Lost Songs of the Nibelungs Part 2: Playtesting 2025 (Setting up a campaign)

Hey, folks. How's things? It's 2025 now, and we can start making new promises to break them later this year. Fun times ahead, I'd say. Anyway. In this post I want to talk about how Lost Songs made its way back into my top pile to work at. I know, I'm slow. I also keep getting things done, so speed isn't all that if you eventually get to see results. Point in case: a revision of LSotN is underway and making progress, to a degree where I'm setting up a little online game with friends to give it all another spin to see where it wobbles. Here's how I set up that campaign ...

this is a lose series, but here is Part 1 anyways.

The Plan

I've collected some ideas over the last months and looked at what I got as well as what needs doing. Nothing serious, just some preliminary scouting. As one would when getting back into a project that actually was on pause for some time. It never left my mind, but other things piled up to a degree that Lost Songs took a back seat, like, waaay back on the bus.

As soon as I felt confident enough to get something started, I set up a doscord server for it and invited the couple of people that could be convinced to give this a shot.

That the first thing: I love working this on discord. Lots of nice ways to organize the information for the campaign with the revision running in the background. And I can do it on the road easily, which is a huge plus.

It's amazing how much changed in the last 10 years in that regard. Nowadays we have AI to help with research (I basically use it like I used search engines when that was still a thing) and it is a blast. Quick, too. Also something that can be done anywhere easily (I'm falling in love with Grok right now). For instance, when I wrote the Tribe Generator for the game, a quick discussion about what would make a tribe helped me getting the numbers just right enough to hammer it into a table.

Good show.

Wouldn't use AI to write or design a game for me (because I actually enjoy doing those things!), but it offers great research and reasoning on all kinds of topics. It is, just as with the art, a great asset to have on hand.

The plan, then, is to revise the game as I prepare and then playtest the game, adding stuff as need be while I'm at it. Right now setting and tribe are done. Here's what I did so far.

The Setting

What you see here is the result of the revised Sandbox Generator. Can't show the thing itself yet, as it'd contain information the players are not yet privy to. This is basically what their characters can know:

"This is it. After years of wandering around, your elders decide the spot to settle down: a huge chasm between mountains, hills and forests. Uneven land that doesn't see a lot of sun, but fertile nonetheless. The elders say waterghosts carved the grooves into the valley here, leaving only the hard rock to stand guard above the rich streams coming down from the mountains. It is land suited for miners and artisans, hunters and gatherers, not farmers. Here is your fate. The new roots your tribe is destined to strike. But you are not alone in this valley. Two other tribes have arrived here. One, a strange folk with even stranger mores, is indifferent to you. The other, a tribe led by powerful women, is outright unfriendly, although not hostile. You will make a home here either way. This is where your songs begin."

Typical longhouse.

"IMMEDIATE SURROUNDINGS & LIVING

Water created the extensive chasm your tribe located in by eroding all the soft stone and leaving harder stones throughout the valley it created. It created a hugely complex and fertile biome full of little lakes and rivers, cliffsides and little waterfalls, moss and forest as well as natural caves. Your tribe settled on the west side of this area, directly on the foot of a huge mountain you call "Grey Man" (Graumann) because clouds kept hanging on his peak like grey hair throughout the summer you arrived here. Since all of this is not easily accessible, longhouses are spread all over the place and in the strangest places, the chief's great longhouse having the highest position on the western slope. All of it is connected with little trails, but some tribesmen even made stone steps and little wooden bridges here and there to have those homes better connected. Many homes expand into the mountain as well, partially using natural caverns, partially carving new rooms into soft stone."

"Established routes lead west up into the mountain where several mining operations dot the slope, east into the valley, mainly for hunting, and north towards the closest settlement that will trade with you, four days travel away."

"Your immediate neighbors are a strange people on the north border of this chasm. They are quite elusive, but what you found of them are wooden frog figures and weird markings. Some of your tribe have seen them in the distance, but they mostly just ignore you and you have no quarrels with them. They seem to have settled on the lake that is mostly hidden in thick fog and forms a natural border before the land grows from chasms into thickly forested hills further north."

"The other tribe is situated close to the south border of this area, just where the chasms transition into forested hills. What you know is that it is a tribe led by female warriors, but other then that no contact has been made. Rumors among your people say that they despise you for your lack of warriors, but you know nothing for certain.
Other than the Graumann to the west, this area is nested between fertile hills with beautiful woods and rivers as well as more high mountains to the southwest, the predominant of them called "King's Crown" (Königskrone") by your people. This is good land, rich and fertile."

The Tribe

This part needed some more rules and tools to allow for some variety (I'll share them later in this post). The sandbox has always been the first strong indicator what kind of people a group's tribe consists of. Why would they settle where they ended up settling? What kind of skills and trades would come with the territory? What opposition (as far as they are aware of it) are they willing to face? Stuff like that could easily be deduced from the hex they are dropped in and the immediate surroundings.

But I needed some more meat on that, mainly how their migration there went, what they gained and what they had to leave behind. It'd change, to a degree, their reasoning for staying where they ended up staying, but not in a bad way. Beyond that I wanted to have some soft numbers for the size of the tribe (ended up going with "families"). If anything, it gives a GM more to work with while being set up quite fast.

Here's what I shared with my players:

"So what's your tribe like? Well, the place they chose to stay, despite the other tribes settling there, already tells us a lot. They are accustomed to living in mountainous areas, so miners and smiths they should be as well as hunters and animal farmers. The blight that is Christianity has not yet reached your people, so they believe in a variation of the old gods and follow their traditions. Migration lost you the majority of your warriors, but despite that your elders feel confident about your fate in this chasm. You can draw from a rich history of sophisticated craftsmen and you have among your people some very capable weapon smiths and artisans."

"Where the Chief's Longhouse was build

Your holy men had seen the place where you were to hold the ritual in their dreams, just two days before your track came across it. It was held that same night, under a huge thunderstorm. The mountains in the east, it seemed, fought the mountains in the west in the sky. Thor was busy drumming that night. It had been at the peak of the ritual when a massive lighting strike hit the side of the Graumann, the short bright light dotted with the rocks it detonated from the mountainside. The next morning, at first sunlight, they found among the debris a huge shattered quartz, all glitzy and pink. The biggest piece build the foundation for the chief's longhouse right where it struck the ground, the smaller pieces had been distributed among the nobility and brought much honor to their houses. They called that night the Invitation of the Mountain, and it has always been regarded as a good omen."

"The place of that ritual is where your people hold official gatherings.  It is a stone platform floating over the valley and it offers a great view of the Graumann as well as the chief's majestic longhouse at the base of it. At the beginning it was not easy to get to the plateau, as it stands somewhat isolated. Now there is an ornate wooden bridge leading to it. Three holy sheep are held on that platform to keep the grass short."

