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June 16th, 2007
09:27 pm - Celebration and Dragons of the Yellow Sea
So a while back, in December 2005, I had posted "What makes a good celebration?" -- where I discussed the idea of making a good celebration and applying that to RPGs.
I now turn back to that in light of some of the revisiting of Ron Edward's GNS theory -- notably Chris Lehrich's "A GNS Question", plus some Story Games threads including complaints about jargon and Forge Glossary help; and also the Knife Fight threads (only open to members) on "GNS Theory in Wikipedia" and Ben Lehman's "To Understand Simulationism, Study Simulationism".
So partly as an extension of Chris Lehrich's excellent Ritual Discourse in RPGs, the concept of RPGs as celebration is one of the more interesting ideas to come out of the Forge, I think. I made a Celebration / Celebrationism entry in the Theory Topics wiki.
Construction vs. Deconstruction
One of the key points about my first post was the celebration shouldn't feel deconstructive. That is an important point for me. There is a big difference between a constructive work and a deconstructive work. For example, I would say that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miracleman series were deconstructive of superheroes. Reading them, the reader was struck by the contrast with what the superhero conventions are -- they expose and criticize the tropes of the superhero comic genre. On the other hand, Kurt Busiek's Astro City is celebratory. It is still transformative of earlier superhero comics, but it works more by building on what is there and transforming it. It introduces new ideas wrapped in the symbolism of superheroes, using the older tropes to introduce new things rather than dwelling on the older tropes themselves.
So a good celebration is constructive -- it builds upon what is there. This doesn't leave the object of celebration untouched. You don't leave a wedding feeling the same way about the relationship. You don't leave a birthday feeling like you did about the previous year.
Dragons of the Yellow Sea
I would like the ongoing Dragons of the Yellow Sea campaign to be a celebration of Korean culture. This is tricky, because there is a lot of elements of 19th century Korea that we don't want to celebrate -- the Confucian repression of women by men, and of commoners by yangban; as well as the insularity that ultimately proved nearly self-destructive. For example, in a deconstructive mode, I could have some scathing things to say about how the story of Chunhyang has the appearance of celebrating women, but really is enforcing women's place as chattel.
I would prefer a constructive approach, though. I'd like to create a positive, pulpy page-turner -- which isn't necessarily historically accurate but still at least draws in and celebrates Korean culture. What does that mean? Well, to some degree it means learning aspects of culture. However, it is more than that. Teaching culture can easily be dry and critical, and the students learn facts that they internalize as facts about other people. In a celebration, however, you join in the thing that you are celebrating. You will internalize what you learn differently than if you treated it as something you are a part of.
Now, I'm not trying for a masterpiece -- just a pulpy adventure saga, but one that is distinctly Korean rather than just American pulp with a veneer of Korean history. This is still difficult, I think. Some of my thoughts on the matter have been: - Highlight issues of the times -- including class conflict between yangban and commoner, corruption of the central government, and the balance of foreign influence shifting from China to Japan.
- Rather than revenge, in stories, the betrayed tends to prove his/her worth by serving the cause all the more.
- Show different sides of Confucian ideals, positive and negative.
- Show a respect of poetry and romance as popular forms of the times.
Campaign Update
We just did the second session of the campaign on Friday. It's going pretty well, I think. There are brief session summaries out on the wiki. The first two episodes were a fairly self-contained adventure, where a royal investigator came searching for the culprit who had killed the crew of a ship bearing goods for the magistrate of Jeju, and taken off with the crew.
One of the techniques that went over pretty well was assigning of nicknames. Within the Korean sources that I've read, people are generally referred to by their family names -- not their given names. This can be confusing, though, since there will often be several people with the same nickname. It's common to refer to people by their position, but also common for people to have nicknames. So we assigned nicknames to each of our characters. During the first session -- which was after the character generation session and finishing touches to the characters by email -- each player described their character, and then everyone else discussed and assigned them a nickname. The nicknames were often distinctly not what the character assigned would want, like "Princess" Song.
We're still struggling a bit with the rules, in particular that people are having trouble deciding what their Aspects should be. It's getting better, just slowly.
