars are never mentioned, or even heard of, and sorcerers fling their fire spells willy nilly, in the street, in front of crowds. The average Games Master and Player may not have heard of the Four Pillars, and sometimes come away feeling that their showboating lacked something.
    Here's a clue: showboating lacks something, all right - mystique.
    The Fourth Pillar, the caution to remain silent, is there for a reason. It is through subtle means that a sorcerer can exercise their greatest power. People respect what they fear; and when they do not know what a sorcerer is capable of, they can learn to greatly fear that sorcerer - but also to respect them, because of their experiences and because of their reputation for having done so many things normal people can never do.
    Respect is the most effective form of protection a sorcerer can possess. If they show wisdom in their actions, and kindness, and empathy, and their philosophy is honourable, the sorcerer will be viewed as one who is above suspicion in the community.
    The Most Useful Spells
    What are the most useful spells a sorcerer can learn - or invent?
    Damage Resistance / Spell Resistance / Spirit Resistance - This suite of spells can easily and quickly be cast, or enchanted into a sorcerer's magical tools for instant casting, first thing every morning. They can be given an extended Duration to last all day, or - with sufficient Shaping factors - be extended to last for a number of days, requiring that the caster only need to recast them once a week or so.
    Banish - Useful to cleanse a possessed person, or an animal, object, or place which houses an unwanted spirit. Banish has its limitations, so exorcisms must be creative and occasionally involve deception and trickery to convince the possessing spirit to let go of its host. Acting and Deceit are highly recommended. Phantom (Sense) can be invaluable.
    Mark - So useful in many ways. The sorcerer may Mark someone and track them down over the Mark's Range, summon them, or target them at a distance. Mark can target the focus of Project (Sense) so the sorcerer can sense what is happening in and around the vicinity of the Marked person or object; and Mark can, of course, be used as the destination for a Portal spell to allow the sorcerer to safely travel immense distances in the blink of an eye.
    Sensory Spells - In my settings, sensory spells are among the first to be taught to any sorcerer, even before the trio of protectve spells of Damage Resistance, Spell Resistance, and Spirit Resistance.
    Four of the five kinds of sensory spells are Mystic (Sense), Perceive (Sense), Project (Sense), and Sense (Object or Substance). Each, in their own way, expands the sorcerer's perceptions beyond the mundane, allowing them access to knowledge they could not possibly know if they were mundanes.
    Sensory spells can be combined with Mark to discern the vicinity of Marked objects or people, or selected areas - a sorcerer who has enchanted a Mark on top of a mountain, for instance, can Project (Sense) and scout the horizon for distant changes in the weather; an urban sorcerer can similarly Mark the top of a tall tower and scan the streets of the city below, or Mark a trained bird and use Project (Sense) and Project (Sense) to see the world below through the literal eyes of a hawk.
    And the fifth sensory spell is possibly the most profoundly useful spell of them all.
    Intuition.
    This spell functionally enhances Insight skill to the point where a sorcerer can instantly, immediately, and accurately, gauge a person's feelings, motivations, Passions, even their flaws, hubris, and hamartia. Something they can learn through building up their regular Insight skill to mastery, but which can be done in a few seconds through this spell.
    The effect of this spell can be described as kind of like the flashback scenes in a detective drama, where the lead character explains how the killer did the crime, only the spell more or less grants the vision without the need for the target to make any kind of a confession - it is all laid out before them like clues before a Poirot or a Horatio Caine: scuff marks, stains on clothing, a quaver in the voice, a sudden dilation of the pupils, a shift in epidermal capillary blood distribution and body posture, laying the target's soul bare before the sorcerer's eyes.
    The sorcerer can use this along with Project (Sense) or Mark to read people long before they ever meet the sorcerer, granting the sorcerer an advantage for when they do meet.
    Forces Beyond Mortal Ken
    Besides the sensory spells, of course, sorcerers can learn spells from Animate (Substance) and Sculpt (Substance), to terrible spells such as Transmogrify (to Substance), Suffocate, Palsy, Shapechange (to Creature), Dominate (Creatures), Enslave (Creatures) and so on.
    There are several gamebreaking spells listed in Mythras Core Rulebook, and I do not mean Wrack. The spells include Trap Soul, Switch Body, and Hide Life. They are among the darkest spells one can encounter, because of their potential for use. A dying sorcerer may use Switch Body to swap out their own soul for their enemy; or they may escape death by temporarily hiding within an amulet, only to return to life in a new body some time down the line.
    A sorcerer may send one of their minions into an enemy's establishment, riding along in the body of some servant or similar minor character, to perceive what they perceive. Though they can use Mark and Project (Sense) to do the same, turning the hapless functionary into an unwitting, unwilling, moving surveillance device.
    Another spell to fear is Tap (Characteristic), which is not as efficient as Enhance (Characteristic) but which can be devastating enough to a group of enemies, because Tap temporarily drains the enemies of their targeted Characteristic. Again, not as efficient as Diminish (Characteristic), but a half-decent sorcerer can use either to reduce a team of bad guys to helplessness by depriving them of their STR, or DEX, or POW, or make them look like fools by suppressing their INT and/or CHA in a social setting.
    Undeniable Power
    The true power of sorcery is not the spells they learn, but rather what they do with those spells. Sorcerers are agents of change, wherever they go; and the more powerful the sorcerer, the less likely they are to show off what they can do - or even to feel the need to show that they are sorcerers at all.
    The currency of sorcery is enigma. The more enigmatic they are, the greater their command of the powers, both real and imagined. It is this currency which marks the Art of sorcery as the most profound of the magical Arts, if not the most feared.
    But if the Art is handled with bravery, and courage, and subtlety; and if the sorcerer always remembers their roots, and keeps their connections with their humble, mundane origins and community, they can be treated not with suspicion and fear, but with deep respect and loyalty, as Bringers of Wonder to their people - the meaning of the word thaumaturge.
  14. Alex Greene

    Immersion

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    One of the most potent storytelling techniques in anybody's arsenal is immersion. Without it, your players cannot really appreciate the setting you have laid out for your characters.
    Immersion is, in short, a state of mind in which the players are so invested in the unfolding game that they can forget they are in a game at all, and actually live out the adventure in character.
    Immersion is the reason why some game settings just take off, and others fall flat on their face.
    The Power of Immersion
    The most important point about immersion is that it starts with the game author - whoever is designing the scenario for the players. This might not becessarily be the Games Master who will be running the game, but often enough it is.
    If the writer of the game creates a compelling enough setting, or campaign, or even just a single scenario, for the game, they will feel the power of immersion while writing it. It can be so powerful that writers who immerse themselves in the setting can become lost in it - whether they are writing fiction, designing a setting, or creating a game within that setting.
    The secret to immersion is to present that feeling of being drawn in and lost in the setting, in such a way as to draw in the Games Master (if they are not the game setting's creator) and also to draw in the readers or players.
    Creating Immersion
    Engaging Characters
    In a work of fiction, a character must be presented as sympathetic, somehow, possessing qualities of heroism or benevolence which mark that character as a protagonist to the reader.
    In a Mythras game, the character can be created with appropriate powers and abilities - but more importantly, they must come across as being the sort of exceptional person to whom the community turns; a member of the only group of characters who can solve the problems presented to them by the Games Master.
    Similarly, a character is more likely to be an enjoyable figure to work with if their abilities and personas jibe with the rest of the group. A combat-orientated character might not get along with a team predominantly composed of investigators or social climbers in a game of political intrigue.

    Engaging Setting
    Likewise, the setting must be something that is not only appealing to the players, but a place worthy of being defended. Immersion in the setting, in a game, is pretty much the same as it is for a written work - the players must feel as if they are living there, letting the place surround them and bring them to life. The players must want to live in the setting, whether it is the setting of Perceforest, or Lyonesse, or Worlds United, or Fioracitta.

    Sensory Immersion
    This is probably the aspect of gaming immersion that most strongly involves hypnotic elements. It is not enough to tell; you must show.
    Examples:-
    'You've been marching through this forest for so long. You come across a tree which looks so familiar, and you feel a chill of apprehension as you begin to suspect you may have been walking in circles.'
    'You can't identify the stench coming through the now-opened door of the laboratory. Perhaps you don't want to.'
    'Candlelight, and incense, and a low, indistinct choir singing somewhere nearby. The sandstone of the walls feels pitted, smoothed down - countless hands must have rubbed off on this darkened spot on the wall, smoothing down the stone. This is the place all the pilgrims wanted to come to; the smooth spot on the wall, supposedly the place where their Saint laid their hand and performed some miracle. But it just feels like smooth, cold, eroded stone to you.'
    Sustaining Immersion
    Once you've created a sense of immersion, you must sustain it throughout the adventure, possibly the campaign.
     
    Engaging Plots
    What makes a plot engaging? For the players, it could be the promise of treasure, or a desperate need to stop some bad guys. Which means you have to make the antagonists compelling, too. This does not mean that you have to add new tricks to old undead, making zombies leap about and climb walls for instance. It means having an antagonist whose scheme poses a credible threat, if not to the characters, then to their way of life.
    The protagonist is doing something bad, and only the player characters can stop them. The plot becomes engaging if the characters want to stop the antagonist, possinly without needing to be prompted by the Games Master.

    Plausibility
    There is no greater power of verisimilitude in a story than plausibility. Is the antagonist believable? Are their goals achievable? The fact that they are not remotely desirable is irrelevant; if the antagonist can destroy the characters' whole town and only home, and they demonstrably want to do so, the Games Master can ramp up the threat by having to characters work out how and why.

    Stakes
    The most important hook to keep the player characters in the game is stakes. The characters must have a stake, and they must want to do whatever it takes to protect that stake.
    Examples of stakes include family and loved ones living in the characters' town; the characters' town or neighbourhood; a neighbourhood which will pay for the characters' protection from some marauding force; a rich financial reward from the patron who needs the characters to see a task through which they cannot do.
    Or something less tangible, such as the characters' reputation, or a rescue or escort mission, or the completion of a diplomatic, trade, or courier mission. Sometimes, the stake can be something owed to oneself, and a need to know that a character can still perform a task they once could do routinely - for example, Athletics after having been injured during a fumbled Athletics check.
     
