How I World-Build: Viestinta's Conceptualization

So I decided to write how I world-build, and began the last week with a short post on the planet that started it all, Heranyt. As I wrote, I realized that the full notebook of stuff I have on Heranyt... well... I don't have any of how I got there, not anymore. Heranyt appeared in a fever dream of gameplay ideas and philosophy and mythology and religion and, well.... I didn't really write any of it down. So this time I'm writing the process down and hopefully others will find it mildly entertaining, at the very least.

So here's the deal: Viestinta is meant to house two different games: Realms of Peril and Hearts of Wulin, which is Chinese melodrama. Sound totally contradictory? It didn't to me, so I figured I'd try and figure out why that idea was so compelling to me.

Realms of Peril is an OSR/PBTA merge that's meant to be an open table game. I've been slowly coming around to the concept, after multiple years of trying to run things with a larger than three player crowd... only to find that the campaigns just can't seem to hold together. Schedules get way too weird. In fact I find non-open table games to be so hard to run that I specifically designed Crescendo to be a resilient against schedules as humanly possible, but that's principally by having the group be incredibly small. If I want to play with a larger group, I'm SOL. Welp, as it turns out Realms of Peril has been tinkered with to get everything not open table to go away. It's got a really good basic resolution system, and you can get a character to the table within minutes.

Hearts of Wulin is a PBTA about wuxia fiction. It's meant to be have proud and restrained badass warriors trying to not get their hearts broken and failing. The game, like most storygames, is meant to be played out in shorter spurts, short enough to where people can safely commit for two to four sessions and then move on. A lot of PBTAs try to solve the logistical issues by making sure there's less logistics, just period. I like wuxia enough to get over my usual aversion to PBTA, and found that the game is actually very good and I can't wait to get it back to the table.

On the one hand you have a drop-in, drop-out game and a short wuxia story generator. That doesn't explain it at all, does it? 

Nope, I don't think so either.

So I decided to write down "the story" of the setting, the thing that I'll base everything else on. Maybe there's an answer beyond "I just think it's neat" somewhere in there.

I know I wanted to keep yuan-ti and dragonborn, so I renamed them to hserpa and drahskin.

The clannish drahskin and devious hserpa, after wiping out all other civilizations except for humans (which they enslaved), turned their millenia old magical and martial prowess on each other. Given their strengths it surprised no one that the war was rather even, although the collateral damage could be truly awful at times.

And then one day the khen-zai artifacts were discovered.

Deep beneath the earth both sides found great store houses of the ancient race: medicines, weapons, and other technologies that could have advanced their respective civilizations hundreds of years in a matter of hours. The Emperor of Fire and the Emperor of Scales met in secret to discuss what they had found. It wasn't a long conversation: they sealed their discoveries away again, and had those who found and those who sealed the discoveries killed. They then agreed to assign guards over these sites, with strict orders that all who were to be found on these "sacred lands" would be publicly executed in the cruelest ways imaginable. They figured that the upheaveal would destroy both their peoples utterly.

And then one day the khen-zai returned.

The fabled elder race, the ones who had become totally ethereal beings, returned with their puppet bodies, to reclaim what had been theirs. Their living chitinous warships pounded the planet with an orbital bombardment that the peoples of Viestinta will never forget, nevermind the planet itself. All the people who had died to protect the planet's way of life... all was in vain.

But then the unthinkable happened: the drahskin Amgala, hserpa An, and the human Gi broke into one of the vaults and, using Gi to pilot, flew a mech into the heart of the mothership, and killed every single of the weak-bodied khen-zai. They returned, triumphant heroes. The planet had triumphed.

Nope.

The khen-zai had actually captured Amgala, An, and Gi, and tested a new technology on them: menticide, the art of brainwashing. They forced the three to believe they had won and sent them back. The khen-zai, while they were originally annoyed that their engineered toys had survived in their absence, they were intrigued by humanity able to use their tech. They had run into it before with other humans, but figured it was a "local" genetic anomaly. They were wrong. So they decided to spare the planet, and see what would happen with this unexpected turn of events. They retired to the ethereal plane to enjoy their debauched cruelties, and waited. They were in no hurry.

The Emperors' long-standing deceptions were quickly discovered and punished. Humanity was freed from slavery, and a world-wide republic was formed, with the technology discovered in the vaults being used to build quickly. Those who were on board were benefited. Those who were not were ignored, ostracized, or killed if the first two methods didn't work out. 

Those who weren't in the sprouting cities languished in small shanty towns, holding onto a way of life that, with the constant allure of the cities calling the young away, became insular, toxic, and more than a bit racist. But they see the error of abandoning the old ways. Or at least they think they do. The worst thing is not death or discomfort, but losing the meaning that comes only with death and discomfort. We'll see how long that lasts.

So that's a good place to stop. There's a lot of this that jumps out at me, and why two games are contained within it. On the one hand you have the newly formed Parliament, with all the hope of the good and the apathy of the evil intermingling, and it being hard to tell the difference at times. A new era has dawned! It is up to those in power to make sure that new dawn is worthwhile. There's all the idealism, honor, folly, and passion of such an enterprise, contrasted against the bloody and benighted past that may not be so past, but an ignored present situation that may kill everyone. And, to me, that speaks Hearts of Wulin.

