The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter Sixteen

 

I swear that this game runs itself sometimes. And then there's times when I realize I want to push. So I do. And then this beauty came out.

November 8th- Chapter Sixteen

This one ends on a major cliffhanger, and makes the upcoming Interlude Play really dangerous. I think it's interesting that the actual fight with the ensivalo isn't the center of the character work, but everything leading up to it.

Kredo and I talked after the session, and we agreed that it was remarkable. By the end of the last campaign, we had been really nostalgic for book one play, where things are slower, the consequences not as steep. But now? We've had a few months and we're so happy we did it... but it's time to go to book two. It's really cool, to be playing a game where you can feel when it's time to change things.

Home: Session One

 

I had been

prepping a map for a new Dark Souls campaign. It wasn't ready, but I was really excited to get it done. I'd just been thinking through it and deciding what to put on the map. You know, the usual overthinking.

And then, suddenly, we had the opportunity to do an Omega Rangers session... until we didn't. The character sheets couldn't be found. The kids were heartbroken. I was... disappointed, for them. I am not a fan of running trad games, even something as fun as Power Rangers.

Suddenly, I was asked: "Hey, can you run Dark Souls?"

Wait, what?

"My map's not done."

"Is that a problem?"

No, not it is not. I turn around, grab my Dungeon Map 5e book,  photocopy a small map, pull out my core Dark Souls book and grab a low-level location with its random table. Boom. Ready. My more detailed map can wait.

They hadn't made characters. Also not a problem: Dark Souls character generation is not quite as fast as Wight Box, but it's pretty damn close. I helped them make characters: Marcus the Brute Knight and Jackson the Fencer Assassin. Boom. Done.

Five minutes for a map and twenty for character creation.

"What exactly are we?

"Undead."

"Like zombies?"

"Yes."

"Why are we back?"

"You don't know. That's part of the point."

"Oh, okay!"

I then described

the opening room: "You awaken in a mostly empty room with an altar, bonfire atop it, and a locked door. The light is dim but warm."

I then turn on the music.

"What's this?" I was asked. Oh, right, they've never actually played Dark Souls. I explain it's The Music of Dark Souls. It was a really cool moment.

They pick the lock, round the corner, round another corner... to a dead end. I get The Look. "We just started!"

"Yeah, funny ain't it?"

"There's gotta be a secret door!"

There is! They 

find the secret door quickly, with a good roll. They walk through the secret passage, come out into a larger room with another altar... and then there's a hiss as the corpse next to them stands up. Marcus kills it in one shot. Three skeletons come running from another room. Marcus and Jackson kill them, but get roughed up doing so. They loot the bodies for their scimitars and short bows, and then keep going.

They go down a hallway, only to find themselves face to face with nine Hollows. Jackson hangs back with his bow to shoot down a few, but Marcus gets absolutely slaughtered by the onslaught, one of which was a critical. Marcus lost all his souls. That moment when they realized that death erased their XP/money... a light went on in their heads.

Suddenly they realized they shouldn't be so stingy with their Position/HP. The amount they lost by spending was a lot lower than being hit.

So Jackson beat a hasty retreat back to the bonfire, brought Marcus back. Marcus lost 2 Charisma as a consequence of being brought back. He flinched, as he realized that dying could really hurt.

Marcus and Jackson

then went back out, found the Hollows and skeletons were they had been before, and killed them again. They did a little more exploring and realized they could get the drop on the nine Hollows that had wiped them out before. Jackson did a Stealth roll, and was able to take out two Hollows almost immediately, Marcus ran down and killed another. 

And that was just the surprise round.

They spent Position hard and fast, turning their misses into hits and their grazes into insta-kills. The nine Hollows went down extremely quickly.

Jackson had enough 

souls to level up! But that meant going back to  a bonfire. Marcus wanted to push on to find another bonfire, not wanting to repeat the ground again. Jackson pointed out if they died, they'd lose everything, and they didn't have enough power to get away with that kind of thing.