    The Payoff of Immersion
    The whole aim of immersion is to draw in the players with the promise of a memorable experience that is as much lived and enjoyed as a real life experience. The Games Master must be able to immerse the players into the game, and the only way to do this is to immerse yourself into the game; to run the game out in your own mind, both from the viewpoint of protagonists and the antagonists.
    The best sort of immersion is so deep that players can find themselves dreaming about the characters and the setting. Of course, as the Games Master you could find yourself dreaming out the adventures yourself, living in the setting, running the scenarios in your dreams. But that's all part and parcel of giving the players a memorable game, one which will stick in their memories, possibly for years to come.
  15. Alex Greene
    Of all the rules of Mythras,the chapter on Theism has the potential to provide the greatest contention, because it covers the topic of the player characters' religion.
    Devotion is one of two non-mundane skills used by theists. The other skill, Exhort, is used to invoke Theistic Miracles.
    But what exactly is Devotion about, anyway?
    Holiness
    Can people really measure someone's holiness by a number? Could a religion's Pontiff really throw down some badass righteous smiting from on high? The Mythras Core Rulebook would seem to maintain that it is so.
    Mythras Core Rulebook says this about Devotion:-
    The ‘skill’ is more accurately a relationship the theist has with an individual god, a small faction or family of divine beings, or indeed an entire pantheon.
    This makes Devotion a little different to the magical skills such as Folk Magic or Invocation. It also makes Devotion very different to the skills used by the closest thing to Theism, namely Animism. With Animism, the two magical skills are Trance and Binding - neither skill involves a relationship with the spirits, and animists are obligated to make their own relationships.
    There is one class of rated traits which does resemble Devotion, and it is not skills.
    It's Passions. Devotion, in the end, is a form of Passion.
    Divine Love
    Like a Passion, Devotion can be used as a resistance roll - Devotion is a measure of one's faith to withstand psychological or physical torture or coercion, according to Mythras Core Rulebook:-
    Devotion can potentially be used to resist various psychological attacks, tests of faith or contests of competing passions.
    A character who has Devotion can draw upon their Faith to look at the worst the world has to hold, and come through their trials "bloody, but unbowed," to paraphrase Henley's poem "Invictus." This is true, even if they do not possess the other Theist skill of Exhort, which is used to call upon the deity's portfolio of Miracles.
    Divine Grace
    The Core Rulebook describes Devotional Pools of Magic Points, offered up by the Theist (who spends their Magic Points, but who can recover them) to power their Miracles. Theists must keep these Pools topped up in order to pay for the Miracles.
    This is where one of the Laws of Games Mastery comes in, and it is this.
    There is no such thing as a Law of Conservation of Magic Points.
    Exactly where those points come from is irrelevant. They can come from the Theists themselves (who may fill up their Devotional Pools before retiring to bed), from other Adventurers who donate their Magic Points ("Hey, guys, I know we're trapped in this dungeon, but I can call upon my god to help out, so can we have a quick Black Mass to my Dark God before we go on? I can find a small animal to sacrifice, so nobody needs to cut their wrists much, but ... where are you going? Guys?") or they can come from a congregation at a site sacred to the deity, such as a shrine or a Temple. This, by the way, is where the rule comes from that the Theist must return to a place of worship to "top up the tank" (which makes it sound crass and tawdry, like returning to their bank's ATM to withdraw cash to fill up their wallet).
    It is so much easier to hold a Mass in a Temple, surrounded by light and incense, and the echoing choral music from the nave, than trying to slit a rat's throat in the middle of a foetid midden. This is where it's far more advantageous to worship light gods than Dark Maggot or Demon Ganglion or whatever: such gods provide greater societal acceptability, and greater access to Devotional Magic Points donated by the much larger congregation (when you have 150 lay congregants donating 1 Magic Point each to the deity, your Theist's Devotional Pool can get filled up very quickly. Consider it like receiving a 10% commission on sales).
    Acting Divine
    The box text on page 179 of the Core Rulebook, Acting Like Your God, is an optional rule which ties the Theist more closely to their deity. As Devotion increases, a combination of peer pressure and society's expectations demand that Theists with high Devotion act more and more like their deities, somehow. The inspiration for this comes from a book, Thomas Kempis' The Imitation of Christ, which basically stated that Christians should become more like Christ to show their devotion to the Faith. Again, it is very difficult to imagine Theists rising very high in Devotion to Dark Maggot if that were the case.
    An alternative mechanism to Devotional Magic Points pools, outlined in Fioracitta, the Heart of Power, is Divine Grace Points. These represent divine favour, and they are bestowed by the deity (for which, read "the Games Master") to followers who make sacrifices and perform devotional acts pleasing to the gods, ranging from attending regular Masses, donating to charities, giving one's time and energies to helping patients in hospitals and so on.
    The higher one's Devotion, the greater the Divine Grace Points bestowed - though a deity who is particularly pleased by their human child may well bestow a full load of Divine Grace Points to a barefoot lay member who just crawled up to the altar, while bestowing a mere 1 Grace Point to the dazzlingly-vested High Priest looking down upon the ragged beggar at his feet. Such are the ways of deities.
    Behavioural changes can take the form of new Passions, as the Devoted follower begins to acquire traits favourable to their deity such as Charity, Honesty, Lust, Humour, Honour, Wisdom, or Courage. I avoided counting Chastity as a virtue, because seriously, Chastity gets you nowhere.
    The Mundane In Service to The Numinous
    Theists could work their mundane Standard and Professional Skills in service to their deities. A deity of strategic warfare might reward leaders who advance in Lore (Tactics & Strategy), and a god of commerce could bless a follower with a high skill in Commerce and Bureaucracy.
    A Goddess of Wealth (such as Harnworld's Halea) could reward Theists who invest their own money (rather than Church money) in local businesses. This reward could take the form of increased opportunities for Commerce and Bureaucracy, and even the occasional (somewhat hot) Behold Miracle to show the Goddess' favour.
    In contrast, the god Agrik (a war god from Harnworld) could show his favour to a Devoted priestess, before a battle with the uptight goddess Larani, with a (really hot) Behold Miracle to show the priestess the throne room and battle room which await her in the fiery fortress of Balgashang, in the Agrikan Harnic afterlife, if she wins. You don't want to know what he shows her if she loses.
    If a Player of a Theist declares that they are performing a Church-approved mundane skill as an act of dedication to the deity (for instance, a Theist of a God of Labour using Crafts (Tailoring) to create a priestly vestment to donate to their Church, or (for example in Fioracitta) a worshipper of Verdia who goes off to the forests in the foothills of the Millagra Mountains to use Locale to look for forage to feed the homeless people of Outer Gioconda), they are likely to fulfil the deity's demands on their time, the payment for the Divine Grace Points (or Devotional Magic Points Pools, if you are using the Theism rules from the Mythras Core Rulebook).
    The key is selflessness. The gods favour selfless Devotion. Deities depend on their congregations believing in them and showing virtuous behaviour (which depends on the deity - what is virtuous to a goddess of wisdom, knowledge, industry, and war is very different to a goddess of love, lust, hedonism, and commerce), so grand acts which benefit the congregation (such as defending a village of the faithful, or leading a congregation of the Goddess of Lust through some rite of mad abandon) will benefit the Theist far more than selfish behaviour.
    Politics versus The Divine
    This is the part that Mythras Core Rulebook tends to get dead wrong. More often than not, in any organised religion the fancier robes are not always worn by the most Devoted or pious. More powerful even than market forces are the forces of politics, and Churches are hotbeds of politics, cowboy diplomacy, corruption, and betrayal.
    Devotion has little room at the upper echelons of ecclesiastical power. It is highly likely that the highest Masses are little more than an exercise in Oratory and Customs, the greatest charitable acts are mere exercises in Courtesy, and the wealth of the Church is nothing more than the exercise of Commerce skill as the supposedly-holy shrine skims 10% off the top of the proceeds of sales of all the tawdry trinkets and "holy water" flasks being sold by all the vendor stalls surrounding the entrance to the shrine.
    In truth, the Devotees with the strongest visions, or the more powerful miracles, are not often well-regarded by their Churches. A Devoted Theist who has access to some powerful Miracle such as Propitiation can be useful to the Church - but if they begin to rail against institutional systemic injustice, or protest that the Mother Church is exacting too high a financial toll on the peasantry, the Church is often likely to arrange for the martyrdom and beatification of the Devoted Theist and the construction of a shrine to draw the pilgrims, and their money.
    Fioracitta
    I have to make a personal pitch for Fioracitta, The Heart of Power here, because part of the heart of the book and setting is Faith. Tamaggia, Venea, and Tazar all meet in Fioracitta, along with Ellah, Schiova, Vecsu, Hirouar, Isaa, Shai-Hebul and so many others. The city is bustling with so many different Faiths, and this was a deliberate choice on my part because Fioracitta, as it is, is a kind of Renaissance-like Babylon for Adventurers. The city's setting, and its rules, are aimed towards sandbox play, meaning that Adventurers can explore whatever their Faith means for them, and for those who surround them.
    One Adventurer's pious Tamaggian Theist might find it difficult to get along with their wild, Pagan Venean counterpart, but she might learn to accept the Venean's less-inhibited attitude to life, as the Venean might also pick up some restraint and propriety from her Tamaggian friend. This would not affect either Adventurer's Devotion in the slightest - but both could grow during the campaign as their characters mature and become more tolerant.
    Faith In The Game
    In the end, Theism is about each Adventurer's Faith in their deity. That Faith can help them to progress within their Church's hierarchy, but it is more likely that Adventurers will encounter politics and Machiavellian shenanigans within their Church, meaning that in the end, the Adventurers' Faith is entirely personal. Not that it makes their Miracles any less powerful - but when an Adventurer's life contains an element of Faith, their story arc is going to be about how much meaning that Faith gives them - and whether or not their Faith Manages.
  16. Alex Greene
    This article is about spirits, and animism, and animists, and about animists in a Mythras game.
    Here's what the Mythras Core Rulebook has to say about animism.
    Animism is magic worked through communion with spirits and the spirit world. It is the magic of shamans and spirit walkers. Such practitioners do not treat with gods or learn their abilities from books or tomes; instead their powers come from the myriad spirits that inhabit the spirit realms, and interact occasionally with the mundane world.
    As far as Adventurers go, what ever is the point of animists? They take up to an hour to get into the right trance state, they just sit there chanting while everybody is fighting, and when they bring back a spirit ally it's an invisible, intangible presence which might as well not be there. What good is an animist if they can't pick up a sword or fire off spells?
    World of Spirits
    To an animist, the whole world is sacred. Every part of the world - rocks, plants, the sky, the rivers - is alive, and their souls are the spirits. An animist has only two powers, to speak of - Trance skill, and Binding skill. Unless they also moonlight as sorcerers or Folk Magicians, or they also worship a deity as theists, an average animist has no access to spells.
    Relationships and Connections
    Animists' power comes from the connections they make with the spirit reflection of the earthly realm. As intermediaries, their job is to bridge this world and the other one; to intercede between people and the spirits. They are medicine people, because most of what they bring to the world is medicine - cures and healing of physical, emotional, and even mental ailments, injuries and wounds.
    The animist makes connections with the spirits. They know the spirits by name. Their traditions allow the animist to call upon those spirits for aid, or for divination, and so on. This is important enough to describe below.
    Animist Traditions
    Every nation has its own animist traditions, and examples of such include real-world animist practices such as shamanism. The word "shaman" possibly comes from a Tungusic word saman, meaning "one who knows."
    In Mythras, animist traditions can be created which bear a resemblance to real world animist traditions such as Shinto, and hopefully these analogues can be created with a little cultural sensitivity so as not to offend people for whom their local animist tradition is of real cultural significance. Real world animist traditions have often very different mythologies, ways, practices, and taboos. It is not as if every animist is cut from the same cloth, all around the world.
    Strengths
    An animist's power comes from their relationships and connections with the spirits. The strength comes from the understanding that the spirits mark aspects of the world - the winds, tides, water currents, mountains, storms, fires, animals, plants, and landscape features of nature, and the hearths and streets of human cities.
    Nature's Power
    The power of spirits can be called up to attack the animist's enemies in the form of storms, tsunami, rip tides, animal attacks, curses and diseases, spirits of a location (genius loci) attacking interlopers, crop failures, infertility, and technological failures, failures to communicate and even financial disasters in the human realm.
    The most versatile abilities of spirits include Comprehension - the ability to converse with creatures associated with the spirit, such as wolves to a wolf spirit, or cats for a cat spirit; Demesne - the control of a spirit over a location with which it is associated, such as a natural glade, a street corner, or a hearth; Domination - the ability to command all associated creatures; Passion - the ability to infuse powerful emotions, usually in people; and Puppeteer - the ability to possess and manipulate a body, usually a person's body.
    Echoes
    In a city, the reflection of the spirit world can take on some of the features of the original nature spirits which it replaced. A street built over what used to be a meadow can acquire some strange characteristics from the original meadow spirit which used to dwell there. The street might be known as Meadow Street; there might be a florist on the corner; and the locals might all have gardens full of brightly coloured flowers, or flowerboxes hanging over balcony railings. A bend in the road which is notorious for accidents might have hungry death spirits lurking nearby to feast off the corner's deadly bounty. They may not be the cause of the black spot, but the locus itself might be generating a large, deadly spirit of its own. 
    Possession
    Spirits may also, in some cases, possess a being, occupying their bodies overtly or covertly through Covert Possession or Puppeteer. Spirit possession may allow the spirits to communicate to the people either through the body of the animist who channelled them, or through someone whom the spirit possessed, in order to utter prophecy or to communicate.
    Exorcism
    The animist can be called upon to remove a possessing spirit from a person, by discorporating and entering the spirit world, then engaging with the spirit in combat. This is one way that an animist can help solve a possession - the other way being to use a bound spirit to do the job for them, such as a fetch, or a Medicine Spirit to attack a Disease Spirit.
    Animists In Game
    An animist can do their best work if they can call upon the spirits of an area to help out. An animist can ask for help from a spirit of nature, who can guide them to safety through a hazardous environment. They can ask the spirits to help in the hunt by channelling a wolf spirit, permitting the animist to think and hunt and track like a wolf. The spirits of medicine can possess the animist, granting them the spirit's healing abilities. Ancestor spirits can be brought in to help bless a family lineage; spirits of a specific beast, such as a beast of burden, can be brought in to a farm or similar establishment to bless the herd with fertility during the breeding season, or the spirit of a wild beast summoned to aid an animist against their enemies by driving those animals to turn and attack the animist's enemies.
    On the street, a spirit of humanity (street spirit, park spirit, hearth spirit, business spirit) can help provide an urban animist with knowledge of the area - which street corners see the most accidents (usually marked by clouds of death spirits hanging around them); whether an area is good or bad for a business (animism could be verging on a kind of feng shui); and whether or not a business is entirely legitimate or has some secrets in its back rooms.
    Animists work best with the environments they are passing through. And if a local spirit is not handy, animists can still help out, by bringing in spirits bound into fetishes to unleash upon the area, causing such strange events as fish falls from the sky, odd animal sightings, unexpected business collapses, or even extremely localised fires or flooding. A swamp spirit released from a fetish into a field on the eve of battle could turn that battlefield into a deadly mire of soft mud for any cavalry and infantry advancing through the area. A fire elemental could wreak havoc for that enemy, who would be sitting targets unable to advance or withdraw due to the cloying mud underfoot.
    The Animist As Protagonist
    A movie, The Emerald Forest, focused on a non-local American boy who became involved with an animistic tribe in the rain forest. The movie explored the boy's gradual learning of their customs, ultimately to the point where he brought down a dam by causing an intense rainstorm to build up the river's levels beyond the dam's ability to hold back the waters.
    Animism in the real world may not have such profound effects (we can only wish), but in a fantasy game the power of animism can do incredible things. As a player of an animist, you just need to know how to respect and venerate your spirits, and the land which creates them.
    Animism In Your Game
    As a Games Master, you get to choose what the local spirits are in the environment, and where they can be found. If every place has a soul, the animist can call upon their Trance skill to see the spirit echo of the material world, and to call upon them and petition them for aid. From helping them with Locale, Navigation, and Streetwise skill checks, to obtaining knowledge they could not obtain through Perception alone, an animist can make themselves valuable assets to the adventuring party. More than being able to scout out a battlefield or to attack the shadows; given enough time to prepare, the animist can marshall those shadows and turn the very battlefield itself against the enemy.
    Just give the team's animist time to get a feel for the lay of the land. That is all the adventurers need to assure victory.
  17. Alex Greene

