This weekend I ran the first session of an ongoing campaign-in-miniature set in Middle-earth, using the game rules from Francesco Nepitello’s The One Ring (TOR).

In the parlance of play, I’m hacking and drifting this game in bits and bobs to get a certain kind of play out of it. Some of the adjustments I’ve made come from ideas cooked up back when I was a playtester on the game. Other tweaks come from Nepitello’s own ongoing development of the game, including rules incorporated in later official supplements like Tales From Wilderland (written by the under-sung hero, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan). For example, we used the revised journey rules Nepitello’s been exploring on his blog (and talking about online) rather than those published in the official game rules.

(more…)

Gamemastery NPC Illustration by Tyler Walpole (© Paizo)

I laid out seven cards I’d selected from Paizo’s GameMastery deck, Urban NPCs, in a row at the middle of the table, where both of my regular players could see them.

Without any preview or overview, I tasked my players with answering the questions below. (I actually even changed the order of the questions at the last minute as I rethought the questions I was hoping would arise during the process.) We shifted the cards around the table to indicate different answers and create a quick sort of infographic describing the NPCs’ relationships with the PCs—allies were pushed above the baseline, enemies below it, dead characters were flipped over, etc.

This is part of my Dragon Age RPG (#DARPG) playtest campaign, where I try out not only new AGE System mechanics for the Dragon Age world but experiment with different techniques and styles of play. I do this all the time, in almost everything I run. From week to week I might riff on questions of pacing, timing, narrative authority, unreliable narration, and all sorts of other tricks, to give individual adventures distinctive feelings. For this particular Dragon Age campaign, we’ve been keeping separate character sheets for the characters at three different levels (3rd, 5th, and 7th now) and flashing back and forth between levels to tell nested and interwoven stories. (I’ll write more about that next.)

Because we’ve been playing the characters across multiple levels simultaneously, these relationships work a little differently than they might in another campaign. Thus we can introduce a character at an earlier point of the story knowing—all of us together—that he or she will end up feeling a certain way about the PCs later on in the story. That adds a dramatic bit of foreshadowing as well as a bit of narrative structure to climb on like a jungle gym.

We can even hop over the actual incidents that changed the characters’ relationships, since there’s little suspense there, and decide what happened in the intervening levels through alluding dialogue (“I can’t forgive you for leaving me on that island.”) or out-of-character exposition (“Remember, now that you’re not romantically involved anymore, he probably doesn’t want to see you.”). If we do choose to play out the actual scenes where relationships dissolve, solidify, or otherwise change, we may do it without engaging the dice because there won’t be questions of success or failure in involved—we’ll be dramatizing a process for which we already know the result. That can be a fun play space, too, including plenty of opportunities to riff on the facts and introduce meaningful surprises while respecting what’s come before (for us, the players) and what we know is to come (for the characters).

Here are the tasks in the order we did them:

1. Two of these characters are enemies or rivals by 7th level. No matter how you feel about them, they are opposed to you now. Pick them now.
2. Two of these characters are allies or cohorts. No matter how your dynamic starts, they are friends or allies now. Pick them now.
3. One of these characters is alive at 5th level but dead by the time you’re 7th level. Pick that character now.
4. One of these characters has a romantic dynamic with one of you—it might be mutual, it might be a love triangle, it might a one-sided infatuation. Pick that character now.
5. You are indebted to one of these characters. You might owe money, service, or your life or freedom. Pick that character now.
6. One of these characters has information or an object you want. Pick that character now.

In actual practice, I deviated from this a bit. Since we had a couple of characters get multiple answers, I assigned the sixth answer to one of the remaining, unselected characters, just to diversify.

Once that was done, I revealed a final wrinkle:

• Two of these characters are turncoats. They may not be what they appear for long. They may turn against you or switch to your side.

Dragon Age Set 1 from Green Ronin Publishing

Which two characters? I predetermined that before I dealt out the seven cards and started the players’ selection process. The turncoats may not live long enough for their embedded loyalties to be revealed, they may be driven into corners or welcomed into the fold through actual play before they can change their stripes—the players still have the power to act on those characters, in other words—but the two characters I preselected have built-in goals and loyalties that go into the mix along with the players’ choices. The rest of the NPCs I put on the table get characterized now, between sessions, to fit the decisions the players made about them.

We then worked together to stat up one of those two cohorts as a companion warrior (a tank, in this case) to help the PCs in forthcoming battles.

