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Alex Greene

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  1. Alex Greene
    This week, and for the next few weeks, you're going to take a little side step. You're going to be presented with the voices of the different cultures of Mythras.
    I know, you've already got The Primitive Voice, The Nomad Voice, and so on, from the Core Rulebooks. But these Voices are different.
    A Connected World
    These voices assume two things: one, that fantasy worlds are connected places, where that which affects one person, one place, affects other people, other places; and two, that the world is not always out to get you. Unlike most roleplaying books, if you reach out your hand to help, they're not going to cut it off at the wrist. The worlds of roleplaying games have become bitter and cynical since 1991's Vampire: the Masquerade attempted to make it cool to be an edgelord. Spoiler: it's never been cool to be an edgelord.
    In these fantasy worlds, if you meet beings with pointy ears, or fur and tusks, they're not sent there to try and kill you, nor are you expected to have to try and kill them. There is no automatic assumption that encounters are solely combat encounters.
    Roleplaying has evolved away from wargaming. We're not beholden to the lineage of That Guy Who Invented Roleplaying In The Seventies to continue to play the games their way, when we can honour Greg Stafford's memory and play a much more shamanic, connected, mysterious, and often magical game, where mysteries are to be explored, secrets revealed, and the characters belong to peoples and cultures who are just living their lives.
    Primitive Cultures
    Ask any anthropologist, and they'll tell you that primitive cultures are anything but "bang two rocks together, wear animal skins, ugh, everybody afraid of sky." That's a racist holdout from colonial days, when Westerners would descend upon isolated villages and immediately denounce the locals as "savages" ripe to be converted to Christianity. "Primitive" meant "lacking in brain power, unlike us," and primitive peoples were depicted in the popular media as clumsy, filthy, crouching, beastly people, little better than animals.
    Converted natives would be branded "the Noble Savage," and depicted as clean-shaven, tall men, standing straight, wearing very civilised loin cloths to hide their modesty - modern fig leaves, echoing the Biblical Adam after he had eaten of the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden and thus, somehow, lost all their innocence. They were painted as wise men, cunning men, in tune with "savage Nature," with their ear to the ground - this being the literal origin of that "ear to the ground" trope. These wise men could literally put their ear to the ground and somehow discern the movements of all living things within a few miles by the sound their feet and hooves made in the ground.
    Often, civilised people would be depicted in comics as slumming it. Robinson Crusoe roped in Man Friday; Lord Greystoke became Tarzan, and Sheena became Queen of the Jungle. Somehow, all it took was a bit of civilised nous, and Westerners could fancy themselves as lords of the savage land, always charming, perfect teeth, not one hair out of place or speck of dirt on their oiled-up, flawless supermodel bodies.
    The Primitive Tech Level
    Lest you imagine otherwise, primitive cultures continue to surprise us Westerners. They have art, musical instruments, knowledge of how to make jewellery, and trade. Modern anthropologists maintain that the marks of emerging sentience include evidence of first aid and attempts to heal injuries through surgery, including trepannation, and tattoos on ancient bodies which seem to be road maps similar to acupuncture meridians (as well as tattoos placed on modern bodies to tell radiotherapists where to focus their beams).
    Others cite the invention of bags as a mark of emergence of civilisation, rather than weapons. Bags allow people to carry tools with them, in anticipation of their future use. Bags allowed primitive workers to carry the tools of their trade along with them - awls, scrapers, drills. Bags could be used to carry a variety of items - medicinal herbs, firemaking kits, knives for cutting, bows and arrows to hunt food.
    Other technologies have made it through the centuries. Leather burnishers are traditionally made from bone; there is no other material, natural or synthetic, which comes close to what bone can do when used to burnish leather and seal in the pores. People still use bits of flint to create fires, even though those flints are now found in Zippo lighters.
    Sure, tools such as knives could be used as weapons against other people; but primitive people also carried trade goods, which meant that they travelled between communities, sometimes looking for work, sometimes looking to trade. Ores of tin from Cornwall and malachite from North Wales were dug up, and there was a brisk market in those ores, essential in the making of bronze. Those people who knew the secret of smelting were close to magicians.
    And they were impressive artists. The Mold Cape is a garment of solid gold, some 3600 years old. Nobody knows how it could have been made using the technology of the day, or even the technology of today; but make it, they did.
    The Beaker People, also, showed remarkable sophistication. So-called because of the containers (beakers, jugs, jars) found with their bodies, the Beaker People showed a highly sophisticated knowledge of medicinal preparations, clay working and pottery and, going by the mead and ale residues in the bottom of some of these beakers, brewing.
    Mead infers beekeeping, and beer infers agriculture; which means that primitive cultures had developed a symbiotic relationship with the land. The ability to anticipate the regularity of winters shows that early humans had learned about the seasons, and could count the days and moon cycles, and perhaps came up with primitive reasoning such as "three moons full, hot days go away and leaves turn brown; three moons full after that, days are short and snow starts to fall."
    The Oral Tradition
    Until the written word obliterated the need to retain long memories, there was always the oral tradition. Modern people cannot imagine what it was like to carry the equivalent of several books around in a person's head, nor how much time and effort was needed to train people to recite the sacred knowledge, word for word, intonation for intonation, until they could sing the same songs as their ancestors did, even after generations.
    Primitive, barbarian, and nomadic cultures specialise in having long memories. Traditions such as memory palaces are nothing compared to the mnemonic techniques which were developed by ancient cultures - techniques which we have, quite literally, forgotten.
    Oh, yes - let's also not forget that thing with the big stone monoliths. We atill can't figure out how they got those big sarsens of bluestone from the Brecons all the way to Wiltshire to build an observatory at Stonehenge. It's not exactly like they carried those stones around with them in their pockets.
    So there is much more to primitive cultures than Clan of The Cave Bear or The Flintstones, or even Stig of The Dump. Bearing that in mind, I am closing this little rant with ...
    The Primitive Voice
    The days and nights are endless.
    We have much to learn.
    Once, my Mother said,
    My birth was announced
    By the spirits of the storm.
    The storm brought with it
    Wind and rain,
    Thunder and lightning.
    The spirits howled to us
    "Among us is born
    A Great Spirit."
    I give no credence to that.
    I only recount
    What Mother says.
    I do know
    That when I came of age,
    I underwent
    The Rite of Ad'aan.
    The Elders took me
    Deep into Orna's Forest,
    To the darkest place,
    And forced me to survive there,
    With nothing but woad on my body
    And a knife of obsidian.
    The food was good.
    I built a fire.
    I found honey in an old tree,
    And the bees fell asleep
    With the smoke from the fire.
    When I was weak,
    I dug up talla roots
    And ate small eggs from a nest
    High up in a tree.
    I left most of the hive,
    the biggest root,
    And the largest eggs,
    Because I knew
    That the world only gave me
    What I needed,
    And that if I took it all,
    Mother would not feed me again.
    When the spirits came for me,
    I was ready.
    When the elders came for me,
    To see if I had passed the Rite
    Or perished,
    They were surprised to see
    That I had built a shelter,
    And the Spirits had provided
    Medicines from the Forest
    Medicines for the sick
    For the women with child.
    "So young," they said.
    "Truly, the spirits were right."
    And they left me there,
    In the darkest part
    Of the Forest.
    But it is no longer Orna's Forest.
    It is the Forest of the Healer.
    It is the Forest of the Child of the Storm.
    And they say of me
    "Listen to her,
    The Child of the Storm.
    Take her medicines.
    Listen to her
    If she comes to the village."
    The days and nights are endless.
    We are not afraid of what they have to teach us.
  2. Alex Greene
    What makes a player character a great character to play?
    All too often, I see people asking the most toxic questions in numerous online venues, along the lines of "What if orcs stumbled across Xenomorphs?" or "What if a sorcerer were assimilated by the Borg?" - and I realised something awful recently. What made those questions toxic was that those questions were about nothing but combat. At least, within the confines of roleplaying games and popular entertainment.
    The unspoken questions were clear. "Would there be Xenomorph / orc hybrids with acid for blood, and what would they be like in a fight?" "would the Borg have all of their technology, plus magic, and what would they be like in a fight?"
    You might as well ask "what if cops became hybridised with sea lions, and what would they be like in a fight?"
    The Assumption of Combat
    Roleplaying is an offshoot of wargaming; and the assumption came down from wargaming that all encounters - literally all encounters - had to involve combat to the death. Players would spend hours poring over the rules minutiae in order to minmax their characters specifically to optimise their hit points and the damage they could inflict. The only measure of success in old school roleplaying was a character's brute strength, damage, and hit points, and one's body count: you could only gain XP through killing, and every class of monster had an attached XP value.
    Needless to say, this was not the most realistic of takes on life.
    New Kinds of Character
    Runequest, and all of its offshoots from Call of Cthulhu through to the modern BRP and Mythras, challenged players from that original old school fantasy roleplaying game, by having a character generation engine which allowed players to create characters who used different skill sets: skills which were not themed around combat at all. Standard Skills now included skills such as Dance and Sing; Professional Skills included Commerce, Courtesy. Oratory, and even Seduction.
    Track and Survival, Musicianship, Art, Craft, Lore, and Language spoke volumes about the expectations of player characters with actual down time lives, as artists, musicians, wilderness hunters, even trellis-climbing seducers a la Ninon de l'Enclos, one of history's forgotten seducers.
    Systems like Mythras allowed for sandbox play. A character could be dropped into the heart of a community such as, say, Fioracitta, and the player could choose their own adventure. A newcomer with a pretty strong Athletics skill could make their way to Prosoche or Little Fourche or Peligran and apply for a job in a Banevio fighting studio, training up in field and track sports, or developing Ride and becoming a jockey, or learning Swim and Boating and join a small ship's crew on Lake Lascha as a deckhand.
    New Assumptions
    Other games emerged such as Traveller, designed to reject this simplistic old school philosophy. Travellers' Hit Points do not bloat up as they progress, no matter how much their skills and bank balances improve. A master of firearms in Traveller is just as physically vulnerable as a one-term raw recruit fresh out of boot. This physical frailty forces players to think not only tactically, but to look for solutions other than combat. This is a philosophy which is present in BRP games systems, including Mythras.
    Call of Cthulhu is a game of cosmic horror, where entities are simply too powerful to kill. They very sight of them is enough to break player characters - now called Investigators, to reflect their new non-murderous role. CoC is a game where characters grow and develop as human beings, sometimes combat able and combat ready such as cops, soldiers and criminals, but despite the players' insistence on stocking up with weapons, very often the monsters win just by turning up and wafting a facial tentacle vaguely in their direction.
    Not long after the first roleplaying games arrived, games systems began to emerge whose assumptions were based around achievements other than murder, where players had to develop characters whose lives focused on non-combat activities, and where players had to develop tactics for social play or investigative play, rather than on brute force and ignorance. Admittedly, many modern roleplaying sourcebooks' combat chapters are still the biggest chapters in their books - but they do have sections on non-combat encounters, so that is encouraging.
    Social Conflict in Mythras Companion
    One of the most recent developments in Mythras was the Social Conflict chapter of Mythras Companion. This was a whole chapter devoted to the tactical application of social skills in a conflict, using the same kind of cut-and-thrust found in the Mythras Core Rulebook, but allowing characters and opponents to choose the skills they wanted to bring to bear in the conflict, not just Combat Styles. In the case of Social Conflict rules, Deceit versus Willpower became a thing, with a cunning deceiver's fast talk being bounced off the opponent's mistrust, or an Ellakan pitting Influence against a Fiorese citizen's Passion of Fear (Non-Itarrans).
    The Social Conflict rules allow for less physical kinds of conflict: battles of words and passions, of deceit pitted against angry rebuttals, of brute threats against scintillating wit, of seduction against Willpower. They allow for more dramatic interpersonal conflicts to unfold, where a character can be crushed without a single weapon being drawn, or wars declared, or won, or lost, with a careless tongue.
    The Social Conflict rules have opened up Mythras to scenarios based on social dramas as gripping as any found in TV shows, movies, or plays, the more traditional forms of mainstream entertainment. If Mythras Companion is not available, it is even possible to run scenarios based on social conflict or investigation using the rules found in the Mythras Core Rulebook on page 287. It is possible to run scenarios in Mythras without a single combat scene appearing anywhere, based entirely on the Core Rulebook's social conflict rules found in the Games Mastery chapter, and come away from the table feeling a sense of tension and anticipation of what could come in the next session.
    It is possible to develop a scenario where the players come to care about their characters, and the non-player characters who surround them in their daily lives.
    Deep Characters
    Mythras is a modern RPG product. As such, the character generation rules allow for the generation of some very deep kinds of characters. Their cultural backgrounds, careers, skill sets, family, connections, and background events all combine to produce characters who are more than just the sum of their Combat Styles, weapon stats, and Locational Hit Points. Characters can be generated who can handle themselves in an investigation (Perception, Insight, Influence, Deceit, Acting, Disguise, Stealth, Track, Seduction), a social situation which can range from political conflict as two representatives stand for election against one another, to a Battle of the Bands, pitting Musicianship against Sing, or even a dance-off, pitting Dance against Endurance.
    Mythras characters can be designed to handle any kinds of situations, from foot chases to competition horse races, to rescues at sea, to stealth infiltration of an enemy stronghold by water in the dead of night. There is so much variety available, that player characters can specialise - become master sorcerers, dedicated artists, and yes - even career soldiers, climbing the ladder of their martial Order, one battlefield promotion at a time.
    Note how martial promotions are not based on random combat encounters, but on such aspects of a character's makeup as valour and bravery in battle, quick thinking (e.g. taking over from a fallen General, and using Oratory to rally the panicking troops together to push for a decisive victory in the face of defeat) and leadership. Intangible qualities which aren't so much measured by numbers on a character sheet as which can come from the player behind the character.
    So, to answer the question, what makes a great player character? The answer can only be "the player," but the player has to learn to come to the game table with higher expectations than to run their character as a bunch of numbers on a sheet and lists of powers, with how those powers are used to kill and murder mooks like some video game.
    Players have got to learn that there is more to their characters than being murderhobos any more. Characters are, within the context of their game settings, people. They are a part of their communities, with loves and hates and fears and ambitions and aspirations; with allies and contacts to help them out, family and pets to take care of and care for,;and even rivals and enemies to keep them on their toes - and not in the sense of getting into a random rooftop fight with them like the Spandex crowd in a four-colour comic book.
    Great player characters are, above all, sentient beings (whether they are human, Bestia, Longane, Pelacur, or Bandaluk). And they become great when their players realise their characters' true potential (to be extensions of their personas) and play them accordingly.
  3. Alex Greene

