To make things easier on myself, I'm gonna try to rip elements of other systems from their original context and chassis and weld them to each other as much as possible. The core such things, I think, are Pendragon, Unknown Armies, Legend of the Five Rings, and Exalted (though that last, at least, might better be called an inspiration rather than a direct contributor). Oh, and D&D itself, of course, primarily of the 3.x editions (particularly Pathfinder), as I am of the age wherein I was graduating high school when 3.0 came out, causing me to totally imprint on it as the height of D&D design. Now that we’re two whole editions beyond that point, I think I can safely call myself a grognard now? I also have no idea what this GURPS 4th edition nonsense is, and am wary of Savage Worlds “fixing” the gloriously broken and baroque Deadlands system. But back to Middens & Morals . . .
Interestingly, the famous Monty Python scene actually serves as an almost spot-on inspiration for this Heartbreaker game. We know from our meta-knowledge that King Arthur is, in fact, the glorious sub-Messiah of Britain, paragon (and advocate) of chivalry, chock-full of virtue, second only to Galahad and the foolish Percival in these respects. But different meta-knowledges tell us that the man working in the shit is absolutely 100% right. The system of Heavenly virtue King Arthur represents, while striving for and achieving the best of what humanity can be, is based on “outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic an' social differences in our society!” and on “violence inherent in the system.” Other media inspirations can include A Song of Ice and Fire (though with less rape, thank you), particularly storylines like Sansa’s and the Hounds and Jaime’s, and Paul Verhoeven’s first English-language movie Flesh+Blood from 1985 (when I was three!). There’s only one rape in that last inspiration, but that can easily be too many for many people, so trigger warning. I’ven’t seen Robert Bresson’s 1974 Lancelot du Lac or Aleksei German’s 2013 Hard to Be a God, but they sound like they could help inspire the kind of mood I’m looking for. Bookwise, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are perhaps the paradigmatic encapsulation of Middens & Morals’s intended blend of things, perhaps especially when read alongside one of my all-time favorite books (and one of two books that I’ve ever intentionally stolen from a library) Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics, by Susan Signe Morrison. I also rather enjoy, and will likely be baking into this Heartbreaker project, John Boswell’s Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. Like Lancelot du Lac and Hard to Be a God, Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes seems like it will also be of use to me once I read it. Finally, I would also like to direct you to what is now a vast literature by pagan/polytheist/occultist anti-capitalists concerning the spell of disenchantment capitalism cast over the world and the resultant activist praxis of re-enchanting it.
I’m having some trouble identifying any sources beyond these, however. Do any of my (possibly imaginary) readers have any ideas?
In order to ensure that I got my ideas out, I copypasta’d the text from a number of my source RPGs and then blended them together and modified them to fit my vision or Middens & Morals. That’s (mostly) what will follow for several posts. Please don’t hate (or sue) me!
When generating a character, start with your character’s concept. Do you want a character who goes toe-to-toe with terrible monsters, matching sword, shield, and sanity against claws and fangs? Or do you want a mystical seer who draws his powers from the great beyond to further his own ends? Nearly anything is possible. Once you have a general concept worked out, use the following steps to bring your idea to life, recording the resulting information and statistics on your Middens and Morals character sheet (we often like to call it a “midden sheet”), which I will create . . . at some point >.<
Step 1—Determine Traits: We start by ditching the traditional six ability scores of D&D. We're not concerned here with where someone's talents lie or what muscles are best developed in their body. Power in this system comes from madness and virtue. Here I hit the first possible Heartbreaker moment (hey, it keeps me honest about what this is): I'm replacing the faux-simplicity of six attributes with a total of 36 >.< Lemme explain. I’m thinking I’ll rip the Virtue system out of Pendragon, giving us 13 pairs of traits (we'll call them Virtues, no matter what we may think of them). That covers the quest for holiness half of Middens & Morals, so I’ll turn to Unknown Armies for the other 10 traits. In that game, the madness meters are a way of describing how traumatized a character is by the events around them, and they come in two varieties: hardened and failed, measuring five types of trauma (5x2=10, obvi). These thirteen opposed pairs of Virtues and five pairs of Traumas determine your character’s most basic personality and are used to decide a wide variety of details and statistics. Some class selections benefit greatly if you have better than average scores for some of your traits.
Step 2—Pick Your Race: Next, pick your character’s race, noting any effects your choice has on rolling with your traits and any other racial qualities. There are seven basic races in Galatia to choose from, although your GM might have others to add to the list.
Step 3—Pick Your Class: A character’s class represents a profession, such as fighter or wizard. If this is a new character, they start at 1st level in his chosen class. As they gain experience points (XP) for defeating monsters, they go up in level, granting them new powers and abilities.
