The Scuttled Ship… Finally

The first Lloegyr game, The Moorstepper on Lloegyr, was a "closed door" larp, meaning that it was designed to be played by a group of characters who couldn't leave the immediate area.  Typically, this involves being trapped in a room, and some sort of premise as to why you can't leave.  Rather than come up with a plot device, I came up with a tradition: important diplomatic discussions were held on a ship that had been scuttled upon a sandbar… and you couldn't leave until you came to an agreement.  Thus the concept of the Scuttled Ship was born.

The sequel to Moorstepper was also set on the Scuttled Ship, as well as the recent prequel game, Mournful Their Mood.  I have a special attachment to using it as a timing device, because the "way out" is through other characters, and you're not problem solving as much as racing against time (which is slightly unusual in convention games).  I'm especially excited to bring this to Ubi Sunt, as after 19 episodes, I wanted to do something very special… and the Scuttled Ship is one of the most special things in Lloegyr.

Why?  Because the meta-concept of the Scuttled Ship is that on the ship, every character is the hero of their own tale.  You have to be important to get on that ship, because space is at a premium and a very important decision is going to be made.  If you're at all political, you don't want to be off the ship, because that's where the most important political decisions are made.  The Scuttled Ship isn't about two important individuals arguing… it's about a mess of converging interests who have to be at the decision point.  Anyone with any stake in the matter of Lloegyr will be there.  Which probably includes your character… or someone your character cares about… or someone who cares about your character.

Why wouldn't you be there?  I've heard some concerns… why would a "Vincian/Kraki/Guth" be there?  Why not sink it?  Won't it just be full of magical events?

To answer your questions…

First, if you're not a Heorot or a Wahlan, you still probably have a stake in what happens.  This is going to determine the next few years, if not decades, of Lloegyr's history, and you can be certain that Guihelm Duke of Vincia, Olaf Olafson, and all those hidden players you've heard of will want someone on that boat.   So will the Faith of Arim, and the priestesses of the Dunmar-Gog, and probably a few others you might not expect.  I guarantee… if you're at all uncertain as to why you might be there… ask, and you shall receive a reason.

Second, it's relatively safe.  You might have thought "why not sink it?"  Of course, so did the Guth, over a century ago.  Remember, the ship is already sunk, and on a sandbar.  It's in the Bay of Bertha, which is adjacent to the neck and the full might of both the Aelic and Heorot people.  Most nobles will bring their guards with them to the shore, and since the days of Rand and Dannis, their navies.  While treachery is certainly possible by those on the ship… it would be quite a battle to attack it again.

And finally… will it be all magic?  No, far from it.  There will be… events, I am sure, because the Matter of Lloegyr is a mystical thing.  But it is first and foremost a political matter… the sum of decisions made by flawed and might people… and as such, politics will be at the core of the game.

Agency and Perspective

I had a conversation with a player recently, about how fucked they are.  I actually have a lot of these conversations, because a lot of people feel like their characters are in grave and inescapable peril (and, well, they are), but this one in particular struck me... because the player didn't seem to accept it.  From that player's perspective, they have to power to save themselves.  Which is a great thing: except for the fact that they're probably wrong.

The reason they're wrong isn't because the storyteller is rail-roading them, or refusing to let their actions.  On the contrary, the storyteller is making sure their characters have agency, and determine the story.  The trick is that the actions that matter are the months of mistakes made in the past, when the character didn't realize what they were doing, and not a last ditch, quick fix effort to avoid the consequences.

Let's say you're a farmer, and also an adventurer.  In April, you go off to court to play at intrigues, and in May you go off to war.  In June, the voice of God (in the case of Lloegyr, me) mentions you should worry about your crops, and you spend a week or two in June tilling your fields.  Then you go off on a quest in July, and spend most of August with your friends in the next city over, and then in September, when I tell everyone "famine is coming" you spend another week or two in your fields.  When October hits, the crops are going to fail, because you didn't tend to them... and I'm going to show you ever single starving peasant I can to drive home your mistake.

The trick is that you don't know what you don't know... until it bites you.  Mistakes are made over time, and the fixes aren't easy or fast.  And sometimes it's too late.  And that's by design in Lloegyr, because it's the defeats that make the victories matter, and the victories that make the final tragedy of it matter.