    Connected

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    No character exists in a vacuum. One of the most important, yet overlooked, aspects of Mythras gaming is connections - Allies, Contacts, even Rivals and Enemies. Much old school gaming tends to focus on player characters being self-contained agents of their lives, yet life doesn't work that way.
    Connections are part of every Session Zero. Every character should go through the process of creating a possible family, background events, and their Connections. This might seem like a waste of time to some players who might be champing at the bit for the chance to get into that dungeon and start slaughtering - but in fact, Connections can make the difference between a page full of empty, meaningless statistics, and a person whose achievements and accomplishments in adventures have meaning.
    Catalysts
    Connections can galvanise the player characters into action - problems arising in their lives can lead the characters into an adventure.
    Examples:
    - An old military buddy usually meets the characters every Monday afternoon to go bowling. On this Monday, he's not at his usual rendezvous, and the characters find that he is in the hospital with a stab wound in the back, and his home has been ransacked. The assailant was after something. There is one clue - their friend gave good fight, and landed a few telling blows, so they're looking for some guy who's as badly injured as their buddy is.
    - A younger family member has gone missing, and the characters have to track down her skeevy new associate, an older man. They track them down to a martial arts studio, where the older man discloses that she has been training under him to take on some college bullies. Now she, and the bullies, have gone dark. Nobody knows where they are, and the trainer hopes she won't get too much in trouble because she has been training with illegal kubotan melee weapons.
    - An old friend's father is dying, and his last words to the friend turn out to be a cryptic clue to a literally haunted treasure.
    Anchors
    Connections can keep the adventurers grounded. No matter how wild their adventures are, or where they go, the characters need someone to come home to, to share their lives and weird exploits. Apart from the characters themselves, their Connections might be the only people who are willing to entertain their wild war stories.
    - Some ex-service buddies hang around in a bar near the barracks, swapping war stories with some of the raw recruits who are allowed off base during furlough.
    - Former Banevio fighting school mystics gather around a fountain in a piazza in Semmi West and reminisce about the bouts they fought, and their old mentor, gone but not forgotten.
    - University alumni meet up once a month in one another's homes and talk about their urbex exploits in reputedly haunted houses, including an abandoned hospital where at least one of them can confirm that there is a definite presence, and it isn't some crook on the run, wearing a rubber monster mask to scare away the casuals.
    Networks
    Connections extend the characters' reach into places where the adventurers themselves cannot go.
    - A character with an Ally in one of the Familiar in Fioracitta could find a lead on a case which could drag the adventurer into a world of Fiorese organised crims or the Shadow Society.
    - An informant working for the Department could slip an agent a note under the door of the hotel she is staying in, with a warning that her cover's been blown and mercenaries are on their way to get her.
    - An associate of a notorious sorcery cabal can ask a Connection to deliver an invitation to haul them halfway across town to the cabal's chantry to talk about a possible job offer.
    - A friend of a friend of one of the Curators of The Occhiadero in Lascha District has obtained a copy of one of their tomes, teaching some vital Folk Magic the characters need.
    Backup
    Sometimes, the characters get into something they cannot handle. The Games Master can either have some of their Connections turn up (or pull strings and have some heavies go in to haul them out), or they can get the players to roleplay their Connections themselves, investigating the disappearance of the main characters.
    - That old buddy with the Family ties can call on the services of some friendly enforcers to back the characters' play if they are up against an overwhelming antagonist force.
    - The Banevio gym can send their finest students to help the characters to win a sporting contest for the honour of Little Fourche District against those Gioconda snobs.
    - That nice lady with the poison garden in Outer Gioconda can send spirits aplenty to help one of her Maledittara sisters on the spirit plane.
    Found Family
    Connections provide the adventurers with a found family, a place to belong, and a sense of involvement in a community.
    - The Department's teams are often closer than friends; closer than family.
    - Family is the place where nobody keep score or counts the favours owed.
    - 'ohana means family ...
    - Your mission, should you choose to accept it ...
    - It's time! Suit up, boot up and mask up! Brigadier Bay needs us!
    In The End
    The Connections forged during Session Zero should not be an afterthought. Whether they are the initial hook, the steadying influence, the backup, the found family, or the extension of the characters' reach, the Connections represent the ordinary people around whom the characters' lives revolve.
    As non-player characters controlled by the Games Master, the presence of Connections gives the Adventurers opportunities to communicate with the Games Master in character, in a way which avoids breaking the fourth wall and allows the players to remain in character.
    The Games Master can use the characters' Connections to help steer them towards answers when they are clueless; to warn them if they are about to try out something dangerous and stupid; and to give them roots into the background community they belong to.
    It's all about making the characters' stories meaningful and memorable, and giving the players something to really talk about at gaming conventions.
  4. Alex Greene

    Intuition

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    Intuition is a great guide for players in a scenario. Reason and logic are good, useful, solid tools for unlocking puzzles - but a player's intuition, the ability to induce rather than deduce, allows the characters to unlock understanding of what is going on in a story.
    An example: The city of Fioracitta. The Adventurers are sitting around a fountain in Piazza Centimani in Carbo District, carousing with soldiers and civilians, when they hear a loud boom in the distance - specifically, Old Town, where the Senate, Parliament, Hall of the Arti, San Tamaggia Temple and government bureaux are housed. A column of smoke rises into the air. They begin to hear the sound of many people screaming. The screams get closer, and louder.
    The soldiers, of course, run back to their units and get ready to receive deployment orders. What do the Adventurers do?
    Hopefully, your Adventurers' first reactiom should be to jump in and help; and then let their curiosity kick in. After all, it'll be they who solve the mystery and bring a miscreant and saboteur to justice.
    The Six Big Questions
    Every adventure scenario should have some element of investigation to it. Even if the adventure is not a whodunnit, there must be clues left around for the players to piece together a picture of what exactly is going on.
    Activity is what differentiates a mere dungeon crawl from an actual adventure. In a dungeon crawl session, your characters have little to do but to destroy the static, nameless, faceless opposition and carve their way through the ranks until they get to the boss fight - after which, the session ends with little else to do but to divvy up the treasure and hand out the Experience Rolls.
    In an adventure, the characters are not faced with static random monsters to fight to the death, an endless Hit Points grindhouse where the monsters and boss level beasts have no other purpose but to stand there and wait for the party to turn up. The adventurers are faced with beings who have something to do, and are often doing their jobs right in front of the player characters.
    In an adventure, the player characters might stumble across an orcish kitchen and hear the chef cussing out their subordinates - the adventurers can lend a hand and fetch more vegetables from the pantry, or become part of the meal if they displease the head chef too much.
    Out in the corridor, they might see orcs and assorted creatures scurrying along to and from the pantry, carrying heavy sacks. Again, they can try and figure out what it going on - sniffing the raucous riot of clashing spices coming from that noise-filled room at the end of the corridor, and perhaps deducing that it must be chow time for the orc barracks.
    It is the adventurers' job to ask loads of questions, if they are to make heads and tails of what is going on all around them.
    The questions are: What, Who, Where, When, How, and Why.
    To go back to the opening scenario:-
    What just exploded? What building was the target? What floor? What room?
    Who is injured? Who is missing? Who is dead? Who is responsible?
    Where is the source of the detonation? Where are the survivors? Where is the miscreant?
    When did they manage to sneak an explosive into the building?
    How did the miscreant sneak an explosive device into the building? How did they make their escape?
    Why did the miscreant target this building? To what end?
    As a Games Master, your job should be to be able to supply those answers to your players' satisfaction at any time. Whether they are asking all the right, mundane, questions, or they are using magic, they have got to know the answers, in order that they can come up with some sort of a cool idea of their own.
    Players' Intuition
    The best player character tool is their intuition - the characters'. and the players'. The more savvy the players, the better able they will be to come up with a half-decent plan, whatever that plan might be.
    Games Masters, if you are running sessions of longer than an hour - I recommend at least two hours, if not three or four - make sure to arrange for pauses in the action, particularly in the runup towards combat scenes. Five minute or ten minute breaks, at least one per hour, and a five minute break at the end of Session Zero, and another one between the last scene and the session or scenario wrap. At least one ten-minute break.
    These are, theoretically, for comfort breaks. But most players will likely wander off and huddle in a corner somewhere, or drop into a breakout room, and hatch a plan. This isn't cheating. In fact, it's the opposite. The players will want to plan something. Let them carry out their plan and let them win at it, with a few nailbiting setbacks of course. The objective of the breaks is to give them time to think of something they can do, to achieve the scenario's objective. If they feel they can pull it off, go for it.
    Cheating
    You might wonder if this is cheating, or that you might be giving the players an undue advantage. It isn't. They are supposed to enjoy the adventure, which means letting them work things out, letting them come up with a plan, and letting them earn their victories. The only time they can truly fail is for them to do nothing.
    Even Leeroy Jenkins' doom is better than doing nothing.
    You don't have to let them have their own way 100% of the time, mind you. That's why you need to have a few aces up your sleeve, to drop a few surprise roadblocks along their road to victory. The unexpected moments when things did not run smooth will make their victories taste all the sweeeter, and they'll be telling the stories to newbies for years.
    Games Master's Intuition
     Players are not the only ones to need intuition. As Games Master, you are responsible for the adventure to run smooth, even if the  players' perception of the adventure is the opposite.
    Remember, you can also ask the Big Six Questions at any time, such as:- What would be the worst thing to happen to the adventurers right now? Who would be the least welcome non-player character to drop in on the characters unannounced (pick a Rival or bitter Enemy) Where are their exits? When would be a good time to drop in inconvenient reinforcements? How can the bad guy escape from a hail of arrows touched by Bypass Armour? Why is there a need to have the boss monster just stand there, when they can use their superior knowledge of nhe ins and outs of this place to set up traps to incapacitate the adventurers?
    How can I bring this battle scene to a swift close? What can I do to incapacitate them rather than kill them?
    As Games Master, you need your intuition to help you make the best decisions at any given time to keep the narrative and immersion going smoothly, even if all your plans and theirs just fell to bits through a few lousy die rolls on both sides. You must be able to go from Plan A to winging it, in such a way that the players can never see the join.
    Conclusion
    Both the players and the Games Master must make good friends with intuition - the players, to figure out what's happening and to work out plans; and the Games Master, to make decisions intended to keep the game running smoothly and remain entertaining for both the players and themselves as Games Masters.
    Don't be afraid to let the players work out plans and not include you. See, the thing is, if they're coming up with a scheme, whether it's whip-smart or dumb as rocks ... they are doing most of the heavy work for you. If they have a plan, be prepared to ditch yours in favour of theirs, because they will be entertaining themselves - and you.
    And who can find fault in that?
  5. Alex Greene