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March 29th, 2007
01:12 pm - Adapting Spirit of the Century
I am getting into the details of how to adapt Spirit of the Century to our campaign "Dragons of the Yellow Sea". Background information on the campaign can be found on my nascent web page and on the Campaign Wiki. Basically, I'm mixing Korean history and the Temeraire novels by Naomi Novik for the campaign. They are roughly a take-off of Hornblower in a parallel history with domesticated dragons -- see her site at temeraire.org for more info).
This is pretty different from the primarily modern pulp source material that SotC is based on. Thus, I feel there are some differences to be dealt with.
Scale
The most obvious thing is the idea of scale -- i.e. how do you represent the different kinds of dragon characters? SotC is based on Fudge, but it dropped the Fudge concept of a Scale stat for characters. I would think that it's appropriate to re-introduce it. Scale would reduce physical damage taken and increase the successes of damage done. I suppose you could just give dragons outrageous ranks in Might and Fists and Endurance, but I think that scale is a better way of representing this.
So a dragon character would have a scale stat, but otherwise has just a normal tree of skills.
Minions and Damage
Another aspect of the SotC rules is the nature of Minions. SotC has a sharp division between minions who drop like flies (often multiple in one attack), and main characters who will generally take 9 to 12 hits in order to eliminate (or slightly less if you're using the optional "Grit" rule).
This one I'm not so sure of what to do about. In the source material, I don't see such a sharp distinction between minions and main characters. I want to maintain the simplicity of it in order to handle extended conflicts. For example, in Throne of Jade there is a scene where a massive gang assault a group of ten or so barricaded in their room. This would take forever played out shot by shot. However, it seems to me like there should be a middle ground between minions and main characters.
Also, I think I might reduce the size of the damage tracks in general. Some pulps have very long fight scenes for which it might be appropriate to have 15 to 20 rounds or more between two opponents. However, in Novik's material this is an extended battle with many opponents, not a long knock-down drag-out fight.
Damage and Weapons
One of the unusual aspects of the SotC rules is that weapons are irrelevant to damage. In keeping with the "two-fisted" ideal of pulps, someone fighting barehanded is just as effective as someone with a sword -- and a thrown rock is as good as a shotgun. However, I not sure this is as true of the Hornblower-esque genre of Novik's world -- where being without a weapon is a more serious concern.
One way to both reduce the length of fights (as mentioned earlier) and address weapons would be for weapons to do more than one box of damage per hit. Perhaps hand weapons do 2 boxes, and guns do 3.
Other Changes
Obviously for an 1860s game as opposed to 1920s, a bunch of the gadget material will be different, and a number of the stunts should probably be changed to reflect the culture and technology. I think these can mostly be dealt with on a case-by-case basis -- though I will go through in advance.
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March 7th, 2007
12:33 am - Prostitution in the 'Verse
So this weekend I played a one-shot game set in the Firefly/Serenity universe using the Spirit of the Century rules. This was partly a chance to play in Firefly/Serenity, which a number of people expressed interest in, and also a test run of the rules. We didn't end up testing the rules very much, though we learned the basics, but we had a lot of fun.
My concept for the one-shot was using a Companions Guild ship -- an armed scout with its own security which was going on missions of interest to the Guild. So I always thought that Companions were a wasted premise in Firefly. They were in principle a set up to explore issues of sexuality, but they were never really used. Thus, I made up a bunch of pregenerated characters for the Guild ship. A key idea for these was using real-world photos of people from the Old West -- an idea taken from Floyd C. Wesel's pregenerated characters for his Serenity RPG convention games, The Crew of The Symphony.
Madeline played Fannie Granger, the captain -- an older Companion who had given up active service and married, but whose husband died in the war.
Liz played Lilly Shepis, a journeyman Companion working as second to Fannie.
Cynthia played Pearl Hart -- originally an NCO of the security forces, but we rewrote her to be the commander since no one picked the commander.
Heather played Lalu Chang, the loud-mouthed engineer.
Bill played Galvin Holloway, a former officer who since the war has become a professional gambler.
Bob played Eliza Collins, the genius but still girly doctor.
I noted that there was no cross-gender play (Bob is a woman). I had made an extra male character, Kenne Black, who was to be the commander of the security forces. However, no one picked him and we wrote him out. There was an extra male character -- and indeed Liz usually plays a male character, but this time she went for Lilly. I've got a page with all the character sheets,
The Coronado and her Crew
The scenario was that they heard that a rich man had beaten up a Companion, and headed over to the planet, Newhall, to investigate. They found a complicated setup there -- the woman beaten up was not a Companion, but rather someone who had been kicked out of the Companion Training Grounds. However, they still wanted to set straight the issues on the planet there.
