Gaj'Uth the Three-Headed Elephant

Following up on this post, here's more of Gaj'Uth. Now, this piece is actually part of a larger piece of cover art for the Dead Wizards RPG I am writing (I don't know when I will be finished, but hopefully this year).

This whole project was born out of a desire to make a pulp sword and sorcery game. Not a narrative game in the strictest sense, but one with more narrative sensibilities than OSR games in general. The system started out as a pure riff on OD&D and I ran a playtest or two with that version a few years ago. But it has morphed quite a bit since then. The second iteration used the descending AC to-hit tables as the primary "core" mechanic, which I still believe is a really cool idea... but I ditched that idea for Dead Wizards and am now working toward an original system that bears some OSR artifacts (there is a saving throw, you use d20 rolls vs. a target).

But the whole point was to make a sword and sorcery game in which you "play through a pulp yarn". The basic unit of adventure role-playing is the adventure itself and in DW that unit is called a yarn. It's a story and it emerges from game play. It's really important to take in that sentence and understand what I mean. You would play this game as a game and whatever kind of lucid, weird, disjointed, harmonious, violent, beautiful, dreamy, or fucked up series of events that emerge from it would be the yarn, or story, that you created. I am not saying this is a "storytelling game" in the sense that many people mean that phrase. It is going to be a game with a game master (I use the term "Judge" because it's the best term - fight me if you want) and while the players do have a lot of impact on their world it is not a shared storytelling game in the strong narrative sense that you'd get from most story games. It's an adventure game with strong narrative flair, not a story game... just to be clear.

Once you complete your yarn by dealing with your characters' needs, you could continue playing more yarns with the same characters or not. I'm designing the system so that it isn't zero-to-hero. Like in most heroic fantasy stories, the "heroes" begin as larger-than-life figures. They are already better than most people. So there isn't any need for balancing or a sense of scale, mostly. This is the kind of game you could run fairly quickly with low prep, depending on how comfortable you are with being creative and judging on the fly. I cringe a little at using the term, but it's a fairly "rules lite" game.

I'll post more soon about the setting and the game system.

The Questing Beast RPG Revisited

Ron Edwards of Adept Press recently played my old game The Questing Beast at IndieCON and made this video talking about it.

The main thrust of the video is that Ron was concerned about the mechanical difference between the games. Primarily, that The Pool gives players a choice whether to take narrative control where TQB doesn't offer that choice. I designed TQB to be a little more "controlled" than The Pool in the sense that I wanted it to feel complete as a system. I wanted everything to be very clear and well structured. The Pool has clarity as well, but is far more open-ended as to how things can emerge from play. At least in a sense, that is.

Anyway, it's been a very long time since I thought about these games but I'm happy that they still get some traction here-and-there.

You can get The Pool and The Questing Beast for free.

Dead Wizards: Playtest #3 in Session

A few years ago I started thinking about a sword & sorcery game and I called it Dead Wizards. It began as an OSR idea, specifically a Swords & Wizardry setting/variant. My idea was to get down and dirty with the idea of heroic fantasy as it existed in my own mind. It had a few elements:

-Characters are larger-than-life heroes.

-"Heroes" means characters that rise above the world in which they live.

-Magic is weird, not scientific.

-The only rule of magic is that magic is never free.

-The gods are not benevolent and life is not fair.

I ran a session wherein I had some S&W houserules in play, such as spending hit points to cast spells. It worked ok. But it wasn't what I really wanted.

Another playtest happened a few months ago but was interrupted by life stuff. So now I've revised the rules again, stripping away even more of the OD&D elements and leaving only the bits that I felt were necessary to convey the point.

This is a game about telling a yarn. The players create characters with needs and deeds and special traits that make them larger-than-life... like any good sword and sorcery hero. The yarn is the events in-game that lead to the fulfillment of the various quests that the PCs have. Their needs must be satisfied, or they must somehow fail to satisfy them. In other words, the play creates a story.

Now, this is not necessarily a good story. Good stories are told by authors speaking from a top down voice whereas most RPGs, including this one, produce "stories" that are bottom up, albeit with some top down pressure from the GM. A Dead Wizards yarn is not meant to be a publishable, compelling tale. it is simply the story that emerges from play - for better or worse.

In that sense, this game occupies a gray area between a classic RPG and a story-based RPG.

Tonight is session two of the playtest. The needs of the heroes should begin to be invoked and the links between their quests should start to be hinted at or revealed. That is the secret to Dead Wizards. Though each player may create disparate characters, the play and the cunning of the Judge and the players working together will weave the characters together in a fantastic yarn.

At least that's the plan.

For more on Dead Wizards, particularly the system, check out this post.