After thinking it over, Marcus agreed.

They went back, and Jackson the Assassin leveled up. From 1d8+4 to 2d8+4 for Position during combat is a huge change! They went back, took on the one Hollow and three skeletons again, and Jackson almost knocked out all four by himself.

There were more

passages. The two decided that they would go try one of the other passages next time. Maybe they' d find another bonfire and not repeat the fights!

But by then Maria and everyone else came home.

Next time!

Storygaming as Mechanical Sandbox

 

The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter Fifteen

 

I have a real problem with smarmy bullshit. so it was a kind of interesting week to follow up on, with this gigantic butterfly. So, I did what I could. And I think it worked!

October 30th through November 5th

The people flock around the giant butterfly, which talks in their minds with a calm, gentle voice: Maalijna, the ground listener. She is gentle, and kind. Children quickly learn to trust her, climbing atop her with no fear whatsoever. When asked to give rides in the sky, Maalijina always chuckles in a high-pitched mental trill: "Your mothers would never forgive me if I did".

The mothers agree. And realize they love her for it.

The "plague" ends immediately. Everyone attributes it to Maalijina.

Around Newport's northern farms, however, things are far from calm. King Lucian collapses all the remaining tunnels between Newport and Montport, and heads back up to Montport, cooperating with Lady Marie's forces.

Doing so results in not one, not two, but three violent deaths, the third one done by Seren, the Bearer of the Blade of Uriel. They were all confused, rushed, and thoroughly strange.

A few animals in the northern farms die, with their heads crushed.

The water in Montport is discovered to be poisoned. Maalijina promises to go there and purify the water there, too, when she's done purifying the ground around Newport.

November 6th- Chapter Fifteen

One of the things that Ross, who finally came back to play with us, said later really stuck with me. There's an interesting kind of loneliness that happens with Crescendo, Ross told me. All these players having these private stories between sessions. They're doing serious emotional buy-in between the sessions, and then suddenly that story is put on public display, full-blast. Without the context.

It's an iceberg of story and emotion and tragedy and comedy, all at once.

Sorta like a Gene Wolfe story. Oops.

A Literary Trail for Crescendo: Out of the Silent Planet

 

The fact that it only occurred to me now to leave a literary trail for Crescendo is silly. I should have considered it sooner. So we'll go in chronological order... sorta. We'll start with the first book that actually woke me up as a child. Like, I still remember sitting on my couch in Aurora at 13, listening to Out of the Silent Planet and drawing and drawing the Sorn. There was something in the description of Mars that haunts me to this day. I recently returned to this book, and realized just how indebted I am to it, especially with Crescendo.

Lewis's prose relaxed me. I'm not sure why it is, but something about the way he writes, just in general, puts me into a flow state. Focused. Better. It's really wonderful, actually. And, for whatever reason, the way he narrates in Out of the Silent Planet scratches some itch in my psyche that I realize I eventually found solace in, with Wolfe.

Ransom's problem felt eerily familiar: a stranger in a strange world. Ransom had to contend with the fact that the things in his head were just as strange and real as the world he was now in.. and he realized there wasn't that much of an operative difference. Mind and world were something that Ransom had to handle with similar levels of dispassion.

The villains felt realistic. Their great evil was... being boring. They just wanted more money. More commercial opportunities. The fact they couldn't figure out just how wonderful and beautiful and tragic Mars was wasn't shown as terrifying, but as sad. Almost silly. The universe was big and awesome and the villains were just so... dumb. Not even in a way that wasn't menacing, just dumb.

Meeting true spiritual beings was unsettling, as it should be. Lewis described them as having a completely different center of gravity, and that fit. There was something strangely comforting in just how eerie the "angels" were. Somehow, you meet something that weird, that unsympathetic, and have it love you. And to have absolutely nothing in common with it, at all.

This eeriness, and how comforting it was, have stuck with me all my life. When life isn't like that, I find I miss it.