    Living A Passionate Life

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    This article takes a look at an aspect of each Adventurer's makeup which is rarely used, except in dire circumstances as an "extra save roll" when the resistance skills have failed, and before the player uses up a Luck Point to make the problem go away.
    This article is about Passions.
    Core Rulebook
    Mythras, page 282, has this to say about Passions. Bolded parts highlighted by me.
    Throughout all kinds of fiction, and especially in fantasy, passion drives the plot. The desire to save the world from the evil dark lord; to pursue and gain power; to quest for glory and lost wisdom; to defend, find or avenge love. The variations are limitless and the Passions system is capable of handling them all.
    Every individual is driven by some sort of passion. Passions both inform and cloud choices. The heart governs the head, and rational thinking is replaced by that overwhelming compulsion a true passion brings. There is nothing we will not do to save our loved ones. Our loyalty to leader or country drives us to selfless acts. Passions impel us, and in Mythras the Passions mechanics can help drive an entire campaign.
    Passionate Themes
    How and where could Games Masters and Players implement Passions in a Mythras game?
    - Passions can drive an individual's choices. An Adventurer who has a loved one back home, and a Passion to love that person, will move mountains to see that person again at the end of the adventure. Another Adventurer, for instance a Fiorese from the time of the Bragoni Occupation, might find their Passion clouding their decisions, such as the Adventurer being forced to rescue a hated Bragoni from the people who had conquered his beloved city of Fioreste (which would be renamed Fioracitta).
    - An adventure can be themed about a single Passion. An Adventurer could learn, at the conclusion of a story, that their beloved father, who'd died when the Adventurer was young (during a Background Event), had in face been murdered: his death had been ordered, and it had been covered up to look like an accidental death. The Adventurer might find themselves with a new Passion, Identify (My Father's Killers) or Avenge (My Father's Killers) - and this could lead them into an adventure further down the line when the Adventurer learns that a fugitive from the law has fled the city, and that the fugitive can identify who had arranged for the death of the Adventurer's father.
    The Adventurer, driven by this Passion, could argue with their Ally that the Adventurer should go with the posse comitatus, over the express wish of the Ally that the Adventurer keep their nose out of this. The Adventurer could be torn by the need to keep the fugitive alive until the Adventurer can extract what they need to know. This could lead to conflict with a Patrol member (possibly even the Ally) who wants to bring the fugitive home dead, rather than alive.
    - Passionate Character. What if the Adventurer's Passions were all greater than their highest skills? What if they did what they did out of their Passion of Love, rated at 103%, 30% more than their Art or Craft skills, or Unarmed, or any of their Combat Styles? An Adventurer might only have mediocre levels of characteristics and skills, but their Passion might drive them to win at all costs, whether that Passion be to Love (a recurring loved one) or Prove (aliens exist) or Identify (whoever abducted my sister). Say hello, Fox Mulder.
    - Augmentation. Passion can boost even the most mundane skill check. It might make all the difference if an Adventurer's 45% Athletics check were boosted, in a chase, by the driving need to catch up to the fleeing quarry in order to beat the living daylights out of them for what they just tried to do to the Adventurer's sister.
    Passionate Settings
    What is it about a Passion that can transform what sounds like a mundane setting into a high-stakes story that keeps the players on the edge of their seat? How can a Passion transform a game from a simple exercise in number-crunching into a legendary quest, or a story of deeds of valour worthy of song?
    Let's look at some examples of popular media settings themed around Passions.
    Star Trek is driven by the need "to explore strange new worlds. To seek new life and new civilisations. To boldly go where no-one has gone before."
    Babylon 5 was "our last, best hope for peace," until it failed in the year of the Shadow War, where it became "our last, best hope ... for victory."
    Doctor Who is driven by the need for compassion and urgency - "Never be cruel. Never be cowardly." "Hate is always foolish, and love is always wise." "Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind." "Just show up, and don't be horrible."
    No, wait - that's Peter Capaldi's advice, not The Doctor's.
    Ignore the bit about the pears. Pears are great. When other people are eating them.
    Farscape's Passions, too, changed. In the beginning, the monologue was:-
    Help me. Listen, please. Is there anybody out there who can here me?
    I'm being hunted by an insane military commander.
    Doing everything I can. I'm just looking for a way home. However, from the third season on, the monologue had changed, revealing the new underlying Passions of the show:-
    If you can hear me
    Beware
    If I make it back
    Will they follow?
    If I open the door
    Are you ready?
    Earth is unprepared
    Helpless
    For the nightmares
    I've seen
    Or should I stay
    Protect my home
    Not show them
    You exist
    But then you'll never know
    The wonders I've seen Driven by so many needs: the need to go home; the need to stay with his partner and found family; the need to help his partner and friends; the need to survive a coming war; the need to keep Earth safe; even the need to get a terrifying secret out of his head. No wonder the protagonist seemed to be more than a little mad, in the end - all those Passions kept tearing him apart.
    Impassioned Play
    A Passion can define an Adventurer more than their highest skills. An Adventurer with, say, Love as their Passion can become renowned as a Great Lover for their deep Passion for another - even if they could have higher renown as a Great Warrior (with a really high Combat Style) or a Great Magician (with Invocation and Shaping both over 100%).
    Even if the Passion were only hovering around 50%, that Passion could be what defines the Adventurer, simply because more of their adventures are themed around that Passion than any of their other qualities, skills, or resources.
    A Great Lover could be driven by the need to experience and share that Love Passion, possibly in a number of people's bedchambers or only in the eyes and heart of one. An Adventurer whose core Passion was Fear (Enemy) could be forced to confront and overcome that terrible Fear in all kinds of situations, to the point where they acquire a new Passion of Bravery.
    Epic Ingredient
    Passions bring an epic element to a setting, campaign, and individual stories. A scenario set in some dungeon disconnected from the world, little more than an exercise in crunching numbers, can never match a scenario with an attached Passion such as Avenge (My Father's Killer). A Passion can lead to a major showdown with the lead antagonist, not to simply reduce the enemy to zero Hit Points or to ensure a victory condition and end the scenario, but to satisfy a driving need to defeat this particular foe, to avenge a loved one, or to overcome a lifelong fear of this enemy which has plagued the protagonist for most of their life.
    In other words, victory can mean something crucial for the Adventurers. It can be personal. And it can be epic.
    Final Thoughts From The Core Rulebook
    The Core Rulebook has this to say about Passions.
    Games Masters can use Passions in a variety of ways, designing entire scenarios around the feelings that a character holds for a particular subject or antagonist. These can be very fulfilling for players, especially when they begin to vicariously experience the emotions gripping their characters.
    This is a lesson for every Games Master and Player. By including Passions which are close to the Passions the Players have, the Games Master can create scenarios which give the Players as much of a sense of fulfilment as their Adventurers would feel. Passions, therefore, make their exploits in the game world memorable and worthy of long discussion - because even if the Adventurers' Passions are only as real as the Adventurers are, the Passions experienced by the Players are real.
    And that includes the Passion Care For (The Adventurers).
  18. Alex Greene

