My Life with Master (30-01-21)

 

I’m not really ready to write anything about this but unless I play it my recollection will just get worse, and right now I'm unlikely to play it so...

I picked this up as I had seen people raving about how original and influential it was, I tried to purchase it from its own site, but its so old (2003) I ended up being sent the pdf by the actual author! The thing it reminds me of the most is Sorcerer and the designer (Paul Czege) cites Ron Edwards as his big inspiration.

The player characters are the minions of some evil genius type like Victor Frankenstein, and the few rules that there are serve to shape a story that will end in the master’s death at their hands. 

The Master is mechanically represented by a Fear value, the environment’s ability to resist them is embodied as Reason, the Minions have Self Loathing and Weariness and their one saving grace, which will cause the master’s doom is Love. The players and GM design the master and their characters in a collaborative fashion with a few elegant rules for defining abilities and character.

The game is then played in Scenes with each player taking one in turn, these tend to end on a dice roll (which will push up at least one of their stats) before moving onto the next player. The balance of stats dictates much of what happens - indeed it's when someone manages to resist Master’s command (which wont happen till their Love has increased) that the end game begins.

It feels like a cleverly calibrated story machine, based on an analysis of these kind of horror movies. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a meaningful set of rules before, as in so intentionally expressive of a take on the world.

Oh and its worth saying, the game makes no effort to tell you what the rules mean, it just hits you with them.
 

Greg Costikyan's MLWM blogpost  is also really interesting…

“To put it another way, a standard RPG is character-centric; its rules define a set of abilities that each character possesses, and the rest is up to the gamemaster and players to negotiate. Master is, by contrast, narrative-centric; its rules define a narrative arc from which there is no escape, and the rest is up to the gamemaster and players to negotiate.”

The full thing can be found here and his actual review which is equally as interesting is here.

I seem to have spent much of my evening reading around MLWM now (including tangentially finding out much more about GC and ordering his book on Uncertainty In Games) - this is from an interview with Paul Czege:

I think intentionally designed RPGs can be better at changing people’s behaviors and beliefs than other media. Playing an RPG imprints its template for how the world works deeply into your brain. My Life with Master infects players with its understanding of the workings of controlling relationships, and how to get out of them. Imagine the social and economic impact of a truly fun roleplaying game that infects players with an ability to resist powerful advertising messages and more consistently make purchasing decisions they feel good about in retrospect.

The full interview is here

Fascinating stuff, I definitely have to actually play this one day.

Mork Borg (28-01-21)

 

As much a work of art as game I think, a punk zine aesthetic with prestige format production values; varied paper types, embossed cover etc, it is a beautiful little artifact. Its random tables seem as much evocative performance as actual rules, not to slight the content. Everything is both incredibly concise and super expressive. I feel like you could open it and just start playing.

‘A doom metal album of a game. A spiked flail to the face. Rules light, heavy everything else.’

Like the VtM core rule book it starts with lore presented directly, a dozen pages or so of a world inspired by metal and medieval millennialism, more Bosch than Tolkien.

The rules are fairly simple and I was going to say hark back to D&D (I feel, with limited knowledge that the system is inspired by Knave and the whole OSR thing - having not actually read Knave yet, though I have dipped into Rakehell) but that may be lazy thinking on my part.

On the face of it it's not terribly mechanically interesting, save that it throws in random tables with eclectic results wherever it feels like it. Random is king. It screams, 'Just roll it! Now!' It feels very anti-math, anti-system.

For action resolution its a roll greater than or equal to a Difficulty Rating system. Throw 1d20 and add the relevant Ability, a normal difficulty being DR 12 with ability scores range from -3 to +3. Abilities (there are 4; Agility, Presence, Strength, Toughness) are rolled like D&D stats on 3d6, but you simply keep the bonus part (a 13 say would give you +1) and throw away the roll.
Like PbtA the enemies don’t roll (I think), the player simply rolls their attack & defence each round, giving and/or taking damage as the dice dictate.