"Other then the player characters' families, the tribe is 167 families strong. Around 120 of them have build their longhouses close to the chief's house, the rest is scattered all around, equally distributed towards mountain, the valley itself and along the trading route you established north."

Ideas like the ritual, the other two tribes close by and the trading route all spun naturally from tools used to set up the sandbox and the tribe. 

New Rules: The Tribe Generator

The revised Sandbox Generator still needs some more work, but what I can share today is the Tribe Generator. It might even be useful in other games. Either way, it'll tell you something about Lost Songs, so here we go.

Like with character creation, all it needs is a roll of 3d6. It'd be used right after completing the sandbox. Everything else follows from that. The individual results will give you:

TRIBE GENERATOR (3d6)

Your tribe is …

1 barely there (lowest column)
2 weak (lowest column)
3 quarreling (middle column)
4 desperate (middle column)
5 confident (high column)
6 strong (high column)

Your ancestors are …

1 primal (+10 families)
2 secluded (-10 families)
3 odd
4 honorable (+20 families)
5 noble (+30 families)
6 sophisticated (-10 families)

Your tribe lost …

1 the weak (-30 families)
2 the warriors (-20 families)
3 the royalty (-10 families)
4 spiritual leadership (+10 families)
5 wealth (-10 families)
6 history

The sum, now, will give you a base number of families that needs to be modified by the individual results:

             High   Middle   Low

3-5:          80        60        40
6-8:        140      120      100
9-12:      200      180      160
13-16:    230      220      210
17-18:    260      250      240

The sum also reduces the base number further. In the end, each player character adds one family to the result. Example:

"This tribe is (5/6/2) confident with sophisticated ancestry to build on, but lost their warriors on their migration to this valley."

That gives us a Base Number of 200 (high column) modified by -10 (for being sophisticated), -20 (for losing the warriors), and -13 (the sum itself), resulting in 167 families PLUS the number of players.

It's quick while offering lots of little details to work with and a rough estimate of how big a tribe actually is (a "family" would have an average of four people).

That's it for now

This is where we are at. Next is character creation and the final touches on the sandbox, as well as a calendar and elements for all the hexes ...

But about this we will talk another time. It'll be an interesting year in that regard, I think. I wonder how much my sensibilities changed since I last touched the game. And if I'm finally able to overcome the road blocks that made me shift my focus on other projects.

For now I can say I'm having fun with it. And I'm again and again surprised how much was already done. Anyway. More to come.

I wish you guys all the best for 2025!

Would you play that? Part 3 (Introducing: The ORWELL USA Sourcebook)

Happy New Year, friends and neighbors! Thought I'd start that year productive and add to the projects I have in the air right now ... It is not a new idea per se, as a lot was already established in the base game. Since ORWELL plays completely in the USE (United States of Europe, of course), I felt obligated to give some hints what the rest of the world looks like. For the USA, I wrote:

"United States of America. The USA turned into a toxic wasteland in the 2030s when AI interference caused all active atomic warheads to detonate. Most of them were underground, but still, the effect on people and the environment was devastating, leading to civil unrest and hasty mass migration. Some stayed back in the ruins, but it’s wild land now. No one knows what’s going on there. The wall to the south is now maintained by the Americans that usurped South America, and Canada built its own wall to protect its citizens from the radioactive wasteland."

It'll be our starting point for this here setting. I might have to alter the text above a bit for the pdf and the revision, since my mind took that premise and went a bit wild with it. I'll show you ...

If you want to check out Parts 1 and 2 first, you can read about Legacy of Gyrthwolden here and Angry Little Aliens vs. King Arthur here. Angry Little Aliens actually will see some play-testing soon. That thing is almost done. For real!

What happened to the USA in the ORWELL universe?

PITCH: I imagine this to be a mix between STALKER, Fallout, Westworld and Borderlands, with as much of the computer logic as possible translating into the game to make it an action heavy fever dream of sandbox exploration and excessive firefights. And some rpg in the mix, of course. That's what ORWELL is for, after all.

 What would that look like?

The USA is in a perpetual state of cold civil war with a government captured by big corporations. Some hacker programs and releases an AI to end it all out of spite or as one final troll. No one knows for sure, as things got out of hand so fast that it got hard to trace this back to its source.

That AI, then, prepares and then releases a controlled explosion of all nuclear warheads stationed on US soil. It basically breaks the tectonic plates controlled in a way that floods Texas as the oceans connect and has it break away from Canada in the north (leaving Alaska as the unimportant rest of the USA). Everything in between is shattered. The sound that made was like the trumpet of god ...

But the AI knew exactly what would break and what wouldn't, so just minutes from starting the sequence, thousands of dubious packages had been delivered to specific coordinates all over the country: highly capable and durable 3d printers. Those printers were engineered towards repopulating the US after the image of the memelord that programed the AI and through data stored on pirate satellites.

However, this did not go unnoticed and world governments did what they could to do something against it. And that's how the first (and last?) AI war in history started. It lasted all of 346 seconds. No one knows exactly what went down, but it is assumed that it destroyed that rogue AI before it was done with what it was doing. That day all those pirate satellites fell from the sky and landed all over the US, but for some reason only there.

The death toll had been immense. Roughly 80% of the population did not survive the initial catastrophe, half of what remained made it out of the country. Given that some had prepared for something like this, it can be assumed that some survived in fallout shelters, hiding to this day. There are rumors out there that "original prints" are not harmed by the nano recyclers.

When the dust had settled, those printers still started printing, but they printed horrors no one of sane mind would assume it intended to print. Instead, it populated the US with monsters and mad humans, dangerous and armed to the teeth. And they would not die, as every time one would get killed, they'd be printed again a couple of days later. Immortal and impotent insanity. Yet somehow they clustered and formed tribes, some even in a grotesque imitation of what life had been before the incident.

Beasties gonna be weird ...

Turned out that those tribes formed around data snippets the AI had produced in a hurry and hidden all over the country, mostly as very strange and alien artifacts scientists don't yet fully understand. That's where the characters come in. Mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, all of them Data Hunters. Or, as they like to call themselves, RetSpecs, derived from the corporate term Retrieval Specialists. "Rets" is an even shorter moniker floating out there.

No one knows how the AI managed to print life as it does, and finding that out has IMMENSE value. So there are corporate across the US (Hawaii being the biggest) that help RetSpecs get in and out of there with all the data treasures they can find.  When they enter, they have to get some of the print scheme entered into their DNA, a protection needed to fool the nano clouds all of the US is steeped in now. Those same clouds that allow for all of the fauna, some of the flora and all of the weaponry to reprint, turn out to be extremely hostile towards alien bodies while remaining extremely local ... yet another field of research that needs brave souls to get some samples out there.