In so many ways, this book is the beginning. Ransom sitting alone under a strange sky, realizing that his own mind and the alien world required the exact same quiet dispassion—that is where the seed of Crescendo was planted. Not in tactical combat or spell lists, but in the terrifying, comforting encounter with a universe that is far larger than you are.

The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter Fourteen

 

I warned Jack, Pierre's player, that I was about to take the gloves off. And I did. It ain't gonna slow down till the end of the Book. I am making good on my word.

October 19th through 24th

Newport

Lillian and Silvy finished growing the lean-to that Abbadon had let them have into a full on mansion, more than big enough for the elves they had brought back. It's located outside of town (I will be updating the Setting Bible to include its location on the map)

Pierre La Forge attempted to whip up the people against the elves, but Lady Marie was able to squash his propaganda with her own. The attitude against the elves, especially after "Maurice" had been put captured, has begun to reverse.

Montport

King Lucian was said to have found forbidden magics under the city of Montport, and destroyed anything connected to it. There's also rumors that King Lucian almost ate someone? The majority of the army denies any such allegations, citing the king's upstanding morals and his bravery. There was hardly a time when he *wasn't* running right at the front of his men, and the rest had to struggle to keep up.

October 25th-29th

On October 25th, hundreds of humans begin to die of what appears to be a plague. Doctors swear it isn’t

If you do not spend Fate Points, you will get a level 6 Ceaseless Vomiting Condition. It's a Mortal Condition. Seren, King Julian, Cato, and Abbadon are not affected. Everyone else is either coughing up the Fate Points to lessen or lower the Condition or you literally die. On October 27th, there’s a rumble, and a bunch of ground under Newport collapses in on itself, destroying houses and the walls. A spiderweb of destroyed earth goes away from Newport. Taxes on the elven buildings goes up. ADDITIONAL PROBLEM: the people who have survived have fallen into rancor, attacking each other or falling into despair. On October 29th, late at night an army of minotaurs appears, from Cleft Mountain in the west, claiming to be serving The King of Sota. Surrender or die.

October 30th, Chapter Fourteen

This was the first time I tried out my new session flow, which I had just written about. And it did exactly what I thought it would do. I started focusing on pushing forward the threads given to me during the interludes above. I don't think I did a good job, but I think part of that is conceptualizing what a Weaver is supposed to actually do in the first place. I'm not sure how to do that, yet.

But the question is now in my mind: what am I actually trying to do by being a Weaver? What is it I'm looking for?

It's a question I am going to spend a good deal of time working out.

Crescendo Design Journal: The Weaver Has to Play

 

An introduction

Should be made for people who have never seen my weird little game. You need to know two different mechanics in order to appreciate the post: Hitting the Books and Beliefs

Hitting the Books

The big unique thing  about Crescendo is its usage of journals. Everyone has either a notebook or a word processing program where they can randomly search whatever they write.

To Hit the Books, everyone opens up their journals to where they know there's writing, closes their eyes, and randomly select a passage from the page. Everyone reads their random selections out loud, and the Weaver (think GM) free associates what he hears into a piece of infromation, like a plot twist or an answer to a question he didn't expect. Everyone then writes down what their character would think of that plot twist or piece of information.

Example:

Alex, playing Warlord Bastien, and Danny, playing Sir Mal, are fighting a troll, and one of them scores a hit on the troll via rolling dice. That requires Hitting the Books, to see what weird plot twist comes up. Paul the Weaver tells everyone to Hit the Books. They randomly search their journals.

Alex: "Without a horde, you're nothing"

Paul: "Everyone dies alone."

Danny: "And when I saw Genevieve, everything changed."

Paul, based off of those readings, decides that a small woman comes running to the defense of the troll: "Leave Stravlkin alone! He wasn't hurting anyone!"

There's a young woman who thinks the troll that was roaring at Alex and Danny is lovable. Is she right?