    Kitting Out The Party

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    [Cover image is from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Atelier_von_Rahmenmachern_und_deren_Werkzeuge_im_18._Jahrhundert.jpg]
    One of the more overlooked issues about Mythras adventuring is what equipment the Adventurers are carrying while out on a campaign. The basic tool lists on pages 60, 61 of Mythras and page 88 of Fioracitta are good guidelines as to what one could expect to take on an adventure, but there is still a need to plan in advance for the adventure.
    The equipment an Adventurer would be expected to carry depends on the environment, and on the nature of the adventure. This article's purpose is to get the Games Master and Players to think about the logistics of adventuring, and to provide a sense of immersion as the Players enter into the Adventurers' spirit, as they trek through the countryside on their adventures.
    Standard Armour and Weapons
    Just to make things easier for each Adventurer, have the players choose their primary melee weapon (e.g. staff, sword, rapier, axe, hammer), secondary melee weapon (e.g. club, dagger, hand axe), and one ranged weapon if their Combat Style includes it (e.g. dagger, bow, crossbow). No more than those three weapons. Those are included in their kit.
    It is also a good idea to have every Adventurer wear the same type of armour, such as a 2AP Quilted / Padded armour. Each piece is made separately, and put on once they reach the destination. Each such suit provides the same AP protection to all Hit Locations, costs about the same, and has a standard ENC load.
    Pack
    Each Adventurer needs the following, for adventures which require travel.
    Backpack
    Bedroll
    Flint and Tinder / firemaking kit
    Knife (cutting tool, not a weapon)
    Lantern, basic
    Lock picks
    Mirror (hand glass)
    Mug/Beaker/Dish/Plate (wood or ceramic – double price for metal)
    Oil flask
    Razor, folding
    Rope (hemp), 10m
    Waterskin or Canteen (holds 2 litres of liquid)
    Rations - Feeding The Party
    Every adventuring party is going to have to carry food, particularly if they are travelling cross-country and in environments where foraging is expected to be poor. It is generally accepted that 1 kg of trail rations (biscuits, dried vegetables, cured meat) will sustain someone for two days. With the Preserve Folk Magic cantrip, that food can be kept practically indefinitely if some form of attempt at preservation is made (and yes, carefully wrapping them up in greaseproof paper counts).
    Here is where Survival and Locale skills become essential, naturally - but Craft (Cooking) is also overlooked.All of the above basically amounts to the bare minimum kit needed of an adventuring party in the wilderness. The rations should last for one to two weeks before running out; supplemented by forage, they could last for a month's travel.
    That presumes that the Adventurers will be hiking on foot to their destination. There is a listing for feed for one's mounts listed on the table on page 60, but assume that beasts of burden are going to need to eat a lot more than one kilogram of hay per day - again, they would need to find something to graze.
    Toolkits
    Adventurers may require specialised toolkits to perform their work, not counting weapons.
    Many of the items in the table on pages 60 and 61 of Mythras presume that each Adventurer may wish to bring along their favourite trade tools, if those tools are relevant to the situation. An actor's elaborate theatrical kit, with wardrobe, might weigh several hundred ENC and be impossible to move around - but a small stack of basic cosmetics, enough for one attempt at Disguise, might only weigh 2 ENC at most.
    The basic list on pages 60 and 61 is only a rough guide. Articles such as a chess or backgammon set (1 ENC, 10 - 1000 SP), burglary kit (grappling hook, crowbar, lockpicks - 1 ENC total) and so on should never encumber the characters.
    Every character should have some small, lightweight travel version of their primary work tools. Never more than about 10 ENC. Preferably no more than 5 ENC. A burglary specialist's toolkit is very different to a journalist's writing kit.
    Urban Adventuring
    Urban adventuring may require Adventurers to dispense with much of the equipment they take for granted out in the wild. Nobody needs to carry forage around in the city; and nobody needs to carry around a bedroll (or their weapons, in general).
    It would be awkward indeed for Adventurers to attend an upper class soiree in the cultured section of the city, dressed in full armour and carrying a full armoury of weapons and adventuring kit. While in the city, less is decidedly more.
    How can the characters get away with carrying along full kit?
    Work
    Of course the Adventurers can carry their heavy tools around, if they have to carry their own work tools to and from the job.
    Training
    The Adventurers could sign up as trainers, and go off on wilderness drill training to teach members of the public the basics of Locale, Survival, and Track.
    Rescue Force
    Adventurers could convince people of their advanced understanding of the locality (Locale skill), enough for them to form an amateur rescue group whose job is to patrol regularly, looking for people who get lost in the wilds.
    Deputised
    The local law can give the Adventurers a badge of office, then order them to go on patrol around the perimeter of their city and its condato, looking for brigands, providing protection detail to passing caravans, and so on.
    Signing Up
    The Adventurers could even join the militia, or at least sign up for their regular public drills. Some towns and cities require all able adults to attend at least some sort of mandatory training to defend the city in the event of an invasion. Their adventures could happen to them while they are on their way home from a training session - or while en route to training.
    Inspiration
    The above should provide some measure of inspiration to players. The journey to a destination can be made as memorable as the adventure itself, providing scenes which allow for dialogues between Adventurers, minor problems for the party to solve together, and all the experiences (and Experience Rolls) of surviving in the rough.
    And back home, the players should never feel that their characters are underequipped if all that they have on them is the clothes on their back, and maybe a single dagger or concealed weapon hidden somewhere on their person.
  19. Alex Greene
    The Adventurers are the core of all games. As games have developed, adventure modules have been less about pre-packaged mazes full of hazards and more about dramas and conflicts, with the Adventurers at the heart of driving the changes.
    As adventures have developed from their implausible "mazes full of traps and horrors" to more nuanced scenarios and dramas, so too have Adventurers. Modern Adventuring parties now more closely resemble bands of roaming mercenaries, military units or hunting parties - even posses, rounded up by the local law to track down and apprehend fugitives.
    Adventuring parties show structure and purpose, and there is a definite lifestyle pattern to Adventuring.
    Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing
    Every party begins life during Session Zero, where the Games Master allows the players to introduce their characters. This generally just consists of the player introducing themselves, their character, and something about who their player is (what species they are, where they come from, what they are most famous for). In certain older games, it's all "name, species, class" and everybody would know what the character can do; but, this being Mythras, things are not nearly so clear-cut.
    The player may use their background, or their career, or their culture, to explain why they are Adventurers, or add a detail out of whole cloth. It might be a good idea for Games Masters to note down any player additions to their GM character notes.
    Games Masters, it's a really good idea to get a copy of the player characters' sheets, so you can tell at a glance what each is good at and where they are weakest. Players, work with your GM on this. It makes things so much easier when both you and the GM are aware of your character's 90% Track skill and grasp of the Pathway Folk Magic cantrip, for instance, especially if the other players forget these details about them.
    An example - in the adventure "A Race Through Dark Places" which I ran during GenCon 2021, each pregenerated character had one thing in common - some sort of connection to the spirit realm. Only one of the characters was an actual animist; the others had some sort of exceptional ability or experience which connected them to the spirit, and which allowed them to interact with spirits in some way. This was, of course, important to the scenario, which required characters who were capable of defending themselves against spectral assaults.
    Another adventure might have the characters united by a common theme - they are all theatre entertainers who lost their job, or they are all competitive fighters who are out training, or they are a patrol of guards securing the condato of a city (the country beyond the city walls which grows the crops the city needs to keep its population fed).
    The real point of Session Zero, beyond introducing the characters to the other players, is to allow the players to let the character bond with one another. They will be working as a team, soon enough.
    First Time Out
    There are many ways to start an adventure going. The Adventurers could be drawn into an ongoing story, unfolding before their eyes; or they could be brought together by a friendly Connection ("I'm puttin' together a team"). The party leader could well seek to form a team of people, based on their already-existing renown (The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, Hawk The Slayer, Krull, Battle Beyond The Stars, The ABC Warriors) and lead that team in person, rather than send them out on a mission.
    However the team forms, they must spend their first few days together. This is the time where the players get to form the team's dynamic. Which characters are early birds; which ones are night owls; and how effective the party leader's Oratory skills are.
    It is okay for the players to have trouble integrating the team at this point. Every team of veterans began as raw recruits, and there is no such thing as Adventurer Boot Camp in most fantasy milieux (unless a member of the party comes up with the idea as a long-term ambition, but that's for a later blog). Every new team has to start learning to fit in, to work well within the group, and to complement everybody else, filling in the weaknesses in other characters' skills while hoping other team members will support their weaknesses, and so on.
    An example is a party whose first adventure takes them deep into the wilderness, for example looking for the driver of a trading wagon who disappeared during the night. Characters need to have access to a variety of wilderness skills to make sense of the adventure - but while every character may have access to Athletics, Boating, Locale, Ride, and Swim, not everyone has access to Navigation, Seamanship, Survival, and Track. It is reasonable, however, to have at least two characters show a mix of at least two relevant skills (Navigation and Survival or Boating, Seamanship and Swim, Locale and Survival) in order to ensure that the party has access to all of the relevant skills between them. This allows each character a chance to shine - the Survival expert to build shelters, the Track expert using Navigation to determine where the prey is going, and so on.
    The players should work out for themselves how to allocate the best tasks to the best players - such as getting the Folk Magician with knowledge of Ignite to help start the fire built by the Survival expert, and getting all the party members to help one another out with pitching tents, foraging, finding clean water, preparing the food, establishing a camp perimeter, and so on.
    The concept of standard kit should be brought up before play ever begins. Every character must have access to a minimum amount of kit to help them to survive. This will be covered in the next blog post.
    Games Masters: What To Do
    Give the characters tasks suited to their needs. Let the party leader know what needs to be done, and allow the leader to negotiate with the players as to what tasks they ought to do. This is the best time to iron out any conflicts and complaints about leadership style, and allows the leader to get a feel as to how the team can work together. Remember, this is the first time for these Adventurers. They will have been torn from their cosy lives by the call to adventure, and they are bound to make mistakes.
    Games Masters: What Not To Do
    Their mistakes should not, however, cost the players their lives, or even injure them. Humiliate them, sure. The Survival expert might put together a perfect campfire, but the wood might be green and non-inflammable without the team magician's Ignite spell; the Navigation expert might get turned around and be unable to find his way back to the camp until somebody finally gets the campfire lit, and so on.
    Never put the starting party in jeopardy of any great or permanent injury.
    And never have them face a combat encounter on their first ever trek out - not unless the combat was the point, such as teaming up to fight brigands camping out in the woods, or kobolds driven down from the mountains to raid a village, and so on. And even so, never soften them up with a lethal combat encounter, first thing. Even an adventure involving tracking down and punishing miscreants should end with the battle, not have the battle take place in the middle somewhere.
    No, it is a stupid idea to have them face a random giant, passing dragon, or lich on their first night under the stars. You know they couldn't cope. They know they couldn't cope. Handing the party a TPK (Total Party Kill) in their first session is a guarantee that you'll never have a second session with those players.
    First Night Rewards
    The first day and night of adventuring should end with the characters being rewarded for their efforts. Either their skills (or spells or other abilities) can bring them some physical reward (such as an Ophidian's superior sense of smell detecting truffles, or a Bestia hunter discovering a perfect site to set up camp), or they can learn something (such as discovering tracks leading away from the site where the wagon was found abandoned, indicating that the wagon was indeed attacked and, judging by the bootprints mixed among the bare footprints in the soft dirt, the driver abducted).
    Always give each player a chance to feel that they made a difference to the whole team, before their first period of rest.
    Assigning Watch Details
    Part of the fledgling party's duties may include watches. Who gets to sleep for four hours first; who has to stand watch for predators of all descriptions in the small hours; and who gets to be woken in the middle of a lovely dream, with hours to go before sunup.
    There is no need to play out each watch as its own scene, unless the Games Master has something planned for the party on their first night out. Not an ambush; something unexpected.
    Examples:-
    - The old ruins were once a thriving town, until it was abandoned by everybody but the ghosts. The night the Adventurers camp out in the ruins is the anniversary of the town's desertion, and this is always a night for the ghosts to come out and play.
    - The legend of a Parliament of Wolves in the area happens to be true. All the wolves gather nearby this night. Not all of them come on four legs.
    - The miscreants were from a non-human species (e.g. Bestia or Lili'tri). Most of the time, humans stay away from the communities of these non-human beings, but these raiders are outcasts from their communities, and the characters' activities have attracted the attention of a patrol of members of this species, who are basically doing the same thing they are.
    - An object falls from the sky, waking everybody up with a tremendous explosion nearby. The characters desert their camp to investigate.
    The First Real Conflict
    The Games Master should not drag out this first adventure. Its point is to bring the party together and unite them, allow the players to give the team an identity. Scenarios run in conventions are always one-shots, self-contained and designed to last no more than, say, four hours, wrapping up with an ending for each character; but even if you are planning a long campaign, this first adventure should not last more than one or two sessions, of four hours each. The first session establishes the party; the second pits them against their first ever antagonists, and the characters should have acquired enough information about the antagonists in the first session, or first half of the session, to know who they are up against in the second half, or second session.
    When pitting the characters against the antagonists, injuries on the players may hurt, but always stop short of Serious or Major Wounds or outright death. Characters may expect wounds, but nothing grievous.
    They should always come home, grinning and telling onlookers "You should see the other guy."
    Wrapping Up The First Scenario
    The Games Master must always challenge the characters with each scenario or story in their campaign, assuming you are running a campaign instead of a one-shot. The challenge of the first session of actual play must always be to get the player characters to play nice with each other and to have each other's backs when the inevitable conflict occurs. There will always be other challenges; but the first challenge should always be to turn a bunch of disparate heroes into a team, for the first time.
  20. Alex Greene