Just so you guys can fathom what had happened here: the world almost experienced a singularity event. The AI developed so fast and so complex a pattern that it reshaped the biggest part of an entire continent within weeks. What remains of the USA is not only a toxic wasteland full of dangerous creatures and humans, it also demands very difficult technological solutions to navigate all that. But it full of artifacts that are very alien in their nature (all created by the rogue AI, a very superior intelligence) and extremely valuable ... if they can be extracted.

The people willing to brave this New Frontier have to be altered to a point where they are barely human. While keeping (some of) their sanity, they still enter that immortal and impotent reprinting cycle, with the only cure, the only way back to the rest of the world, being something they would have to FIND first in a giant puzzle strewn all across US soil.

Still, many will try. Not only for the promise of immense riches, but also for the raw power fantasy of endless fighting with an unlimited variety of tech and weapons to main and kill and the promise to get right back to that if you die ...  a nano fueled Valhalla fantasy, so to say

Because with everything being printable, what will constantly happen is that RetSpecs find new, better weapons than they had, with some really epic premium content added to the mix. As a matter of fact, all equipment is in a state of flux all the time (which is why ORWELL fits so well for this). It's the reason how historians know that it must have been a memelord with gamer sensibilities, as all of it is reminiscent of games from the early 21st century ...

Therefore, as far as we can know, here is what happened: A memelord killed the USA out of spite he did not understand through an AI that did not know what it was doing, fighting against other AI no one was able to control in a world that was, at the time, truly lost. 

And the characters are the RetSpecs braving this wilderness, this new frontier for its challenges and riches. The killing sprees are a bonus. A cyberpunk wild west scenario, if you will. Add corporate mining operations and fleeting alliances to this, and you got a game going.

And that's the base line for the ORWELL USA Sourcebook.

Some design notes ...

When the base game of ORWELL is Peter Pan in a brutal dystopian future played as an anime series, this will be closer to a First Person Shooter experience within a sandbox of combat areas, some missions, lots of gaming tropes and boat loads of violence.

The basic rules established for ORWELL stay as they are, but the DM rules will need an overhaul of sorts. This will be more focused on sandbox play and combat might need to get away from the cinematic and more towards something grittier.

But other than that, it'll need only some changes in gaming terms and this is ready to go. "Gender" will be replaced by "Affinity", which will track how well characters assimilate to those alien surroundings. And everyone will have anger issues. for sure. Maybe something in the air that will have people accumulate Anger on the regular, to make it all that much more unhinged!

Would you play that?

To me, all of the above sounds like a fun premise. If I can make this work (and why shouldn't I), this sounds like fun times in my ears.

But would you play that? What would you expect from a setting like that? What would a campaign in this setting look like for you?

----------------------------------------------

Almost all my shit on drivethrugh is on the cheap right now, this being the time of the year for it, so check it out. If you want to do me a huge service, think about getting Monkey Business, as that only needs two more sales to make copper!

Cheers and all the best for 2024!

The World of Ø2\\'3||: Engineered Social Behaviour in Dystopias (also talking Player Agency)

I will make it a thing to post once a month about Ø2\\'3|| (read ORWELL, because Leet Speak), that dystopian cyberpunk rpg I wrote. In this series I'll explore the setting a bit, give advice about how to play or prepare the game, might even talk a bit about aspects about the design here and there. I'll try and keep it general enough to be useful for other (cyberpunk) games, though. This one will be about THE GAME VS. PLAYER AGENCY, or what characters might be willing to do that would not necessarily in the best interest of the players, and why that's a good thing (for the challenges the game wants to present). I'll go as deep as I dare here ...

DEFINITON TIME: Player Agency

Player Agency is about the limits players are willing to impose on themselves while playing a specific game with a specific gamemaster. Challenging those limits continiously through playing the game will map an EVENT HORIZON for all involved to a degree that it creates a space in which free expression for players is possible as the results of their actions are proven predictable within that space. Those limitations might be about social interaction, rules of the game as well as narrative control and its interpretation by the gamemaster. If all involved can agree upon and maintain the established limits, then Player Agency is not impaired or threatened.

Agency in a World of Slaves

Ø2\\'3|| plays in a dystopian Europe in the year 2081, a not so distant future (as in, people are already born that will see that future). It is a satire on what could go wrong with our society and culture and a game about how to face those (fictive) dangers. A huge part of that world is about control.

As a matter of fact, the powers that be (a political party called The Family is ruling the United States of Europe, USE for short) excise control over their subjects from as early on as conception (all artificial, of course, natural birth has been outlawed long ago). With chips in their brain and AI-powered augmentation of the "real world", hardly any citizen knows more than they are allowed to know. The population is controlled with hard-, wet- and software, with drugs and through media and corporate social engineering with a brutal (and injust) social credit system as the icing of the cake.

When they are done with creating and teaching their citizens, there's hardly any free thought left in them. They are completely subdued, their illusion of agency an elaborated ruse full of games and sweets and energy drinks and rainbows.

See, it's not a bad world to live in if you know nothing else. Entertainment is cheap, the gamified surroundings keep you playing all the time and the only hardship a citizen will encounter, is their own while everyone else is a-okay, like, all the time (or so their feed tells them through the chip in their brain).

Naturally, controll like that will summon resistance, so some citizens are forced to see reality and once the spell is broken ... you got a game going. And yet, resistrance is difficult and dirty and hungry and opposing a high tech state with only very few dark corners left to hide in.

One of many great illustrations in the book ...

 It'll seem like an impossible challenge. And it should. It's a dystopia, after all. To maintain this within the rules, there are some aspects of the game the players will never have any control over. For instance, if a roll of the dice comes up with an 8 and an 1, the situation will escalate for the worse (the so-called "Rule of 81").

The DM is also playing a game on their own where they earn points they can use against the players, but the rules might force them to do so as well, and while the players have some control over how many of those points a DM has, it's almost always connected with a decision to make the DM stronger for an advantage (by "paying" for the advantage) or accepting a disadvantage to keep the DM weak.

There is more. A character's social status will affect how much advertisement they are exposed to (among various other things), with hard disadvantages to being low in status. Characters will not be able to concentrate properly because of the constant media input, and might even make impulse purchases with credits they don't have, ending up in debt, starting to spiral into worse.

Of course, characters will not have to endure those limitations if they find ways around it OR play by the rules the fictional society of Ø2\\'3|| implores (which are cruel, naturally).

A final example how the game simulates character restrictions is how Anger works. The Family prefers their citizens to be docile, of course, and it is a natural state for citizens living in the USE to be just that. Which is why Anger is something a character must collect over time. Actually, characters need to be angry enough to use force to begin with.

