I’ve been playing again since taking a three months break from playing and thinking really hard about how I want to approach this activity and if I even want to continue doing it. One of the important improvements is retracting my investment in all “community” aspects of roleplaying and the related madness, and focusing on just playing with other people that want to play, possibly in person and outside of any convention setting. I thought I was doing this already, but apparently when you’re “in” something you struggle to see how much you’re affected by it.
Talking about myself aside, one of the games that has resuscitated my enthusiasm in play is Fantasy for Real. I’ve played four times recently, all of them one-shots (I’d like to play a longer series, but the opportunity hasn’t arisen. Maybe this one will go longer!), and I’d like to focus on the latest one, which happened yesterday.
Andrea and Alex rolled up two goblins (Stizzy and Tacky). Andrea was really into playing a fast-talking type, so Stizzy had Convincing at Great, while Alex wanted to get into the magic system, so he shifted Magic at Great.
So I started making up the pickle, and I rolled six components! What resulted was a clusterfuck of a romantic relationship, two spells, Gibbers in the woods, and two substances! Geez. I realized later that I forgot to introduce the second spell into play, but even playing with five components, this was a lot of irons in the fire. I decided to connect up everything in a single “node”, with almost everything affecting everything else and centering on the rivalry in Zorandor between Strongholme and Shining House, a cave-like home to dwarf-like goblins in the surrounding mountains, both fiefdoms’ heirs being in love with each other, and multiple characters being either addicted to alcohol or to tripping on purple mushrooms.
Tacky ended up getting himself involved with one of the spells in the backstory and the local wizard, Vazzo (italianizing Vats, the first wizard in the authors table). Alex actually used an Elan roll on his intro, as he wanted to start with picklet content, and I decided to place Tiberius, a wizard he was hunting, inside of a school managed by Vazzo himself. Vazzo was tied to pickle content, selling spells to Strongholme to teleport into the mountain vault and steal the goblins’ doubloons. Tacky ended up enlisting as Vazzo’s assistant and being dragged into the scheme, then through a series of bad rolls, the final one regarding a spell to … “free the bowels” of the goblin queen, then being severely punished for his greed and stupidity and thrown to “certain death” from the mountainside by the goblins.
Stizzy started by attempting to “free” the cow-horses from the local ranch (in his mind, they were being oppressed by the Strongholme humans), and was carried by force into the Stronghold prisons by Chamberlain Ruggiero, a local noble who was out with his riders. There he met with Adele and Gianni, the star-crossed lovers, who he convinced to free him, and Alalai, a man driven mad by the Gibbers. Through a series of bad rolls and a visit to the forest, he got entangled with Gibbers and purple mushroom visions, but managed to snap Alalai (real name Mandricordo) out of his trance long enough for the man to decide to sacrifice himself to let him fly away. After that and finding proof of the doubloon heist as a magical tracker on Adele’s belt, he gained the trust of Sara, the queen of the goblins, and installed himself as an advisor.
Stizzy and Tacky only ended up meeting at the very end, when Stizzy, who had gained the local goblins’ trust, was presented with Tacky, who was caught in the mountain vaults as part of a doubloon heist. Stizzy proceeded to pretend not to know him and joined the lynching.
The first interesting thing that happened is that, despite us not seeing any of the “conclusions” (whatever that means) to any of the pickle components, despite us interacting with 5 out of 6. Stizzy’s almost-certain-death felt like a natural ending point. One character had gained something, the other had lost something, or possibly died. Even though the pickle itself remained unresolved, the story of these two characters felt like it was at a natural end, so we ended it. I really like how chaotic and unresolved the situation was when we left it, and I only provided a minimal epilogue of what happened next in the region, as Stizzy was advisor to Sara.
What really doesn’t come out through the summary is the amount of really stupid and borderline childish things that came out during this session, some of which completely untranslatable, as they had to do with a rhyming scheme that was established early by Vazzo’s idiosyncratic and a bit nutty behavior. It seems like every mage or person of note in this area is named according to some sort of rhyming scheme, for whatever reason, which introduced a lot of language-based comedy. I actually don’t want to get into some of the specifics as they should probably remain within the room they were said.
The level of stupidity that we indulged in at this table would have probably been dysfunctional at any other table, with any other game, but for some reason, it worked: the jokes were not out of context or out of boredom, but just interacting with the absurd nature of this place: idiots on giant horses, everyone being addicted to magic mushrooms or alcohol, an eccentric wizard smuggling doubloons, a questionable love affair … it felt validating the wackiness and adding vividness onto what we were doing. And a lot of this comedy came through characters acting and saying something in the situation and actually affecting it.
To conclude, I realized before playing that I don’t really understand what “whimsy” means, as it’s not really a word I use much and it doesn’t exist in my native language. But maybe I do understand? Tacky and Stizzy did what they felt like doing, we ended the session because we felt like doing it, we made all the wizard names rhyme with their titles because we felt like doing it. We weren’t thinking much of adhering to any sort of standard to what any of this should look like, and it ended up being beautifully chaotic and unexpected. Maybe that’s what it means?