Step 4—Pick Skills and Select Feats: Determine the number of skill ranks possessed by your character, based on their class, each of which utilizes a different trait to determine that number (and any other bonuses, such as the bonus received by humans). Then spend these ranks on skills, but remember that you cannot have more ranks than your level in any one skill (for a starting character, this is usually one). After skills, determine how many feats your character receives, based on their class and level, and select them.
Step 5—Buy Equipment: Each new character begins the game with an amount of money, based on their class, that can be spent on a wide range of equipment and gear, from chainmail armor to leather backpacks. This gear helps your character survive while adventuring. Generally speaking, you cannot use this starting money to buy magic items without the consent of your GM.
Step 6—Finishing Details: Finally, you need to determine all of a character’s details, including their starting hit points (hp), Armor Class (AC), saving throws, initiative number, and attack values. All of these numbers are determined by the decisions made in previous steps. A level 1 character begins with maximum hit points for their Hit Die roll. Aside from these, you need to decide on your character’s name, physical appearance, chivalric domain (the battlefield, the home, or the heart), and religion. The former two don’t have any game-mechanical effects but can certainly affect the narrative of the game! The latter two, however, identify the goals your character strives for in terms of their traits, and what the benefits in game mechanics of achieving those goals are. It is best to jot down a few qualities of their personality beyond those which have a mechanical effect in the game as well, to help you play the character during the game. Determine where your character grew up and their resulting native tongue. A character knows a number of additional languages equal to five less than one-sixth the sum of their Lustful, Energetic, Deceitful, Worldly, Trusting, and Failed Isolation (if the result of the calculation is negative, that character only speaks their cribtongue). Some characters may want to take otherworldly or magical languages; they may only take one such per point of Hardened Unnatural they possess.
Showing posts with label Fantasy Heartbreaker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantasy Heartbreaker. Show all posts
Sunday, July 1, 2018
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Introducing Middens & Morals {Design Domingo #1}
“I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's;
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.”
--William Blake, Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion, chapter 1, plate 10, lines 20-21, The Words of Los
Welcome to Design Domingo!
Yeah, I know, but I couldn't think of a good word to describe creating my own game system that alliterated without using the Spanish word for Sunday. And I, like Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon skalds he flattered with imitation, enjoy alliteration. *shrug* It's a thing.
Welcome to my long-running Fantasy Heartbreaker project, currently named Middens and Morals. I seem to mean something slightly different than Ron Edwards and many people by the term “Fantasy Heartbreaker”. I tend to mean by it a homebrew RPG system that someone tinkers with on and off for years or decades, trying to get it just right. Fantasy Heartbreakers are generally attempts to do “D&D but better” or (more rarely) “Exalted but better”; there are also a number of Sci-Fi Heartbreakers (“Traveller but better”), Cyberpunk Heartbreakers (“Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun but better”), Gothic Heartbreakers (“World of Darkness but better”), and arguably every superhero game is some level of Supers Heartbreaker (sometimes they’re trying to improve on a better game, but just as often they’re starting from scratch). They don't break hearts cuz of an old nickname of the Christian God or a much-newer Pat Benatar song (*sigh* Oh, Pat ~ I will always love you); they break hearts because they never quite capture what their creators are trying to capture with the elegance of design that is required of RPG mechanic design. But, of course, that's not really the point, is it? We ask ourselves questions that have no elegant answers in order to whet the blade of our thoughts, to shape the cup of our mind, so that when we do ask questions that have elegant answers we can speedily reach those heights that are higher than they could be if such was our first attempt at elegance. They are sandboxes, where we can play and put things together and not have to worry whether the sand coheres into adobe that will last the centuries.
It's also, well, like that Japanese company that figured out that everyone's shit has tiny, tiny, miniscule amounts of gold in it (we already know what Freud would say, by the way) and that building a factory to separate out this gold from the stinky remains of Tokyo living which hid it from prying eyes would not only be economically feasible, but quite profitable. This series of posts is the shit that has come about from all the RPGs I've consumed over the last two and a half decades or so of my life (since I was about 10 or 11) ~ I can only hope the gold is relatively easy to see among it. And that the smell is the rich, earthy, fertile smell of a truly satisfying shit, and not the putrescence that flows from the SAD (Standard American Diet ~ no, literally, this is an acronym used by actual scientists and policymakers).
“Man was made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.”