    Rewards

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    What rewards are you handing out to your player characters? Have you given a thought that maybe "gold coins, drop treasure, and magic items" might not be enough for your player characters?
    Rewards are an incentive for players to continue playing, to see the session, scenario, or campaign through to its end. Games Masters have to balance the quantity of the rewards with their quality, and also their variety and suitability for the players as much as for the characters. Short scenarios can be rewarded with small, immediately-gratifying rewards such as coins and drop treasure; but Games Masters may seek out more ephemeral, yet more lasting, rewards for longer stories, as well as interim rewards throughout a campaign to keep the players' interest, or to offset temporary losses sustained in the course of play.
    Here are some of the kinds of rewards which Games Masters can offer to player characters. These all have positive effects and drawbacks.
    Money
    Coin is the most obvious - but give a thought to the nature of cash in your setting. Metal coins are not the only form of currency - currency can take the form of anything from compressed salt coins to cages full of chickens, to sacks of grain or salt, to promissory notes. Give at least some thought to the local economy and what the locals consider to be a fungible currency.
    Art
    Artworks are a larger and bulkier reward than bags of coins. Some art can be worth millions of coins: others can be virtually worthless. A gold ring and a massive marble statue might both be worth the exact same price on their respective markets - but one cannot exactly slip the statue into one's pocket (unless the setting has access to the Shrink sorcery spell). Other than the knowledge that artworks are a lot more of a risky sell than bullion coins, the process of gaining wealth apply to artworks from jewellery to paintings to statuary.
    Connections
    A new Connection can be a marvellous tool for the Games Master. Connections can be the catalyst that sends the characters into an adventure. Connections can also become a reward when they become a part of the characters' lives during the course of a campaign - whether as a healer, a majordomo of the characters' home, a savvy Contact with her ear to the streets, or "the guy who knows a guy" who provides the inrroductions to rich patrons, Connections are a valuable asset to everybody.
    Property
    Like cash and art, but this is more solid and much more expensive. Having real estate changes a character. For one thing, the character now belongs to the "landed classes," and people pay them more respects. For another, ad owners of a deed to some property, that household can provide a steady source of income if properly managed. An estate run by a majordomo is much more likely to be a source of positive profits, particularly if that majordomo is as competent as they are loyal.
    Pets
    Having a pet also changes a character, whether they are a Besti who acquires a hunting hound as a puppy and has to train it to hunt with him, or a magician who acquires an animal familiar. The character has an animal companion to look after.
    Company
    Sometimes, a significant other turns up in a character's life - a friend, a family member, a lover, a loved one. They may not be Allies or Contacts - but, like pets, they give the character reason to want to come home.
    Mundane Treasures
    Coin can only go so far. Artworks are bulky. Sometimes, a character can be allowed to receive material treasures such as books, new weapons, armour that fits, decent shoes, and so on.
    Magical Treasures
    Mythras is geared more towards personal ability than magic items. Actual magic items are rare in Mythras. The Enchant sorcery spell is designed to create magic items which are temporary: the enchanter creates it to serve some purpose, usually to allow them to cast a powerful sorcery spell very quickly, and items tend to be unwoven after their purpose is served just to allow the enchanter to get their Magic Points capacity back.
    This makes magical treasures the most ephemeral and fleeting of all the reward types, because inevitably they are only a part of the reward - a tool by which means the character can complete a task and gain access to more tangible rewards, such as the rewards above.
    Answers
    Some characters are brought into the game world asking questions: Who murdered my father? Why did my mother leave when I was nine? Where is my brother, missing for two years? What destroyed my entire village while I was away up in magic school in the mountains? Who is the out-of-towner who visits my mother every year on my birthday? Their game's story can be centered around them answering those deep-seated questions. Either they can receive full answers, in which case they'd better come up with new questions, or their campaign story arc can be brought to an end if all of their questions are answered, allowing the player to retire them out of the game.
    Achievements
    Some characters can bring with them, not so much unresolved questions, but unresolved aspirations - to topple the king, to rise to the top of a criminal empire, to become the world's greatest artist / scientist / mage / general, or whatever. They want something. Their character has a definite goal. Well, give it to them, even if it takes them out of the game. And sometimes, remember Seneca's advice - "You can't always get what you want; but if you try, sometimes you'll find you get what you need."
    Resolution
    Some characters have unresolved issues - to seek revenge on their parents' killer, or to stop an Enemy from ruining everybody's lives, including their own. The reward here is that the character does get to do something which makes a difference - justice for one's parents (so they don't have to go out at night and fight criminals in their pyjamas any more), or stopping a runaway enemy before they inflict irreparable damage. Again, if they can achieve resolution, they can either develop new unresolved issues to resolve or, for one-shots or short single adventures, they can drop out of the game at that point.
    Status / Recognition / Reputation
    Status can mean so much in campaign play. Characters' status may or may not be listed as a number, but the character can accomplish a lot more than before. Their earned status can open doors for them, including bringing in a better (read: wealthier) class of Patron. A campaign can revolve around the characters trying to get as much pull as possible back home. Reputations can also be made, including bad reputations cleared, through one's actions during the adventure.
    Advancement
    Similar to status, if a character is involved in a brotherhood, guild, church, or order, their reward can take the form of advancement in rank, particularly if the adventure they just completed involved them defeating an enemy of the group which gives them shelter and an identity.
    Evolution
    Magic-oriented characters can receive a magical reward. More than just learnin new spells, a magician's evolution takes the form of improvement in their magical skills, and the increasing power and responsibilities which come from increasing their Folk Magic, or Invocation and Shaping, or Meditation and Mysticism, or Binding and Trance.
    Apotheosis
    Theists and animists can, likewise, develop their relationship with their favourite spirits or deities, through increases in Devotion and Exhort, or through divine Gifts.
    Tragic Ending
    The ultimate reward, literally, is for the character not to make it back home alive at all. There can be something ennobling and uplifting, even in a bittersweet way, for a character to give their absolute all, and to lay down their lives to save others and to complete the task with a resounding success. Everybody else's happily ever after, bought and paid for by the character whose ever after is in PC heaven.
    To go back to Apotheosis, this would be the ultimate in Apotheosis for a theist or animist character, as their soul ascends to its final reward in a blaze of light, or the ghostly figure of the animist appears before the rest of the party, thanking them before they open a portal and walk through it into a visible portion of the spirit realm.
    In the end, there are many different ways to bring characters decent rewards for their efforts. Some of these are more suited for short game play, others better suited for campaign play and story arcs - but in the end, the most important reward is to the players.
    A Memorable Game
    This reward does not benefit the characters in the least bit. The reward is to the players. A Games Master can think long and hard about the best way to reward each character - but the final reward is to the players, who can take home cherished memories of memorable settings, memorable challenges, memorable colleagues, memorable team play, memorable events, and stories about what their characters did, as well as praise for the Games Master whose games can be unforgettable.
  6. Alex Greene
    In the world of 2021, between the lure of video games and the rise of solo roleplaying where game engines have been developed to emulate the Games Master's role, the role of the Games Master can sometimes feel precarious. A tabletop game dies if the players desert - but even a single player can enjoy a solo game if they have a solo engine / GM-in-a-box book to automate the GM's role.
    Games Masters need to up their game, nowadays, more than ever.
    This is where the fine art of storytelling comes in.
    In he earliest days of tabletop roleplaying, where all the Games Master (who used to be called the Dungeon Master before DM assumed a different meaning nowadays) had to do was just randomly create a dungeon and moderate technical queries about what a player could or could not do, their job was relatively simple and involved consultation of the Dungeon Master's Guide for what could, and could not, be done. However, you can now consult all sorts of online resources yourself for answers, meaning that the Games Master's role of provider of technical feedback is now redundant. That leaves them with the role of story creator / adventure creator, and the market demands a lot more effort nowadays.
    Fortunately, the Games Master has access to storytelling tools, which have existed for a long time, unnoticed and generally unused.
    One of those storytelling tools is hypnosis.
    Hypnosis
    You may be feeling a little disconcerted right now. Hypnosis is a scary topic for some of you here. Your characters probably suffered at the hands (or the gaze) of some vampire or sorcerer whose commands were laced with a sorcery spell such as Dominate - or even worse, Enslave - forcing Hard Willpower checks to resist the glare of their dread hypnotic eyes. However, it is not so bad. Every person has the capacity to go into a trance. Everybody can be hypnotised.
    In fact, you are likely to have experienced hypnosis personally, every time you picked up a game core rulebook or supplement, and found your mind going through an adventure or just taking in the scenery if it's a compelling sandbox environment you end up in. Have you ever been interrupted while you've been totally immersed in a thing, and had to experience waking up from reading such a book in depth, and blinking, and staring in a state of shock trying to work out what the person who interrupted you is saying? Congrats. What you got woken up from was a trance, and the person who interrupted you was an insensitive clod.
    Hypnosis is like that, and it is so easy to learn storytelling tools to keep the players engrossed and immersed in the setting, and make Gamesmasters relevant.
    Immersion
    When you are creating a setting for an adventure or a campaign, or establishing a setting for sandbox play, you are setting up something for the players to immerse themselves into. Each player has an unconscious mind working behid the scenes; and it is when the unconscious mind is engaged that the players become immersed in the world, the scene unfolds about them, and they become their characters.
    Your job, as Games Master, is to learn to do this consistently. And yes, it is a skill. Fortunately, it's a skill you can learn really quickly. Put your granddad's fob watch away. You won't need it.
    Unconscious Mind
    It is not the "subconscious mind," no matter what you heard or read from whatever sources. It's the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious is what you're probably using right now to argue with me. The unconscious is the bit you use all the time, but are unaware of - that's why it's called the unconscious. The term subconscious implies that it is somehow beneath the conscious mind, perhaps even subservient to it. It is nothing of the sort. Modern psychology uses the model of the iceberg to describe how the conscious and the unconscious work. You remember the old myth that humans only use 10% of their brains? Any medical surgeon could tell you that humans use 100% of their brains - but any competent psychologist will tell you that they use only 10% of their minds for conscious thought.
    The other 90% is the unconscious mind.
    The unconscious is where your imagination comes from. Literally. It builds up images and crafts sensations from your memories, and then runs them in your mind, creating from scratch things which only exist because you have remembered something similar in the past. Example: Imagine you're walking up towards your front door. All the familiar sounds, sensations, sights from memory are running in your mind. Describe what you see to yourself.
    Now when you open the door and step inside, you're not in your home any more - you're inside a glowing palace of stained glass windows and ceiling, a cathedral with a vast floor, a flat plain dappled with a million colours of light filtered by the glass, a light which comes from the sun far above you. There are scents: incense, burning orange blossoms, wine ...
    Now come back here, and remember what you just experienced.
    The unconscious constructed that for you. Your job, as Games Master, is to work with the unconscious mind to create such scenes for them.
    The players' unconscious mind ... and your own.
    The Conscious Censor and The Power of Perversity
    Some of you might have just asked "But what if I don't like the smell of orange blossoms?" or "What if I've never smelled orange blossoms?"
    Fear not. That's the conscious mind talking. The conscious is, literally, a shield against all the data impacting on the unconscious mind. If the unconscious had to process everything all at once, it would break down. Nothing would get done. The conscious mind, the bit that responds when someone says "you" to them, the bit that thinks it is the main part of the mind: that's just a buffer, capable of holding no more than between 5 and 9 things in short term memory at one time.
    When someone mansplains, or when they are being an insufferable smart alec - they're dwelling in their conscious mind. That is not "the highest expression of human or civilised thought" that rationalists think it is. In fact, it is a staggeringly illogical mindset, because it can hold so few facts, like having a supercomputer which you can only access through an interface whose core is a Raspberry Pi.
    The conscious' main job is literally to censor and delete the imagination. You cannot live in an imaginary world all the time, and sooner or later you have to disengage from that and focus on the boring day to day minutiae of the here and now, such as washing the dishes and filling out the tax forms. Or arguing over inerpretations about a trivial ruling in the back pages of some core rulebook.
    Continued next week
  7. Alex Greene

    Adventuring

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    The word "adventure" comes from Middle English: from Old French aventure (noun), aventurer (verb), based on Latin adventurus ‘about to happen’, from advenire ‘arrive’. It concerns things happening. Drama. Conflict. As any great screenwriter, playwright and storyteller will tell you, there are a lot of ways to stage and set a drama - many different sources of conflict.
    Let's look at some sources of drama. 90% of all drama and conflict is going to come from persons. The rest is environmental drama - floods, fires, wars, diseases, rioting, earthquakes, volcanoes, molasses tsunamis, and on and on. In other words, disasters.
    So the drama and conflicts which come from a person can be powerful things to overcome. Let's look at a few core elements which drive bad guys.
    Vanity: Arrogance; haughtiness; overconfidence; ambition; murder to prove a point; killing for oneupmanship; brinksmanship; and karening - calling in the law to harass innocents.
    Greed: Avarice; miserliness; corruption; offering bribes; accepting bribes; loss of touch with reality; Marie Antoinette "Let them eat cake" (even though she never said it, the image is still used as a valid lesson); valuing things over people; social inequality.
    Envy: Betrayal, after becoming a friend; murder; inferiority complex; poisoning the well; gossiping and smearing.
    Hatred: Bigotry; self-denial; mass murder; nationalism.
    Desire: An emotion almost never covered in roleplaying games. Lust; longing; stalking; obsession; crossing lines; ignoring boundaries.
    Fear: The enemy fears the protagonists, and will do everything in their power to detroy them. If the antagonist is powerful, this cam be a problem for the characters - but remember that the enemy fears them? This means that the enemy is aware of their vulnerability - and fears that the characters can exploit that vulnerability, or flat-out destroy the antagonist ... if the protagonists can work out what that vulnerability is, in time.
    Adventures begin when the player characters recognise the drama unfolding - the greedy tycoon sliding his grossly incompetent nephew into a position of authority with power over the player characters, or the group's "best friend" turning out to be someone who hates them after all, and has been feeding crucial intel to the bad guys all along - and do something about it.
    Their plans can go awry - their plan of directly assaulting the stronghold of the bad guy who's been smearing their name is thwarted by a bunch of laws, and a whole lot of guards - and they may be forced to adopt new plans, reject them, and come up with even more plans; but it's the act of trying to figure things out, and trying to come up with solutions, and thinking up strategies other than combat, which make an adventure.
    Moreover, the act of thinking on their feet, the uncertainty that they might fail and face worse than being reduced to zero hit points, is what makes adventures memorable. Opinion: I don't think you can ever find anything memorable about hack'n'slash dungeoneering without having a broader context for it. It's like eating mashed potato without salt or butter.
  8. Alex Greene

    Payoff

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    Let's talk more about the payoff.
    What's the payoff? It's the feelings you get from gaming. It's the pleasure, or other feelings, you get once a session's over, and the Experience Rolls and material awards are handed out.
    In gaming, as in many activities, there are goals - achievements, and the feelings associated with those achievements. Goals can be divided into true goals (also known as clean goals) and dirty goals. The aim of gaming is to reach a true goal - earning a victory in an adventure and claiming the players' rewards such as wealth, experience, and so on.
    When your players' characters succeed in their adventure, or score a critical success at a critical time, or come up with a beautiful scheme or plan which succeeds despite things not running smooth - tell me about such an event that happened to you. Can youi describe how you felt? Did you feel that your characters should be proud of their accomplishment, or do you feel accomplished?
    What is your payoff like? Tell me about when you come home from a game session, or sign out of Zoom, and sit back. What is it like for you if your character wins? What if they've just lost in the session, or even died?
    Experienced gamers ... what do you feel now from claiming a victory, that you didn't feel when you enjoyed your first few victories? Same goes for losses - do you feel that your younger self felt it more intensely if your character got stuck in a cliffhanger, or came home without the prize, or didn't come home at all? Do you shrug off misfortunes more nowadays, or are the roles reversed - your character having had so much invested in them that you cannot bear to have such a sophisticated, multi-layered character fall to some random encounter monster's blade in a dark, anonymous corridor?
    Tell me more about your payoff, and the reason why you love gaming.
  9. Alex Greene

    Greetings

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    This blog is about settings. And immersion, and getting a sense of belonging. And rejection of the hack'n'slash mentality of gaming.
    It is also about hypnosis, and hypnotic language, and high weirdness, and the ocarina.

    Everybody here got into gaming for their own reasons. Give me five minutes, and I bet I could draw out your reason for playing d100 games, or for playing tabletop games at all.
    What do you get out of your favourite d100 game / setting? What's the payoff for you, that brings you back to this specific game, world, or setting, or even makes this your go-to place for adventures?
    This blog will explore that payoff. In my case, those payoffs plural. By exploring the things that bring others to the table, you might find the things within you which motivate you to game. And I'll reveal my payoffs, the reasons why I do what I do - writing game material, playing the ocarina, and hypnosis.
  10. Alex Greene
    So, this being the last Saturday of the month of October 2023, I felt it was time to go back to Meeros and environs for another adventure. Last time, it was Sariniya's Curse; this time, it's Xamoxis' Cleansing.
    Behold, a map.
    For 
     
    For some of us, this is the first time we've seen where Meeros sits, as well as the lands and seas surrounding the city.
    What's this adventure about?
    First of all, Xamoxis' Cleansing is some sort of MacGuffin. A desideratum. A Maltese Falcon.
    It has magic powers. It's somewhere on this map. Everybody wants it. Nobody knows where it is. Nobody needed it till recently. The Adventurers only hear about it when, out of the blue, one faction offers money for them to go and get it for them.
    Everybody
    The following Non-Player Characters all want this artefact.
    Dianthe Kalos
    The matriarch of the Kalos noble family. She's the person who will hire the Adventurers.
    Fire Eyes
    A Panthotaur tribe leader. He needs the MacGuffin because he thinks it can cure him?
    White Leg
    Fire Eyes' son. He wants his Dad to get well.
    Scylla
    Centuries ago Xamoxis of Skotados betrayed this naiad and stole most of her magic to create Xamoxis’ Cleansing. Now she wants that mojo back. Only, why wait centuries? What's she been doing all that time?
    Sa-Aba
    The charismatic leader of the Katharos, a cult devoted to Sariniya, the Goddess of Vengeance. Yaay for the shout out to Sariniya!
    Xitos the Hound
    A shadowy merchant. He's got money. He just wants the doohickey to add to his collection.
    Doohickey
    The Doohickey itself is a big silver bowl, found in a Sunken Temple, so at this first glance I guess there's going to be another pedestrian little dungeon delve full of monsters, traps, and razor-edged combat to the death because that's all the writers know.
    The map infers there'll be a hexcrawl element, as well, with more combat as the default encounter.
    Powers
    The bowl is ridiculously overpowered. It is the prison of an untold number of river naiads. These river spirits can be captured and imprisoned within the bowl, which has infinite space for them. Any naiad which touches the bowl gets dragged into it.
    The bowl uses its own store of Magic Points to unleash several special effects. The naiads can also be commanded to use their powers by the wielder of the bowl.
    These are its powers.
    Magically cure any poison or disease
    Confer on the recipient the ability to breathe water for a year and a day
    Confer on the recipient the service of an Intensity 2 Water Elemental once per month for a year and a day
    Confer on the recipient an additional 1d10 years of life
    The Beginning
    The Adventurers turn up in Tithys, pronounced "Tie - THESE," not "Tithies," get your minds out of the gutter.
    The big rivalry is between Diane Callous and Sheetos the Hutt. One of them has made it and the other one is still trying, but they're both dishonest, disloyal, and disrespectful. They both offer the same deal - money, power, connections. Both of them want to be the top dog and control all the trade up the river. One of them is already there, and they just want the bowl as a decoration really. The other one wants it to add to their collection.
    The Job
    Whoever they work for, the Adventurers now hexcrawl up the River Amaranth, looking for a Temple of Doom of Tomb of Something. They meet the Sariniya crowd, who want the bowl for themselves. The Sariniya crowd just made short work of a bunch of panthotaurs ... well, call them Thundercats if you like. So Lion-O is dying, his son wants the bowl to cure his Dad, they deliver an ultimatum with menaces, and the Sariniyans are just as snippy.
    Then the naiad Scylla does the same, and you cut away to one of those Godsawful bloody Poochie cutscenes, and guess what? SHE does the same thing, and if the Adventurers cheese her off she turns the whole river against them.
    There are some days when you just want them all to wipe each other out, and you go back home and sip ouzo with your feet resting on some living human furniture.
    The Big Chief
    So the Adventurers might go and meet with the Panths, and their tribe is called the Mad Keen, okay, and they take him to the Big Chief, who's undergoing a feverish ordeal thanks to some drug. And then you get this, which makes me spit beetroot.
    Any character that can make a Hard Healing roll recognises the symptoms of Lyssa’s Kiss and knows that Amthara Root is the only plant that can counteract the poison.
    Why?
    Why does it always have to be that some poison has only one possible antidote, and guess what? YOU have to go on a quest past horrid monsters to get it?
    And then there's the text box.
    Lyssa’s Kiss
    A cruel poison created from the rendered brains of madmen. It can be cured with Amthara Root or a Cure Malady spell.
    One. Can it with the madmen's brains. People with mental health problems are not sources of weird, exotic poisons, for crying out loud, we have enough problems without someone spreading groundless detractions about the biochemical state of our brains.
    Two, the weed is growing everywhere up and down the river, so why the hell haven't the panthotaurs (who worship the river) harvested it for themselves?
    Three, Cure Malady spell. So the Adventurers have a cleric, right? No? Well, what a damp squib. Roll up some new guys.
    So anyway ,,,
    The Adventurers could get it in their heads that there is insufficient motivation in the world to induce them to complete this rancid, threat-filled quest, let alone when they get there and find the ghost of the depraved sorcerer who created the bowl in the first place, and who is quite content to just exist in the Temple, thank you.
    Oh yes, I did mention that the bowl can cure poisons. That includes the poison which is ravaging Fire Eyes, aka Lion-O. So at least the Adventurers could bargain with the ghost to get a gallon of the waters blessed by the bowl to bring back and cure the Big Cat Boss and treat a few of the furries' wounds. They worship the river, so they might feel inclined to spare the adventurers and oh no, I just swallowed some of that Kool-Aid.
    Conclusion
    The big key to this adventure is motivation. About the only being who has motivation is the Sariniya priest Sa-Aba, who is yer basic moustache-twirling baddie who wants to weaponise the MacGuffin and flood the valley. But it contains so many utterly loathesome beings, the Adventurers might as well just seek out some high ground and watch the human priest just flood the Amaranth River Valley and sweep the detritus down to the sea.
    You might guess that I'm not exactly a friend of railroady adventures. Enjoy playing this, but be aware that there are so many ways outside of the story path outlined in this book. Nor do you, as GM, need half these characters to make the story engaging.
    Here's one alternate path.
    Sariniya's Vision
    This is post-Sariniya's Curse. By now, the Adventurers will have visited the heart of Sariniya's worship, and learned of Her new Ministry devoted to peace and the alleviation of the suffering She and Her priests once afflicted on the world while She was the Goddess of Vengeance.
    An agent of Sariniya can approach the Adventurers in Meeros, and tell them that there is great suffering up the river. That sends them off to Tithys, and there they meet Dianthe, who may reject their petition to explore the river, initially. Turns out that she can be persuaded, with the promise of possible power to add to her existing power base.
    They explore, looking for the Temple, and almost miss it because they are expecting something submerged, rather than a huge building three hundred feet above the ground, high and dry. But find if they do, and just in time to save Fire Eyes and unite the entire Panthotaur tribe against Dianthe's thugs and mercenaries, whom she sent up river to rob the Temple and deprive the Adventurers of their earned treasure, and their lives.
    Big fight. Good guys win. Dianthe gets a thrashing, and loses her power base. Everybody go home.
    At least, that is how I could run it as a GM.
  11. Alex Greene