The one stand-out rule character wise is ‘omens’ which are much like fortune points in Conan (re-roll one die, do maximum damage etc) except you are not awarded them but rather have d2 or whatever each day.

I wonder what it would be like to play, I suspect the appropriate way would be with loads of random tables, yet the sample adventure is not really like that, it has a fixed floor plan with some nice details linking its contents.

Oh and how could I forget (because the mad formatting!) - the Calender of Nechrubel. You roll to see when the world will end, each day the GM rolls to see if a misery is activated. Miseries are presented as Psalms. “6:6 And the unnamed enter the earth, passing through the Veil as it is sundered by Daejmon, the left underling of Nechrubel.”

Here’s rpg designer Chris Bisette rolling up 2 Mork Borg characters.

And here’s its own brilliant character generator - its a one click wonder of a thing!

And and here's the official Mork Borg website with shop links etc.

Conan (23-01-21)

I actually read this quite some time before Feng Shui but I've just rolled up a character using the Modiphius webapp and skimmed the action mechanics again to write this up now.

This is the Modiphius Conan game from 2017 using their '2d20 system', with the unwieldy subtitle 'Adventures in an age undreamed of' (which always makes me think of a Chris Morris bit from the IT Crowd). It is a beautifully illustrated book, with just over 400 pages providing the rules and plenty of resources for adventuring in Robert E Howard's Hyborea, including a starter adventure.

Character creation is detailed and evocative with each stage of the process involving assigning or modifying stats as the result of some background story consequence.

You start by picking your homeland, then your basic attributes (Strength, Awareness, Brawn, Coordination, Intelligence, Personality & Willpower), modify these according to ‘Aspects’ (Fast & Fit, Eagle-eyed, Socially Adept etc), then roll or pick Caste (social class) and so on. The system can clearly produce a really varied range of characters with interesting details including story hooks in the form of  Events with Traits which double as a device for the player to regain Fortune Points.

Most characters start each session with 2 Fortune Points, these can be spent on bonus dice for skill tests, gaining additional actions in combat or influencing the story in some way. The GM awards Fortune Points to the players throughout a session as rewards for achieving aims, good role playing etc.

The character I rolled up was from the Priesthood caste and got the 'A place in need of Guidance' event resulting in the ‘Shrine Guardian’ trait. 

I could potentially invoke this trait in play by having members of my scattered congregation appear looking for help, or make the noble nemesis of my faith be the friend of some NPC we are bargaining with, and thus have the GM replenish my Fortune Points as a result. Note there is not much guidance on the specifics so its  very much reliant on player creativity and GM ruling.

 

For me the standout game mechanic is Momentum.

Skill tests are a little like the White Wolf Storyteller system of rolling dice against a target number and counting the number of successes. The difficulty of a task dictates how many successes are required, and in the default situation the character gets 2d20 to try to achieve that. A success is any die roll under the sum of the relevant attribute and skill values. 

For every success more than the quantity required for the task the player gets a point of momentum. This can be used immediately or stored in the party pool for later (to a maximum of 6). Momentum can be spent by anyone to gain extra dice for a skill test, extra damage dice, inhibit an enemy action, glean more detailed information from some inquiry roll, or increase the quality or scope of an action.

This sounds like a lot of fun to me and judging by Seth Skorkowsky's review it facilitates team play and is conducive to the heroic action outcomes you'd find in the source material (as you can boost your actions up to cut heads clean off etc).

The GM has their own version of Momentum - Doom Points. In general the game is rigged in the players' favour; they always win initiative, weak enemies are downed in one blow etc. Doom points provide the GM with a systematized method for overriding this on dramatically appropriate occasions. They start with as many as the sum of all the players' Fortune Points and more are added as a result of player actions or circumstantial effects. Like momentum, doom is represented by a pool of physical tokens on the table, likely contributing tension as the pool builds.

I'm sure there are a load more interesting rules in Conan, but without rereading that whole big book I'll need to leave them for now. Overall it looks like a fun game with plenty of interesting systems for emulating the Conan stories, although I don't remember playing any rpgs back in the day with such meta-gaming systems at their core, so I have no real idea of what that would be like.