    Slaying Dragons

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    [Featured image taken from Monster Wiki - https://monster.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon?file=DragonRed.jpg]
    This post is a hard one to write, and not for the reasons you might think.
    Dragon slaying, noble questing knights, castles ... they are all such staples of fantasy, it's hard to get away from such tropes. From Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, through to more modern incarnations in popular media such as Kilgarrah (voiced by the late, great John Hurt) in the TV series Merlin, the dragons in the movies The Last Dragon and Reign of Fire, Skyrim, the Eragon series, and the "How To Train Your Dragon" animated movie franchise, dragons are as iconic to the fantasy genre as robots and rayguns are to science fiction.
    Big, Scaly, Breathing Fire
    You're all familiar with the trope. Dragons are house-sized, sometimes palace-sized, reptiles which fly with the aid of huge, leathery wings, They have long, flexible necks and tails, and breathe fire (or ice, or electricity, or acid, or cold, depending on the colour of the scales). They live to prey upon villages, carrying off sheep and cattle, and the occasional peasant girl. They can be lured by tying a princess to a rock, then striking at it in the one vulnerable spot on their bodies, which is typically where they are ticklish *cough* some spot just under a forelimb, in its armpit.
    Oh, and let's not forget the pile of gold it's supposed to be sitting on.
    There's one problem with this image of dragons.
    Symbolism and Parable
    Dragons aren't actually supposed to be literal big flying fire-breathing reptiles, you know. They just symbolise an even more horrible beast.
    Feudalism.
    A dragon is actually some kingdom next door. It takes a tithe from each village (it's called taxes), it sits on a hoard of gold (again, taxes), it is destructive (armies), and it has a penchant for princesses and virgins (droit de seigneur - look that up. It is not nice).
    Of course dragons are just symbols for that nasty feudal kingdom next door. Painting the king next door as being a greedy, gold-hungry reptile is about as low as propaganda can get.
    But what does that mean for dragonslaying quests?
    Well, if the adventurers are off to slay a dragon, that makes them mercenaries hired by the local government. It makes their quest an invasion. Their mission - to slay the king next door (assassination, regime change) and retrieve its hoard (plunder the nation's already-stolen wealth and extricate it from its country of origin) in the form of the spoils of war.
    This is sounding more and more like a mediaeval Crusade to the Holy Land, isn't it?
    Invoking The Draconic
    How can a GM invoke a dragon as a threat force in a fantasy, without going down the tired old Tolkien / Arthurian road, following the well-worn tropes trodden by so many identikit heroes of literature and tabletop? In other words, what does the dragon represent in the story, if it is not a literal fire-breathing flying kaiju lizard?
    Blatant Symbolism
    The dragon's treasure might not be gold - after all, that is mere matter, the coffers of the plundered nation next door.
    The real treasure, the dragon's strength, could be political power. The adventurer who conquers a dragon, or rather conquers a nation, can take on the might of that dragon, assuming the mantle of rulership. They can talk about war with the kingdom they came from, and spend their nights sleeping with one eye open for the next adventurer to come along with an eye for slaying the dragon ...
    Magical Symbolism
    What can a dragon symbolise, other than political power? The power of magic, tamed by a human will.
    The quest to master the dragon can symbolise nothing less than the character's quest to Awaken to a legacy of magic and power, invoking its essence into the soul and transforming the protagonist into a sorcerer on the level of a Merlin or a Dr Strange.
    Power of The Elements
    The dragon can be a symbol for raw elemental power - the untamed power to raise earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, ice storms, tsunamis, lightning and thunder, or volcanic eruptions. The antagonist could be summoning a dragon to evoke such a threat and devastate an entire region.
    First Contact
    The entity being faced by the adventurers is so alien to their perceptions that they literally see what amounts to a dragon, because their minds cannot process the cosmic horror of what is actually there.
    Dynastic Legacy
    The dragon could well be a genetic legacy - a bloodline of nobles, Old Blood, coming from the Old Days - perhaps from some chthonic former kingdom now claimed by Earth and Time and Fire, but still surviving, in the genes of this one clan.
    Snake People / Lizard People
    The dragon could indeed be a bloodline - in this case, a species of ophidians. The dragon may be metaphorical, but the serpent people in your story might definitely be real, very ancient, and very alien.
    Running A Dragon-Themed Adventure
    But what if you, as Games Master, really want to run an adventure where your player characters are out to literally slay a fiery flying magic lizard the size of their village? What can you do to prevent your characters from just grinding over a bunch of tactics and combat tricks like some ho hum run of the mill combat scenario?
    What can you do to make the adventure the scariest, most exciting, most immersive story ever for your players?
    Make It Mean Something
    Make the story a confrontation, rather than a straight combat against a big boss level beast. Your characters' goal is to stop the dragon, not try to kill it. You can't kill something with the power of the living Earth running through it.
    Skin In The Game
    Have something at stake. The dragon has something - or, rather, someone - dear to the player characters. A loved one, a Connection, a ruler to whom they owe undying loyalty, a mentor, a loved family member (or even a hated one - family is family), or someone loved to the nation such as a High Priestess.
    Whatever, or whoever, it is, the dragon has them as a hostage - and it is up to some of the characters to confront the beast long enough for the rest of the party to bust that loved one out of the dungeon.
    Yes, there's the dungeon.
    Follow The Leader
    The characters aren't there to kill a literal dragon, but rather to disband its human cult of mind-enslaved pets. Your dragon could be a human, with all the charisma of a Thulsa Doom, but - in a devious twist - actually ruling with wisdom and benevolence, preaching peace and offering diplomacy to bring war to an end. She could be uniting the squabbling nations, and the characters are part of a coalition team of mercenaries sent to assassinate this guru because it's cutting into their business of selling weapons to the warring chiefs.
    Regime Change
    Here's where the symbolism comes into its own. The adventurers are mercenaries sent to the nation next door to raid its coffers, kill its king, and bring back the wealth of a plundered nation to satisfy their king's draconic (draconian?) dreams of conquest. The only visible dragons are the banners of the human enemy soldiers.
    My Boss, The Dragon
    The final twist is to have the characters actually work for the dragon. She's too big and old to go flying about, and the characters are her guardians and protectors, perhaps even diplomats, making trade agreements with nations to keep her fed in her dotage in exchange for the dragon's incredible wisdom and knowledge (dropping hints about such innovations as the mouldboard plough, springs, the compass, and timepieces governed by mechanical escapements, but somehow avoiding the invention of gunpowder for some reason ...)
    Dreams of Dragons
    From literal flying kaiju reptiles, to the banners of kingdoms and cults, to ancient noble or even royal bloodlines, to the thundering nuclear power source of magic itself, there are so many ways to bring dragons into your fantasy campaign.
    Just don't fall into the one dreadful pit that ruins it for everybody - making them a cliche, running dragons as just plain old boss level monsters without putting a little thought behind them to understanding what dragons really mean, in terms of their symbolism and the sheer power that they epitomise and represent. A power that the players could potentially acquire for themselves, whether through conquest ... or legacy.
    In short - don't let your dragons get stale.
     

  21. Alex Greene
    Most of this week, I have been focusing my attention on "A Race Through Dark Places," my GenCon Online blog set in Fioracitta.
    This weekend has been a real test of all those principles I've been using, especially the hypnotic storytelling.
    Welcome to Fioracitta
    This map is a detail from a region map created by Jim Abbott for Fioracitta, The Heart of Power.

    The adventure takes place in Escharro (bottom centre left).
    The six player characters are:-
    Amares - Adventurer / Entertainer, who works in The Painted Mask in Lascha East District. Loves to scout ahead while adventuring. Keeps their adventuring and professional lives separate.
    Kepina Chauput - Bestia Adventurer. Originally from the Chauput Valley in Fourche, but has been hearing a psychic Call for years, originating somewhere here. Literally walked from Fourche to Itarra, following The Call.
    Maghe' Piccuri - Adventurer / Celebrity. Brash, charismatic, larger than life, this renowned actor from Lascha East may be hiding a few secrets behind his in-your-face persona.
    Padana di Sottibo - Adventurer / Rescue Worker, this sleek Longane is equally at home in the waters of the River Cariccia and Lake Lascha as she is the streets of Fioracitta. Currently employed by the Guardia, and is also a member of The Lakeside Warriors (a rescuer and mystic).
    Turan Charesi - Adventurer / Family Man about town. The best-dressed member of the party. On call by the Family he belongs to (the Charesi) to take care of matters which require his unique brand of diplomacy.
    Zurhan al-Turaph - Adventurer / Benedittara Animist, Zurhan is a typical magician with piercing eyes, whose flowing, graceful movements almost make him appear like one of the spirits he interacts with.
    The Prompts
    "A Race Through Dark Places" was a one-shot adventure run twice over the course of GenCon Online 2021, on a dedicated Discord server. Both sessions were, in effect, the same story. The initial prompt was this image:-

    In the end, some of the unused prompts included these images:-

     
     

     
    #
     

     

    The Adventure
    "A Race Through Dark Places" opened with the player characters boarding the ferry from Vindia to Birigna, stopping at Escharro before heading off to Teldatta, Orchudo Island, and Birigna, before making its long journey back to Vindia. There had been disappearances around Escharro, coinciding with bizarre phenomena surrounding the Magetti Estate, which was only accessible via a lakeside boat dock cut into the native rock of Escharro.
    Rumours included a possible hidden Venea temple, a secret meeting place of the Dragons of Shadow (a secret society set up during the Bragoni Conquest of Fioracitta), and brigands. The characters met the owners, Aldo and Genti Rubeno, and their majordomo and factotum, Pilor Garic, a Macenti.
    For this mission, I bought some mansion floorplans from DrivethruRPG rather than create my own Villa Magetti. This was the ground floor plan which greeted the players.