Notice how it was just what Paul felt like doing in the moment. He could have come up wit ha totally different answer to those prompts, and it would have been fine. That's what he wanted in the moment. That and he was keeping the Beliefs of the players in mind, see the next section.

Beliefs

The core of your character are three Beliefs, statements your Hero is willing to burn the rest of the world down for. If you act in accordance with your Beliefs, you usually succeed in your actions during the game. You gain power from acting upon your Beliefs.

The Weaver normally tries to make situations that challenge Beliefs, pitting them against each other. If the Weaver does his job right, a lot of the game is centered around trolley problems pulled from the players' Beliefs.

Warlord Bastien

1. The Horde has always been my home. I will never be at home without them.

2. We used to beat our women and children, to our harm, and I put a stop to it. I owe my ability to hope to this.

3. Our Horde is constantly fighting. My rage (and purpose) are fed because of it.

Sir Mal

1. King Julian knighted me as he lay injured on the battlefield. I don’t owe him anything I think important.

2. The queen Madeline took me as her toy. I owe her many a good time.

3. One day a knight, Sir Alain, came into the slums where I picked pockets, and told me that he was my father. He taught me what kindness looks like.

The above example 

is actually a pretty good poke at both the Heroes. The young woman is dedicated to the troll, something that both Sir Mal and Warlord Bastien respect. But it also rubs against the fact that they're facing the troll in combat. Sir Mal is fighting because he is a knight, that's a troll over there, and it's threatening people. Warlord Bastien very much conflates rage and purpose, so if he stops what he started it's not going to go well for him.

They're going to have to pick a way forward, and it's probably not going to be clean.

That's the heart of what makes Crescendo.

I have made

 a ton of changes to Crescendo over the years. It's a criticism leveled at me that I have no choice but to own. I like to tinker, what can I say? Game design is a hobby. It ain't my job. A lot of the changes are also what I think of as "periphery": stuff that goes around the core of Crescendo.

Here's the old formula for a single Chapter Session:

• A random event happens, drawn from the journals
• Players, one at a time, respond to this random event, using their Beliefs and the Setting's Myth to succeed at their actions. This is a verbal puzzle. You have to solve the metaphysical and material aspects of the problem in order to win.
• Players can roll dice to challenge what's going on. It always randomly resets the situation after rolling, whether you win or lose.
• The randomness is determined by everyone's journals, when they Hit the Books. This means that the randomness begins to converge after a long, long long time.

And, so long

as Crescendo was a 1-3 player game, without 1:1 time, this setup worked. A smaller game meant the story sorta meandered but was deeply meaningful. As the Weaver, I somewhat focused on Beliefs, but it was a small enough social environment that I didn't have to really focus on Beliefs. We could essentially run the Epic as a series of one-shots that have indeterminate time skips. Which was a really fun setup, and I loved doing it.

But the goal has always been 

to emulate the kinds of stories Gene Wolfe, Christopher Ruocchio, and C.S. Lewis tell. And something was  missing in the above set up. It was close, but this is my hobby and I don't have a deadline, and therefore I can turn on the 'tism all the way up, and say "No, not yet." Wolfe isn't about characters who are only tangentially connected to each other, but who are connected even when they aren't in the same room, and they may not know it. This is shown the best in Book of the Long Sun and The Wizard Knight, where Wolfe puts his philosophy right up on his sleeve.

Enter the BROSR 

and their discoveries in 1:1 time and interlude scheming. Immediately I knew this would fulfill the core conceit of Wolfe: everyone is the tip of an iceberg. Everyone is connected, and their actions affect each other all the time, they just don't know it. And this game tech would allow me fulfill that core conceit.

So I committed to testing another two years after putting in 1:1 time and entirely player-driven scheming into Crescendo. I'm here to make a good game that emulates Wolfe faithfully.

And it works!!!  It requires some more work from the players, but it more than pays back what they put into it. Players could take a great deal of effort and care and get amazing results out of Crescendo.  The rules support the players as close to perfectly as one can get. This has been proven, over and over and over again. The players are really happy! Each session is part of a continuum of story that's going on around it, an iceberg of drama.

