The process of co-creating, co-writing, and, most importantly, playing MonkeyDome blew my fucking mind.

It was a horrible mess. Gray matter everywhere.

Took me a whole week to piece it all back together, which was a feat due to my complete lack of king’s horses or king’s men.

This festering wound in my skull, along with a particularly eye-opening and downright thrilling Western mod of MonkeyDome we played, dead tired, on the train to JiffyCon laid the groundwork for a new game I’m tentatively calling Swords Without Master (or Sword Buddies, who knows.)

A Tale of Two Rogues

Over the past few months, I have been immensely enjoying Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar series. Some of the stories are distant memories recalled from the mists of my youth; many of them, brand new. These books rekindled in me the lusty fires of sword & sorcery. And what’s more, I recognized my gaming desires tucked inside the text: a tantalizing blend of humor, thrills, and wonder. I had discovered that, perhaps not by accident, I had grown into the fiction that gave birth to this hobby.

There was a kernel of something in MonkeyDome very in tune with what I was enjoying in the fiction. Something that could be teased out. Not something to exactly replicate Leiber’s works, but a reasonable gaming equivalent with all the perils, the irony, and the strangeness.

I wanted to pull that out and mold it into the fantasy game that I think I might have been dreaming of since I cracked open my first Monster Manual.

But this isn’t Tolkien. This is not a game about all the brave princes riding out against the darkness. It’s about rogues. About a world full of kings and slaves and you are those few who refuse to be either. And not in that heroic way you’re thinking. No one’s out to change the world. It’s the lure of glittering gems, unexplored lands and irresistible demonesses. Adventure, wealth, glory and drink. To live the good life and occasionally do some good along the way.

So with Fafhrd and Gray Mouser as my guides, in the weeks follow the publication of MonkeyDome, aided in no small way by my privileged access to the ever-insightful Emily Care Boss and any other ISSer whose ear I could bend on the subject, I feverishly built upon the framework of MonkeyDome until I found a game that sated my thirst for a long term campaign-style, no prep, sword & sorcery game.

It’s going to take a while to publish this game, and do it right. In the meantime, partly to get the ideas out there so I feel less guilty about taking my time on the actual book and partly to organize my thoughts for said book, I’d like to share with you the bulk of the system in a series of posts on the blog here.

Glum & Jovial

MonkeyDome practically begs to be modded, tones first. You cannot play the game an not immediately think about other tones and how they might fare. Zany was right out. Leiber wrote with a wry sense of humor and there is a delightful wackiness to many of his stories, perhaps even moments of out-and-out zaniness, but it was never a constant threat.

Grim was appropriate, but kind of tired in the fantasy setting. The continual badassification of the fantasy genre grates me, and Grim would only spread the plague.

Glum & Jovial immediately felt right for the genre. Their definitions need a little stretching, particularly in the case of the Overtone, but this is easily done.

Also, since I’m making this game with an eye towards more long term play, I need a few tricks to keep the tones from going stale. So I introduced “powers” for characters and monsters that could create new tones, either specific to their characters or for the Overtone. Just exactly how these “powers” work and what they are, I’ll have to deal with in a future post, because they depend on a couple other concepts that need to be discussed first. The important part for now is that Glum & Jovial are the base tones for the game, but those will change from time to time during the game.

There are some real interesting difficulties that arise when you change the tones of MonkeyDome. Half the fun is the wild flying back and forth between the Zany and Grim poles. Though they do contrast well, Glum and Jovial aren’t quite as extreme. And they don’t pivot on violence. To borrow the shovel example from MonkeyDome, how can swinging a shovel at someone’s head be Jovial or Glum? So I had to refocus exactly what the tones applied to, and that meant messing with how scenes are structures. Which is grand, because I needed a few new ways to work a scene anyway.