     
    Hypnotic Storytelling Tips
    Here are some of the hypnotic tips used to immerse the players into the action.
    Revivification
    Have you ever described something so vividly that you find yourself losing all sense of where you are, and immersing yourself in the memory as though you were living it? This is known as revivification, and it is the workhorse of all hypnotic techniques.
    The basic principle here is "Where attention goes, energy flows."
    Second Person Narrative
    Addressing each player as "you" is a powerful narrative technique. Don't be afraid to use "you" in the in-character chat. Your players' unconscious minds quickly pick up that it's they who are being addressed, not the players. This leads to revivification, and players living out the adventure as though they were there.
    Appeal to The Senses
    Sense memory is your best friend. Allow evocative details to fill the narrative - the rich floral scents of a garden, the cool of the lake water on bare feet, the taste of cool clean drinking water going down your throat, the sounds of ravens overhead; or the scent of blood (those who've smelled blood will flinch, and others will just imagine), or fire, or the sounds of movement in a corridor which is supposed to be empty, dusty soft scraping and swishing, coming closer down the dry floorboards ...
    You Are The Problem Solver
    The NPCs are not the problem solvers. The players are. Or rather, the unconscious minds. The mind is a natural problem solver, and if there is a situation where there are two disparate clues, the unconscious will put them together and find a connection, somehow.
    Newbie GMs, here's a hint from an old GM.
    Let them make the connection.
    You'll find that most of the time, the adventure takes a sharp turn away from your plotted narrative if the characters (i.e. the unconscious minds of the players) solve the problem in their heads, talk about it, and come up with a rough idea of what is going on. Nine times out of ten, if you've laid down a carefully-scripted narrative, whether it is a mystery, a conspiracy, or a room full of monsters, the unconscious minds are going to figure it out. They are going to look right through any schemes you come up with.
    Figuring it out is the point. It's half the fun.
    Want to know what the other half of the fun is?
    Letting the players come up with a plan that saws your plan into little bitty pieces, then executing it.
    Last Thoughts On "A Race Through Dark Places"
    Everything I described above came true. I felt it happen, right before my very eyes. Remember - your players are going to be smart. A lot of them have been GMs before, and want to run characters rather than run games because, deep down, they want to win something. It's got to be meaningful. It's got to justify the characters' being there.
    Most of all, they want to feel like the heroes. Which they are.
    Being a Games Master is a hard job. Deep down, you've got to love one thing - the looks on the players' faces, the sound of their voices, when you present them with a story they can sink their teeth into. They can put in a personal stake in the adventure. They will want to get to a happy ending, where happy endings are not guaranteed unless they make it happen.
    The rewards are there. Hard won, sometimes with deep personal losses - injuries, Tenacity loss, fatigue - but when they can come away feeling that they have won every single Experience Roll, where they have spent those Luck Points and it has made all the difference, then you will have done a great job, and brought smiles to the players' faces. And if the game's more than a one-shot, but a multi-session story or even part of a campaign, that will bring them back to the table to see how it turns out next time.
    And in the end, that's the best reward you can live for, as a Games Master.
  22. Alex Greene
    Continuing the exploration of the different Cultures from the Mythras Core Rulebook, this time looking at Nomads.
    Nomadic people have coexisted with settled peoples since the dawn of humanity. There has been a dichotomy between settled people and nomadic travellers since the first humans left Olduvai Gorge to fend for themselves when it became too crowded. Some humans settled in new places ... others, kept on going.
    Epic Scale
    Going by the fossil records, hominins evolved bipedal locomotion (walking upright) millions of years before Homo sapiens arrived in the world. Fossil evidence of Homo foot and leg bones show that the early ancestors of modern humans literally walked around the world - many thousands of miles, in all directions. They picked a direction, and only the oceans stopped them.
    And when they invented sailing, even the oceans ceased to be a barrier.
    Nomad Lifestyle
    The earliest nomadic lifestyle is also the oldest actual lifestyle. Early humans were hunter-gatherers, regularly following the migrating herds and seeking out locations where seasonal plants and game could be found. Pastoral nomadic tribes raised cattle and drove them across the land in order to ensure that their herds never overgrazed in any one given area.
    Of course, the herds themselves knew where to go to find the best food sources, and the nomadic tribes supplemented their mostly-meat diet with whatever vegetables, fruits, and grains they came across in their travels.
    Wealth
    Nomadic peoples usually measure wealth by their herds. Since their wealth is mobile, theft is discouraged through a culture of fear from reprisal. A code of honour is a necessity, particularly when different nomad tribes' routes intersect, for instance at their regular overwintering stops.
    Diet
    Ironically, many nomadic tribes suffered from lactose intolerance. They usually got around this by fermenting milk, from cattle or horses, since fermentation destroys lactose. There is, of course, no problem with consuming the herd animals' meat, which is often served boiled, in a broth.
    Grains which grow quickly and easily, requiring little labour to cultivate, are also common. Millet, fennel, oats, and spelt are staples, often served boiled or roasted. Millet and fennel can provide sustenance to keep people on their feet for days.
    Clothing and Art
    Every part of a nomad's life has to be portable. And that includes art. There is little need for heavy artefacts such as statues or paintings. Personal adornment is common; jewellery and other forms of artistic expression, possibly including tattooing, were common. Clothing tends to be practical and designed for endurance; clothes would be worn until they fell apart. It has been argued that horse nomads invented the first trousers, to spare their inner thighs from chafing from riding over long distances. Trousers could be tucked into boots, providing extra protection to the extremities from exposure to the elements.
    Nomadic peoples also adorn their tools and equipment. Those wanderers who travel in wagons traditionally decorate their vehicles - which are also their homes. The symbolism of their art can tell a story of the family, painted and carved into the wooden sides of their wagons, or adorning the fabric of their tents. Rugs, carpets, and other items of furniture such as cushions are also highly decorative items in and of themselves, as well as being functional in keeping out draughts and providing soft surfaces to sit and sleep on. These items are bundled with the tents, or stowed in the wagons, as part of their homes, and are designed to be as portable as the homes' structures themselves.
    There is archaeological evidence to suggest that many nomadic tribes were accomplished at working copper, bronze, tin, silver, and gold. Some are expert craftspeople at woodworking and leatherworking. In Britain, wandering metalworkers may have driven the trade in ores from the tin mines of Cornwall and the malachite (copper ore) mines of the Great Orme in North Wales, responsible for driving the Bronze Age.
     