    Mythras Modern - Careers

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    This week, following on from our look at modern Cultures, it's time to look at Careers open to player characters.

    Job Versus Career
    Go to Google. Search for "career" and select Images. You'll get endless rows of pretty, smiling business people sitting behind computers, or shaking hands in meetings. Diverse. Modern. Utterly, spirit-crushingly boring.
    Now look for "Adventure." Select Images. You'll typically see people standing atop a mountain, or kayaking in bright lycra.
    It's nut exactly what we think of when we think of adventures, is it?
    Careers are important to modern humans. Mythras approaches Careers as groups basic collections of expected skills. A farmer is likely to have Brawn, Perception, Endurance, and Track; an athlete is likely to have Athletics, possibly Acrobatics.
    Careers in the modern world mean something very different. Careers, as defined in ordinary life, aren't so much collections of basic skills, but are more like ways of distinguishing your status in society. The emphasis is not so much on your skills - admit it, does anyone you know have percentage scores next to the listed skills on their resume (and how many of you have your best Combat Styles listed on those resumes either)? - as your income, your tax bracket and your social mobility options.
    So with that, let's look at Careers, as they apply in Mythras, and shoehorn them into the modern game.

    Modern Adventurers
    Your characters are phenomenal people. In the modern milieu, your characters' Careers basically define your background, your origins, and the resources you can bring to bear.
    What you are, in the present day, is Adventurers.
    Those fine people at Merrian-Webster have definitions for "Adventurer" -
    1 : someone who seeks dangerous or exciting experiences : a person who looks for adventures: such as
    a : soldier of fortune
    b : one who engages in risky commercial enterprises for profit
    2: somewhat old-fashioned : one who seeks unmerited wealth or position especially by playing on the credulity or prejudice of others
    Adventurers do not necessarily fit in with their livelihoods or lifestyles. The best of the best, who focus on their income-providing real-life careers, don't generally jump into dangerous situations without giving it much thought. If trouble comes to them, they respond by backing away and inserting walls of lawyers and/or hired thugs to protect them.
    Most paragons of their careers are risk-averse. When there is danger, they protect their income streams first, then their reputations, and then their status. Usually, they fall at the protecting their reputations bit - and then watch the other two go away pretty sharpish.
    Adventurers put their reputations first. Your income stream and status don't mean anything if you've destroyed your reputation with an ill-chosen swearword in a public place or, worse, a well-aimed punch to the face of someone who just mocked your beloved wife.
    The reputation, in the case of Adventurers, tends to be along the lines of "free-wheeling sybarite," "paradoxically-reclusive playboy," "wealthy playa," "gentleman bastard", "arriviste", "parvenue", "vixen," and "femme fatale." The less-adventurous are likely to throw epithets at such venturesome types, such as "bad boy," "wolf," "creep," and so on.
    Not that the characters would notice such insults - the lioness does not turn whenever a little dog barks.

    Interests and Passions
    What would your characters be interested in? Those would be your Passions. Think of something your character loves doing that is part of their Career. A championship motorbike racer would love redlining their wheels to go as fast as possible. A hustler would love to go right into the thick of some social event,go right up to the most dangerous person in the room, and lie through their teeth - and have that mover and shaker believe every word.
    Pick three Passions. One of those Passions must be central to your Career. This is essential. A world-leading surgeon is going to put Saving Lives as a core Passion.
    It's interesting to have one negative Passion, and typically those can be along the lines of Never Get Caught, Risks Are For Cowards and Come Out On TOp, No Matter What. A favourite negative Passion for first responders and lifesavers is Be Seen To Be The Hero, and honestly this has got so many of them into trouble because it leads to top cops framing people just to keep their arrest quotas at the top of the league, medics going rogue and turning into modern day Harold Shipmans, and star athletes turning to anabolic steroids later in their careers, as their aging bodies find themselves no longer able to keep up with the competition.
    Lastly, their one remaining Passion should be something which keeps dragging them away from their Careers. A high-ranking bureaucrat is hardly going to make that step from being eighteenth in line to Chief Accountant and instead embrace the life of a lion tamer ... or even a lumberjack ... unless they have a Passion which leads them away from their day job.
    What Passion would so consume you that it would spirit you away to some far-flung part of the world? What Passion would have you driving through the Atacama Desert, with a dozen pings on your phone from Doreen back in Sales asking if you're coming back to work next Monday?

    Skills
    We're going to look at Skills next week; but there are a few things which need addressing here.
    Modern Mythras has access to some Skills which are not in the Mythras Core Rulebook. Computers, Demolitions, Electronics, Sensors, Knowledge, and Research are right at the top of the list. Firearms turn up among the Combat Styles.
    Knowledge replaces Lore, and Research augments appropriate Knowledge Skills. A character can use Research to obtain information fron amywhere: you can carry hundreds of gigabytes' worth of documents in PDF and epub form in modern phones and microSD cards, whole libraries' worth of knowledge. Nowadays, one cellphone can access, and carry, more knowledge than several Libraries of Alexandria. All at your fingertips.
    Urban and Suburban Cultures and Subcultures are very unlikely to have Locale as a Standard Skill. Criminal, Militant, and Underground Subcultures can be assumed to have Streetwise as a Standard Skill, with Locale as a Professional Skill.
    We haven't touched upon magic, psionics, the supernatural, or superpowers here. Up to this point, the emphasis has been on skill-based approaches. The supernatural and weird stuff will come in later on. This is a look at the characters as skilled, competent, daring, yet all too human people. We can move on to mind reading and conjuring up storms afterwards.
    I'm taking a cue from Berin Kinsman's game DoubleZero, which is a beautiful non-Mythras game system available through Lightspress Media. DoubleZero focuses strongly on skill-based adventures in the modern game, but it can be used for gaming in historical eras, or cinematic action movie settings, or even in gaming soap opera dramas with dishy doctors, hunky firefighters and lifeguards, and the sultry Girl Next Door with a reputation for using and discarding every man she sees.
    For each of these Careers, only three Standard Skills and three Professional Skills will be listed. This leaves four slots open for each category to fill with Skill Points.
    By the way, you can use the Skill Points allocation system from Mythras, or use the Skill Pyramid from Mythras Companion. However you choose to distribute those Skill Points, the skills listed are core skills for each Career, with the rest being optional to you.
    As usual, Customs and Native Tongue get +40% free.
    This list does not cover Combat Styles. You can assume everybody here knows how to handle at least one firearm, either because they were given training as part of their job, or because they went for training for self-defence with a private firearms training instructor at some local gun range.

    Athlete
    Athletics, Endurance, Willpower
    Acrobatics, Courtesy, Oratory
    Celebrity
    Dance, Influence, Sing
    Courtesy, Musicianship, Oratory
    Detective (includes bounty hunters and paranormal investigators)
    Insight, Perception, Streetwise
    Bureaucracy, Sleight, Track
    Engineer
    Brawn, Perception, Willpower
    Electronics, Engineering, Knowledge (optionally, swap out Electronics for Mechanic)
    Law Enforcement (Police, Federals)
    Influence, Perception, Unarmed
    Bureaucracy, Knowledge (Law), Oratory

    Criminal (includes Assassin, Gangster, Grifter, Hacker, Sex Worker, Smuggler, Thief, Vigilante)
    Deceit, Stealth, Streetwise
    Commerce, Lockpicking, Sleight
    Journalist (includes citizen journalists, bloggers, vloggers and so on)
    Insight, Perception, Stealth
    Art (journalism), Oratory, Research
    Medic
    Endurance, First Aid, Perception
    Knowledge (Medicine), Medicine, Survival
    Military (includes Pilot, Sailor, Soldier)
    Athletics, Perception, Unarmed
    Demolitions, Engineering, Survival
    Scientist
    Insight, Perception, Willpower
    Research, at least one Knowledge (some science field), Teach
    Secret Agent (includes Undercover Agent)
    Deceit, Streetwise, Stealth
    Culture, Disguise, Sleight

    Other Careers
    There are so many other career options. Literally every job on Earth. It's not about the actual thing you do, as such, as much as it's about how it shapes your individual approach to life. There might not be much appeal in putting a hotel receprionist through scenarios out of a Hollywood action thriller, but sometimes it can be entertaining to put such a fish-out-of-water civilian character through the wringer and see what emerges from the other side. Look at Sarah Connor at the start of The Terminator as compared to Sarah Connor towards the end of T2.
    So pick a character, think of their Culture (where they grew up), and their Career (how the world sees them), and next week we'll look at those Skills. It'll be a bit on the shorter side - so many of the Skills are effectively unchanged from Mythras Core - but there are enough changes to warrant a good long look at what you'll need to play in the modern world.
  12. Alex Greene
    In this post, we'll be reviewing the chapters on vehicles and technology.

    Vehicle Design
    The Vehicle Design chapter, on page 178, follows the same general modular system as the Starship design chapter. You create enough Modules to fit your vehicle's crew, you determine what other Modules you need (weapons, a mobile lab, etc), and from those you can determine the vehicle's Size, Speed, and Handling. Whatever you need, from a zippy little motorcycle to a walker tank or ATV; this is the chapter for you.
    The system is designed to be as simple as possible to use. If you're mathphobic, sadly you're going to hate the minimal amount of arithmetic which you'll inevitably encounter. There really needs to be an online Notes from Pavis online ship and vehicle table, similar to their character generator and sorcery spell apps. One which can work out Size, Thrust, Handling, and costs.

    Lists of common vehicles and Starship types begin from page 194. The vehicles listed are three hover (grav) vehicles (Speeder Bike, Land Speeder (Standard), Land Speeder (Fast)), two All Terrain Vehicles (Small and Medium), and a small quadbike.
    The space vessels listed are three kinds of Starfighter - Allround, Fast and Fragile, Slow and Sturdy - a Free Trader, followed by a Very Fast Starfighter on the page; the sequel to Starfighter, The Fast and The Fragile 2; a small bomber; a shuttle; Starfighter, The Fast and The Fragile 3; and then a bunch of Capital Ships, designed with the Capital Ships part of the Starship Design rules.
    The Capital Ships section has a feature not found in the Starship Design chapter - turbolasers, weapons specific to capital ships.
    The listed Capital Ships include a Corvette, a Destroyer, a Frigate, and that's it. You'll need to find Carriers, Cruisers, Dreadnoughts, Escorts and so on elsewhere. Hopefully they won't be as ugly as Traveller's Donosev class Scout or Tigress planetbuster.

    Technology
    This chapter starts on page 188. Characters need access to technology in M-Space. Bear in mind that tech toys are little more than props to further, or complicate, the telling of the story. The devices themselves do not resolve the scenarios: the characters do.
    The chapter begins with rules for laboratory research, and using laboratory modules in vehicles and Starships to conduct that research. The good news is, you don't need to attach those lab modules to vehicles or ships - these rules apply to stationary laboratories, planetside and orbital alike.
    The next page delivers pointers for trade and cargo, "for characters that wants to make good use of their cargo holds." M-Space has its own version of Traveller's trade game. It's on page 189 of the Technology chapter.
    And then, weapons and armour on pages 190 and 191. We're talking about fancy science fiction weapons here, blasters, ionisation rifles, particle grenadesm force swords, with some archaic melee weapons thrown in for good measure. If you want more modern slug throwers, there is a supplement called Mythras Firearms available. This chapter doesn't cover exotic slugthrowers such as gauss rifles (mini-railguns) or gyrojets (guns which launch tiny guided missiles).
    The chapter moves on to Strangeness and Technology, where the Strangeness of an alien species can be applied to tech built for that species, and a list of personal equipment for the following two pages, ending on page 193. All the basic stuff any character might need in a typical science fiction scenario, presented as no-frills one-paragraph descriptions and costs in credits.
    Sidebars in the two chapters include rules for partial Modules, Stunts (like psionic vehicles, vehicle Luck Points and so on), researching (inventing) new objects, and rules for MacGyvering one-shot objects, with a section on page 195 covering information access levels - an invaluable guide for scenarios leaning heavily into Tradecraft (spy scenarios) or Cyberpunk.
    By the way, there are no rules for cybernetics here in this core rulebook - they are covered in M-Space Companion, and rules for robotic and cyborg Circles given in Circles of Steel.
    And that's it. It's nowhere near as flash as anything presented in Traveller, but practically everything listed in the Traveller books can be ported into M-Space with minimal reworking. In fact, it is encouraged.
    Tech Levels and M-Space
    Which brings us to the technology levels of M-Space. The Tech Level table is on page 135, and it looks roughly the same as the familiar system of TL development from Traveller. I'm afraid there's no getting away from the old 2D6 science fiction tabletop roleplaying game, any more than it's possible to get far away from Star Trek or Doctor Who when crafting a new SF TV show or movie.
    There's a paragraph explaining this.
    These tables are taken from the original 1977 Traveller RPG by Marc Miller (now under a Creative Commons license). This is as close to canon as you can come. For me, sticking with it is a small homage to one of the first sci-fi RPGs ever.
    These tech levels are more or less familiar to people moving over to M-Space, but - as we'll reveal in a future blog post, M-Space Speculations, it can be tweaked or even rewritten to suit your campaign setting, along with such things as the psionics rules.
    Next Week
    We're at the end of the core rulebook next week, covering Life Forms, then the Appendices. Once we get to the index, that's it. Make use of your vehicle sheet on page 185, draw up a couple of fun vehicles, and we'll meet you here next week.
  13. Alex Greene
    Greetings, Cosmonauts, and welcome to the next part of my look at M-Space by Frostbyte Books.
    This week, we take a look at two disparate chapters - Circles, and Psionics.
    Circles