The Perilous Scene

MonkeyDome has one scene: the scene where the player characters are in danger. There’s a lot that can be done with this scene, subduing the hostilities a bit to create a downbeat in the story, shifting the focus from out-and-out combat to a strained negotiation over food rations, etc. But in the end, you’re still fighting. Always and constantly fighting.

This is a good thing for a post-apocalyptic game in which everything is a struggle. Perhaps not so in a sword & sorcery game where battle is what’s best in life, but not all that life has to offer. And it would get repetitive over the course of several games. So I gave the MonkeyDome scene a name and created some brethren to keep it company.

A quick note on terminology before we go on: In MonkeyDome each scene has a Fuel and a Fire. Such is the case for perilous scenes in Swords Without Master, but I’ve changed the names to the Thunder and the Storm, respectively. The metaphor doesn’t quite hold up in the same way, as storms actually cause thunder, but there’s a certain poetry to the rolling of distant thunder heralding a storm. (Also, the Game Blaster is now the overplayer. It just seemed more apropos.)

The perilous scene works exactly like a MonkeyDome scene.  No need to mess with perfection.

• The Thunder and the Storm put us right in the midst of danger and ensures that that’s more to come. Gives us drive and direction.
• The bones are rolled to answer the question: How am I going to deal with this? Putting the player in focus with a clear objective.
• The scene is over when the players, not the overplayer, say it’s over. They decided when they’ve had enough action.

The perilous scenes–being about adventure, danger, and daring–are really the backbone of the game. But the players need a little more. Moments in the game when they weren’t describing how deftly they were able to slay hoary chimera and phantom legions. And sometimes the story needs a chance to reveal hoary secrets or revel in phantom lovers. So two more scene types were added: discovery and character.

The Discovery Scene

The discovery scene is a moment when the characters find something, unearth information, remember important details, notice a hidden trap, sift through a treasure horde to find a lost amulet with wicked powers, and otherwise discover something. But more importantly, they are about the players, not the overplayer, making these things happen. The discovery scene gives the overplayer something of a break as the other players offer up plot hooks, fictional matter, and dark twists.

The scene plays out a bit different than a perilous scene. It starts the same way, with the overplayer rolling the Overtone, narrating the introduction and handing the dice to one of the players. This time, instead of responding to a threat, the player rolls for the tone of the discovery they are about to make. They say what their character has discovered (or what pertinate information they have to hand over) and then ask the overplayer one loaded question about the discovery which the overplayer must answer.

The overplayer rolls Glum and sets the scene with our heroes trapped in a dusty, stale tomb. Outside swarms of doombeetles scrape at the tomb’s stony door as the party’s torches begin to sputter in the fading air (the Thunder). Crimson Red, the northron son of a mason with a keen eye for stonework, rolls a Jovial tone in this discovery scene. “Ha ha. You fret too much, my companions. This is a fine northland tomb and like all fine northland tombs, it will have an tunnel hidden beneath a flagstone, such as this one right here.” With that, Crimson taps the stone with his pommel and beams as it hollowly resounds.

Then Crimson’s player turns to the overplayer and asks, “For what purpose do the northrons provide their dead with escape hatches?”

The purpose of the scene is to  provide the characters with a world to explore, and make them agents of that exploration. It also exists to light the brainfires of the players.  Especially the overplayers, who should select it whenever they aren’t sure of what to do next.

Unlike the perilous scene, the players do not decide when the scene ends. After answering the question asked, the overplayer can either take the dice back and start a new scene or tell the players to continue, in which case the focus player will have to hand off the dice and it’s someone else’s turn to discover something.

“You first, my tiny friend.” Crimson Red’s player hands the dice to Mary Rat, the slipperiest street thief in all of Ikmarth. Mary rolls Glum and cautiously, wordlessly pries the flagstone open. “I know you northrons were never too clever in your trapmaking, but you’re artful enough in your poisons.  So let’s be careful. Hand me that torch.” Mary Rat’s player says the torch is still dimming, even with the flagstone removed. No wind. No fresh air. This tunnel doesn’t lead out, “but where?” she asks the overplayer. “Deeper into long undisturbed catacombs,” the overplayer answers before taking the dice. It’s a fine time for a perilous scene.