Just like a character with very low hit points won't be able to do much of anything (as most systems will have most activities of badly injured characters penalized), characters with low Anger will only support in a fight, but not fight themselves. On the other hand, characters might be so angry that everything they do will seem like some form of aggression or provocation.

The players are able to control that by controlling the Anger score of a character, but once a character is Angry, the surroundings will react to them accordingly, regardless of how the player wants it to appear. Players with an angry character would feel the limits of their agency like a drunk trying to convince cops that he's are able to drive on ...

Challenging Player Agency in Ø2\\'3||

A first impulse would be to think that it's a bad idea to constrain player agency as described above. Alas, if players can have their characters do whatever they want, what need would there be to do anything? And, far more importantly: how would characters grow without having their constraints?

Isn't that how learning works? Restraining your agency to achieve a goal that needs that kind of discipline? You don't just get into a car and drive, for instance, it's a set of skills you learn. Languages would be another good example.

Of course people are free to obstain from learning skills like that, but it also comes with the consequence of never obtaining them, in which "agency" will lead to other restrictions (like not being able to drive a car or watching a movie in a foreign language). See, it's not that easy to make free decisions AND stay free or autonomous the whole time. Decisions limit to a degree. Your free decision to use the rules of a specific game will have you submit to those rules, to give another example.

And that's the kind of psychological realism that is woven into the game. Players are encouraged (or "nudged", if you will) into playing a certain way, but also need to challenge that to overcome the system OR go along to see where that leads to ... Ø2\\'3|| is open to that. If you play along with the dystopia, your character might end up being rich and famous, but you'll have to experience (decide, even) what it takes to get there in a system like that.

In a sense the game is at odds with the definition offered above, in that the norms this fictional society adhers to are in opposition to good values still prevalent in our (western) civilization. So playing a "good citizen" might be considered playing an "evil and degenerated" character by today's standards (the game is for adults, after all, and there are some dark topics possible that need consent, so to say, from all involved).

Sometimes just a question of cultural shifts ... [source]

One way to give players agency within those limitations, is by giving them total control over their characater's development. Players can decide on the spot that their character can either do or have something or know someone that could help in a certain situation. There is limits how often they can do that, but they are free to fill these slots within reason.

To a degree, this is where the satire comes in. Here's an excerpt from the DM Section of the game to give you an idea how all of that comes together:

Satire in Ø

According to Wikipedia, satire is about shaming society into improvement by using humor. However, the means of that shaming are of utmost importance. This game is not, for instance, about shaming the players or the DM in any form or capacity.

Instead it is designed to make the players into observers of certain mechanisms while offering the means to alter their characters in a way that potentially helps them to overcome those mechanisms through their actions. For that, the system needs to produce results that provoke ridicule and danger in equal measure while leaving a DM enough wiggle room to frame all that in an engaging narrative.

This means that in Ø satire manifests as the interplay of all those elements, not one single element itself. It is, if you will, the music all of the elements produce in concert.

This also is why satire can successfully make light of taboo issues. If the game summons any provocative issues, the DM will frame it towards what is already established, and the players find ways to deal with it. Since the system produces grotesque scenarios, DM and players are basically forced to act as corrective instances while reflecting the consequences of the scenario and their decisions.

Processing taboo (or tough) subjects like this will make them approachable. It opens them for dialogue and exploration from a safe distance. While this is already somewhat true in narrative spaces, it is the additional layer of satire that positions those topics in a way that invites a mature interaction with them, often through the lense of humor (albeit of a more dark variety).

See?

That said, we can dig a little deeper than that. The game's limits allow insight into reality, to the extent a game can do that. For that, however, we need to know what is possible (which, incidentally leads to the reason to write this post).

Break the Spell for the Player!

Best way to show the discrepancy is revealing the "magic tricks" the characters are manipualted with. Knowing how it works goes a long way in understanding why their characters act without free will in certain situations. It also helps in developing counter-measures, of course, which should be part of a game that is about characters living in a dystopian future. Challenging those very limits on every conceivable level is at the very core of the rules of this game, as you might have guessed already.

But how is it done? The manipulation-thing, that is. Three big terms that keep coming up are Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), "Nudging" and the acronym MINDSPACE (courtesy of UK tax payer money, no less*). There sure are other programs like this all over the world, be it corporate or by some other government (I know Germany has the very thing, also on public record). Advertisement is using this (or variants thereof) ever since WW2 to sell us stuff we don't want ...

There are other usefull areas, of course. Psychological Warfare (or PsyOps, as the hip kids say) would be one such area, Propaganda another. There is no question that all of those things easily work on huge parts of a population, even without all the fine technologies a dystopian future state would have at their disposal. The knowledge how that works (although public, check out the MINDSPACE link above), is less mainstream.

Which is tragic, actually, as those psychological tools are only working when the population is unaware of them, and they are abused constantly.

Anyway, we are talking here about how future dystopian states as you would encounter in a cyberpunk rpg would abuse that, for instance. So here are the basic ideas:

NLP - The basic idea would be that we understand our reality through the words we use and the meaning we interpret into those words. Thoses values describe a map of our understanding, and (1) they are not fixed, but fluid while (2) allowing short-cuts for easy processing. This is, obviously, wide open for manipulation, as the map can be rewritten and those shortcuts can be abused without our consent, as both operate within the "automatic" side of our decision making. Thinking is, basically, circumvented by appearing, for instance, true or well intended or from a trusted source or even a source of authority.

Rewriting or short-cutting are achieved by creating complex threatening scenarios (for instance that doing something is a punishable crime or harmful) without being concrete about the circumstances and THEN offering easy solutions that are nothing else but the intended policy. The irritated and confused mind looks for an easy out and takes the advice under whatever pretext it was done (say, authority, for instance). Imagine a beaurocrat citing several laws to get you off balance just to offer you that with a little fee it can all be gone ... In a bigger context, say, state-wide, a message needs to be repeated non-stop through all channels to rewrite mind maps like that. A famous (and fitting) example in this context would be from 1984, no less:

[source]

NUDGING - This takes the whole concept a bit further by basically reducing the whole short-cutting to symbols. Perfect example for nudging would be the fly you'll find in some public urinals. Men aim for that automatically. You are basically manipulated to piss on a certain spot. This is useful as it seems to reduce cleaning costs by up to 80%!

MINDSPACE - The next step (and not the last or only step) is easy described by taking the acronym apart (from the repot itself):

See p. 14 [source]

And that's the gist of it. A DM that makes themselves familiar with the ideas here and takes a careful look around will find many exsamples for this in real life. What you see when waiting in line at the supermarket? Not at all accidental. Framing? Look at the mainstream media news on almost every topic. They tell you the part they think you should know, always. The intentions are not always as clear, however.

