Last year sometime, I took the “Ronnies” course, which involved reading game texts, watching play, and thinking about the connections between them. There was even homework! The capstone of the course was designing a game around a theme (“Red Meat”) in 24 hours and getting it to play. The idea that came to me was a game called Arenas of the Old City (“Throw them red meat and they will be content for a while, licking their chops!”) where you’re a gladiator in fantasy not-Rome: “Your arena is one of many, a place where citizens of the Old City come to be entertained by you and your colleagues. It’s probably owned by some patrician or another, either to offer lowbrow entertainment to placate the plebeians, flatter the equerries, or impress patrician peers. It may pride itself on avant-garde extravaganzas or be content with middlebrow fare.”
I ran it for Ron and a classmate, and it was fun but not quite complete; I think it took about twenty minutes for the game to run out of juice because the arena rules were clunky. In class, Ron had said, “The motivation now is that the thing is real. It exists even though you haven’t made it yet. It’s a good sign when the amount of writing on the pages overwhelms what’s printed on them.” I regarded the game as an entertaining enough classroom exercise. I edited it a little and then put it back on the shelf until last weekend, when my buddy Brandon sent me an e-mail that said, “Hey, I know I said I’d run something for common hour ‘D&D’ this week, but I have an important faculty meeting I need to attend.” So I opened up “Arenas” and revised it some more until it I thought it would get me an hour of play. This from my class notes seems apt: “Design for where you are for whatever you want to do right now.”
Five players, the regular gang of students that has coalesced over the past year of weekly play. We had finished a game I was calling Greyhawk of Many Things that started last semester and had played a few one-shots since then, including one a student ran. “What are we playing today?” Arenas of the Old City; you’re a gladiator, it’ll be fun.
They created characters, choosing from among gladiators, demagogues, charioteers, and beast-masters and accruing debt for their choice of level, age, health, knowledge, and social class. We got Sephronius Crassus, a patrician gladiator (level 4); Kuon Lavreus Longinus, an equerry gladiator (level 4); Particus, a legendary (level 6) plebeian demagogue; Gladius Fidias Killus, a plebeian gladiator (level 4), and Riot III (I decided she was a foreign barbarian we called Riotus Tertius), a plebeian beast-master (level 2) whose parents were very sick. The rules told each player to say (a) how they felt about the city or the arena, and (b) what their relationship with one another PC was like. I put it all on the classroom whiteboard. That took us about twenty minutes.
Then I rolled for the situation in the city using the table in the game; we got barbarians roaming the countryside, the Senate trying to curry favor with the people, Easterners coming to the arenas for some weird religious reason, and the Supreme Sacerdote one of our regulars. Still looking for the opening hook; how do the different classes feel about things? I rolled the extremes on the reaction table, which the players found hugely amusing. So the plebeians were rioting in the streets, looking for those dratted Eastern cultists, and to deal with it the patricians had elected a dictator with the full support of the equerries. Now I could picture what was going on.
From my previous run of the game, I knew that it was important to have the situation in the city push against the players. So I said that there was an angry mob outside the arena who want to break in and wreck things because they might be harboring Eastern cultists. I told the patrician gladiator that his dad owned the place but let him run it; what do you do? Put on some sort of gladiator pantomime showing that we’re against the Easterners too, maybe. Particus the demagogue wound up going out first to talk to the mob and being forced by some of them to lead them to loot the Senate. Meanwhile, Killius tried to wow the crowd by fighting a bull, but when it trampled him, he got hurt and the crowd thought that was hysterical. Riotus rode the bull away from the arena to make sure they didn’t find her sick parents taking refuge in the arena’s stables, and when one of the rioters at the Senate threw a Molotov cocktail, I mean a not-Greek firebomb, the Capitol building caught on fire and gave Particus a chance to get back to the arena.
All of that was a round of action with everyone having a chance to do something. I could have done another round of outside-the-arena play, roping Particus into the political stuff at the Capitol building and doing more with the crowd outside the arena, but that’s not what the game is about, at least not yet.
Because the show must go on! The rules told us to set the mood for the crowd. I said the crowd is violent, but one of the players pointed out that the entertainment value of Killius getting trampled might have made them just seethe instead. We all agreed that the equerries were offended and the patricians were feeling punitive. We rolled for Sephronius’s dad, who was feeling hopeful. A -5 Purse! “What does that mean?” Unless you do something, you’ll wind up further in debt! “Uh oh.”
We had time for two “acts” in the show, which involve the players pooling dice to create little vignettes of arena performance. For the first act, Kuon dressed as Heracles and strangled a lion while Particus narrated. That went very well! Then in act two, Killius went up against a bull again, with a trained monkey riding the bull, Sephronius there to help him. The crowd loved it, particularly the part where Killius got gored again and the monkey made “I’m the champion” gestures! All in all, they made enough Gold to give everyone a modest payout, with Sephronius in charge of handing it out.
“Are we playing this again next week?” Sure, if you want to. “Yeah, I like this character.” Okay, so we’ll play this again? Chorus of agreement. Delightful. I really enjoyed this game.