Bill commented that this seemed very much like "Whores in the Vineyard" to him -- the western theme plus the power of the PCs to come in and solve the planet's problems was indeed much like a Dogs scenario. I hadn't planned that intentionally, but it fit. (The mock title reminds me of Brand and Mo's Bitches in the Vineyard game, incidentally.)
So the NPCs I had were: Kira, the woman who was beaten; Terrence, the secretly retarded man who did it; Jordan, Terrence's rich brother who owns half the planet; Sheriff Wei Lau, the local constable; and Sheydra, acting head of the local Training Grounds.
At one point, Liz used her "Uncanny Hunch" stunt to hand me a note which contained her hunch -- "Kira is protecting Jordan in some way. She knows somthing about him and is in love with him." We ran out of time and so had to wrap up the game a little abruptly, but everyone was really into it.
Nearly all of this was in-character dialogue and simple skill rolls, so we didn't do much with the system. We only got to serious conflict near the end, and at that point we were trying to get through quickly. We did try earlier using the social conflict rules for Galvin's poker game with Jordan. However, we cut that short as we agreed that it just felt too slow. It only involved one PC, and there were no maneuvers or other choices in gambling as written.
Of course, the elephant in the room was that the whole adventure was centered on prostitution, which we often commented on. For example, Madeline commented at some point, "We have a brand to protect." There were a bunch of questions and discussion about what should be done about the Training Grounds, and what the local people's attitudes were.
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March 2nd, 2007
02:25 pm - Spirit of Serenity
So more on Spirit of the Century. A bit of news about it. Brian Isikoff spoke about the SotC game that he game-mastered on Episode #12 of his podcast, 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction. This is the same game I mentioned in my last post, Women of the Century, where I played the woman reporter Cat Sullivan.
They briefly discuss the issue of Sam's character "Genome Joe". So he was an over-the-top geeky type who did wacky biogenetic manipulation and quantum teleporting, and spoke in a hilarious nasal voice. I think the issue here is what some people have called "gonzo escalation". To explain, Joe almost immediately activated his unreliable quantum teleporter gadget in order to go to the bathroom (?), and appeared in an outhouse in Virginia. Later in the early fight, Joe took a pill to give him a silicon-based shell. In a game with equally over-the-top characters, I think that's fine. It is an issue, though, when you have more down-to-earth characters like a nosy reporter or a stuck-up blue-blood.
Also regarding SotC, there will be a supplement for SotC called "New Horizons" where each chapter addresses a marginalized group from the pulps, kept outside by their sex, their race, their lifestyle, or their beliefs. It's going to be written by Bruce Baugh (cf. his LJ post) and edited by Brand Robins (cf. his blog post).
In the meantime, though, I'm going to be running a SotC one-shot for my group tomorrow to see how we like the system. It's going to be set in the Firefly/Serenity universe, though. (In our initial vote over preferred campaign ideas, Firefly/Serenity was a runner-up to "Dragons of the Yellow Sea".)
So for running a Firefly one-shot game, I think we should definitely have fewer than 10 Fate Points at the start. I'm thinking of only have 2 at the start, with more given as usual through negative consequences of Aspects. Firefly is action in the spirit of the Western pulps as opposed to superhero pulps. It's interesting to note that Spirit of the Century's bibliography is all modern-day material (i.e. 1980s or later) -- citing Alan Moore's Tom Strong and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Warren Ellis' The Authority and Planetary, along with various modern pulp films like Big Trouble in Little China, The Rocketeer and The Mummy. This is cool, and I'd like to do that straight some time. However, we're also looking for a system to do "Dragons of the Yellow Sea" -- which is based on Naomi Novik and more down-to-Earth material.
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February 26th, 2007
04:06 pm - Women of the Century
So there was some recent controversy over Spirit of the Century, starting I think with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) peaseblossom's post on Friday about SotC entitled Pulp, gender, genre, which has garnered well over a hundred comments.
drivingblind responded in comments, then had his own summary That thread, where he "So at the heart of all the hullaballoo portion of things was how the art was done, and what sort of message the art conveyed. There was very little hullaballoo about the *text*, because pretty much most of what she said about the *text* of the book that was problematic was spot on correct. We *did* get the male to female ratios wrong, and we *did* somewhat accidentally let the list of character types stay male-centric. I mea culpa'd on that part, accepted it and noted it as something we're sorry about and need to work on, and then started swinging at the parts I didn't agree with... which was mostly about the darn art!"