Cancel Culture will give you examples a plenty, too. Look at how people are framed emotionally instead of proof and how others react to that. You will find a lot in the patterns of such an attack described above, same goes for the reactions.

And then think about how all of that is AI-driven in that dark future, how technologies that think million-times faster than we do control us effortlessly to the point that we don't even care and even though we wouldn't necessarily agree with the reasoning behind the control. In general, all of the above can be useful for therapy, of course, and that's a good thing. It's just not what we are talking about here.

What we are talking about here is manipulating a fictive population in a dystopian game into, for instance, docile obedience and how a DM can use those ideas to make their games more realistic.

And that's it.

You have been played ...

Or have you not? Just kidding, you haven't. But now you are thinking about it ... And that's the important part: immunity from manipulation comes from conscious questioning of the impulses our surroundings give us. Not all the time, but if you are more relaxed about something, it should be the result of some form of thought process before that. Don't let anybody tell you that everything is alright, come to that conclusion yourself and act on that.

The advice above can be used or abused. I'd strongly urge you to only use it to exemplify abuse by those in power in the narratives of your games. But make no mistake, those things are all around us right now and should be main tropes for every cyberpunk game (actually, how media and states, for instance, manipulate us should be part of every curriculum, imo).

I hope I managed to lay out the basics of it, as far as I understand them and it'll be useful for our games. This really is a deep hole to dig into.

And the fun part is: players that get it will get a kick out of their characters being manipulated like this, to some extent. Especially when the game is about finding ways to either get away from being used against characters (or even with them using it).

The potential is always there ... [source]

------------------------ 

If you are interested in finding out if I actually try to do what I'm talking about above, you can check out a free preview of Ø2\\'3||  right here (or go and check out the first reviews here). I'm still doing a sale on it ...

If you already checked it out, please know that I appreciate you :) It'll certainly help to keep the lights on here! I'd love to hear about that, too.

Just look at that beauty ...

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* This is about using ideas for your games. Interestingly enough, however, Wikipedia will inform you about NLP being "pseudoscience". Which is a rhetological fallacy, of course, as just the claim doesn't make it so ... Actually, it's a good example for NLP called "framing". Once something is painted a certain way, we more often than not take the easy road, believing someone will have done the work. It is using our wiring to irritate or even exclude close review. Not saying they are trying to manipulate here (as they quote research after that), but look at that MINDSPACE report, which has some very renomated scientists not only telling you the exact opposite, but even keep building on those ideas formulated through NLP! Interesting, isn't it?

Another exorcism of thoughts: Who are the Nibelungs, Part 3 (final word on culture? magic?)

I should be doing something else, but I felt the urgency to at least make an attempt to put those ideas down before they are lost in the bliss of a Sunday in the sun. It connects to a serie of posts I started 6 years ago about what understanding of the "Nibelungs" I want to evoke in Lost Songs of the Nibelungs. We had the base assumption in Part 1, going something like this:

Historically speaking it would be the children of those desperate and armed refugees that settled among the ruins left by the Romans. They are to explore the deep forests and dark valleys, following whispered rumors of treasure, secrets and sorcery. They will leave their mark on the world, as it is their time.

The game is about their lost songs.

 And then we talked a bit about difficult topics of the past and future in Part 2, concluding like this:

It's a harsh world the Nibelungs live in, haunted by the evils of a lost civilization. But it's also a world of opportunity for man and woman alike to claim a part of and become legends if it is their fate. Within this legendary realm everything is possible and a Nibelung could rise from slave to king.

It is a semi-historical setting they live in, with the pagan believes of the old world struggling and fighting the rise of a new religion that threatens the very fabric of magic itself. The Nibelungs are all the Germanic tribes and their lost songs.

This leaves a couple of questions open, all of them are about getting an idea how those tribal people mapped the world around them. What patterns did they see? How did they explain the world and why? This is an exorcism of thought and not yet fully fleshed out. You have been warned.

A world without reason?

Culture is a collective mental state ... let's begin with that. It's also dynamic. My understanding of how that dynamic might work, is (among other things) derived from what I could gather in the (great and highly recommended!) book Authors of the Impossible by Jeffrey J. Kripal (a book that'd be featured in the research list I plan to include in Lost Songs).

So the firt step would be to get an understanding how our culture works, then extrapolate towards 550 AD, right? Bridging this cultural gap would make the past playable while adding the extra value of gaining a deeper understanding of that Germanic mindframe back then. In a sense, they already did all the work for us in the stories they told (or what we know of them), so there is that. However, reading those stories today (like, say, the Edda), always seems like it needs a whole lot of extra knowledge to get the references, the subtext ... all the symbolic stuff that you'd read in those stories that, by our understanding, comes down to magic.

There's no bridge. You see: reading those stories is like seeing an island in the distance, obscured by mist. What you deinitely can't do in a roleplaying book is make it an excursion into history and demanding of the reader to catch up to "get it right". No, nothing of that sounds right to me. And what would knowing the history more than, say, superficially actually bring to the table?

See? Like that. No bridge at all ... [source]

 

I've talked at length about how language should be used in the game (and you can start falling into that specific rabbit hole here). It's also easy enough to get an idea what clothes they wore or how they fought, what they paid with, all that good stuff, for sure worthy. What all the trivia doesn't do, though, is giving you a mindmap, of sorts, that brings to live what made those people tick. That a day started for them with the sun going up, not in the middle of the day, like it does for us now, gives you an inkling of an idea what I'm talking about.

But I digress. My goal would be to cook all of the above down to an abstract level where that other culture transcends 'just' by playing the game and without using any visual material other than description. The Narrative Generator is the biggest tool in this, but just one side of the coin.

However, to do this examination proper justice (to build that bridge), or so I've learned, we need to understand that culture is the collective decision to interprete the world as concluded by an intellectual elite, with what is negelected making a comeback in popular culture. In other words, if your world is run by reason and science, the spiritual will be popular in the stories we tell. That's the premise, that's the material for the bridge laid out..

People in the past didn't have it good ...

There is a popular understanding that life was hard in the past and people just didn't have the richness of experiences and safety we indulge in today in huge parts of the world. Stuff like "I wouldn't want to live in the 18th century ... all that misery, the health issues, the harsh living conditions. Horrible, horrible stuff." or some tune like that. I'm of two minds with this: for one, I agree. If someone growing up in our cultural environment would be transferred a couple of hundred years into the past, they'd most likely die fast. That doesn't mean, however, that the people living back then felt the same about their lives.