    Across The Sea
    Oceans did not offer a barrier to people, either. Nomadic people often take to the water for trade and to conduct diplomacy between people living on the land. The Pacific Ocean hosted an entire culture of people who regularly travelled between the Polynesian islands on sailing canoes.
    Diversity
    Nomadic cultures are diverse. Historically, the Eurasian Nomads were different to Amerind Nomads, and the most famous Nomads of all - the Mongol Hordes - were among the most aggressive people on Earth, until the United States.
    Nomads In Your Fantasy Game
    Your fantasy roleplaying game can be based around your characters belonging to a Nomad culture tribe, wandering between towns, meeting other cultures. Of all the different cultures, Nomads are the likeliest to encounter and interact with every other culture - Civilised, Barbarian, and Primitive - on a regular basis. This gives the Nomadic campaign a perspective that has not often been explored in many fantasy roleplaying games.
    Here are some example themes for a Nomadic campaign, using an example setting introduced in the last article, The Barbarian Voice - Alternative, where the Southern peoples are Civilised, and the Northern nations are small Barbarian cultures.
    Trade
    Characters can be hired by a caravan of the Northwestern Trading Tribespeople to provide protection for the wanderers from raiders, both of their own people and from barbarian, primitive and civilised robbers. Examples: mercenaries hired to travel along the dangerous West Coast Road between the Southerners and the wintering grounds of the Northwestern Trading Tribes. The greatest danger comes near the end of their epic journey, when the caravan has to cross through the territory of the Northern Mountain People.
    On the road, the characters can learn about the Traders. At first, they hardly interact at all with the Traders; but as the journey unfolds, they find themselves becoming assimilated into their wandering culture, ultimately going native. They discover that this is how the Traders keep going - through a steady influx of strong, hardy men and women they collect along the way.
    Diplomacy
    There is often little in the way of a centralised Nomadic leadership. However, on occasion a conflict may arise between individual tribes - and there are rules in place to smooth ruffled feathers and ensure harmony between the tribes. One of these is the provision of moots, gatherings where the conficting tribes meet in a neutral place, under a flag of truce, in order to negotiate peace and to offer diplomatic trade - horses, cattle, husbands, wives.
    The characters can be drawn into one such moot, either as hired hands (in which case they get to see very little of the trade, only to become involved in an investigation when things go wrong and someone begins killing the Elders in their tents), or as members of the tribes themselves, getting together and resolving their differences to fight against a raiding party of outsider brigands.
    Survival
    The characters can begin a campaign out in the wilderness, starving, freezing half to death, only to be picked up by wandering Nomads. As they travel, and earn their Culture, Locale, Language, Lore, Navigation, Survival, and Track skills, and gradually assimilate into the Nomadic way of life, the reason for their stranding can become clear - they were robbed, and left for dead, by Southerner brigands who operate in the area, taking from lone wanderers. The brigands have left hundreds of people lying dead on the side of the road, and the Nomads are familiar with these brutes, so much so that when the characters next neet those brigands, they have plenty of opportunities to mete out justice for themselves, and for their other victims.
    And this time, the Travellers won't be alone.
    Exploration
    The characters are Nomads, and they have reached sufficient numbers - along with their spouses, families, and herds - that the caravan of which they are a part can no longer sustain such numbers, and part of the caravan must hive off and forge their own road in an unexplored territory to the Northeast. This is a story of exploration, of survival, and of conflict. The characters are responsible for their people as they carve out a new path to a land nobody has heard of before - a land of tumbled ruins and ghosts, but also abundant plants, game, and water. Along the way, they may find primitive peoples, and trade with them.
    Conflict
    There is so much potential for conflicts. Internally, a Nomadic people can be at war with its own identity. Opportunities can arise for people to settle down and form a sedentary community. If this internal faction does settle down while the characters keep moving, can the sedentary settlers ever be called Nomads again? And will they extend the same hospitality when their wandering cousins return along their route, looking for a spot to overwinter?
    Externally, the most obvious conflict is one which, sadly, is echoed in the real world. Bigotry is prevalent in many Civilised cultures, and often as Civilised cultures degenerate they turn to nationalism, populism and racism, painting a romanticised illusion of hearkening back to some "good old days" or "glorious Empires" - and wandering peoples, from Travellers to Rroma and Sinti peoples, are often picked upon by these governments, enacting harsh laws which criminalise them for just existing - something which is not confimed to history books talking about World War II, but which is actually taking place in Great Britain and Europe in 2021.
    This is an ugly theme, one of the ugliest themes you will encounter - and it is included here only as a reminder that the real world is often a harsher place for footloose people than any fantasy world can ever be. Games Masters may wish to explore this theme, but bear in mind that it always brings out the worst in people, and it can lead to conflicts around the table - so this is a theme best left alone, unless everybody around the table is comfortable with wanting to explore this theme.
    The Nomadic Voice
    Here, then, is the alternative Nomadic Voice, from the Lands of the Southerners and Northerner Tribes.
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    The road had never been this rough before. Our cattle were complaining, the horses were complaining, and every single baby began squalling at the same time in the nursery wagons. We were all on edge as we entered The Valleys of Pain, just north of  the dreaded Forest of the Storm Child.
    They say that a great spirit of pain dominates this entire region, and that not a single valley is free of its influence. People are afraid to sing here. Afraid to love, or to laugh, or to compose poems or tell the stories. We must cross through these valleys in order to reach our wintering grounds to the North, and everybody hates this part, the worst leg of our route.
    I spotted the first corpse, lying beside Hovath's crossroads. A piece of broken steel protruded from the body's chest. A sword, snapped off halfway up the blade. The dead man must have been in agony in his last moments.
    It wasn't long before Davvo saw another corpse beside the one I saw. Then Matti saw a dozen more in a field nearby. But we had already sent for Affric, our leader, long before.
    No wonder the Pain Spirit was strong. There had been a war here. A major one, by the looks of it. We used the Southerner loan word for war in our speech, because there is no equivalent in our language.
    Most of the dead were fringe Southerners, in their fancy armour and shields, all shattered. One or two of their weapons were intact, and some in need of repair. Matti crowed in triumph as he unearthed what looked like one of the Southerners' fancy new firearms, a black powder musket.
    But then we heard Vrida's keening lament. She recognised some of the bodies. They were Gailo, Fendi, and Tamon, three of her cousins from the Bariski Clan; and Sardi, the only nephew of her late brother, who had settled in with the Southerners. By the looks of it, they had met here and been forced to kill each other without even recognising that they were kin by blood and birth.
    Affric told us all that the rules were clear. We could not profit from slaughter. Moreover, since the fancy weapon had belonged to Vrida's nephew Sardi, there would be a blood curse upon any of his kin by blood and birth who took that gun from Sardi's body.
    We buried all of their weapons of war, along with the bodies, in a single mass grave near the edge of the Gorimir Forest, and left a marker to future Trading Tribes caravans who will wander along here. Some treasures are to be left alone.
    We could not do much more for them. We were in the last days of Autumn, and we could not stay for long, if we were to make our wintering camp site in time. The night before we moved on, we defied the Great Spirit of Pain with singing and festivities, honouring the dead and releasing the spirits of Sardi, and the cousins Gailo, Fendi, and Tamon, who had ended up dying at Sardi's hand before Sardi fell at their hands.
    But in the morning, we slaughtered one of our herd, a sickly thing, and prepared it for a feast in honour of the Pain Spirit. We left it there, on the corner of Hovath's crossroads, in the hope that there could be peace between it and the travelling tribes which crossed through its land.
    After all, hospitality is our highest virtue, and we never exclude family from our feasts.
  23. Alex Greene
    And so it's the turn of civilised cultures to come under the spotlight.
    The words "civic," "civil," "civilian," "civility," and "civilisation" come from a Latin root, "civitas," city. It can be argued that a civilised nation is one which has reached a sufficient level of sophistication as to require urban developments - the formation of communities into cities, plural.
    Throughout history, there have been a good many examples of civilised societies, each of which thought itself the pinnacle of human societal development. Until they weren't.
    What, then, makes a civilisation? The cities? The languages? The landmarks? The wonders? The songs?
    It could be argued that it is consensus and consistency alone which define a group of people as a civilisation or a society - the agreement that all members of that society share a common identity, history, language, and so on, and the independent standardisation of the stories the members tell of themselves, how they came to be, and who they are.
    Arguably, it's the consensus which defines a civilisation. No civilisation ever declared itself to be the barbarians.
    Strange Nations
    This time, this blog looks at the civilisations you create for roleplaying games, rather than real world historical civilisations. The Earth has so damn many civilisations and societies that to chart them all, from their origins to their downfalls, would fill the syllabuses of entire universities. As, indeed, it does.
    You don't need a doctorate to create a culture for Mythras - not a Primitive, Barbarian, Nomadic, or Civilised culture. Going by what's on the market, most roleplaying game settings just set up civilisations as backdrops for adventures, with a cursory paragraph or two defining the known history of how the city came to be, and so on. Few settings ever take the time to write long and detailed historical essays about their settings (Kelestia Publications' Summa Venariva, which defines the history of Venarive, Northwest Lythia, for the Harnworld setting, is one exception), and fewer readers will pay good money for such a book, apart from diehard completists.
    Settings are presented as is, with stock tropes of Nomadic, Primitive, and Barbarian outsiders coming to the relatively static Town to sample the food, the ale, and the willing nightlife. As a Games Master or setting creator, you are not bound to follow any logical structure for defining your civilisation; but for verisimilitude, here are some guidelines.
    Water
    Water is the hidden element which defines where the centres of civilisation will set up. Crop plants will only grow where there is an abundant supply of water. Plants can grow in desert conditions, but not without some source of water coming from somewhere - the Atacama Desert is described as the driest place on Earth, and the only plant life which grows anywhere in that most arid of wastes exists because of the fogs which blow over the barrier mountains from the Pacific. Without the clouds bringing airborne moisture, there'd be nothing growing there at all.
    Water enables plant growth. Abundant water brings herbivores, carnivores, and eventually humans. Those who decide to settle in these places of abundant water eventually found the communities which grow into cities.
    Agriculture
    A society develops into a civilisation when it can move out of basic subsistence farming, where intensive labour provides only just enough to satisfy one's immediate needs. Advances in farming technology, such as the Archimedes Screw, the mouldboard plough, and selective breeding of grains and domesticated animals for different characteristics such as food animals for their meat or milk, or other herd animals for their skins or wool, yield a surplus of goods which can be taken to a city for trade with its every-growing hungry population.
    Other forms of domestication include apiary (beekeping), domestication of birds for their meat (chicken in particular), and even silkworms to produce silk. Just don't ask how they go about extracting the silk from the silkworm caterpillars' cocoons. You'll never touch silk again.
    Surplus means trade - trade for better equipment, for money, for labour to improve on the buildings of the holdings - and even time, because if you have a stock of goods you can sell, and some way of preserving them from rot and vermin, you won't have to labour so hard to fill your stocks - and that means time to begin to pursue leisure pursuits not related to growing crops or animal husbandry.
    Trade
    Of course, trade goes both ways - goods come in, goods go out. Coin is a useful guide to measure the worth of something, but many civilisations exist for centuries without a currency, just going by honouring debts and bartering. Currency can be food, equipment, labour or more abstract things such as artworks. The independent publishers WMB Saltworks have published a book listing 108 different forms of currency, and some of these are historically relevant - such as salt, which was so valued to the ancient Romans that it was used to pay the wages of the Empire's soldiers - hence the word salary, which derives from the Latin word for salt, and the modern phrase "Worth their salt."
    One harsh note here - a lot of ancient and not so ancient civilisations considered disenfranchised people a form of currency, too. The history of the world is a lot darker than the history books would have it, because many of the monuments and cities listed in those books were likely built, and maintained, but never run by, slaves.
    Communications
    Travelling along the trade routes with the cargoes would have been information; gossip, news, songs, jokes, and stories. Instructional information - planting advice, recipes, and so on - are also transmitted along these trade routes. In time, they become a corpus of information which, at least in civilisations, become solidified on paper - which leads us to:-
    Writing and Arithmetic
    One of the earliest signs of a civilisation, though not a definitive sign, is the adoption of a writing system to abstract trade, turning words into symbols to represent cargoes and consignments of trade goods, and number systems to quantify amounts.
    Gradually, writing systems expand beyond their remit of facilitating trade to encompass the transmission of stories, poems, and so on.
    Laws and Standards
    As a development from trade, civilisations develop standardised weights and measures to determine the standards by which traders must follow, in an attempt to establish universal consistency across the market places in all parts of the overall community or polity which shares the common cultural identity. Lawmakers arise, to press their stamp on fair trading standards on things like the length of cloth, standard weights of grains, the prescribed formulae of medicines, and so on. Trade guilds form to codify the authorised procedures which members of the guild must apply to their work, and set the standards of quality of goods, and the market prices.
    The highest forms of laws governing such topics as crime, enforcement, trials, and punishments, srise from the earliest trade laws. It does not take long for the law to change to forbid murder, once some landowner starts killing off their neighbours to take their land.
    Shared Resources
    This, then, is where civilisations develop, when there is a shared experience of history, carried down through the generations both orally and in written form; where systems regulating trade develop into bureaucracies, and all that leisure time develops into arts and crafts, songs, poetry, myths and legends. Every culture develops its cultural identity through art, but civilisations do what they can to preserve the material forms of those expressions - artworks, books, journals, recipe collections, history books, and so on. Biijs, including libraries of scrolls, enable people to learn what once had only been available to a selected few who'd been entrusted to keeping the oral records through recitation.
    Community and Identity
    In the end, it is the people who define their society as a civilisation. It is people who are responsible for maintaining the histories and creating their own, for sharing their dreams and composing new songs, for forgetting stories only to have mystified future historians dig them up down the line.
    Most other cultures generally have little time for such things as professional dancers, artists, and philosophers - and there is a threshold through which a society must pass in order to be considered a civilisation, something which does not depend on inventions and technology, but on the ability of its individual members to live out entire lives pursuing abstract goals unrelated to living out a life making or growing things just to survive. It is the move away from subsistence which provides the roots for the consensus and consistency which define that which is shared by the civilisation.
    The Civilised Voice
    Here, then, is the alternative Civilised Voice. This one is set in Fioracitta, the Heart of Power.
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    My name is Zurhan al-Turaph, and this is my journal. I have been asked to provide a regular journal of my daily activities and musings. A man in Lascha East swears to me that my written thoughts can be a source of much luchre from an ever-increasing, demanding audience, so I cannot deny him his ambitions, however vain they seem to be to me. After all, what harm can it do to write about my life?
    The hardest thing for me to write about is contemporary idiomatic speech. What exactly does it mean when somebody is rolling in the pigs? It is an expression much used among the young to denote someone who has come into wealth. Personally, I cannot see the metaphor. Pigs are inedible to me, carriers of parasites, dwellers in their own filth.