I once said Lloegyr is about kicking down your sandcastles.  That's only partly true.  Sometimes, I see a puppy and I have to kill it.  But more often, I watch the tide slowly creep in, and keep you distracted with that really fun game of volleyball until the waves are upon it.  And then I point to the sand castle getting washed away, and focus on your attempts to save it after it's too late.  And the best part for me is that it's usually another player who's doing it to you.  All I have to do is place the emphasis.

Truth, Justice and all Those Dumb Things

Something I've noticed about Lloegyr... Fundamental Attribution Error is in full swing, and I love it.  As characters get drawn into conflict, the players get into wars of words, and the rhetoric starts to fly.  Most of the time, players get drawn into their own IC justifications, believing what they're saying... and that's awesome.  Really... it's how real people work: we make up rational arguments to justify our feelings.  So if you really want to be king, you argue you would be the best king, and start believing it... because you want to be king.

But...

There's a slight problem with the rhetoric sometimes, and it causes people problems when dealing with NPCs.  It's when the rhetoric appeals to the modern Americans we are, and not the fictional Heorots and Aels and Vincians and Kraki we pretend to be.

There's a lot of people who are preaching "peace" to NPCs, and to think of the country (I stopped counting at ten PCs using this argument in the past week... so I'm not talking about you, I'm talking to everyone).  Telling a Heorot to work for peace is like telling your typical American to work for accurate and straight-forward food packaging... most will agree it's a good cause, but they just don't give a shit.  Telling an Ael to think of their country is like telling U.S. citizen to think about "North America..." no one gives a shit about their continent.  Peace and patriotism are more modern concerns, and your traditional Heorot cares about family and honor more than anything else.

I don't mind players having more modern values... I think it makes the game more tragic.  Just realize that making an argument for peace is like making an argument about calorie labels... even if you're right, the people you're talking to (i.e. the NPCs) might not care.

Heorot Men Marry Late, and the Primacy of Player Decisions

First, the actual setting material.

Heorot men typically come of age in their mid-teens, when they are physically capable of battle.  The Heorot rite of passage is typically a test of mettle: the month of Geor is typically reserved for all kinds of tourneys and games, and when a boy competes in his first games, he is considered a man.  Coincidentally, this seems to be about the same age that women begin menstruating, and so both men and women reach maturity about the same time.

However, Heorot men typically marry relatively late, particular since the Guth War.  The heroes of that generation... Castus, Burgred, Finn, Oswulf, Walder... all started their families relatively late in their lives (in their late twenties).  The first legitimate child born to one of Castus' close friends was Aldred, who was born when Burgred was already in his mid-twenties.  The King himself was 28 when his son was born, and Ala, the King's only legitimate child, was not born until the King was 35.  The reason for this was relatively practical: until it seemed that Castus had a legitimate chance of winning the war, having heirs was of secondary importance.  Even then, there was a general sentiment that the kingdom should be won before children be had, and most men of this generation delayed starting a family.

This sentiment was passed down, in a manner, to the current generation.  The general attitude amongst Heorot noblemen who are old enough to remember the Guth war, but not old enough to have fought in it, is that one should accomplish something before he marries.  As such, the many heirs of this generation... Aldred of Timber, Nulte of Lothan, Lud of Kenton (generally those of age to have fought in the Merov War)... are unmarried.

While this was a cause for concern amongst the Earls for some time, with the death of Nulte of Lothan without issue, this has quickly become a common topic of discussion in Heorot Halls (when they're not talking about rebellions, succession, and murder, of course).  There is a prevailing attitude that it is time for the eligible Heorot bachelors to find themselves wives, and get to making new bachelors for the decades to come.

From a meta-game perspective... all of this background is about twenty minutes old as of the time this blog was published.  The facts have always been true, but there has never been a reason given for why the named characters of the setting married so late.  Instead, the dates came about from players all picking their ages independently, and when I put them on a timeline recently, some demographic information became apparent.

There's some thematic elements of this game I try to hammer home (i.e. honor), because they're vital for the tone of the game.  If players do not understand or address Honor, or hospitality, then the storyteller has to reinforce that element.  Other elements, however, I try to leave alone, and justify in the game.  This is one of them... the ages at which your characters marry and have children might not strictly reflect the source material, but in the end, it's better to allow players to define the setting, and use it to come up with interesting additions to the setting.