    Circles are the M-Space equivalent of the factions of Mythras- its Guilds, Orders, Sodalities, Cults, and so on. Circles can take on the form of extended family, political pressure groups, terrorist organisations, political parties, corporations, and so on.
    Circles are defined here by characteristics - their Ideas (ideologies, etc); their types (Organization, Ideology, Corporation, Location), their Influence (INF), Size (SIZ), and Resources (RES), which are measured on a non-linear scale of 1-20; and Attributes, which determine how the Circles get things done, such as Ahimsa (non-violence), Black Ops, Functional Stupidity, Memes, and so on.
    Traits for the Circles include Ranks, Benefits )such as tech, psionics etc). The chapter continues with a look at further traits such as the Circle's age, entry and exit conditions, and so on. These few pages, which include a Circle stat sheet, are everything you need to create a Circle as small as a found family of misfit explorers, a ship's crew from a random passing freighter, or a globe-spanning organised crime ring.
    Circles and Odd Soot
    The Circles presented here are universally considered to be positive. Membership in those Circles means that the Circle accepts the character, and the character accepts the Circle's ethos and ideologies.
    Odd Soot, also from Frostbyte Books, looks at the concept of negative Circles - Circles whose presence is a detriment to the character, and which shaped the character's outlook with dark memories and painful events in their past. Circles in Odd Soot are structured differently to those featured here - for one thing, they are rated 1% - 100% just like Skills and Passions - and they influence the character as much as they influence third parties.
    Example Circle
    The Polidori Society
    Ideas: A collective of psychic (energy) vampires, exploring their identity and culture.
    Type: Organisation (Occult)
    Characteristics: INF (9, Counterculture, Vampyre Identity, LGBTQIA+), SIZ (6), RES (17)
    Attributes: Ahimsa, Cellular, Connected, Dedicated Followers, Secrecy, Spread, Welfare.
    Traits: Shelter, Library, Psionic Training, Healing

    Psionics
    Every science fiction roleplating game since Traveller has included rules for psionics in their core rulebooks. M-Space is no exception. From telepaths to telekinetics, clairvoyants to teleporters, science fiction has included the occasional psychic mutant to throw the scientists a curve ball.
    Psychic powers are frequently held as a thorn in the side of the more rational, logical breed of science fiction writers who prefer their stories to revolve around real science, rather than the "rules" of psionics and what they term "woo." But this is science fiction, and for every Expanse there is a Star Trek; for every rationalist Asimov character, there is a Deanna Troi or Telzey Amberdon.
    For every Han Solo, there is an Obi-Wan or baby Yoda. And this is the last time I will ever refer to Star Wars in this blog.

    How do the M-Space rules approach psionics, then?
    The rules are pretty basic. Your psion has access to three streams of psi - Sense, Mind, and Matter. Sense is your ESP, clairvoyance type strand, with other applications such as Meditation and Battle Meditation. Mind covers empathy, telepathy, mind control, and so on. And Matter covers the interaction of psi with the physical world - telekinesis, but also physical healing, illusions, martial flow, and ultimately Life Giver - which restores the very recently dead to life.
    For the most part, these abilities require a check against Sense, Mind, or Matter - which are independently rated from 1% - 100% like Skills and Passions - and success draws upon Power Points, which are like Magic Points from Mythras or Prana Points from Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels. All Power Points are restored with a good night's sleep or, with the use of the Meditation power, one hour.
    Curiously enough, this iteration of the psionics rules does not include teleportation, translocation (jumping between parallels) or other powers found in the pages of, for instance, Worlds United, After The Vampire Wars or, indeed, Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels. To give yourself a richer psionic experience, consider poaching some of the powers from those books.
    Consider how your space-based compaign would be affected if one of your characters could Spacejaunt - teleport over vast distances, even between solar systems thousands of light years apart (as Gully Foyle did in the final chapter of Alfred Bester's The Stars, My Destination) or between universes (such as Luther Arkwright (from The Adventures of Luther Arkwright), Princess Victoria (from Heart of Empire), and Proteus (from The Legend of Luther Arkwright)).
    Some psions' abilities break the rules listed in M-Space. Break those rules, if you have to. Create a psion character who can use all of the Mind Talents, ignoring the requirements for "first, second, and third arc." Drop the need for power points. Replace them with fatigue points, and only accumulate them the same way one accumulated fatigue in physical combat. Low POW, low-skill psions might be able to send and receive psychic messages over short distances and even touch range only, whereas high-POW, highly-skilled or even alien psions might be able to reach with their minds and senses to connect with other minds in solar systems sectors away.
    And some wanderers might skip from one M-Class, Terra-Prime garden world to another, not needing a ship to take them anywhere - just teleporting from world to world, as you and I might change channels on the TV.
    And that's the review of Circles and Psionics in M-Space. Next week, it's the turn of Vehicles and Technology.
  14. Alex Greene
    Welcome to part 4 of this look through Frostbyte Books' M-Space. Today, it's all about the transport.
    Specifically, starships.
    Transport
    The default mode of transport in M-Space is by ship. Nothing is stopping you from creating a setting which has your guys traipsing between star systems or even universes via a network of portals a la Stargate or the Glen Larson TV series Buck Rogers - or indeed like the original Trippy Stargate sequence from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. You could even borrow the whole Spice deal from Dune and have a Guild of Navigators ferry ships from world to world, "travelling without moving" and similar druggy, trippy stuff: or Spacejaunting from Bester's The Stars, My Destination.
    But that's something for another blog post. I might call that one M-Space: Speculations and hold that after my review of the core rulebook.
    Back to the ships.
    M-Space Ships versus Traveller Ships
    Go and look up Starships on DriveThruRPG, and you will come back with a bewildering choice of sublight boats and ships. Scouts, Traders, Freighters, Liners, troop transports, Corvettes, Frigates, Escorts, Cruisers, Dreadnoughts and some seriously ugly "planet cracker" ships, including the Traveller answer to the Death Star, the Tigress-class Christmas Tree Decoration:-

    Honestly, I can't imagine an uglier ship.
    Oh, wait ...

    Seriously, Traveller starships leave so much to be desired, aesthetically speaking.
    So, then, straight over to M-Space, which presents Starship design rules. These are so different.
    First of all, everything is about how many Modules your ship has, not its displacement tonnage. Your ship can be some tiny scout singleship or some vast cityship - the rules cover the construction of ships of any size, based on Modules, not tonnage.
    The items which consume Modules are very simple. Crew space, Bridge / cockpit, engines, maneuvering, hyperspace, galley, sickbay, weapons, lab. Stuff like that. There is a list of components and their Module costs.
    Not everything requires a Module cost.
    The following things are always included in a starship: Hull, power plant, airlock (not for small ships), vacuum suits for complete crew, computer, life support system, communications system, sensors, repair kit and a gravity generator. There is no need to buy specific Modules for these functions.
    Okay ... so add hyperdrive, fuel storage, and manoeuvre drive to that, and your Starship design can become so incredibly simple. Just pluck numbers for your ship's performance out of a hat. Throw away your copy of High Guard. This is not Traveller. You don't have to follow the Traveller rules to calculate your Starship's performance.
    High Guard has a bunch of high tech alternatives to Jump. The Hop Drive. The Skip Drive. The Spacefolding Drive. Hyperdrive. Exotic particle collectors like the Traveller Double Adventure Annic Nova. Okay, bring back your copy of High Guard and borrow those technologies if you like - just include them in the list of things which do not require a Module calculation.
    How do your M-Space Starships travel from star to star? M-Space has one or two mentions of your ship needing refuelling after every jump, but honestly these rules are optional. All of them.
    There's a section which allows you to compare the SIZ of the ship (based on the number of Modules) and the TR of the drives - you can just pick the TR, it won't hurt to pluck a suitable number out of a hat if you like, or use the Modules times a multiplier like 1.2 (cutting edge) or 0.8 (cheap commercial) and so on. Costs, likewise, can be glossed over if you like: you do not have to scrabble for every single Credit to pay for your ship's mortgage plus interest for forty stinking years. Once again, M-Space is not Traveller.
    You can design your ships to look like some freaky designs with M-Space. Examples from Space: 1999:-

    Or The Infernal Machine ...

    And you could be inspired by from Star Trek, and come up with a ship like this ...

    It's up to you.

    Move over, Annic Nova.

    I mean, seriously, you don't have to do Traveller with M-Space ships. Do you want your characters to face off against a vampire ship like the one from Lifeforce above, with its near-immortal occupants? Go for it. Nothing says your vampire ship has to use refined hydrogen guel costing Cr 500 per ton, and have to work out how many tons of fuel it's supposed to store and how much it consumes per jump. Why not have this ship become a real menace because (a) it's sentient, (b) it's fuelled by living souls, (c) its primary weapon can suck the life force out of every living being on a small planetoid to fuel its jump, (d) whoops, I've given away one of the terrifying enemy ships of my M-Space book Terra Quadrant, still a WIP?
    Have I whetted your appetites enough yet?
    Okay, next section, Starship Combat.
    Starship Combat
    M-Space treats your characters' Starship as a character. Your enemy ships or boats are likewise treated as characters. Your Sections are like locational Hit Points; your crew's Skills are your ship's Skills; your ship's Armour works like AP on your Hit Locations; and your ship has all the combat attributes you'd expect from Combat, with your ship's Crews adding Action Points, your ships having Initiative, combat differential rolls, Special Effects, the works.
    If you know how M-Space Extended Conflicts and Combat work on a scale of player characters, you can easily adapt to starship combat. There are two examples of ship combat on pages 110 and 216. You can look them up.
    The same way that there is a section for simplified combat in M-Space next to the regular Combat chapter, there is a simplified starship combat section on Page 112, for quick and dirty ship combats on the fly.
    Want more? Page 116 goes into detail on Advanced Starship Combat. Yes, M-Space is a gift that keeps on giving. Here, you will find some advanced options for starship combat, including the effects of exotic weapons, armour, and weapon options.
    This section gives you as many rules as you wish to engage in starship combat, whether it's an Eagle transporter facing off against fighter craft or two Stargate Atlantis Wraith Hive ships firing broadsides at one another for feeding rights to the planet they are orbiting.
    That's it for the Starships section of M-Space. We're about halfway through the book. The rest of the book is Alien Creation, World Building, Circles, Psionics, Vehicle Design, Technology, Life Forms and five Appendices. Next week, we're covering Alien Creation and World Building. I'll go through the rules for both, using the rules to generate an alien species I created for Castrobancla, The City of Aliens - the Pelacur.
    Get ready for First Contact and prepare for landing next week.
  15. Alex Greene
    This blog post is best read in the dark. Alone.
    I'm going to take you to a calmer, cosier world, where people could walk for miles across lonely moors, down country roads, and along beaches, without meeting a single living soul. A world where the pace of life is slower, but the heart rate is through the roof. A cool world, where your brow occasionally prickles with sweat for no reason.
    A cold sweat, to accompany the chills down your spine.
    Welcome, reader, to the world of Montague Rhodes "Monty" James, and his beloved stories of horror and the supernatural.
    Welcome ... to The Design Mechanism's Casting The Runes.
    M R James
    M R James was a profoundly thorough and meticulous mediaevalist scholar. His works can still be cited as definitive in his field. However, James is most famous for his collection of ghost stories, all set in a charming, pastoral realm; an England which was beginning to disappear in the real world even during Monty's lifetime, as the 20th century reeled from one world war and lurched towards a second one a decade later.
    The world of horror literature was changing. Ghost stories were more and more being seen as passé, and the world was lapping up the weird fiction of HPL and his acolytes. Stories of science fiction were beginning to fill the pages of magazines, displacing the dreaming country lanes and haunted fens with harder stories of American derring do among the stars.
    But during the traditional Christmas Eve story telling sessions when the world outside was dark and still after the Solstice, and the wind rattled the windows and made the candles in the room flicker and cast dancing shadows to fuel the imagination, M R James' world of deeper shadows lived on to this day.
    Casting The Runes And Other Stories
    James' work is regarded as unmatchable in his field. Evocative; conversational, like a written transcript of a story narrated verbally (you can practically hear Monty lean forwards from his spectral chair in the afterlife to speak to you); and, most of all, terrifying; his stories have inspired homages, imitations and downright parodies.
    "Casting The Runes" is one of James' most famous horror stories, where Karswell, a man of poor and vulgar character, casts a dangerous spell over Dunning, the story's protagonist. Dunning discovers that Karswell had cast the runes, slipped him a sheet of paper inscribed with runes of summoning.
    Other famous James ghost stories include Lost Hearts, a suspense story involving a young orphan and haunting visions of two Traveller children with missing hearts; Count Magnus, a vampire story of an obnoxious man whose ill character lead to a Faustian deal, and an evil which lived on long after his death; and O Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad, one of his most famous stories, which centres around the discovery of an odd whistle on a beach ... and the slow, building terror which follows when the protagonist blows it.
    You can read the stories here; but for best effect, you can either buy his books as hardcopies, to hold in your hands, feeling the paper beneath your fingertips as you turn the pages and read out the words under a solitary lamp in the dark ...
    ... or you can set a roleplaying game in M R James country, and play a character.
    This is the setting for The Design Mechanism's Casting The Runes.

    The Tabletop Roleplaying Game
    This project of The Design Mechanism was announced with a little mystery - "What is Project Rose Garden?"
    Aficionados of M R James immediately caught the reference to "The Rose Garden," one of James' short stories, and immediately drew the conclusion that they would be looking at a new horror game.