On the other hand all you have to do is learn about real-world cases of mothers in the Appalachian Mountains giving their children Mountain Dew (which dissolves their teeth) instead of water, because there is no infrastructure to produce clean water there, to see the downsides of such a venture. A good drive through Steubenville, OH, a decade or so ago, would have shown a place dying because it wasn't a part of the global initiative.  And in these places one must survive however one can, whatever that looks like. Even if that means breaking into tombs and stealing tech and robbing the globalists at every opportunity to live... all the while espousing values that are not practical to hold anymore, because the world no longer works according to blood and sweat, but rationalization and passion. This desperation screams out Realms of Peril to me.

So the setting, unlike Heranyt or Rakkaus, now serves two functions: playing an open table sword and sorcery game, with people dropping in and dropping out, and short but intense personal stories that may or may not involve excessive mounts of idealism and doomed romance. Those things don't seem so separate to me anymore. And in fact, at least for me, it may not work out any other way.

Viestinta is a world in the midst of bifurcation. On the one hand you have the prosperous elites who no longer really know they're elites, having to deal with the consequences of globalization and the deadening effect that has one one's soul. On the other you have those left behind, who are trying to scratch out a mean existence in a world that has forgotten them.. and the horrors that live so close to them. It is a world of rapidly growing magitech and skyscrapes with squalor not even one hundred miles away... all watched over by the curious and otherwise-bored khen-zai.

That's a chilling set up.

We'll start focusing on importing real world stuff next time.!

Hearts of Wulin

 

Look folks, this review is gonna be kinda weird. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with PBTA. On the one hand, I greatly appreciate the framework that Mr. Baker set up. I heartily agree that RPGs are a conversation, with mechanics coming on specific triggers. Yup, I'm with that part. But there's a hyper-focus to PBTA that I have a hard time with. Maybe that's the vestiges of DnD still living within my soul fighting to survive or whatever, but the scope of a good PBTA game is so small it weirds me out. I like the more "old school" feel, of having discrete skills that can be used in multiple ways. By paring down the "moves" of skills into something more restricted I just feel like something is lost.

Now, to be fair, this is my second PBTA I've ever actually played, the first being Dungeon World. I've been told in no uncertain terms by PBTA apologists that the PBTA tech has evolved past that point, and has done so in earnest.

That may be true, but the hyper focus of skills into genre emulation isn't gone in this PBTA game. It's done better, yes, but my underlying issue with all PBTA remains: you're telling me how to play. Thank you kindly, but I don't want you telling me how to play. That's not your job, Designer-Person. Give me somewhat specific tools, with some guidance on how to use them, and I'll figure it out from there.

So no, I'm not quite the target audience for this game. 

But y'know what? I decided to bite on this one. Most of the important movies of my childhood and teenaged years include Chinese martial art films. I mean, Hero is as influential on me as Clannad, not to mention House of Flying Daggers. It's a genre I've not explored in a very long time, and one I could stand to look at again. That and I saw a session of it played online and was astounded at how emotionally safe everyone was during it. There was some seriously heavy stuff going down, but everyone was fine! It was awesome!

I still don't have the hardcopy in my hands, thanks to COVID. That made learning the game a bit harder; I don't absorb information from PDFs terribly well. But fortunately I had a PBTA aficionado around to help, so I was able to lean on him a bit during play. Fortunately, I found the game relatively easy to pick up. PBTA is normally pretty easy to learn, at least in my experience, and that's not different here. You just play, and the GM butts in with mechanics when necessary until you learn it. It's a pretty simple process.

And, let's be honest, the moves themselves aren't that mechanically different from most other PBTA games I've read. Granted, I want to do this genre, but that doesn't change the involuntary twitch. And, to be fair, that's my problem, not the designers. But I wound up loving this game.

It's because of the Internal Conflict move.

Basically, if you run into a spot that might create emotional distress, you roll this move. You get XP, just for having to do the move. You then have three possible outcomes, all of them various levels of bad but.... they're mostly open. You can just do what you think best within the context. This one move creates some of the most fun I've ever seen in an RPG. Your character can go crazy and you're emotionally shielded from it. If you want to have a really RP intense game, then emotional shielding like this is crucial. You have to be able to point at the mask and go "This is happening to this thing, this object, not to me"

What I love about this mechanic is that it allows you to radically shift the narrative in ways that are consistent with your character. One of the issues I've frequently run into as a GM is the wish to control the plot. I think part of my issue that I like lots of elements being introduced, just to see how the characters react. With this? I don't have to. Just ask if it's a moment of Internal Conflict. The plot practically writes itself after that. Just throw new things to drive everyone nuts, sit back, and grab the popcorn.

And that's not including the more high fantasy moves that are included in the back of the book. I really appreciated having these put in. They work more to my tastes, and I'm glad that they were included to expand the scope of the game. That's something I really like. I know I'll be using them a lot.

So you grab these very specific moves, combine it with a good and strong reaction mechanic, and you have a recipe for awesomeness. I did a Mortal Kombat-inspired game and we didn't even fight until the end. We didn't need to, I just called for Inner Conflict rolls and just saw where it went from there. And when we did fight it was really intense and cool, because we had all this interpersonal drama going on.

I really look forward to getting the book in my hands. The PDF is gorgeous and put together well. It's hard not to get inspired by the art, which is compellingly ethereal. The text is well laid out and clear. My lack of ability to read the text is my own hang up; this is really well done stuff. If you can read PDFs and get something out of them I think you'd have an easy time for it. 

Despite my own prejudices this is easily one of my favorite games. The mechanics are extremely well oriented, with a good reaction mechanic to help redirect the narrative. There's actually some good variety, a bit of a wider scope allowed. The drama these mechanics elicit are so heartfelt.

And heartfelt is my jam.