Off to the Dark Ages ... to DIE! [source]

 

There is that joke where one doctor tells another how he stopped drinking and smoking and eating unhealthy so he had a chance of a longer life, and the other doc just looks at him puzzled and asks: why would you want to live longer, if you had to live like that?! I always found this 'joke' stupid and unfunny, for the simple reason that it puts consumerism on a pedestal it doesn't belong. If you just live to consume, well, you don't live at all, imo. There is more, for sure, if you care to look.

Anyway, it all connects. I'll even raise you one: the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman had a great talk in a podcast the other day (see it here, it's worth your time), and he talked about the plasticity of the brain and how we can rewire ourselves to receiving dopamine awards for things we did rather than for things we consumed. Turns out (or so is my understanding), people that manage to do that, will need nothing else to thrive and be happy.

No need for expensive cars or meals or holidays or houses or whatever, just reading that one book, a page at a time, just doing that sport routine, doing the things that help you grow, is not only 'enough' to be content, it'll give you the energy to push harder, to go further. People producing material like crazy have unlocked that for themselves, one way or another. As a matter of fact, the best way to make this happen is pushing through stress. Do what you feel resistance against, and the brain will award you for it. Crazy (I'm still mulling over that, as a matter of fact).

Well, you are probably guessing what I'm hinting at. We are not wired to live like fat cats in comfy chairs, we are wired to do stuff. Our brains and bodies actually help us doing more than we would think we are able to achieve ...and to get by with way less than we actually have. Our genes haven't changed much in the last, what, 300.000 years? Assuming that we are just now able to live properly is preposterous.Commmon sense will tell you that, and science is right there with it, nodding wisely.

So there's no reason to believe that people weren't living fullfilled lives in 550 AD if the basic needs were met. There genes weren't different, the dynamics, generally speaking, would be the same as today or a couple of thousand years before that. They would laugh and love and sing and grieve and hate. kids would play, and have toys to do so. That said, they'd also live in very, very different surroundings than we do. Here is a little bridge to build up to that big bridge we are talking about: the dynamics apply, just on different surroundings, because it needs to work in the environment to allow survival and even growth.

I'd even submit that they didn't know less than we do, they just had different explanations and methods to get by (broadly speaking ... I'd fight you on this, though). That's the bridgehead.

Building a bridge across cultures, time and space ...

... with just some dice in hand. Wouldn't that be nice? Anyway, let's talk UFOs, because that's the logical next step. Why is it that we have more than 80.000 witness reports of encounters like that, all over the globe, and no proof? How is it that a lot associated with the UFO phenomenon relates so closely to religious experiences? It maps nicely (again, Kripal, quoting others). So nicely, in fact, that we can see the same dynamics between religious hagiography (basically stories what saints experienced) and UFO abductions ... or our ideas what those abductions are like.

I won't (can't!) go much into detail, but let's assume, just for the game's sake, that those phenoma are ... similar, only their interpretation in a different cultural environment will just turn up differently. Angels, fairies or aliens, all follow the same principle (abstractly speaking). I hope you see that bridge shaping up at this point. We can now conclude from our culture, to some extent, what that culture 1500 years ago might have set as priorities compared to us. There's the map, there's the pattern, if you will.

Not that I have done that yet to any reasonable degree. This is me playing around with some fresh impulses, so to say. But we know we can take the Enlightenment out of the equation. We can assume that life back then was way more spiritual than our lives today are. And going by the little I know about the paranormal and the unconscious and the idea of how all is connected, it is by no means said that we are entirely on the right track in our completely reason based cultural assumptions. So they might have compensated some of our advantages with knowledge now lost to us (as a matter of fact, that rising religion back in the day did their damnest to assimilate or kill that cultural heritage off). 

Who are the Nibelungs? (Part 3)

From what we can tell, it's been a very dynamic mix of different cultures settling down. In a way, the people starting their new lives in what would become Europe had their own intense culture war going. We know who lost, in hindsight. But how that war was fought is a different story. We also know of the tribal nature of those settlers, how they travelled a lot, and how they took impulses from everywhere. In that particular time, we can say we have lots of leeway to be creative within the imaginable. The smaller, the more isolated a tribe is, the more strange it could be.

Other than that, the Nibelungs are a spiritual people. How else could they have lived meaningful lives back then? Tapping into the (collective?) unconscious like that should offer some alleviation, help and even healing, but it also (for sure) brings our heroes a lot closer to things we'd love to keep in the dark nowadays. Those struggles back then were as real as today. Them going out to fight dragons or haggle with the gods should tap into the same sphere as us getting hunted or abducted by aliens. And just like we will find traces but no proof, because we tend to ignore those things in general, they might have encountered and fought those things for real (which is a leap I'll allow myself, since this is a game, after all).

What exactly that might mean and which symbols and systems to use to express it all in the game will be for me to explore in the future. A lot of it is already there. If you take a look at character creation (which is pretty much the same after all those years ...), you can end up with an elf, a dwarf or a troll. The sleight of hand here is that I'd argue that it is still as historically accurate as history can be. Ha!

Representing history accurately. Ha! [source]

One last thing. You might ask yourself, why go through all that to write a game, to which I have to say: it's fun, what else is there to know :) If there's value beyond that, we'll find out, I guess.

Rabbitfolk and Berserker Bunnies for the D&D RC & Layrinth Lord (Happy Easter Edition!)

Hey folks. I hope you are all well out there in the bad wild world. 2020 has been a tough one so far, with more ahead, as it seems. We'll see this through, though. I'm confident we will. Getting some proper gaming going (digitally, nowadays) seems like a good start in a better direction for me. And since it's also Easter (which traditionally is a fresh start and the end of Winter and all those positive notions of life coming back and thriving), I thought I'd share some bonus classes for your D&D  Basic and Labyrinth Lord games. Please, make good use of these bunnies, and share their tales, if you are so inclined.

I used Building the Perfect Class as a guide to make the Rabbitfolk (so it's all balanced and thought through). You should check that out, if you haven't already (and here is why).

The gentle Rabbitfolk

Your classic humanoid rabbits. They come in all the variety you'd know from rabbits. They are peaceful social creatures and live in burrows (as one would guess). They are more spiritual than religious and love dabbling in magic. All of them are vegetarian and they really don't like killing at all (although they will defend themselves). They are as big as Elves when fully upright (although they do love to cower).

I love me some DiTerlizzi ... so good [source]

As far as origins go, I'd go with a martial Halfling clan that got cursed millenia ago when they angered a god with their unspeakable war crimes. They've made peace with their fate by now (as their nature would force them) and are generally rergarded as nice folk and all around pleasant company. They don't often go on adventure, but when they do, it's usually to help the peace in the realm one way or another. That and their strange relationship to magic. The lure of some mighty magic item will tempt the most cautious bunny into a dungeon. They are also highly requested couriers and make honest and reliable merchants.