     
    First of all, just so you know ... the engine for this game is not based on Mythras. There have been plans to release Casting as a Mythras game, with the familiar d100 engine; but this is not that day.
    Casting The Runes' engine is based on Pelgrane Press' GUMSHOE engine, devised by Robin D Laws and Kenneth Hite. It begins with a preface by Ramsey Campbell.
    RAMSEY BLOODY CAMPBELL.
    The quality that makes [James'] best tales – which is to say most of them – unforgettable is his wit in communicating horror.
    -- the Preface
    The Book
    Moving from the Preface, the rest of the book presents the usual sections - an introduction to roleplaying games, an intro to the world of M R James (I refuse to give it the umbrella term Monty Country in the same vein as "Lovecraft Country"), the character generation rules, and chapters devoted to gameplay, acquiring clues, creatures, magic, the historic period and locales, campaigns, and sample scenarios, along with an Appendix which is, basically, the "Appendix N" of ghost stories and tales of strangeness.
    But really, those are mere technical details. What really matters is what this game is about, what it does, and what makes it unique, not only from the other games I am looking at in this blog, but also from other Gumshoe products such as Fear Itself, Night's Black Agents and The Esoterrorists.
    It even differs in play from The Design Mechanism's other horror roleplaying games, After The Vampire Wars and Weird of Hali, both of which I have already covered in this blog.
    Using GUMSHOE
    GUMSHOE is an investigative game. Your characters, known as Investigators, are presented with a mystery. You explore the mystery, gathering Clues, until it leads you to a place of unremitting horror (or "pleasing terror" if you like) from which you recover ... or maybe not.
    Presenting Jamesian Horror
    The elements which make a Casting game unique are the tools by which M R James himself presented his stories. Casting really is best run in a semi-darkened room, preferably with inhospitable weather pounding on the outside of the glass.
    Far from being cosy, James’s stories frequently present a reassuringly ordinary setting that is invaded by the malevolent and terrible. Sometimes everyday objects take on or harbour hideous life, and at times the juxtaposition of these elements borders on surrealism.
    -- the Preface
    Gaming Casting is about setting a style. Your investigations are not in the style of Delta Green, all kicking down doors and taking names at gunpoint. Casting is about a methodical gathering of facts, even as the darkness gathers about the Investigators. The atmosphere of a Casting adventure should always start with an almost cosy mundanity - your Investigator wants to write a travelogue about Sweden, or they come into possession of some weird, ugly mezzotint, or they stumble across a rusty whistle on some beach.
    As the game progresses, your characters invariably sense that something is amiss. A sense of unease begins to fill the air. If your Investigators are alone, they sense things out of the corner of their eyes. Odd synchronicities catch their attention. A sense that they are not alone, and that they are somehow being watched from afar.
    If your characters are Investigators, along the lines of Hodgson's Carnacki, they can become accustomed to these feelings; but your Investigators can be hapless members of the general public drawn into this terrifying world. Retired postal workers, school teachers on holiday, formidable bustling women in tweeds rampaging about the village on bicycles - the appeal of the game is to land them in a situation where they find that they have bitten off far more than they can chew. So much more fun to have their body hairs prickling in response to dark terrors far beyond their little circle of experiences.
    GUMSHOE Investigators are based around certain key elements - Abilities, Health, Stability, and the Sources of Stability which keep them on this side of the sanity membrane. The usual characteristic rolls and skill percentages do not appear in this game. Rather, your Investigators are good at some things, and they are healthy and mentally sound at the start of the game, though both can get eroded as the game progresses.
    If you are not used to GUMSHOE, please read page 13, the section on Investigative Abilities. It's that important.
    Amateur Hour
    Many of your Investigators are likely to come from a unique background: gentle beings of leisure, people of independent means who can come and go as they please. Investigations in M R James' worlds are delightfully free of the scent of luchre, and Investigators can board a train or hail a cab and visit anywhere, without a hint of screaming poverty, running short of money to pay for a meal or a few nights' stay at some village inn. Their independence is a heady brew which can draw your Players in to their Investigators' short lives.
    Casting paints a golden age for people who were able to go anywhere, do anything, and come back with warnings for the curious not to go there.
    Each Investigative Career (Authors, Antiquarians, Collectors, Physicists, Doctors, Secretaries, Historians, and so on) is prefaced with a monochrome thumbnail portrait and a brief quote relevant to that career from either a James story or from some other source. You are encouraged to have your Investigator come from one of those investigative careers and to settle into that role.
    Creature Feature
    The game would not be the same without a healthy bestiary of strange entities to haunt and terrify your Investigators. The creatures are drawn from a variety of sources, not just from James' stories. The creature entering via the window in the pic below comes from The Mezzotint:-

    You can tell it was a creature of uncouth mien, because it refused to use the door like a civilised person. Shocking, its lack of standards.
    There is a section for Gamesmasters on how to create such mythic or folklorish creatures, from Little People to vampires, from Black Dogs to Cornish Piskies and Nockers.
    It should be obvious that most supernatural beings are lethally dangerous, and that any reckless Investigator, however strong, who dares grapple with one will soon meet a horrible end. That’s as it should be. Supernatural terror lies in the physical helplessness of puny mortals before the unknown.
    This is also a chance for GMs so disposed to cunningly undermine and critique the brute-force-and-sheerbloody- ignorance attitude rampant in Edwardian England. Any victory or banishment of the unearthly enemy should come from more than just a straight bat and a strong right arm. Knowledge, and more than a bit of luck, will be required.
    -- Casting The Runes, The Design Mechanism
    The list of creatures begins with a vampiric, ghostly creature from the mind and pen of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories, the Aeiirii Manifestation, and follows up with elementals, familiars, Arthur Machen's Children of Pan, Ghosts and Ghouls (with lists of Stability costs associated with ghostly manifestations), Demons (from Casting The Runes), Mummies, Night-Ravens, and the Sheeted Ghosts from "O Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad."
    The chapter moves on from the lesser creatures to actual gods - the two examples given being Odin and Sweet Mama Hecate, below.

    This is then followed by a list of game stats for mundane creatures - bears, boars, bulls. Dogs, cats, tories.
    "Do not cross this field unless you can run a hundred metres in nine seconds, because the bull can run it in ten."
    -- famous sign on a farm gate
    Abracadabra, Alakazam
    The next chapter is all about magic, and its effects on the setting. Magic, in this book, is not really for the Investigators, unless it is somehow defensive - magic circles and amulets to ward off evil, nazars to be worn and carried and so on.
    This chapter captures the essence of the sorceries of Casting The Runes, Count Magnus, O Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad, and the dark forces controlled by Mocata in Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out. Magic is something to be warded against, more than it is a tool for the Investigators to use. The price to pay is heavy - Health, Stability and so on - and it is best wielded by the kinds of barbaric NPC Gamesmaster vulgarians who never had much in the way of Stability to start with.
    The workings listed in this chapter are delightfully thematic, and some horrific, to be enacted only at great cost. The book does not encourage Investigators to learn them - with sone exceptions, such as Protective Circlle and Warding.
    What follows next is a list of dreaded tomes, along with their contents and costs for reading them. Fairly standard fare, something you'll have seen in Call of Cthulhu and other games. After this is a section on extraordinary items - vampire hunters' crossbows of rowan or hawthorn wood, protective amulets, Carnacki's "Electric Pentacle" (basically, a force field), the Hand of Glory (anyone want to enact scenes from The Wicker Man?) and witch bottles.
    The Period
    The next chapter covers the period of James' life - Edwardian England. The chapter delves into incomes, social class, and similar. The section on money is actually dressing - no matter the social class of the Investigators, they should never lack for money to get them to where they want to go, or to buy replacement items for what they need, whether it be a new umbrella or Derby hat, or shot for a Purdey shotgun.
    This chapter is more about giving you a taste of what people did, and what was available to them: telegrams, rather than emails; libraries of heavy books, rather than a bunch of PDFs on a tablet; clothing, weaponry, investigative equipment - a Kodak Brownie can potentially be more dangerous than a twelve-bore shotgun, for instance.
    The history of this chapter is staggering, evocative, and worth reading all on its own. This, along with the Appendix with its sources, is the biggest love letter to the Edwardian era, both real and imagined, that anyone not born in that time could ever hope to write.
    Campaigning
    You are not restricted to the horror stories of M R James. The same period gave such delights as John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, and your characters could become embroiled in spy scandals against various political groups at the time, even as the forces of more supernatural darkness gather on the horizon ...
    Think of a famous author whose stories defined that era in ways which still take the breath away. You're invited to set your stories in the Edwardian era, and in Monty Country
    damn, that one slipped out
    but you can be inspired by other authors, if you like. Proust. Joyce. Kafka. Anais Nin. W Somerset Maugham. Maybe not Edgar Rice Burroughs - too pulpy, and maybe more than a bit colonial. Rainer Marie Rilke. D H Lawrence. George Bernard Shaw. You can extract elements from these books and bring them in to add flavour to your Investigators' delvings, turning them into bright, strange, convoluted dramas where they only occasionally veer into Gothic darkness. The mundanity of their everyday dramas contrasts with the bitter, weird darkness of the supernatural.
    And sometimes, the mundanity can present the Investigators with threats more immediate than any centuried corpse rising from its crypt.
    The Last Word
    Casting The Runes is a departure from The Design Mechanism's d100 fare, but it is a delightful addition to their library. Being a standalone horror game based on GUMSHOE, Casting is mechanically compatible with Fear Itself, Night's Black Agents, The Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Republic, and any other game based on Pelgrane Press' GUMSHOE engine. Yes, it stands alongside its GUMSHOE siblings as a game in its own right, well worth opening and looking into as an introduction to GUMSHOE games.
    This is the brainchild of Paul StJohn Mackintosh, and it is one of the best roleplaying supplements I have had the privilege to come across.
    Additionally, it doesn't take much effort to convert the non-crunchy materials for use in a wide variety of alternate settings. Consider taking the game engine from Weird of Hali or After The Vampire Wars in the setting, if you must insist on playing the game with Mythras rules. Even the Circles and Extended Conflict rules from Frostbyte Books' Odd Soot are useful and can be ported to this setting, if you would like to set your Casting game in a more esoteric 1920s of Difference Engines and interstellar travel in Comae Space.
    Pick up this book. It is easy to lose yourself in a time period just over a century ago, such is the powerful writing in this book.
    Just remember, when you come back into this world, to check to make sure that you're not bringing Something back with you from the depths of the book.
    And whatever else you do, do not blow that damn whistle.
    Here you have a story written with the sole object of inspiring a pleasing terror in the reader; and as I think, that is the true aim of the ghost story.
    - M.R. James
  16. Alex Greene

    Hiatus

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    I'm taking a hiatus this week. I really want to take a look at two books which slightly deviate from Mythras products, but which have strong ties to Mythras. One is The Weird of Hali; the other is Casting The Runes.
    The next book review will be next week.
  18. Alex Greene
    Following from the last blog post, which looked at the newest Mythras setting, Destined, we're going to take a look at another Mythras setting, Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels.
    Luther Arkwright is The Design Mechanism's foray into a genre known as Steampunk. This genre of science fiction is characterised by strange, baroque steam-driven inventons, vehicles, devices and weapons. The Difference Engine by Wiliam Gibson and Bruce Sterling more or less made Steampunk mainstream, but the UK broached the genre first with the Bryan Talbot graphic novels The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Heart of Empire. 
    Eternal Champions
    Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius was one incarnation of The Eternal Champion - a mortal being who exists in some form in every universe within a vast multiverse of parallels. This may have been inspired by Joseph Campbell's non-fiction philosophical work The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which may itself have roots in older heroes such as Beowulf and
    Legal team here. Stop it.
    Anyway, there you go. Bryan Talbot's eponymous Luther Arkwright was his answer to that other guy. The multiverse of Bryan Talbot is similar to that of Moorcock, but unlike Moorcock's setting which had a different Eternal Champion in each parallel, there was only one Luther Arkwright, unique across every parallel. Luther was gifted with the ability to plane shift on his own, trvelling from parallel to parallel as easily as ordinary people would wander into an adjacent room.
    In the graphic novels, there is a cosmic conflict going on, as an alien force known as The Disruptors destabilise individual parallels as part of a long-running master plan. The Big Picture is described in the Luther Arkwright sourcebook. This sourcebook also describes the protagonist force set up to combat these Disruptors, Project VALHALLA and the parallel known as Zero-Zero.
    This is where Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Universe comes in, because the player characters are Agents of Project VALHALLA, taking orders from the AI W.O.T.A.N. and travelling between parallels in a steampunk dimension ship to thwart the Disruptors wherever they turn up.

    Sourcebook Contents
    Player characters are VALHALLA Agents, wanderers between parallels. If you've never encountered this kind of setting before, think of it as like the TV series Sliders.
    The sourcebook has all you need to run adventures in the Talbotverse, but you'll still need the Mythras Core Rulebook for the basic game engine. 
    The Arkwright Multiverse - Background information, the Grand Metaplot, and where the characters come in.
    Character Creation - The basic information on how to create your characters.
    Traits, Passions & Dependencies - Characters have special Traits, Passions, and flaws known as Dependencies. These set them above the run of the mill people, but also tint their heroic powers with downsides and weakness which serve to humanise them.
    Madness & Other Colours - A hard chapter to read through, this covers Tenacity, psychological conditions and the mechanical consequences of exposure to the horrors of the Talbotverse.
    Mind Games - This is missing from the blurb on page 5, but it covers Psionics and Mysticism. In addition to possessing his unique multidimensional talent, Luther is a master of psionics and mysticism. Your characters may not have Luther's singular existence and there may be parallel versions of them in a bunch of 'verses, but at least you can have someone who is a master of both Mysticism and Psionics, too.
    Technology - Here's where the Steampunk comes in. Weapons, armour, tools, equipment, and various sundry paraphernalia, all given a modern Steampunk twist, including using tech from different parallels.
    Firearms & Combat - Basically, everything from Mythras Firearms began its story here. This was probably the first Mythras supplement to cover firearms combat, and this sourcebook includes science fiction weapons such as vibro beamers.
    Vehicles - This is about how people get around both within and between 'verses. There are airships.
    W.O.T.A.N & The Disruptors - Here's the dirt on W.O.T.A.N., VALHALLA, and the Disruptors.
    Parallels - Information on landmark parallels, and how to create your own.
    Games Master Resources - Advice to Gamesmasters on running Arkwright adventures and campaigns, and stats on the major characters.
    On Thin Ice - An ice age grips Parallel 13.16.94, and the Disruptors are planning something bad. In this adventure, your Agents must go in, find out what they are doing, and stop them.
    The Arkwright Saga - The Grand Metaplot was explained in the Introduction, but here is where the book summarises both of Bryan Talbot's books. No substitute for reading the originals, mind you, but if you cannot find The Adventures of Luther Arkwright or Heart of Empire, these will have to do.
    Steampunk
    The fashions, and the mores, may be more Nineteen Seventies than Eighteen Seventies, but Luther Arkwright is proudly Steampunk in the manner of Jules Verne and H G Wells. Your characters might be content with driving around the English coast in Minis and making phone calls from iconic red telephone booths, and wearing late Seventies and early Eighties styles ... a fashion nightmare ... and the tech level available to the Agents effectively allows them access to modern conveniences though with a steampunk twist.
    Page 22 lists the different technological eras, ranging from the pre-industrial (roughly the late 1700s / early 1800s) through to the Nanotechnology and Spacefaring. The parallels which are of interest to the Disruptors would seem to be those which have a developed industrial base of some kind, often with a distinct reliance on steam.
    Superspies
    This setting is not for the faint of heart. The multiverse is not forgiving, and the price of failure is usually a bullet in the head. With stakes as high as the fate of entire parallels, the characters have to enter each battlefield world with circumspection.
    Luther Arkwright is as much a game of tradecraft (espionage) and intrigue (shifting loyalties, betrayal, treachery, mysteries, string pulling, suspense) as it is a science fiction steampunk romp.
     

    A Very British Adventure
    Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels is as quintessentially British as Doctor Who, fish & chips, and spelling colour with a u. Bryan's incredibly-detailed graphic novels draw an unmistakably British filter over the world. This sourcebook honours this by setting many of the adventures in some parallel or other of London, but you don't have to stick to London to set your adventures.
    It does, however, make for some truly bizarre imagery to see Union flags flying over Government buildings in Cleveland, Ohio, or Tokyo, and all the locals stopping at 4pm local time for tea. This is by design.