There are few ways in which the structure of the discovery scenes differ from perilous.

• There is Thunder, but no Storm so that there’s a hint of danger, an omen or distant threat to keep things moving, but nothing immediate to take the focus in the scene.
• The bones are rolled to inform the nature of the discovery, and help inspire with a little creative constraint.
• The scene is over when the overplayer, not the players, says it’s over.

The Character Scene

The character scene deviates even more from the standard MonkeyDome scene. The focus of the perilous is to show the characters dealing with danger. The focus of the discovery scene are the things being uncovered. The focus of the character scene is spotlight one aspect of a character or a relationship.

This important beat can easily get lost in the quest for more and juicier conflict. So I wanted to make room to just feel out the characters a bit. A scene where a player can simply show that their character is an accomplished sailor, has a past with the overlord’s son, needs money, is haunted by the souls of those he’s slain, can climb a temple tower without a rope, etc.

The overplayer sets the location for the scene, but that’s about it. No thunder, no storm. There’s no personal or overtone in the character scene.  The player rolls to set the tone for the illustration and then just narrates what’s happening, letting us know what they’re illustrating.

The overplayer calls for a character scene in the early morning just before the pious are called to worship in the City of Ikmarth and then passes the bones to Mary Rat’s player. Jovial over Glum. Mary Rat’s player decides she’s going to illustrate just how at home Mary Rat is in the streets of Ikmarth. “The pink dawn crawls across the black rooftops and, as if she were conducting of a great symphony, Mary Rat gestures silently here and there,  commanding merchants to drag their goods to market, summoning the children sent to purchase the day’s supplies, calling forth the various laborers to their toils. And into the newborn crowd she disappears until her pouches jingle merrily with the contents of many other pouches.”

The dice then sit on the table, once the player in focus is done. Any new player may pick them up and request a character scene. Or the overplayer may pick them up and move on to a perilous or a discovery scene. Or any new player may pick them up and hand them to the overplayer to end the character scenes. They last for just as long as everyone wants them to.

• There is no Thunder or Storm provided by the overplayer. The focus is solely on the character. The player in focus is welcome to have his wine-drunk swordsman assaulted by a gang of footpads so that he can dispatch them forthwith as an illustration of his superior swordplay. But any peril is entirely up the player.
• The bones are rolled to set the mood for the illustration. There is no overtone in this scene, only the tone rolled by the player, which everyone works to support.
• The scene is over when anyone decides it’s over to prevent dawdling and exhausting the berserker’s patience.

As far as choosing which type of scene comes next, that lies almost solely under the rule of the overplayer, save for a few “powers” available to the players which, as I promised before, I’ll deal with in a future post. The one guiding principle the overplayer has when making this decision is to ignore what the story needs and concentrate on what the players need.

Feeling the bloodlust? Perilous scene.

Overplayer need a kick in the imagination? Discovery scene.

A player wants to prove his character can get laid? Character scene.

Ignoring what the story needs is rather important here. The characters have just come home from many, many months of adventuring to find, at the city gates, a veritable army of debtors and their thugs waiting for them. This scene seems to clearly be a perilous scene.

But it could just as easily be a discovery scene in which Mary Rat notices during the ensuing battle that several long time enemies are strangely and suddenly in alliance against them.

Or it could be a character scene in which Crimson Red demonstrates that he’s just a dangerous without his sword as he is fully armed.

The scene types are not there to provide for the story. The game has other mechanisms that help in that regard, which I will get to in the next chapter . . .

Up Next: Motif, Mystery & Moral.

Further Down the Road: Tricks & the Bestiary; Warcats & Torchbearers; and Campaigns & Cartography.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 9:41 pm and is filed under MonkeyDome, Sword Buddies, Swords Without Master. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.