--William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
There’s a tension inherent in what we call the European Dark Ages or the (different) period we call Middle that fascinates me. {I’m talking here about the general mishmash of memes in all of our heads, not the actual thousand years or so between the Fall of Rome and the onset of Early Modernity.} It's a world beyond alien to us modern folk. Basically none of the things we consider vital for mental health were present and available to the large mass of people. Work was often constant and backbreaking and, although alienation of labor hadn't yet set in, taxes were high enough in crops, money, and men that we might consider a similar fruitlessness of one's labors to have pertained. Nutrition was poor, flavors bland, and diet unvaried. Feudalism is a system of rests on everyone in the social hierarchy lacking control of their destiny, and, in any view of the time period with even the slightest pinch of grimdark added, being subject to constant tests of loyalty and abusive manipulations by what we would now call warlords or gang leaders. Disease was a constant companion, even without the Armageddon of plague. You know how toothaches carry with them just the most intensely depressing emotional load in addition to their owie factor? Not only would toothaches (and other such pains) be more common thanks to the undeveloped state of medicine, painkillers would have been unavailable or much weaker than we have today. Transportation being much slower and recreational time being more limited (vacation? What’s that?), seeing someone who lived even two miles away could happen but a few times a week, and long stretches of time were spent alone or in small groupings. And therapy? What’s that?
And yet, despite all of this ~ or maybe because of it ~ the cultures of the time were fascinated with rising up out of the muck, ascending into a Heavenly bliss. Stories filled the pages and the ears with the quests of shining paragons of virtue and their striving to achieve and (harder still) maintain that exalted state. Priests preached an honor that was an exacting discipline, and every effort was taken to maintain the image of the ruling classes fulfilling them. Popular entertainment ~ books, poems, street entertainment, and theatrical plays ~ centered on questions of virtue in deed and in attitude, inventing the genres of the “morality play” and the “passion play”. Characters in these plays often lacked identity beyond their role and/or moral status, with names like “Everyman”, “Pilgrim”, “Temptation”, and “Prudence”. Religion was much more suffused into everyday life than it is now, a constant gaze above the clouds and past the Pearly Gates. Careful attention was paid to one’s behaviors, thoughts, and ways of being to refine them in an alchemy whose methods ranged from the explicit and arcane (that is to say, alchemy itself) to the mundane and banal, but always to the goal of forging your soul into gold worthy of keeping company with angels. Chivalry grew, ensconcing further the reign of the feudal warlords but attempting to bend it towards a Godly purpose to match its divine right of kings; Romance developed, in part, as what we might call Zeroth Wave feminism, lending a measure of agency to women in the grinding processes of what would eventually become heterosexuality. Even (many of the) countercultures of the time approached things from this yearning for an angelic life ~ utopian movements even back then were explicitly attempting to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The Diggers, for example, (ancestors of us anarchists, socialists, and communists) explicitly based their belief in economic equality in a passage from the Bible. The same effect carries over to the self-consciously antinomian movements of the day ~ those Gnostic sects in this category were striving to achieve the glory of the Pleroma by breaking the rules of this earthly prison; even Sin could be found to be Virtue! This is the time the Grail chose to be findable.
“I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.”
--Dylan Thomas
I am fascinated by this contradiction. All that is best in life and all that is worst in life all mixed up and blended together in Dung Ages stage strewn with the midden trash of what passed for civilization at the time. This is humanity in its most distilled essence, the truest nature of what it is to be us. So, I thought, why don't I try to recreate D&D in its image, mixing in all the lovely off-the-wall fantastic elements I can?
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.”
--William Blake, Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion, chapter 1, plate 10, lines 20-21, The Words of Los
Welcome to Design Domingo!
Yeah, I know, but I couldn't think of a good word to describe creating my own game system that alliterated without using the Spanish word for Sunday. And I, like Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon skalds he flattered with imitation, enjoy alliteration. *shrug* It's a thing.
Welcome to my long-running Fantasy Heartbreaker project, currently named Middens and Morals. I seem to mean something slightly different than Ron Edwards and many people by the term “Fantasy Heartbreaker”. I tend to mean by it a homebrew RPG system that someone tinkers with on and off for years or decades, trying to get it just right. Fantasy Heartbreakers are generally attempts to do “D&D but better” or (more rarely) “Exalted but better”; there are also a number of Sci-Fi Heartbreakers (“Traveller but better”), Cyberpunk Heartbreakers (“Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun but better”), Gothic Heartbreakers (“World of Darkness but better”), and arguably every superhero game is some level of Supers Heartbreaker (sometimes they’re trying to improve on a better game, but just as often they’re starting from scratch). They don't break hearts cuz of an old nickname of the Christian God or a much-newer Pat Benatar song (*sigh* Oh, Pat ~ I will always love you); they break hearts because they never quite capture what their creators are trying to capture with the elegance of design that is required of RPG mechanic design. But, of course, that's not really the point, is it? We ask ourselves questions that have no elegant answers in order to whet the blade of our thoughts, to shape the cup of our mind, so that when we do ask questions that have elegant answers we can speedily reach those heights that are higher than they could be if such was our first attempt at elegance. They are sandboxes, where we can play and put things together and not have to worry whether the sand coheres into adobe that will last the centuries.