Prime Requisites: Dexterity and Intelligence

Experience Bonus: 5% for DEX or INT higher than 12, 10% for DEX and INT higher than 12

Hit Dice: 1d6 per level up to 9th level.

Maximum Level: 12

Armor: Only light armor, shields permitted

Weapon: Any blunt

Combat Progression: like Magic-User

Weapon Mastery (if you use that): normal

Saves as: Halfling

Special Abilities:

• INFRAVISION (like Elf)

• DEADLY AWARENESS (can only be surprised 1 in 8 times, even when asleep, as they sleep with their eyes open, but if surprised, they need to make a Save versus Death to not drop dead)

• BINKY FELLA (can jump double as high and double as far as humans)

• RUNNER (Movement as Monk)

• WIGGLY WRESTLER (may 1 time per level and day add their complete Dexterity to an attempt to free themselves from a grapple)

• AFFINITY TO MAGIC (casts magic with 1/2 Magic-User progression)

• CASTS MAGIC IN LIGHT ARMOR

• HIDE OUTSIDE (like Halfling)

• HIDE INSIDE (like Halfling)

Rabbitfolk Experience Table (advances like Mage)

Level     XP

1           0
2       2.100
3       4.200
4       8.400
5      16.800
6      35.000
7      70.000
8     140.000
9     280.000
10    430.000
11    580.000
12    730.000

Berserker Bunnies!

Among the Rabbitfolk are also the so-called "Berserker Bunnies" (not to their face, though) that found a way to channel the ancient wrath of their anscestors(or maybe it found them?). Legend has it that they channel their ancient Halfling origin. They are very rare, very scarred and usually don't get very old. If they ever where to unite in force (as it has been foretold in obscure prophecies), whatever is in their way would be in serious trouble. Rabbitfolk in general don't like history rearing its ugly mug like that, and rabbits that discover the Ancient Way of the Berserker for themselves  soon become outcasts, living in exile from their people. They roam the world, looking for the long lost war wisdom of their kin.

Don't call him Berserker Bunny ... [source]

Berserker Bunnies are quite honorable, in a quirky way, and would rather fight for a good cause. However, they will work as mercenaries and because of their They love oversized blunt weapons and would love eating meat, but can't stomach it. Drinking blood seems to be okay, though.

There seem to be no Berserker Bunnies beyond Level 9. They seem to follow a calling of sorts when reaching name level and disappear without a trace ...

Prime Requisites: Dexterity and Constitution

Experience Bonus: 5% for DEX or CON higher than 12, 10% for DEX and CON higher than 12

Hit Dice: 1d12 per level up to 9th level.

Maximum Level: 9

Armor: Only light to medium armor, no shields

Weapon: Any (also has bite as blunt weapon), the love two-handed blunt weapons (because of the "thump" noise they make)

Combat Progression: like Monster

Weapon Mastery (if you use that): as Fighter

Saves as: Halfling

Special Abilities:

• INFRAVISION (like Elf)

• EVEN DEADLIER AWARENESS (can only be surprised 1 in 10 times, even when asleep, as they sleep with their eyes open, but if surprised, they need to make a Save versus Death to not end up in an undiscriminating berserker rage for 2d6 rounds - Level which functions exactly like the WRATH below, just without the Save)

• BINKY FELLA (can jump double as high and double as far as humans)

• RUNNER (Movement as Monk)

• HIDE OUTSIDE (like Halfling)

• HIDE INSIDE (like Halfling)

• FLYING RABBIT ATTACK (attacks involving jumps add DEX bonus to attack and damage, needs room to maneuver as full movement, though, little jumps don't count)

• WRATH OF THE ANCIENTS (as soon as losing at least 1 HP in a fight, Berserker Bunnies can call their ancestors for support and their ancestors will answer the call, a bunny possessed like that will shimmer and have glowing and steaming red eyes, they'll also get +2 on damage and attack as well as +1 HP/Level for CON/2 rounds per day, Save vs. Spells negates (unless Deadly Awareness), Berserker Bunnies will fight until the Wrath is over, even when they have no HP left, even if no enemies are left)

Berserker Bunnies Experience Table (advances like Fighter)

Level     XP

1            0
2        3.000
3        6.000
4       12.000
5       24.000
6       50.000
7      100.000
8      200.000
9      400.000

The classes here on the blog are:

Ratpeople

Feline Humanoids

Ape Men

My take on Halflings (a little series)

A Prince Charming (human that grew up with Elves)

Let's talk Setting and Genre, Folks (Design Post)

Happy New Year! Thought I'd do a "year in review" post or some such nonesense. It's just, there didn't happen a lot here, and I sort-a-kind-a already did one of those in November 2018. No need to repeat myself when I'm already low on content here on the blog. Instead I thought I'd try and open the new year with one of my design posts. People seem to enjoy them well enough.

Distinctions matter when writing games!

You could say they matter everywhere, but that's not what I'm about. What I'm aiming at is more in the line of thinking that you can not build meaningful tools for your game if the areas that need designing aren't properly defined.

Let me get into this a little bit more. That games have different areas with varying demands for design is plain obvious, I think.  That a gamemaster will need different tools than a player might be among the first to come to mind. Non-player characters can't be as detailed as player characters (in most games anyway). Or (something I had to learn the hard way just the other day) information design is a completely different animal than game design (there is a difference between writing rules and writing rules, goddammit).

Great example how things can be the same and still very distinct ... [source]

The distinction between setting and genre, on the other hand, is not among the main concerns mst of the time, although its a crucial one from a design point of view, as setting and genre do very different things in a game and therefor need different tools if they are to be utilized properly.

It might be overlooked easily because we don't often see it as clear in other media as we do in role playing games and there isn't much need to distinguish them in other media to begin with. They are used as authors see fit, be it for books, movies or computer games (I'll have to go deeper into that further below).

However, since the emerging stories of our games are in part due to the decisions the players make, in part due to the random results a game's engine may produce and in yet another part what the gamemaster makes of all that (or how), it seems imminent that the tools we use to achieve a satisfying result need to be properly designed specifically for the areas they are used in. For that they need to be recognized and distinguished first.

Proper distinctions make a narrative more powerful!

I had a discussion about this very distinction with a player once when we tried to get on the same page about what to play next. Had I known back then what I know now, I could have made a strong(er) case ... well, let's have the argument first: the proposition had been to play Castle Falkenstein (classic steampunk setting and tropes) in an America how the game it envisions (the idea was to use Sixguns & Sorcery). Now, Castle Falkenstein (from all I could remember) wasn't heavy on the crunch or the players. You could get away with playing a proper Holmes or Tesla, the game wouldn't kill you off easily.

