I always enjoy Gothcon, and this time I received some much-needed exercise as the play-area was located a few blocks away from the main convention buildings. I may even have managed to navigate the larger layout of the city via the trams without embarrassing reversals, for the first time in my travels here.

As usual the people at Indierummet were fun to see and fun to play with, and I wrote a bit about playing some Fantasy for Real here.

Harnmaster

All through the past eight years, and to a significant extent for the past twenty-five, I’ve been fighting the idea that “situation” is defined by preparation. “Situation? Oh, that’s the thing I make that the player characters encounter.” No, that’s not what I mean. I am talking about the in-play phenomenon of all active entities in the entire actionable location (time, whatever), regardless of who made them, who plays them, and whether they are in a current scene.

That means that preparation is a highly specific and vastly diverse phenomenon whose only purpose is to contribute what is necessary beforehand, for this game, to the playable situation.

This makes these convention circumstances, if you’ll excuse the expression, a stone bitch. A game like Harnmaster + the circumstances of me bringing much more than I would to a single event for entirely non-contributing-prior people, than I’d have to bring or do for a long-term game among fellow preparers = extensive, even brutal effort. But more importantly, it’s also conceptually and procedurally difficult to reconcile “sudden adventure go” with the game’s admirably naturalistic social and geographic build-up in ordinary play.

Knowing the job, I set myself to it. I did want a big orc presence, so I chose the Bwaft location from Nasty, Brutal, and Short. Then I got confused and made up the wrong orcs, as in, all their numbers, and I couldn’t face starting over. (Recall that all of this is in tandem with preparing for late-70s RuneQuest in Edinburgh …) Fortunately, in combing through that text and “Harn stuff” online, I discovered that the nearby region at the mountain’s foothills (if you have the big Harn map, it’s I3), includes the human Taelda tribe and nomadic orcs of the right type, the Nuthuk, so now I had some content to play with, if not the convenience of the full Bwaft write-up. Rather than get all canonical with Harn barbarian tribes, my concept for the Taelda an uncritical scoop from whatever came up in an online search.

As it turned out, that particular spot is pure magic for preparation. This region of Harn is strongly affected by the presence of Ilvir, a god (or whatever) who makes mutant life in wild proliferation to no intended purpose. So these things, ivashu, are all over the place here. As I’m kind of obsessed with doing, I whipped one up using the rules in a later edition of the game:

Note that it has ethereal properties, which allowed some anchoring for magical or semi-magical topics like shamanism and astrology. I wandered through more questionable online sources in no systematic or completist way, and I found and/or made up the relationship you can find on the final page of the notebook/prep PDF above. Summarized verbally:

• Ilvir, one of the “big eight” pantheon; basically a weirdo who creates mosnters at random, worshipped by many disconnected, incoherent, ever appearing-and-disappearing cults
• Cothlynn, the local tribal name for Ilvir, interpreted in worship or at least reverence in ways that suit tribal customs and needs
• Orcs are irreligious, but I conceived of their textual shamans as ritualizing interactions with ethereals (spirits), which is pragmatically necessary in Harn

Anyway, I thought about a pile-up among human tribesmen, an orc tribe, and a “civilized” NPC, representing these different interpretations of Ilvir and probably perceiving one another as completely different, and of course that necessitates an ancient, isolated, magical site, for which I looted the magical item rules. I finalized the characters in a white heat as I was short of time (I really didn’t think through the implications of running completely original workups of both RuneQuest and Harnmaster for successive weekends). I’m also not explaining this right because prep among these, aside from the early stages of the orcs which I’d already done, was simultaneous and synergistic.

Given that all of this was much more staged than how I’d set up for long-term play, once play began, I took pains to rely on the travel procedures and related rolls. The effect was to discover, at any moment and at eventual arrival, to see which of the three groups was progresssing fastest toward the single location.

About the video: it lost sound on the first three+ hours, unknown to me at the time, so you’re only seeing the end of the final fight and closing events. I’m really sad about it because a lot of the relatively ordinary activity like nabbing some food or dealing with thick plantlife included much interaction, so we had a good strong portrait of each character by the time any confrontations began. Here’s what you need to know.