Notice that, to start, the players have very little information to go on. They’re choosing their enemies and allies based on the most superficial features. Still, they had enough information to go on to make some surprising and provocative decisions. Both of the PCs are Dragon Age elves (one’s a city elf, one’s Dalish), with subplots about fighting for elf rights in a human-dominated world, yet they chose the only elf in the lineup to be an enemy. It surprised and enticed me as much as it did them, I think. As they moved the cards around on the table, though, interesting combinations of answers emerged and they naturally made choices that they wanted to play out or deal with the fallout from later. They didn’t shy away from drama. They created rich situations that they wanted to know more about and also wanted to play with.

The NPCs are toys, like building blocks, which the players used to build a playground.

In case you’re curious, my players ended up pairing off some of the choices in really compelling ways. They are indebted to a dead dwarf and have a romantic entanglement with one of their enemies. So we have two sources of inspiration and action awaiting us: we can dramatize the circumstances by which predetermined facts come about and we can play to find out how these circumstances get more complicated (or maybe even resolved).

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Again with War in the North.

I’m using this game to explore some questions because (a) I am currently playing it and (b) because it’s a relatable property even if you’re not playing it—I feel safe assuming that many of you have seen the Lord of the Rings movies or know of them. War in the North is a third-person action RPG set in the movie-adaptation version of Middle-earth (or something so close to it that its familiar characters and locations resemble actors and designs from the films). It focuses on a cast of new heroes battling Sauron’s forces mostly in environments drawn from Tolkien’s lore but not seen in the films.

This isn’t really about War in the North, though. It’s a flawed, fun game that I’ve been enjoying as a fan of Middle-earth and as a gamer looking for light RPG elements, a dose of combat, and some handsome scenery. Still, I can understand why it’s not connecting with some players and reviewers—it’s not a richly complex combat challenge or a deeply varied RPG experience. It’s a light, straightforward affair for casual co-op play and a good deal of Middle-earth sight-seeing.

No, I’m singling out War in the North again because of Game Informer‘s review of it, in which Joe Juba writes:

The conceptual framework is solid, and with some extensive tuning and polish, it would be fun to play. Just thinking of War in the North reimagined as an old-school isometric adventure (à la Dark Alliance) gets me pumped up…but it’s too late for that now. [via]

That bit got me thinking (again) about how games get reviewed.

How much should a game be marked down for driving a reviewer to want the game in a different form? Is it fair to penalize a game for not being another game? How much responsibility does a reviewer have to buy into a game’s premise when reviewing it—and how much of the premise must be accepted?

I mean, if a reviewer thinks that RTS game would make for a great shooter, is that a fair mark against the game—the fact that it is not some other game? I feel like that’s somehow analogous to complaining about a film’s genre or casting; these can be legitimate gripes (“The lead actor was a bad fit for the part”) but they can also go too far (“Tommy Lee Jones should have played the curmudgeonly mentor—I like Tommy Lee Jones—so this movie isn’t what it could have been”).

It’s not that a reviewer is out of line to say “This game made we wish for a new isometric RPG” or “This developer has had greater success with isometric RPGs” but to what extent should a game be faulted for not being something else?

I’m all for reviewers reporting their honest opinions. Isn’t there a difference between reporting one’s opinion and faulting a game for not sharing them, though? To some extent, I should not review RTS games because I objectively suck at them but were I to do so anyway, I think I’d separate my opinions of the medium from a value judgment of the game’s success at fulfilling its own promise. The very best RTS game still makes a crappy FPS.

To what extent should a reviewer grant the game its premise and measure how well it executed that premise—and not how close it came to what the reviewer’s prefers?

I think you should review the game you got. That can be tricky, though, especially as borders between game categories continue to blur. A game with RPG elements might make for a lousy full-on RPG but a great shooter. If a game’s marketing plays up its RPG elements, but the actual game focuses on its job as a shooter, is it fair to fault the game for the expectations set by the marketing department?

As artworks, as products—reviewing games is a complex business.

["As Darkness Rises," by Noah Bradley, © Wizards of the Coast]

Will here. A couple of weeks ago, I had a short article published in Dungeon Magazine #189 part of D&D Insider—my first official piece for Dungeons & Dragons, like, ever. (You need a subscription to D&D Insider to get access to Dungeon content.) The article, “Diyun: The Hanging City,” gives a quick description of a setting where my players spent many weeks adventuring back around the turn of the century. It’s a place that’s stuck in my imagination over the years, to the point that I know how it smells, how sounds, and, I thought, how it looks.