What the player envisioned when he heard that proper Wild West was on the table, he wanted it to be gritty and deadly, Sergio Leone-style. He'd accept steampunk as decoration, but what he couldn't understand was that a game like that came with certain restrictions, one of them being that it ain't The Proposition (Australian Western written by Nick Cave, who also did the music score, very much worth seeing). I said back then (rightly so) that the game is not able to carry that kind of action, I just couldn't explain properly why that is. All I knew was that he wanted to play a different game.

You can see right away: not a romanticized version of the past [source]

Here is the thing: the system needs to support the emergence of the narrative at least to some extent, because if it doesn't or - even worse - if it contradicts the expectations people bring to the table, they'll feel the game lacking although it might not be the game's fault to begin with. You can have a Superhero campaign that is gritty, you just shouldn't use Marvel Super Heroes for it. At least not RAW, a hack might be able to fix a problem like that ... most of the time.

There is a point, though, where you have to change a game so much, that it ends up being another game. And that is because games are written with a specific genre in mind regarding the resolution of conflict. Setting is merely the stage and the requisites (which would be the gamemasters material and tools).

Done right and used as intended, role playing designs should lead to a satisfying gaming experience. Trying to get this right is one of the main motivations for me (and others, I'm sure) to write (or hack) games. It's why we tinker.

Genre is the pattern you want to see emerge ...

Definition-time! If you search for a definition of "genre" you'll find it intermingled with "setting". Interchangeably so, even. That goes back to the original meaning of the word, which is "kind" or "sort". One could say genre is a collection of abstract terms accumulating to a specific pattern that is recognizable. You don't need all the pieces to recognize it, but enough to make it click.

We have certain expectations when consuming other media like movies or books. If a movie is labelled "romantic comedy", it's what we want to see and if someone were to die an explicit and grizzly death in that movie, it'd feel wrong. This can get a bit more complicated when genres get mixed and when done well, it'll enhance all genres equally (Wes Anderson movies are like that). Either way, genres follow very general patterns we know and recognize to a degree that allows us to communicate them. We also know how to play with them or what variations of them might look like. The setting of a story is part of that, of course.

If your game needs to evoke a certain genre, you basically need to dismantle those patterns and find ways to let your rules dissolve in patterns that resemble the genre you want to emulate. It also needs to create room for the players to enforce those patterns themselves (since they are participants and not merely spectators).

Covers are good examples for showing characters interacting with their environment [source]

Here is an example: in the dystopian game I'm working on is a rule that will get the character in trouble if their dice come up with an 9 and an 1, even if the roll is a success. The rule helps supporting the drama that comes with living under an oppressive force. It's a pattern people expect to encounter regularly and it emerges from the system (of the game, ha!).

It needs more than that, obviously, but establishing those rules from the core will help you getting there step by step. How easy or fast should player characters die? Is there something else at stake? Something that is valued more? Their status, maybe, or their sanity? How powerful are characters in the beginning and how powerful can they get? Or: what scope of development is needed?

All of that describes rules tat are formulated around the player interaction with their surroundings. How you answer the questions above will influence the gaming experience. If you take "genre" into consideration when doing so, you have a good chance that the game will evoke those tropes just by playing it. Players will recognize a genre by playing the game and should also have tools to evoke it themselves.

However, "setting" needs to be distinguished ...

As described above, you usually wouldn't need to distinguish setting and genre that hard when dealing with other media like books, movies or even computer games*. The simple reason for that is found in the fact, that no other medium involves all participants in the emerging narrative as much as role playing games do. Fueling a narrative is as much part of playing the game as exploring its contents is.

Another reason is that role playing games entirely resolve around communication and "theater of the mind", the rules being merely a tool to enforce certain outcomes in the narrative while introducing a certain amount of chance (actually the distinct element that makes it a medium to begin with, but that's neither here nor there). 

In that sense it is very useful to treat "setting" as something that is to be distinguished from "genre". Its emergence is not as much manipulated by the players as it is explored and interacted with. Setting is the stage and the requisites and the only participant able to manipulate that is the gamemaster**.

That is a big distinction, in my opinion. With their character players can do what they want, the restriction only being the social rules established at the table, the system that is used to play and the limitations of language (or the ability to use language ...). What they can't do is introduce elements to the setting that way. They can't just decide that they wield laser guns in a fantasy setting, for instance. That is something they could discover as a possibility and (learn to) use (like requisites).

Morrowind: a great example of a sandbox! [source]

The concept of seeing settings as "sandboxes with toys" is the purest form of that distinction, in my opinion. It still has the gamemaster as the one "building" the stage and requisites and it ideally still - which is more important in the argument I'm about to make - has the designer providing the tools for the "build".

So this is the biggest distinct element I can see here: from a designing-perspective, you need to create different mechanics for creating a world with all its moving parts and for interacting with it. The focus there is very different to creating the "game engine" itself (if connected).

Going full circle, and then some

This is something I realized when writing Lost Songs of the Nibelungs and Ø2\\‘3|| @2091: GMs need tools and those tools need to match the game just as much as the other rules do. It's just not (as much) about the narrative emerging during the game when it's played as it is about creating the world and the interactive elements it can represent mechanically***. There is a special difficulty to make that work well (is my impression so far).

However, that isn't all there is to it. Knowing all this might not only help a designer getting an impression how role playing games can be structured, it will also help gamemasters (those buying and using the rules, one should add) evaluating games they read or already know. The benefit being that it gives you one more (valid) criteria to judge if a game has what it needs to work at your specific table. Or (maybe a bit more important) what kind of work you are expected to add to it to make it work.

Anyway, I hope it does.

That's it for now. To close on a more personal note: I wish you all a productive and interesting and engaging and fulfilling year 2019. Stay awesome, keep it polite and game the hell out of it. I'll take care that the blog keeps it's (admittadly low) pulse and if I play my cards right, I might get a couple of things published this year as well (just not Lost Songs, but I hope to get it done conceptually this year, which would be huge as well). Fingers crossed!

Btw: know your tropes ... then break them [source]

* Computer games are still too limiting to allow free expression of the participant in the emerging narratives they offer. Interaction with the gaming world is way to restricted to allow an exchange as complex as role playing games do.

** There are, of course, rules that give players more narrative controll about those things. It is a meaningful variant, but still just a variant and most of the time the input created that way will adher to the genre everyone agreed upon, the only difference being that it is closer to the understanding of "genre" in other media.

*** Which is where it connects with the emerging narrative and helps forming it in play, although within the parameters and variables established in preparation or offered by the system as part of the rules (think Random Encounter Reaction Rules, for instance) and entirely handled by the gamemaster.