I watched Pan’s Labyrinth on the weekend for the first time. Liked it, mostly. The ending left me feeling rather distant to the whole thing. Anyway, this made me start thinking a bit about many of the modern fantasy and sci-fi books and movies that I’ve read and watched. One of the more common trends seem to be that the “fantastical” elements of the premise are really extended metaphors for the main protagonists and often at the denouncement of the characters, these whole other fantastical elements are dramatical changed along with the characters. As long as these fantastical elements are self-coherent and consistent, I generally like these kind of stories. Stuff like the novels of Philip K. Dick, Jeff Noon, Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman. However if they are not coherent, they become nothing more than a “visual candy” or a dream (still Alice in Wonderland is one my favourite stories).
But what if this concept could be turned into a roleplaying game, where the setting and the characters are closely tied and as the characters evolve, so does the setting, eventually leading to the characters denouncement and resolution of the setting’s fantastical elements? I put together the bare bones of such a system after the jump. What do you think? Would you play it?
You create a player character with several elements to his personality. These elements can manifest in the game as fantastical “otherworld” (or “high science”) elements that are tied to the character. As the players progress through the game and their characters develop, so do these elements change and evolve and even new one’s get introduced. The character’s themselves are mortal (or at least in terms of supernatural powers are mortal), this is important. These elements are not fictions of the characters mind, but actually exist. Ones that get introduced at character creation, are part of the setting. Elements that get introduced later are “unseen” or come from another place and cannot stay long in our world.
The goal of the players is that they must somehow, unlock the mystery behind these fantastical elements and their relationship to them. It’s important to realise that this isn’t a Call of Cthulhu type of game where the character must maintain their sanity. I guess the balancing act for the characters is that they stay in this world and that they are not consumed by the elements the players have intentionally or unintentionally introduced.
But this is a very high level concept and I started trying to drill it down into actual game mechanics. I think a game like this would have to be sitting somewhere in the conflict/scene resolution range as opposed to the standard popular task resolution. The system would also cover the actual adventure and campaign, not just individual character-events. I think using cards and/or counters would be a good approach. Dice would take from the storytelling aspect of it.
So this is what I imagined.
Characters are not defined by traits. You do not define your character by what they can do, but instead by how they are connected to everything else. Your character starts mortal, no super-powers or extraordinary abilities so to speak. Instead you define a number of relationships. Also, your character has no history or background. It’s as if your character woke up in this life with no memories except for the vague relationships with the world around them. I like this idea because then the players are driven to explore the premise and their connection to it. I used the same idea in Reboot for the same purpose.
The first relationship you define for your character would be the relationship with the other player characters (PCs). The relationships between the PCs should form a circle so that every PC is connect to every other PC by a number of jumps never exceeding the number of players. This forms a simple pattern and patterns allow people to get a handle on things. If a player drops out later, a new relationship must be formed/added to keep the circle complete, likewise a new player will break some relationships and create new ones (what your not my real dad?).
Then each player creates two to three relationship to the “real world”. This introduces or defines an element of the setting and the character. It can be weird, strange and wonderful. Even though we talk about the mundane or real world, it doesn’t mean it can’t, in itself, be fantastical. A player could could define a relationship as “works in a large mega-corporation”, this introduces mega-corporations into the setting. Another player could define a relationship as “priest of the nobber religion”, this introduces a religion and his flock. The player could define a relationship as “flying ship builder” and now we have flying “ships” etc. There are three types of mundane relationships here: profession (how they survive), obsessions and people. Children characters cannot have profession, they are defined by the people around, their family and guardians, while adults by their job and how they live. Players must then decide which one is positive, negative and neutral or perhaps this can be defined randomly or by GM choice. I’m not sure which is better. Example, choosing “works in large mega-corporation” as the positive one might mean your character is a high up manager, even on the board, as the negative one might mean being a corporate “slave” working long hours for little pay and neutral might mean an okay job that pays the bills and provides a moderate lifestyle. These mundane relationships cannot be described as goals, they are give and take. The player can use them, but then they use the player. The corporation may have secret plans that the player gets pulled into while at the same time the player may be stealing technologically powerful items to aid the other players. The GM uses these player relationships to create the setting, the mundane world, where the players start from. Next the players must create their secret, hidden or other-worldly relationships. Children get more than adult characters. These relationships might be “impregnated by aliens”, “shifted out of time”, “lost heir of demon-bloodline”, “inherited magical gift”, “key to dimensional gateways”, “experimented on”, “mutant”, etc. Again one relationship must be positive, while the other negative. These fantastical relationships are intertwined as one however unlikes the mundane relationships which are exclusive.
A potential resolution mechanic here is that, each time you do something for one of your relationships, you get a number of counters. Every time you draw on a relationship to achieve something, you lose counters. Positive relationships give you more counters, negative give you less (and obviously neutral somewhere in the middle of the two). Then, when you want to do something not involving a relationship, the GM can either let you do it, veto it being impossible or breaking the premise or tell you the cost in counters. A character’s fantastical cannot be used to gain counters till it is resolved (see the next paragraph)! You might be able to draw on counters from your relationship with the other player-characters too but I’m not sure what the drawback of that is. Perhaps you can also reduce the cost of a task if you can draw apon a relationship to aid you.
Now the interesting part, I think. Each player character is a key. Or rather there is a “key” buried in their fantastical relationship. The key is just a concept, it doesn’t have to have any bearing on the setting, instead it provides the players with a goal. To find the key, the players must complete three tasks based on that relationship while maintaining their mundane relationships. I picked three merely because of it’s symbolic use in stories. Their mundane relationships can be part of the key. This means each player character gets focused on for a number of adventures/sessions in turn. If the players win the key, the player gains power over their fantastical relationship, the fantastical element can change dramatical to accommodate this, and find a balance between the mundane and fantastical. The players get a say in how this occurs. If they fail they become cursed and either the mundane or the fantastical wins out and they become tied to the mundane world or lost to the fantastical. Only the GM decides the consequences of this. However for the purposes of the system, the key is still completed, even if they fail. The tasks do not have to be “quests” with specific goals, the GM may never explicitly state that the players have completed a task, it’s a conceptual/story-oriented, a framework for the story to hang on.
Once all the player keys have been completed, there is the final key. The GM introduces a new fantastical relationship to all the players. This can be based off all the previous keys or be something completely new. Imagine the players as a circle of keys with a key in the centre created by the GM. This key should be sort of bigger than the others, even more explicit: a war with the mundane world, the beginning of an invasion, the crumbling of social order due to it’s influence, etc. To win this key and complete the game, they must beat nine tasks of increasing difficulty. Once it is complete, the game is over, the setting and characters have been resolved. The setting should also be completely and utterly transformed.
To get people’s create juices flowing to come up with interesting and unique mundane and fantastical relationships, I think some using “morphological forced connections” would be brilliant here. Essentially you build a table of correspondents for a number of categories, for us it probably would be a selection of genres like Space Opera, Supernatural, Mythical, Futuristic, etc. Then you randomly choose an item from each table, linking them together. This could be done randomly or the players just use it as inspiration. The book would also need lots of examples and write-ups.
Would you play with a system like this? I keep wondering if I would. The players should eventually win and this will put off a lot of people and I think in the past, it would have put me off too. But in the last few years I’ve come to love games like Universalis and Nobilis. It’s the journey thats fun, not where you stop.