• The orcs arrived first, before the ivashu started manifesting in earnest; the humans arrived after that and didn’t spot them, but they were situated to spot the human NPC who had been unlucky during his journey and arrived last, with much less time to set up his ritual than he’d hoped
• Cultural misunderstandings and genuine conflicts of interest led to a fight with the NPC, which the orcs joined in (and if I remember correctly, they initially targeted both sides but were lucky enough not to melt down future negotiations). When it became clear that this NPC guy wasn’t going to make it to the magic site, he attempted a divine intervention which would have been quite a sight, except that the roll failed.

I should clarify that the NPC adversary was a brute for both physical combat and magic, but his rolls weren’t great, and by the time of this video, when the toughest tribesman engaged him, he’d absorbed an insane number of slingstones and arrows. As seen in the Spelens Hus game, in a way, it’s sometimes worse to be tough enough not to faint in response to a given injury, because then you’re lumbering through combat penalized by agony. This guy was looking at -30 or more to his attacks and defenses as well as +10 to the d6 injury-check at this point.

My energy definitely failed out toward the end – it was a long push that day, with a couple of sudden alarms and running around just before the session. So my ability to play more actively sort of crested at the halfway point and eventually suffered some less good judgment calls, which you can see in the video.

• I discouraged potential conflict between orc and human player-characters, which is silly because the whole situation was about how they might or might not successfully interact.
• I minimized the dangers of the ivashu, like their toxic scent. It was mainly based on players’ rolls, granted, but the tasks should have been a higher scale of what success and failure meant.

I will take this opportunity to give honor to the two players whose somewhat mystical characters gorked out into trance right in the middle of a savage, bloody fight as unpredictable monsters manifested all around them; not like a little one-round trance either, but full-out unconscious for the duration.

Dallas

Preparation is a whole different animal for this game! Which I stress here because the situation of play is composed of exactly the same elements: location, time, backstory, and entities with varying loyalties and goals.

The procedure in this case does include one person who knows a great deal of context, i.e., like Harnmaster, but also that each other person has their own little “world” composed of several characters to play and interpret as what one might think of as GM-ish, unlike Harnmaster. In a convention context, the task is to get that point across as quickly and pragmatically as possible, and as well as possible considering that one is communicating with nine people.

I used the scenario, “Down Along the Coast,” #3 in the book, It’s fairly dense, including J.R. running a complex ploy, an intense ecological controversy, and a stealth or “misunderstand-y” romantic complication. Some of the victory conditions are zero-sum and others are more cooperative or potentially compatible.

I want to lay out one of most important stepe in preparation: the GM’s cards as assigned by the scenario. The book doesn’t fully explain whether they’re all face-down to start and maybe implies that they should all start face-down. I chose to begin face-up with things that everyone knew existed, like the Local Press and similar, and everything else face-down. I think that’s really clear and understandable, although, on reflection, I realized that if the GM plays “obvious” things as obvious, then they would get flipped face-up almost immediately in the first turn anyway.

It must be acknowledged that the characters were passed out at random, and the player with the cowboy hat received J.R. Who said the universe is not watching?

I preserved a lot of my interactive introductory process, emphasizing that each player fully plays everyone who’s face-up in front of them (and flip the face-down ones up when they act). They understood it well, and more so as we played, and sometimes the experience was a bit like the Iliad, in the sense that the Ewings are full of their own drama and problems, but they are also “above the fray” of the lesser mortals struggling and suffering in the context of their divine spats and priorities, so the lesser mortals receive at least equal and sometimes more attention and play overall.

I did my best to present the basics of turn and action resources, in the sense of “just enough” so the more detailed aspects and resolution procedures could be folded in as we went along.

i tried to get across a tricky concept: that a controlled NPC or entity does not have to know they are “allied” with a Ewing, because all that matters is that their decisions and efforts work toward that player’s Ewing’s benefit and specific scenario goals. Therefore it’s up to the player to decide, for example, whether the FBI gets involved for reasons of their own which turn out to work in Lucy’s favor, or conversely, Lucy knows a guy who knows a guy who can lay the hammer down in response to her request or directive.

As with the Spelens Hus game, J.R. prevailed although for a while there it seemed he would not, Cliff proved to be a formidable adversary hampered by his conflicting loyalties, and the female characters were well-positioned to leverage their goals via others’ actions and to affect others’ success.

I do not consider myself to be a skilled Dallas player or organizer yet, but this was a big step up from the first try. After playing the included scenarios, probably more than once, I’ll try my hand at scenario creation – I know that I’d like to see something for which Jock and Sue Ellen were both featured more centrally and with more at risk for themselves and others.