    A Very Different Adventure
    This book is available from The Design Mechanism's new store, in both PDF and hardcover. The game has been available for many years - it was originally a RuneQuest title and bore the RQ imprint - and in light of news that Luther Arkwright had been optioned in '21 for a TV series, as well as the next Luther Arkwright graphic novel set to be issued on 14 July 2022, this sourcebook - and its adventure supplement Parallel Lines - deserve to be revisited.
  19. Alex Greene

    Exploring Ruins

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    A personal note before I begin this week's post.
    Last week's hiatus could not have been more timely. I ended up going through a week from hell. I am not entirely convinced it isn't going to turn out to be a fortnight from Hell, but at least the crises I faced this last week have been resolved.
    Can't speak for tomorrow's crises, but then again tomorrow doesn't exist yet.
    Ruination
    What do you think of, when you think of ruins?
    There are many types of ruins, but they all have the same ending: places which are no longer being used, for whatever reason.
    A ruin might have been abandoned due to economic reasons, or due to the death of the person who kept the community together. A place can be brought to ruin by enemy conquest, or by natural disaster. However it happened, a ruin is a place where dreams died, and the past can only serve as a warning to the present.
    Types of Ruin
    Here are some ideas as to what sort of ruin the Adventurers can find themselves in. Roll on 1d20 or choose.

    Age of Ruins
    Next, look at the age of the ruins. Roll 1d10 or choose.

    Claim To Fame
    Some ruins have a claim to fame; a place in the history books. Think of the ruins of Troy and Pompeii, of Sutton Hoo and Derinkuyu. Imagine the Great Library of Alexandria at its height and its nickname, "The Place of The Cure of The Soul." Imagine the now-vanished workshop od Tapputi, the world's first recorded scientist, chemist, perfumer, and the inventor of the distillery. Or your world's oldest amphitheatre, where the most famous historical playwright of your fantasy world once trod the sand and delivered her impassioned monologues, and entertained the crowds with philosophically-charged plays and parables?
    An abandoned hospital, thousands of years old, on the site of your world's first university, will be charged with a different kind of energy than the wreckage of a deserted psychiatric hospital abandoned due to an outbreak of plague ten years ago.

    How / Why Did The Ruin Form?
    Most ruins form from either economically-motivated abandonment, warfare, a natural disaster, disease, famine, conquest, invasion, ideological imposition, or the cessation of some form of resource on which the ruins depended.
    Economically-motivated abandonment: That's simply money. People stopped coming to the place, perhaps because the location was no longer central to the city and a new place had opened up in the centre of a new, expanded community. Consider a temple sited on a hill. The supporting city builds a new temple in the centre, and people stop coming to the old temple, eventually trigge3ring its abandonment as the priesthood move to the new temple.
    Warfare: The city of Troy was thought of as a Greek myth, until it was discovered (and then blown to smithereens by explosives. Go figure). Also, the capital of Ancient Corinth deserves a mention here. Corinth is the place where the Corinthians lived, accorsing to the Biblical Letters of Saint Paul. They were also mentioned in the Acts of The Apostles in the same bible. You can thank the Romans for destroying the place, and the sea for claiming the rest of it.
    Natural disaster: Consider Pompeii, smothered for more than a millennium by Vesuvius. Your ruins could be buried in several hundred feet of volcanic ashes, washed away by a tsunami, or even (in your fantasy world) partly obliterated by a falling rock. A very small falling rock, which made a big mess, like Chelyabinsk in 2013.
    Disease: A horrific way to go, diseases such as the plague, smallpox and so on can ravage entire regions of the countrydside. In the Harnworld setting, The Red Death (smallpox) claimed millions across Northwestern Lythia, including the island of Harn. The nation of Thonia (which has its own geographic module, published by Kelestia Publications) was all but rendered a barren wasteland. Thonia's thriving, yet isolated, civilisations were all but eradicated by the Red Death.
    Famine: Famine can also lay waste entire regions. Famine can be caused by a number of factors: war, disease, drought, natural disaster - but also stupidity. Cultivation requires effort, planning, and resources: a crop which fails can turn a paradise island into a Summerisle.
    Conquest / Invasion:  Going back to the ancient city of Troy, and to Alexandria. In both cases, imagine what they would have looked like today, if they had not been scrubbed down to the foundations by some ugly brute invaders. The same goes for ideological imposition: look at all those Abbeys and Monasteries which were ordered shut down by Henry VIII.
    Cessation: Not exactly famine, as such, or even economic abandonment. Sometimes, a natural resource which drew people to a civic centre just dries up. Water from a natural spring (perhaps blessed by the Gods), or a herb which becomes extinct, or even some technology on which the rest of the region depends, but which becomes obsolete with the advent of a new technology (such as iron in the Bronze Age, or the mouldboard plough, or irrigation).
    Why Explore These Ruins?
    What would bring the Adventurers to an abandoned site? As Gamesmaster, you could think of a few reasons, but here are half a dozen ideas to set you off.
    Rescue: Someone has gone wandering away from the community, off into the wilderness, and they've become stuck somehow amid the ruins on the hill. Perhaps they fell through a sinkhole to an undiscovered complex beneath; or perhaps they might have fallen foul of some bandits who have taken refuge there. Either way, time is of the essence before the missing person is killed or dies of exposure.
    Reclamation: The ruins have now been bought up by a landowner, who wishes to develop the property. The Adventurers can be tasked with going there to clear out the monsters which have taken residence there, and which occasionally have been making forays into the town during times of famine. They could also venture there in order to find out some reason why they should not build there - perhaps it is credibly haunted, or there is still a trace of lingering plague there, and so on.
    Shelter: - The Adventurers are passing by, when a storm hits, or snow, or they spot an oncoming invasion, and the ruins provide shelter and concealment.
    Exploration: - There are rumours of a lost treasure of some kind hidden in the ruins. Don't knock this one: you never know when your clumsy excavations in the floor of an ancient Abbey may reveal a hidden copy of The Qur'an from the 13th Century.
    Diplomacy: - Circumstances might require a neutral meeting point for meetings intended to bring a war to an end, or to conduct some state of affairs between cultures or nations. What better place than a ruin which nobody can lay claim to, or even a ruin which has cultural significance to both parties (e.g. a ruined Abbey where a treaty had been signed between two warring nations six hundred years before, the first time both nations had gone to war with one another).
    Trade: - Your Adventurers have someone or something. The other side has someone or something. What better place to arrange the exchange than a place which has excellent sight lines for one or both teams' snipers? Or maybe they could go there with a genuine intent to swap ...

    Last Word
    In the end, a ruin can be more than just a place to store random monsters to chop into little pieces. If you think that the abandoned places of the world can be more interesting to explore without bands of wandering monsters, feel free to use the above guidelines to work out some adventures to throw at your Adventurers. Who knows; they could uncover a Derinkuyu in some unexplored part of the world, and build up a population in the tens of thousands livin underground, with themselves as the leaders of an entire community and the complex as their base of operations - or they could content themselves with building an underground home, and building a regional power base with trade coming to them.
    Just watch out for those ancient ghosts ...

     
  20. Alex Greene
    Personal note: Before writing this blog, I thought I'd try and Google the word "horror" to see if I could come up with a suitable graphic for this post.
    The search engine just gave me a bunch of faces, close up, staring full screen at the viewer, leering, gurning, screaming, gaping open-mouthed like simpletons faced with their first conjuring trick.
    That's not scary. That's just marketing people capitalising on the Uncanny Valley, and presenting the world with a bunch of actors in heavy makeup to make their faces look disfigured - because the fear of disabled people and ugliness is the last refuge of plain old bigotry left in the world.
    Creating Scary Stories
    So this is about creating gaming scenarios intended to terrify the Players. Note - not the Adventurers.
    It is as hard to create a horror scenario as it is to create a mystery. How can you create a terrifying scenario to a party of Adventurers who go in to the haunted house fully armoured top to toe, and carrying huge, unwieldy, devastating weapons of war? When the Players' first impulse is to yell "I roll initiative and ready my weapons" when they meet a zombie in a room; when their reaction to confronting a shifting werewolf is to dig through their bags for silver weapons because the Players know that silver is deadly to them; how can you get through a jaded, blasé mindset and scare them?
    Safety Tools
    Safety tools are probably more important in the horror genre than in any other genre of gaming. The themes of horror roleplaying include topics which cause discomfort, and while players might know exactly what they are getting into, still some events and topics might crop up which could cause distress to individuals. A player might agree to play in a story where spiders feature strongly because they have no fear of spiders - but they may draw the line at the depiction of fire, for instance. Or they might have no problem with investigating a haunted house and have no fear of ghosts, but vampires could terrify them.
    Safety tools include safety cards - the "O" card for "okay" (it's the player acting in character, for instance, rather than being terrified for real), the "pause" card to allow the player to take a breather, and the "X" card to signal that the player doesn't want to explore the scene any further. Gestures such as "cut" (hands in an X across the chest, palms down) and "brake" (hands in front of chest, palms out) serve the same function as the "pause" and "X" cards.
    Games Masters can exercise options such as veils, which draw a veil over the scene and close it down so the characters can move on, and script changes which can rewind a scene to an earlier point or even go to a previous scene.
    And with that now said, let's look deep into the nature of fear.
    The Nature Of Fear
    People watch horror movies and read horror stories to feel an enjoyable frisson of fear. Humans must be the only species that indulges in risky activities in this way. Human couples often watch horror movies together because it deepens emotional bonds. Around the gaming table, Players enjoy horror scenarios for the same reason - the sharing of the emotions of fear increases team camaraderie.
    Fear is an emotional reaction to the perception of a threat. Fear only arises where there is a threat, either real or implied. In a horror game, the threat can come from the predations of a monster or monsters.
    Fear comes in four main flavours.
    Unease - Your gut instinct is telling you that something is wrong. You can't see anything wrong, and everything feels normal, but all the same ...
    Dread - Your gut instinct is correct. Something is wrong. You know when something feels normal, and things are definitely not normal, though you don't know the cause.
    Terror - You know something is wrong, and you know what it is - but you've not encountered it yet.
    Horror - You encounter the cause of whatever is wrong.
    Genres and Subgenres
    Horror categories include:-
    - body horror, where the character is facing a terrible fate as they physically transform into something monstrous IThe Fly);
    - monster horror, where the characters are the prey of some terrifying monster (vampire / werewolf / demon / zombies);
    - psychological horror, where the protagonists begin to doubt their own sanity, or have to face their own fears (Vertigo, Marnie);
    - gothic horror, where the protagonists are plunged into a macabre world of dark symbolism (Masque of The Red Death, The Fall of The House of Usher);
    - cosmic horror, where the protagonists confront the realisation that the world of normality and sanity is a fragile shell over an infinite abyss of darkness (The Shadow Out Of Time);
    - and folk horror, where the protagonists face fear and terror in some isolated part of the world (The Wicker Man, Candyman).
    Intrusion Of The Other
    In every element of horror, the protagonists must face the intrusion of The Other - the antagonistic element whose presence in the story is intended to threaten the protagonist, and thereby generate fear. As the Games Master, you are the person in charge of this Other, whether it be a vampire, a mutant giant crocodile inhabiting a lake, a village full of ritualistic cannibals, a global zombie outbreak, or an alien invasion.
    In a game of cosmic horror, you get to play Cthulhu. Let that sink in.
    How do you generate these feelings of horror, terror, dread, and unease among the Players?
    Start With Normality
    Always begin with the everyday; the routine; the ordinary. The protagonists are on their way to a remote village to start new lives, or they are heading for some old mansion to spend the night there before claiming an inheritance. Life should revolve around such petty pursuits as looking for work, or going to a party, or a similar event.
    Inciting Incident
    Something out of place happens not long into the adventure. Dead birds fall from the sky; a local comes up to the protagonists and says "This place is not for you. Get out now, while you still can!"; the pub that the characters wander into suddenly falls silent, and the landlord and every single patron stop what they're doing and stare at them.
    Build Things Up Slowly
    In order to build things up slowly, you need to set the scene and show the protagonists what the normal environment looks like. Then, once they get used to it, not long after the inciting incident, add layers of unease and dread. This is done in three ways.
    Additions - Something new and unfamiliar appears. Strange writing on the wall; an odd shadow; strange lights in the sky at night.
    Deletions - Something the protagonists take for granted disappear. A friendly face vanishes; the sounds of barking dogs at night cease, and there is no sign of any dogs around.
    Changes - Something looks, sounds, or feels different: more menacing. The wind's nightly howl sounds almost bestial; the trees around the village seem to be closer, somehow.
    Keep adding and layering these changes, until the protagonists look around and wonder where they are.
    Suspense
    Mystery is a situation which has taken place in the past. Suspense is anticipation of a future event. The protagonists should be aware that something is happening; something is coming, some event or the arrival of the presence with which they must struggle. As much as all the weirdness is building up slowly, the protagonists must become aware that these additions, deletions, and edits are building up towards something horrendous - and they can neither escape it, nor can they turn away or find a safe place to hide.
    Surprises
    Long before the confrontation, you can shock and terrify the protagonists with surprises and moments of terror. A demon manifests as strange clouds of light and hideous odours, advancing along a road towards the character in the dead of night; or the evil occultist sends vile dreams into the sleeping protagonists' minds.
    Nobody Is Safe
    The antagonist, the Horror, now takes away non-player characters who have become close to the protagonists. For example, a friendly priest and police officer who'd expressed sympathy for the protagonists and an interest in joining them in the hunt suddenly go quiet - only to turn up where the protagonists least expect them, dead, to show the protagonists that they are now on their own.
    With permission from individual Players, worked out in advance before the game begins, the Horror can even take away one or more of the protagonists to show the rest that it means business.
    Give Them Hope
    Fear is unsustainable. There have to be moments of respite to allow the Players time to breathe and rally around, before reintroducing the fear. Give the protagonists some element which can drive away the dark forces of the antagonist. A shelter; an amulet; a weapon. Whatever that element is, it drives away the antagonist for a little while, allowing the protagonists to settle down and feel a momentary sense of relief.
    Then Take It Away
    Don't let them enjoy that momentary sense of relief for too long. Jumpscares are your best weapon. Remember that jumpscare moments are supposed to be unexpected. The best time to scare the protagonists is to combine the jumpscare moment with the sense that Nobody Is Safe, above. Have the protagonist take away a non-player character in mid-sentence. Punctuate the moment by randomly dropping a heavy book on the table, for example. Then, when the collaborating Player starts to say something, slam that book down again.
    Just because you and the Player have agreed that the antagonist can take their character away, it doesn't mean that the Player should not be scared too. You can both agree to have their character killed off by the end of Scene 3, but nothing says you have to honour that - you can take them off the table midway through Scene 2, for example.
    When To Escalate From Terror To Horror
    Terror and horror are peak emotions. Neither is sustainable. In the 2000 AD strip The Out, protagonist Cyd Finlea is a human exploring distant space; virtually the only human. The worlds she visits are full of strangeness and wonders, but there is also a dread force known as The Tankinar, which is a kind of technological disease which springs up now and then, every few millennia. Sadly for Cyd, she gets to meet them twice in her lifetime. The first time around, she is ground up into mincemeat, but advanced alien science gives her new life in a clone body. But the second encounter is a textbook exercise in horror.
    Cyd hears that the Tankinar are on the loose again, and boards a ship heading for some alien world, only to find that the Tankinar have beaten her to it. With their last avenue of escape (a spaceship) destroyed, Cyd and the stranded aliens are chased down by hyperfast Tankinar, or cut down by the planet's natural predators, before Cyd finds herself alone on a barren planet, watching the last city in flames.
    Consumed by terror, Cyd finds herself believing that there is nothing worse to come ... until she hears the lightest of sounds, like a gentle footstep, right behind her.
    And that's when she comes face to face with the Tankinar.
    ALL of the Tankinar.
    But they do not kill her. In a truly masterful twist, Cyd Finlea experiences the greatest horror of all: the realisation that her body itself has already been contaminated by a seed of the Tankinar ... which becomes active, consuming her from within and transforming her into one of them, body and soul.
     The best time to introduce the horror is at the moment of peak terror. This requires mastery of suspense and timing, and as Games Master you must wait until the Players' attention is as fully focused as possible on the game before dropping the hammer of horror on them.
    Yes. I went there.
    The Final Girl Is A Myth
    In many hororr movies of the slasher genre, there is usually some sole survivor - typically a blonde cheerleader or similar. The concept of the Final Girl comes from these slasher movies. As Games Master, you are not beholden to keep any of the protagonists alive to see the end of the scenario.
    This isn't a matter of giving the characters the consequences of critical successes or fumbles at the wrong moment. Protagonists who do risky things such as leaping between buildings can be allowed to succeed in their Athletics rolls, even if everything indicates that by rights, they should be plummeting to their deaths. Their fate to die at the hands of the antagonist should as clear as crystal to the Players. the only way they are going to exit is at the hands of the bad guys, and even if the Players deliberately sit their protagonists down in the middle of a blazing house fire in an attempt to let the flames taken them, it won't be the fire that does them in - it will be the antagonist, pouncing on them from behind when the they least expect it.
    One Last Twist
    Many horror stories leave one final revelation to drive the protagonists to insanity (lo and behold, they too are becoming Deep Ones), or straight into the arms of the monster they thought they had killed. The best twist is always withheld until the last possible minute of the session, when the survivors think that they got away from the horrors, and they are back home, supposedly safe and sound, returning slowly to their lives of normality and sanity.
    Until their dread enemy appears in a crowd for a fleeting moment, or takes over a monitor at work, or the Players hear a tune which had played during the scenario ("We've Only Just Begun" by The Carpenters still evokes shudders among diehard horror fans who ever watched In The Mouth of Madness, to the point where they can't even stand hearing it being played as an advertising jingle) ... or they visit a friend's grave, only to have a hand thrust up out of the dirt and grab theirs in an unbreakable grip ... or they board a taxi, and the driver leans over to look at the passengers - and it's their antagonist!
  21. Alex Greene
    In my previous post, the creation of magic items was addressed. Various mechanisms were looked at, from the use of the sorcery skill Enchant (Object) through to the creation of religious artefacts and relics, and spirit fetishes.
    This blog looks at the magic items themselves, and the impact they have in game.
    Significance
    No enchanted artefact should ever be insignificant. Every artefact carries with it the power to affect the outcome of an Adventurer's skill checks, if not the storyline of the scenario.
    Even if the artefact carries some sort of minor "skill buff," such as automatically augmenting a mundane CHA-based skill check such as a musical instrument which offers an enhancement to Musicianship checks, it must never be discounted or glossed over, or traded up for a more powerful artefact in the next session. Every supernatural enhancement counts.
    Investment
    Enchanted items are never two-a-penny. Every artefact probably had a significant energy investment behind it, on the part of the creator. Enchanted items rarely, if ever, look like something rolled off a mass production line. They often bear marks, or artistic stylings, which identify their creators - makers' marks. This often makes enchanted artefacts unique, identifiable, and frequently irreplaceable.
    Cultural Impact
    Each enchanted artefact is the product of somebody's culture, shaped by that culture, fashioned from materials significant to that culture, and bearing the hallmarks of, and symbols of, that culture.
    A Barbarian might fashion a pair of boots to allow them to travel for miles non-stop, augmenting their predilections for wandering through wildernesses. A Nomad from a riverine tribe could fashion a spirit fetish from an ocarina (see? I had to bring in ocarinas somewhere!) to whistle up fair weather or to appease hostile river spirits, Loreleis, Sirens and other predatory supernatural entities which, according to the Lore, would lurk around the more sluggish stretches of the river.
    A Civilised sorcerer might enchant a cap and charge it with Enhance (POW) to boost their Magic Points supply, and another might create a mask which bestows the Change Gender Gift from page 202 of Mythras to whomsoever wears it.
    Magic swords, axes and armour are not the only artefacts of significance to a culture. The real world historical Beaker Culture of Bronze Age Europe were characterised by the beakers with which they were buried, for instance. The Mold Gold Cape, another artefact dating back to the Bronze Age, is an artefact of huge cultural significance even to the modern day, due to the mystery of its manufacture - it is a mystery even to modern archaeologists, who still only have a general idea of how such a thing could be made, but can only guess at what tools they used.