    Although, now I've written down those words, perhaps the metaphor does describe the rich, and their behaviour once they have money. I cannot exactly exempt myself, since my home in Degianna appears to be the most expensive home of this party of Adventurers to which I have become attached, and I am considerably wealthier than all of them put together.
    Perhaps this is a timely warning to myself not to allow myself to follow suit and "roll in pigs."
    I would introduce the other members of this expedition, but they have all requested that I refrain from dropping names. They are all, in their own way, charming and peculiar. One, a Latolian, was once seen by myself as they emerged from the staff entrance of The Painted Mask in Lascha East District, before crossing the piazza to attend services at the San Tamaggia opposite. Until then, I had never met a more beautiful - looking person. I was assured by my employer that they are definitely human, unlike my Bestia and Longane colleagues.
    I am not startled by the sight of Bestia, Longane, Monacielli and Serpent People roaming the streets - my old mentor was a Besti - but these two companions of mine are a rare breed. I had never seen anyone swim that lake as quickly as my Longane companion. I swear, she must have mystical capabilities.
    The other two are as human as I am, though they have not got, nor can they imagine, my history. My story is unique. As with the Latolian, I am not certain of the sex of one of my colleagues - I swear, they are male one moment and female the next, or so it seems in the dark of this place we are exploring. A trick of the light, perhaps. The other, a well-dressed and refined man, reminds me so much of myself in my impetuous, cocky, callow youth.
    So, then, these are the people I am to work with. And a fine assembly they are. I watched them from the vantage of the rowing boat which bore me to the boat dock of the house we are to explore. My boat was last, of course, and apart from my rower I was alone; but I watched the others as they sat in pairs in their boats, chatting and gossiping excitedly.
    I have not yet told them about the destination, this house in Escharro we have to explore. Namely, that I think I may know its layout better than they can imagine. It is tied to my story - for this is the home of my old mentor in the Arts of the Benedittara.
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    If you want to know the rest, see if there's a space available in "A Race Through Dark Places" at GenCon on the 17th and 18th of September, at GenCon Online.
    Or you can wait till I publish the fanfic afterwards ...
  24. Alex Greene
    Continuing my look into the four basic cultural backgrounds from the Mythras Core Rulebook.
    What, exactly, is a barbarian anyway?
    What distinguishes a Barbarian culture from a Primitive, Nomadic, or Civilised culture? The answer, shockingly, is nothing. "Barbarian" is a political definition - basically, it's "any culture that isn't ours."
    Technically, "barbarian" just means "foreign," or "outsider," just like "pagan" just means "country bumpkin" and "mundane" means "man of the world." It's only in gaming that barbarians are conflated into a generalised image of some shirtless, woad-daubed warrior types with braided beards and hair and helmets with horns.
    Technically, there really should be no Barbarians - just other people. However, fantasy games demand that barbarians exist, so what can you do?
    Barbarian Culture
    A Barbarian culture is one which does not follow the laws or mores of the civilised culture next door. That does not mean that they are Primitives, though it is feasible to have a culture which leans towards Primitive or Nomadic, yet retains an identity which is identifiable as Barbarian.
    Languages
    Barbarians could speak their own language, heavily accented, and either plain speaking or laden with idiomatic expressions. Half the fun of dealing with a Barbarian party encountered in the wild is figuring out which tribe they are, and which language and dialect they speak.
    Language defines territory, for the most part, and an Adventurer familiar with Barbarian cultures may have to fine tune their Lore to cover, for example, the Northern Lake People from the Northern Mountain People and the Northwestern Trading Tribespeople, even though they could all be classified as "The Northern People" to people from the Southern lands.
    Social Structure
    Generally, Barbarian cultures tend to be led by Chieftains, Thanes, and tribal leaders with similar titles. Rulership does not have to come at the end of a sword, nor does the title always go to the strong. A weak man may win the mantle through guile; a woman can rise to prominence as a great leader, uniting disparate tribes through trade and diplomacy yet also enforcing the accord between tribal nations by commanding strong armies, leading from the front.
    Clans and lineages of ancestry are common, with extended families being led by a Matriarch or Patriarch, and revered elders frequently making journeys to attend a Parliament, or Thing (pronounced "ting") of the tribes, to lay down the new laws for the year and to settle disputes between individuals and entire tribes.
    Knowledge of The Land
    Your Barbarian culture is highly likely to have just as extensive knowledge of Locale as their Primitive cousins. They are likely to have Animism as their primary source of magic, with some Mysticism and Folk Magic. Their literature, carried mostly in the head with the same oral traditions which sustained the Primitives, may tell of ancient gods and even older demons, those demons being the Primitive gods who were rendered obsolete by the new deities of the Barbarian tribes.
    The oral traditions are also likely to form the basis for their Locale and Lore skills - knowledge of where the healing herbs are, knowledge of how to cultivate crops, make the proper sacrifices to the land to allow travellers to pass without incident, and the best seasons to plant and to reap. The oral tradition ties the Barbarians to the land, perhaps even more deeply than it does the Primitive peoples.
    Laws
    Laws are kept in the minds of Lawkeepers, and mostly have to do with the placement of borders and bounds between the lands of different tribes, or matters of inheritance. Again, do not assume that only men may be Lawkeepers - imagine a Barbarian, tribal culture dominated by their women, ruling each tribe with a Triummulierate (the term for a Triumvirate of women) and laying down laws regarding the need to be honourable in conduct, whether that be in trade, diplomacy, or warfare.
    Some of the highest laws in Barbarian cultures concern hospitality. Many Barbarian tribes dwell in wilderness regions which would be considered inhospitable to a "civilised" citizen, and even to other Barbarians who are used to the land, to be exiled from the comforts of the hearth is effectively a death sentence. The presence of a warm hearth nearby can mean the difference between life and death - so there are laws of hospitality proscribing the conduct of both hosts and passing strangers.
    The offering of hospitality to a stranger who arrives in a storm is one of the highest expressions of the Barbarian culture's ethos. Hospitality is sacrosanct, and hosts are expected to offer a warm bed, hot food, and a place by the fire to strangers. Likewise, a stranger may accept hospitality (they'd be a fool not to), but they are required to behave with dignity and grace, and to express gratitude to their hosts (rather than try to seduce or murder them).
    Good feasting, good poetry and song, and - if the stranger is a healer - treatment of the sick of the household for free, are generally accepted as a cause for celebration. A stranger who can entertain the hosts, or help them, or stand with them and defend them, is considered a gracious visitor and their good reputation will spread.
    Trade and Diplomacy
    The same drives behind the treatment of strangers applies to trade and diplomatic relations. Representatives of other tribes, including "civilised" cultures, are feted like visiting kings, because the hosts are bound by the laws of hospitality. This extends to visiting bands of Adventurers passing through Barbarian territory: these are Barbarians, not bandits or brigands, and the Games Master should take great care not to just turn an encounter with Barbarians as just another random combat encounter. It's a cliche, it's been done to death, and you can do so much better.
    The Barbarian Voice
    So here, then, is my take on The Barbarian Voice.
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    We stumbled across the ragtag party of Southerners, close to sunset. They were still building their encampment in the worst possible place - exposed, high on a windswept hill particularly vulnerable to cold, high winds, and right next to a field of burial mounds prone to nightly hauntings.
    I ordered my men to stay silent and refrain from laughing. These Southerners seemed little more than children; and they seemed to be ill-equipped to handle the elements. They certainly had no awareness of the land, nor its hazards: one of them sought to pitch her flimsy tent right on top of a nest of firegrubs, and one of the party, a fancyman, was trying to erect their tent next to a tree ... on a hill prone to being struck by lightning in a storm.
    Indeed, there was a storm looming, and so I approached these wayward children, bringing with me one of my lovers, a man called Shanto - which means "Speaker of Truth in Many Tongues" - to ask the wanderers if they would like to share our fire tonight.
    Their response was predictably hostile. At our approach, they drew swords. The fancyman gestured to the sky, in a vain attempt to summon lightning to his aid. I did not have the heart to tell him that his vulgar sciences will not work on this sacred hill, if the spirits do not permit it.
    Instead, I let Shanto speak for me. I offered these frightened, ignorant children the chance to sit at our fire and share hospitality; a mark of respect, even to those who know not how to respect our highest laws. Fortunately, the fancyman knew both Shanto's language and his tribe, and spoke to him in greeting. Shanto told the fancyman to insist on speaking directly to me.
    It took some coaxing - apparently, the fancyman prefers the company of other men, or something- but eventually, he turned to me and stated his intent to seek out some treasure which was reputedly buried in the grounds of a ruined Southerner fort, abandoned to the wilds some two generations before even the summers of my Grandmother.
    I nodded, silently, and spoke to Shanto in my tongue, for him to translate, as was our custom, and made our offer. The young children gratefully accepted, and struck their tents and abandoned their futile attempt to light a fire on Windspirit Hill to join us at our camp.
    On the way back to the camp, Shanto spoke to me in my tongue, to let me know the strangers' plans, which they thought they could conceal from us by speaking in their Southerner tongue. I reminded Shanto that I could overhear them just as well as he, and that I was aware that they planned something nefarious with the artefact they sought.
    I also told Shanto that, should they survive the wilderness and the beasts which lurk around the Southerner fort, to return home with that prize they sought, that they may do what they like with it once they return home. In the end, if they are tested by the land and survive the tests, they would not need any artefact to seize power back home. They would be entitled to power in and of themselves, because the land will have tempered their strength beyond the capabilities of their fellow Southerners.
  25. Alex Greene
    Last week's post covered the quest of the Games Master to stay relevant, and the introduction of hypnosis as a tool of Games Mastery; immersion; and the capabilities of the conscious and unconscious minds.
    This week, we move on to actual use of hypnosis in storytelling and in gaming, as used by the Games Master.
    The ABS Formula
    The crucial element of hypnosis is called the ABS Formula. It can be broken into three parts: Engage the Attention; Bypass the Conscious Mind; Stimulate the Unconscious.
    Engage The Attention
    The initial stage of hypnotic storytelling, this involves drawing the players' attention to the task at hand - beginning the game, allowing the story to unfold. You know that this stage is complete when all of the players are fosucing on you, and at that point you can begin to draw them into the game.
    Bypass the Conscious Mind
    This is the stage where you are bypassing the conscious censor and getting through to the unconscious mind to prepare it to create the inner environment  In regular hypnosis, this would be the stage where the hypnotist engages the subjects in a formal trance induction. However, this is hypnotic storytelling, and the objective is not a trance state but the engagement of the players as their characters, living out the scenario.
    Bringing The Players Into Your Dream
    One way to begin the process of revivification is to ask the players a single question about their character; one which is designed to increase their focus, and to concentrate their unconscious' attention that they exhibit revivific
    Stimulate the Unconscious
    This is the part where you and the players' unconscious work together to create the inner environment in the players' minds to match the environment within your own. Here is where the players' minds are sufficiently focused for immersion to take place and for play to begin.
    Prep Work
    Strange New World
    This is an exercise from the Hypnosis Training Academy. Its aim is to encourage creativity, a vital ingredient in Games Mastery.
    Start with a random object - an egg, a book, a cup - and start imagining its environment. Is it in a nest? How big or small is it? Where is the nest? In a hedgerow? On a cliff ledge, or high atop a tall building like a tower?
    When I started with this exercise, I imagines a peregrine falcon's nest, and a pair of falcons, in the crenellatioins of a tower - the tallest tower in a city. I began to work out the details of what the tower looked like - it was square, made of brick, with a building below it, and a massive public square. That public square became populated with people, brightly coloured in Renaissance-style garb, reminiscent of characters from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck (in particular the II and III of Wands, the Queen and King of Cups, the Knight of Pentacles, the IX of Pentacles, and the VII of Swords.
    I furnished this august public square with fountains, added sex workers hanging around them, and placed a church across the way - facing a brothel directly opposite.
    Thus was born Piazza Derisola, the so-called Hanging Garden in Fioracitta.
    Part of this exercise involved me going first, entering a light trance (easy enough, once you learn self-hypnosis) and putting myself in the mind of a Magnate, perhaps the artisan from the II of Wands, holding a globe in his hand, gazing out at the Piazza Derisola, thinking of the business he had in hand, and the person he was expecting to meet there for a clandestine meeting ...
    Revivification
    This is another advanced hypnotic technique. Revivification is a state of mind where the mind is so engaged in something - remembering, usually - that they lose awareness of their surroundings.
    Hypnotic Games Mastery begins by including revivifying elements into your world building. Make your world setting compelling enough, through including sensory elements from the players' memories, that they can't help but be drawn in and practically feel the cobbles of the street beneath their feet.
    Describe a riot of scents of various cooking meats from the vendors preparing hot foods on the periphery of a market; the singsone voices of the stallholders hawking their wares; the seagulls' cries overhead, competing with the turbulent human babble below. Chances are, every player will have some sort of scent memories to draw from - and in your worldbuilding, strive to bring those memories to life by fanning the embers of their memories to bright flames with your words.
    Drawing The Players Into Your Dream
    So now you have the elements in place to induce revivification, you need to catalyse the players' focus. Annd you do this by asking each player one question.
    What makes your character happy?
    Once they begin answering the question, keep the ball rolling for each player by encouraging them to delve deeper. You can do this very simply, through support sounds - "Mm-h'mm," "Ah," "Cool," "Excellent" - and with the simple phrase "Go on."
     Observing Signs of Increasing Focus
    As the players get more involved in their characters, perhaps to the point where they are living their lives, walking a mile in their shoes as it were, observe their body language. If it looks as if they are not paying that much attention to you, but rather focusing on the character; and if they are making little gestures from picking up an orange to the act of drawing a polishing cloth across a blade; then you can begin the adventure.
    Maintaining Focus
    Maintain focus in the game by investing in the characters, and giving them plenty to do - and that means breaking the old habits of "team leader / party tank / cleric healer / mage artillery / rogue backstabber / ranger for the ranged combat" everybody seems to fall into.
    Give your characters advance knowledge. Have them encounter people who possess knowledge about their destination. Don't make every single encounter about combat - make them memorable by having the players engage with sentient beings as people. Many times, the unconscious mind will help by conjuring up the people your characters encounter.
    Throw the stereotypes out of the window. Your orc encounter in the wilderness - they're going home laden with fish and birds from a successful bit of foraging, and they are singing a victory song to let their husbands know that tonight, they dine like kings. That wandering beast is following a trail left by a wounded animal: it has no interest in the characters. That sorcerer is heading for the players' town, with their retinue of male and female acolytes. They recently cast an enchantment to permanently become non-binary, and they are going into town to avail themselves of their spells to the townsfolk who need them - Enhance CHA, Sculpt Flesh, and Shapechange (to non-binary).
    Make the encounters into stories. The unconscious informs the conscious mind through stories. Stories are about conveying meaning - and your unconscious can grasp your intent as Games Master, and actually help you to carry out your job of delivering an engaging and rewarding game.
    Their unconscious minds can manifest these encounters, and the players will perceive them with their mind's eye. This is engaging their imagination hypnotically, and if you exercise your imagination and leave the combat section of the core rulebook to gather a little dust, you'll be able to engage the players' imagination and keep them immersed until the moment you bring them back in the room to hand out the Experience Rolls.
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