That, right there, is Wolfe in a nutshell. Disagree with me at your peril.

And yet, as we get 

to the end of the first Book of The Fall of the King of Sota, I know, intuitively, that something is off. I have learned when to trust this feeling, and to know when to put it aside. I have the time to look at it, so I decided to let it through the gates.

And boy, did I get a mainline of intuition that was pretty self-damning.

Crescendo is based

very openly upon merging storygame and oldschool principles, especially the BROSR. I've never been quiet about that. And it works like it should: oldschoolers find the game focused on story in a way they appreciate, while storygamers like the structure and how it helps generate unexpected outcomes. The logic of Crescendo is extremely old school. The results are pure story.

And nowhere is this more obvious than the role of the Weaver. When I first named the role, I thought of it as an old-school judge with a slight twist: it was his job to interpret all the journal entries read out loud during Hitting the Books. His primary job was to weave the random journal entries from everyone into something coherent. The general shape of the story was not the Weaver's business. So long as we were at this more intimate scale, that was fine.

But then

I added in 1:1 time, interlude play, and I opened the game up to twelve different people. I am currently running the game for nine. Which is absolutely crazy! I've never done anything like this for a storygame! Crescendo scales the additional players really nicely, and the interlude play sings with 5+ people. Some of the best gameplay I've ever had in my life has been in that in between PBP stuff. It's amazing to see how people cook up these situations, and it's been a real genuine pleasure to be the Weaver for these moments.

As it turns out,

scale matters. Crescendo's Hitting the Books mechanics, which create manageable chaos at 1-3 players, absolutely balloons at anything higher than three. Which means that what was originally a somewhat meandering story goes completely chaotic. The players are doing what they're supposed to be doing. The story should cohere, and the thematics, I found, were lacking in a specific way that I knew was not the player's fault. They have been going at 11 the whole freaking time, and it's been beautiful.

The fault should

be obvious: The role of the Weaver has not adapted to the new ludological environment. The players are not going to naturally cohere at the scale that Crescendo now operates in. The Weaver does not live up to his name, now. The Weaver originally was meant to be much more similar to an oldschool Judge.

With the increased scale and the addition of between session play, the Weaver has more material to work with. And it is his job to do so.

And it can all be fixed very simply.

Here's the new formula for the Chapter Session:

• The Weaver picks a player and uses the consequences of their actions during interlude play to challenge their Beliefs.
• The player uses their Beliefs and the Setting's Myth to respond to the Weaver. It's a verbal puzzle. You have to solve the metaphysical and material aspects of the problem presented by the Weaver.
• Once the player is done responding, the Weaver uses the consequences of their actions to challenge another player's Beliefs, possibly using SEEN and GOSS.
• Players can roll dice to challenge what's going on. It always randomly resets the situation after rolling, whether you win or lose.
• The randomness is determined by everyone's journals, when they Hit the Books. This means that the randomness begins to converge after a long, long long time.

• Once the session is done, it is wrapped up by Hitting the Books, to see how the actions of the session have created unexpected consequences.

The benefits

of this are powerful. The players' actions from between sessions are validated because they are directly addressed. This creates a loop between interlude play and its chapter session. You now have a unified story going on, across the weeks. And then... the journal pull creates consequences none of us could have seen coming, forcing the players to go address the fallout in the next week of interlude play. The players have to go address the consequences of their actions in the next week of interlude play. Which then blows up in the next chapter session.

This will make the Weaver inherently start drawing the threads together, before the game explodes it back out again, twisting the story into unexpected directions... which are based upon the players' journalings!

By making

the Weaver the active bridge between Interlude scheming and Chapter friction, Crescendo doesn't lose its old-school logic or its storygame heart. It finally lets nine people sit at a table, spin their own threads, and watch as the tapestry builds into something totally unexpected, new, and hauntingly beautiful.