Coincidentally, Brand Robins has posted on a very similar topic with some thoughts starting with illustrations of women for the Conan RPG, and about genre and sex more generally:
Why is that Woman on Her Hands and Knees?
A Question for the Ladies
But Brand, don't You Like Sex? (RANT)
the_tall_man had three posts in response:
Dirty, Filthy Sexist Propaganda (also a GameCraft thread)
Integrity, relevancy, openness, honesty, awareness, and provocation
Views on Genre
Now, by sheer coincidence, I just played Spirit of the Century for the first time this Thursday (game-mastered by Brian Isikoff as part of EndGame Oakland's Thursday Evening Role-playing). And I played a female character -- a woman reporter named Cat Sullivan -- modelled after Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday or Catherine Hepburn in Woman of the Year (whom I had mixed up at the time).
There were five other players. Karen played "Ginny Steel" (a tomboy mechanic, a variant on Sally Slick); Chris Bennett played "Master Kwan" (an oriental stage magician with a talent for disappearing); Sam Stephenson played "Genome Joe" (an over-the-top geek with bio-manipulation and quantum teleporting); Paul Strack played "Dr. Octavo" (another stage-magician type with sword-cane and knives); and Robert played "David Willingsworth" (an English blue-blood).
A lot of the players seemed to be interested in the character -- at least, I had a ton of suggestions for her Aspects. I eventually went with "Nose for News", "Quick Change", "First on the Scene", "I Know a Guy", "Just One More Thing", "Great Gams", "Let Me Check in My Purse", "In Over Her Head", and "Anything For The Story". The "Great Gams" Aspect was Karen's suggestion, which I immediately took up ("gams" is old slang for legs).
I think she got along fairly well. She didn't have any obvious combat schtick, and took back seat to a degree in a fight. I had given her a gun but only Average skill, and I never actually used it in the game since the more combative characters handled things. There was a bit when I went to distract some German guards while Ginny slipped into the engine room, where they assumed that she was slutty just for coming by to chat them up ("We've heard American women are like that"). Notably, it was plausible for them to think that, but it seemed strange for them to say that to her -- making it sound more like a commentary. The Russell/Hepburn fast-talking reporter type would hang out with men frequently. One line that stuck with me from the game: Dr. Octavo: There are things which Man was not meant to know.
Cat Sullivan: Exactly. That's why there are women.
The larger point, though, is that I think the pulp genre does have a fair amount of racism and sexism built into its tropes. I've commented earlier in my LJ on Fu Manchu and Orientalism. Now, Fred responded in comments about the racist/sexist side of pulp saying, "From my perspective, we put more than enough stuff about the ugly bits into the game. We didn't want the game to be *about* the ugly bits of the past -- that's a message that runs counter to the light, breezy fun vibe we wanted. So we hung a lantern on it, said it was there so you don't get ugly surprises if you go researching the materials. But to make it a big point of the game? No thanks, honestly. "
I think that if you want to have pulp without the racist and sexist bits, you have to re-think things to a fair degree. If you want to avoid the ugly bits of the genre, then you have to actively work to change it. I think the Spirit of the Century does make some effort by having characters like Sally Slick, but I don't think it does enough. As peaseblossom noted, it does do better than many if not most RPGs. For example, I discuss Deadlands in my essay Gender Roles in RPG Texts, which I criticized by its "sidebar" approach -- essentially doing the genre straight and then adding a sidebar about women.
You should ideally have character generation that treats gender and race as a core element rather than a sidebar. Fred acknowledges this, luckily. Having taken an interest in Spirit of the Century, I might look at doing some material for it that addresses the imbalance. Looking at my own work, I think of an old HERO System adventure from the early nineties I wrote, a pulp adventure in the South Seas called The Land Which Time Forgot. I had only mild nods in it -- one of the six PCs was a woman (though she was a tough "Rugged Explorer"), and two were Asian. I ponder updating some of this, both for my current sensibilities and the Spirit system.
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