I had, quite frankly, built up my expectations for the imagery that might accompany the piece. This being a work for Wizards of the Coast, I knew it would be handsome art, but how would it compare to the Diyun in my head? I found out the same way you did, by logging in to D&D Insider and seeing the piece posted for public consumption.

Wizards of the Coast hired an artist named Noah Bradley to illustrate my article. We’ve never met. We never collaborated directly. Somehow, though, the Wizards of the Coast art director and Noah got inside my head and painted a vision of Diyun that is so close to what I’ve always imagined that… it’s eerie. More than that, it’s better than what I’d imagined because it’s in the real world now where you and I can both see it.

I immediately had to know more about how Noah Bradley works, so I dropped him a line. He was nice enough to answer a few questions for us here at Gameplaywright. Read on.

(more…)

In my most recent D&D campaign, The Northsea Saga, I chose to wear a lot of my inspirations on my sleeve. The thrust of the campaign was essentially this: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings meets Brian Wood’s Northlanders comic book. Humanity, all but abandoned by elves and dwarves, was fighting a losing battle against the Witch-Queen (inspirations, right on my sleeve), a godlike sorceress who was raising up volcanic islands throughout Northsea where her followers—orcs, goblins, humans, and giants—could dwell. It was full of travel and adventure, grand sorrow and ugly violence, epic foes and nuanced heroes.

A whole lot of the tone I managed to convey came across from the music I selected. (Much of which is included in this iTunes playlist.) To get a sense of what I’m talking about here, check out the iTunes or Amazon MP3 previews for the tracks mentioned here. I’m not a musical scholar or even much of a musician, so I don’t talk about music properly—I engage with it almost completely on narrative terms: atmosphere, pacing, allusion. It’s one thing for me to tell you that a track is brooding or elegant, but it’s another to hear it in the music itself, right?

I used music to draw out the themes and motifs of the game world and the story the players were developing over time. Whenever the ever-distant Witch-Queen came up—like when the player-characters meddled with a magical artifact of hers that they’d discovered—I played the music I’d chosen as her theme: John Debney’s beautiful and brooding “Darkness Theme” from the game, Lair. (I never played Lair, but I play its soundtrack a whole lot in D&D campaigns and when I’m writing for fantasy settings.) It’s a great repeater.

The campaign began with the death of the beloved human king, and the player’s heroic characters spent a lot of time trying to sort out who would succeed him. When kingly matters arose in play—whether it was the players or me who brought it up—I played “Hymn For King Conan” from Knut Avenstroup Haugen’s wonderful Age of Conan score, to remind the players of the absent friend and the empty throne. At the Viking-style funeral for the king, a band of woeful poets sang a dirge. For this rare piece of source music in the campaign, I turned to Miranda Sex Garden’s “Gush Forth My Tears.”

Other opportunities for music abounded. Dramatic pre-adventure recaps of past adventures called for dramatic cues, so I sometimes used John Debney’s score from the opening narration of The Scorpion King. For the fearsome ship-rocking approach of a humungous sea-serpent, I used Jonathan Elias’s opening cue from Pathfinder.

Of course, D&D means battles—I used the afore-mentioned “Beowulf Slays the Beast,” Jerry Goldsmith’s “The Fire Dragon” (from The 13th Warrior), and, for battles against the Witch-Queen’s magical followers, “Firestorm” (from Lair), all of which are solid repeaters.

Over the course of the campaign, I made five distinct playlists, including lots of other music (to represent the lands of elves and dwarves, for example), with no playlist lasting more than 75 minutes. That’s enough time for a wide variety of music, but having a limit on the number of tracks helps me avoid searching for tracks in the middle of play. I pre-select a few action tracks, a few non-combat repeaters, a dramatic cue or two for landmark scenes like the opening recap or the closing narration, and an opener to mark the revelation of the evil traitor (or what have you) and I feel ready to play. The repetition in action and rest cues helps motifs emerge, for those players who care to pay attention, and lets the repeating cues sort of fade away for those players who don’t. This keeps the music interesting from week to week without being distracting—some players simply don’t care what you’re playing, most of the time.

Next time, I’ll write about exactly how I use music during actual play, from the hardware I use to the tactics I employ when changing tracks during play. It’s what I get asked about most when I talk about using music in play.

In the meantime, read this post by occasional Gameplaywright contributor, Zack Walters, about how he uses music in his Dark Sun campaign: Music to Defile By.