It's also, well, like that Japanese company that figured out that everyone's shit has tiny, tiny, miniscule amounts of gold in it (we already know what Freud would say, by the way) and that building a factory to separate out this gold from the stinky remains of Tokyo living which hid it from prying eyes would not only be economically feasible, but quite profitable. This series of posts is the shit that has come about from all the RPGs I've consumed over the last two and a half decades or so of my life (since I was about 10 or 11) ~ I can only hope the gold is relatively easy to see among it. And that the smell is the rich, earthy, fertile smell of a truly satisfying shit, and not the putrescence that flows from the SAD (Standard American Diet ~ no, literally, this is an acronym used by actual scientists and policymakers).
“Man was made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.”
--William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
There’s a tension inherent in what we call the European Dark Ages or the (different) period we call Middle that fascinates me. {I’m talking here about the general mishmash of memes in all of our heads, not the actual thousand years or so between the Fall of Rome and the onset of Early Modernity.} It's a world beyond alien to us modern folk. Basically none of the things we consider vital for mental health were present and available to the large mass of people. Work was often constant and backbreaking and, although alienation of labor hadn't yet set in, taxes were high enough in crops, money, and men that we might consider a similar fruitlessness of one's labors to have pertained. Nutrition was poor, flavors bland, and diet unvaried. Feudalism is a system of rests on everyone in the social hierarchy lacking control of their destiny, and, in any view of the time period with even the slightest pinch of grimdark added, being subject to constant tests of loyalty and abusive manipulations by what we would now call warlords or gang leaders. Disease was a constant companion, even without the Armageddon of plague. You know how toothaches carry with them just the most intensely depressing emotional load in addition to their owie factor? Not only would toothaches (and other such pains) be more common thanks to the undeveloped state of medicine, painkillers would have been unavailable or much weaker than we have today. Transportation being much slower and recreational time being more limited (vacation? What’s that?), seeing someone who lived even two miles away could happen but a few times a week, and long stretches of time were spent alone or in small groupings. And therapy? What’s that?
And yet, despite all of this ~ or maybe because of it ~ the cultures of the time were fascinated with rising up out of the muck, ascending into a Heavenly bliss. Stories filled the pages and the ears with the quests of shining paragons of virtue and their striving to achieve and (harder still) maintain that exalted state. Priests preached an honor that was an exacting discipline, and every effort was taken to maintain the image of the ruling classes fulfilling them. Popular entertainment ~ books, poems, street entertainment, and theatrical plays ~ centered on questions of virtue in deed and in attitude, inventing the genres of the “morality play” and the “passion play”. Characters in these plays often lacked identity beyond their role and/or moral status, with names like “Everyman”, “Pilgrim”, “Temptation”, and “Prudence”. Religion was much more suffused into everyday life than it is now, a constant gaze above the clouds and past the Pearly Gates. Careful attention was paid to one’s behaviors, thoughts, and ways of being to refine them in an alchemy whose methods ranged from the explicit and arcane (that is to say, alchemy itself) to the mundane and banal, but always to the goal of forging your soul into gold worthy of keeping company with angels. Chivalry grew, ensconcing further the reign of the feudal warlords but attempting to bend it towards a Godly purpose to match its divine right of kings; Romance developed, in part, as what we might call Zeroth Wave feminism, lending a measure of agency to women in the grinding processes of what would eventually become heterosexuality. Even (many of the) countercultures of the time approached things from this yearning for an angelic life ~ utopian movements even back then were explicitly attempting to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The Diggers, for example, (ancestors of us anarchists, socialists, and communists) explicitly based their belief in economic equality in a passage from the Bible. The same effect carries over to the self-consciously antinomian movements of the day ~ those Gnostic sects in this category were striving to achieve the glory of the Pleroma by breaking the rules of this earthly prison; even Sin could be found to be Virtue! This is the time the Grail chose to be findable.
“I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.”
--Dylan Thomas
I am fascinated by this contradiction. All that is best in life and all that is worst in life all mixed up and blended together in Dung Ages stage strewn with the midden trash of what passed for civilization at the time. This is humanity in its most distilled essence, the truest nature of what it is to be us. So, I thought, why don't I try to recreate D&D in its image, mixing in all the lovely off-the-wall fantastic elements I can?
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