    Artefacts include relics, the remains of saints, or objects which are reputed to have been in contact with someone supposedly blessed by a deity. Śarīra, for example, are pearl-like spheres which have been found among the ashes of Buddhist saints who attained Mahasamadhi (the ultimate Samadhi - death). Relics have cultural significance, since they are held to be tangible reminders that those who came before, whose lives and deaths shaped the contemporary religion, actually existed - they were real, not merely the products of storytellers' imaginations.
    Expectation
    The name of Sheffield Steel, or Clogau Gold, is a brand. There is an expectation of sublime quality to any item forged from such materials. In fantasy, a blade made from obsidian, or a cutting blade forged from meteoric iron, usually has some expected power of supreme sharpness and durability. Such blades are supposedly unbreakable, never dulling or losing their edge; or they may require the spilling of blood before they can be resheathed, once drawn.
    Another, more modern example was the so-called "Welsh Blade" created during The Great War, when England wanted to terrify the Germans with their deadliest weaponised force ... er, Welsh people. To add to the propaganda, Welsh infantry units were issued with "Welsh Blades," on which the words "DROS URDDAS CYMRU" were etched or stamped. The propaganda painted the Welsh as some sort of mainland British Gurkha force, armed with savagely sharp "trench swords."
    The main power of these items was expectation. When the hero brings out their prized enchanted item, there is an expectation that the hero will surely prevail; the magic of the artefact unleashed is expected to overwhelm anything the enemy can bring to bear against the hero and their people. This has a historical precedent going back to Roman Emperor Constantine, who conquered with a sign, the Labarum, also called a vexillum or Chi-Ro, which was emblazoned on a war banner as a symbol of Constantine's divine power. Even if, like the inscriptions on "Welsh Blades," that "divine power" was merely well-distributed propaganda spread in the enemy camps to prime the pumps.
    The power of expectation can extend far beyond the reach of any powers an enchanted artefact may possess. A theist could possess some item, such as a Śarīra, reputed to have belonged to a Great Soul who spread peace during her life. The theist could prominently display this relic, signalling their desire for peace to the representatives of two warring nations brought to the table to sue for an end to the war.
    A magic mailed gauntlet worn by a king in your setting, for instance, could be endowed with the power to heal plagues with a touch, or to cause wrongdoers to crumble into ashes. A theist could indeed embody a healing Miracle, or a sorcerer Enchant the glove with Transmogrify (to Ash) - but simple rumours, propaganda, and expectation can give an artefact a blessed, or cursed air, even if the Adventurers never get to see the artefact, or suffer its touch - though if an Adventurer does come into contact with the mailed gauntlet and survive, it could work to the advantage of the character: they were not turned to ashes, therefore they are not wrongdoers, and so on.
    Enchantment
    In the end, the nature of enchantment is as much the product of rumour, legend, and the Lore skill as it is the product of skill, craftspersonship and prowess with sorcery or other form of magic. A blade crafted by a mystic swordsmaster, whose Talent of Augment (Craft) allows them to fashion master-level blades, can be held with huge fear and respect, even if it is just mundane with a few ordinary Enhancements from the manufacturing process. A violin created by your setting's answer to Stradivarius, for example, can acquire a legend through association with stories of a devilish creature bargaining for the soul of some youngster in a contest of musical skill.
    It all boils down to the concept of enchantments and artefacts being desiderata - objects which spark desire in those who see them. Mythras games are about the characters, and their achievements; but the existence of enchanted artefacts and relics, their legends and histories, can weave the characters into the items' stories and legends, allowing the characters to exploit those legends in an adventure, even if those items turn out to have no discernible magic powers whatsoever, but merely an association with something legendary within the setting.
  22. Alex Greene
    With this article, we begin a look at the artefacts of magic, and their influence on the cultures of the settings of Mythras. The Core Rulebook places the emphasis on the player characters, their native wit and their acquired magical powers or connections to the spirits and/or gods, rather than on magic items and enchanted treasures.
    Enchantments
    Enchantment is defined as a feeling of great pleasure or delight, as well as the state of being under a spell or magic. This blog could focus on the second definition, since this blog covers the items used by Adventurers during their escapades; but it would be a good idea to begin by looking at how the first definition can also be relevant to this topic.
    Enchantment as in "a state of great pleasure" can easily come from being under the effects of mundane hypnosis as much as anything else.  To be enchanted by something, or someone, is to be placed in an altered state by the mere presence of the person or object. When you are enchanted, the proximity of the object or person increases the levels of oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin neurotransmitters in your body. Your attention focuses on the cause of that heightened awareness. The more you focus, the deeper you go, the more pronounced the effects, and the more the heightened presence of phenylethylamine makes you feel like swooning.
    And that overall feeling and focus increases tenfold when you realise, or are told, that you are the proud owner of such an object, or that the person seeks your time.
    The object which captures your attention, the person who seems to narrow the world down to just you and them, is a desideratum. This desideratum controls your perceptions, for as long as you remain so deeply enchanted, and your whole perceptions feel so good that the world even glows a little around the desired object or charming person.
    Come back in the room, a little, and let yourself imagine how that feels in the context of your Adventurers and their lives.
    Enchant (Object)
    This is the only enchantment-type spell in the Mythras Core Rulebook. As far as the Core Rulebook is concerned, this is the only means by which one can create magic items for Mythras.
    Of course, what makes it daunting is the heavy price one has to pay for this spell.
    A spell which is to be made perpetual must be Combined with the casting of Enchant. In addition, it is limited to possessing only as many points of shaping as the Intensity of the Enchant. The strain of creating the enchantment permanently reduces the sorcerer’s Magic Points attribute by the magic point cost of the combined spell. These can be recovered later if the enchantment is unwoven by the original caster or the object (or person) is destroyed.
    Even a POW 18 human can, therefore, only create a handful of magic items with this spell before they find themselves unable to generate Magic Points. The career of the professional Enchanter would seem to be a short one.
    The reason for this restriction would seem to be to limit the number of actual magic items available within the game, as well as to keep them as low key as possible. The Adventurers are forced, by this restriction, to rely upon their own native wits, talents, magic, and connections - both mundane and Numinous - to resolve the conflicts in the adventures they undertake. Actual magic items are rare, and never outshine their wielders. Adventurers must, accordingly, pay a heavy price for their Magic Swords of Damage Enhancement and Bypass Armour, or their Shields of Damage Resistance and Castback.
    There can only be one natural conclusion to reach: Enchant (Object) cannot be the only way to imbue artefacts with magical power.
    Methods of Creation
    Consider how many other magical items in the Mythras Core Rulebook seem to have achieved sustained magical power. The kinds of magical artefacts which are bestowed on favoured faction members in the form of Gifts, and the plethora of spirit fetishes created by animists, would indicate that there are other ways to create enchanted items. That could include theistic religious items, which could be charged with the theists' Devotional Magic Points.
    The Folk Magic Curse spell acts in a similar way to Enchant (Object), in that the caster's Magic Point capacity is reduced for as long as the curse is kept active. This opens a precedent for other, as-yet undiscovered, Folk Magic spells to sustain themselves on the caster's lifeforce.
    The following are suggestions for alternative ways for a sufficiently-motivated enchanter to create enchanted items. None of these are at all canon, but a Games Master can use these creation paths as dictated by the needs of the plot, or for the purposes of the campaign.
    Sacrifice
    A sacrifice must be made, in order to provide sufficient energies to create a permanent change within the artefact. This could be a simple burning of organic matter such as a quantity of grain, a piece of meat, a quantity of fruits, or a liquid such as milk. The amount burned is the equivalent in Silver Pieces of 2d4 x the Magic Points one would sacrifice, otherwise.
    An alternative to persistent Magic Point loss would be persistent fatigue. The enchanter could sustain a long-term, persistent fatigue level lasting for 1d4 days after the final creation of the artefact. An enchanter with a heavy workload could be rendered exhausted for days after all that creation, or they could space out their enchantments to around one session per week.
    There are other kinds of sacrifices one could make, such as applying a reverse Tap (Characteristic) to reduce one's characteristics to create the artefact, or sacrificing Experience Rolls equal to the Intensity of the enchantment. This is similar to the Experience Roll sacrifice made by an animist to create the housing for a spirit fetish (Mythras, page 136).
    Harnmaster Rules
    The Harnmaster roleplaying game uses a different fatigue mechanic, and furthermore it does not use Magic Points. Harnmaster even has a different way of creating artefacts, dividing them into two categories - Minor Artefacts, and Major Artefacts. Minor Artefacts only retain one ability, such as the "Fount of Power" spell which is the equivalent of Mythras' "Store Mana" spell. Major Artefacts require a spell called a "False Soul" (basically, this turns the artefact into a programmable "device") to hold the other component powers together (such as "Fount of Power" and "Resurge", which recharges "Fount of Power" without intervention from the item's wielder).
    The one rule which all artefacts, Minor and Major,  have in common, is this:- the Duration of these artefact enchantments is always Indefinite (self-sustaining, but can be permanently dispelled) if they are cast over an artefact which has already been created. However, if the enchantment is cast over the artefact as it is being grown or made from scratch,  the enchantment's Duration is Permanent - the artefact's powers cannot be dispelled, only temporarily suppressed.
    The process of creating permanent artefacts, therefore, takes as long as the artefect does to be created, which is a minimum of something like [15 - Intensity] hours, or some multiple of [15 - Intensity]. Or the Games Master could abstract the process, using the Equipment Manufacturing and Quality rules from page 65 of Mythras Core Rulebook, taking double the time to create a regular item of the same type.
    There is another set of rules one can use - available from Old Bones Publishing here. Again, if the enchanter takes double the time to create the artefact, and enchants it as it is being built or grown, any enchantments so created will have Permanent Duration.
    Unique Materials
    This is the whole "eight pounds of dragon scales," "the seeds of a rare flower which grows in the Elpathian Mountains," "a single ruby worth 4,000 Gold Pieces" territory. The acquisition of such rare or expensive materials or fabrics, of course, forms the focus of an entire story, possibly spread over multiple sessions. It might be easier to obtain a measure of ordinary frankincense worth ten thousand Silver Pieces, for example, by travelling to the place where it is made, and haggling for the goods.
    Holy Devotion
    Religious artefacts can be created through acts of Devotion. Theists with sufficient motivation can Consecrate an artefact and make it sacred to the deity. The Games Master can even rule that they do not even require the Consecrate spell - merely a passionate Herculean Exhort skill check and expenditure of Devotional Magic Points into the item.
    Some religious artefacts might not even need consecration. Holy relics, particularly body parts of dead high-Devotion saints, could have their own internal, regenerating store of Devotional Magic Points, not usable by the theist but only usable for the relic's Miracles.
    The Enchantment Effect - Wonders
    The process of creating the artefacts, relics, and fetishes is only part of the story of enchanted items. In the next post, the blog will focus on the artefacts' effects on the Adventurers and their loved ones, on the campaign, and on the game setting.
  23. Alex Greene

    The Late Blog

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    The Civilised Voice - Alternative ended up being delayed ten hours from its usual go-live time of 12:00 UTC+1. It went live at 22:00 UTC+1.
    This was due to my ongoing preparations for running "A Race Through Dark Places" for Fioracitta, at GenCon Online, September 17 and 18.
     
    All future blog posts are going live at 10pm UTC or UTC+1 on Saturday nights, from the 2021-09-11 post onward.
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