GSN Theory in 750 Words or Less

If you designed your own rpg system, you've probably heard of GNS Theory.  GNS stands for Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist, and was developed a little more than fifteen years ago, mostly on a website called The Forge.  We can talk a lot about GNS Theory (particularly if we want to be really geeky about our hobby), but for the most part, the people who developed it have moved on to other models, and the rest of us (including myself) just use it because Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist are useful terms.  For the players of Ubi Sunt, these terms give us a common language to describe different perspectives on how to play our game.

A quick breakdown:

• The Gamist perspective is best described as "goal-oriented."  You have a goal, you have obstacles, and you're trying to win.  Usually, people focus on mechanics when they discuss gamism (particularly min-maxing), but I personally feel that this is terribly inaccurate: the individual who is rigorously pursuing political goals is just as gamist as the player who creates the world's greatest swordsman and fights a lot of enemies.  Both are pursuing goals as efficiently as they can.  A personal observation: amongst larpers, there seems to be a sense that the gamist perspective is less valid than other perspectives.  I think this is inherently untrue… not only are all perspectives valid, but undermining the gamist perspective ignores the fact that mutually exclusive goals are the primary causes of conflict in larps, and the gamist perspective is vital for in-character conflict.
• The Narrativist perspective focuses on story and character development.  This approach emphasizes internal motivations, and presenting situations where players have internal conflict.  When you write long character backgrounds, set up tragic circumstances, and make "bad decisions" in-character, you're dancing with the narrativist perspective.  While narrativist storytelling is apparently emphasized by most parlor larpers, your intrepid storyteller is extremely dubious of the Narrativist perspective.  Part of my personal reservations about Narrativism is the tendency to privilege "story" above other approaches, without regard for the structure of stories, or how the construction of narratives in a collaborative sense requires strong simulationist and gamist elements.  (Translation of that incredibly pedantic sentence… the difference between writing a story and playing it out in a larp is that a larp requires both strong context and game elements to work when there's multiple people telling the story).
• Your storyteller is a very strong Simulationist, and if you look under the hood, Lloegyr is an incredibly Simulationist game.  The Simulationist is primarily concerned with genre simulation: verisimilitude is the most important aspect.  An vital element, however, is that this is genre simulation, not historical simulation.  (The specific genre we're trying to recreate, by the way, is that of the HBO Game of Thrones series… your play experience should feel like those shows).  A personal opinion: Simulationists are like the middle children of the GNS world… we can easily allow for both games and drama within our construction, as long as the genre is selected to allow for this.  This is not to say we're without problems.  I would argue the individuals who get the most angry with decisions made during a chronicle are Simulationists… all it takes is for one thing to just not make sense and everything is ruined.  If you find yourself hung up on what day it is in character, and travel times, you're probably a Simulationist.  And when the storyteller handwaves travel times and what day it is, you feel vaguely unsatisfied, because the storyteller just muted your genre simulation somewhat.

Note that no player or storyteller is squarely in any of these camps.  Everyone has all three tendencies to some degree.  However, recognizing which tendencies we have, and to what degree, allows us to discuss what we like or dislike about a particular design choice, and also to agree on what sort of game we're playing.

A New Con Larp

I'm about to start writing a one-shot larp for Dundracon, a gaming convention that takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area between the 15th and 18th of February.  If anyone wants to take a California gaming vacation, I highly recommend it.  But since most of you will not see this little corner of Lloegyr, I figured I would tell you what I'm writing.

I'm about to submit Mournful Their Mood, a 25-person one-shot game that can be run in four hours, beginning to end.  It will detail the events of the last generation's Scuttled Ship, where Castus met Maegan, in the company of Burgred and Maela, and a young Jenevra and a still old Caledon.  With a bit of luck, I can spin it so I increase the Lloegyr canon, and produce plot elements for the current monthly game.

If you're interested in knowing more, click on the DDC tag... all my notes for this game will be there.

Spoiler: The Original Epilogue

So, this is a spoiler post, but I don't feel to guilty.  These aren't spoilers for this game.

Instead, these are spoilers for the previous trilogy... the game that I ran before at three conventions between 2006 and 2008.  We have sufficiently departed from the timeline to put them in here.  You won't find too many of your characters (partly because neither Vincia, nor any clan apart from the Onellons, existed in this continuity), and most of the individuals here have not been introduced.  Further, some are so far from their original concept that it's impossible even call them the same character.  But, because I think it's thematically appropriate, I thought I would put it here.

Also, it is slightly edited.  Just saying.

Anyways, spoilers behind the cut.

No More NaNoWriMo

Alas, I did not manage to continue NaNoWriMo this year.  I am generally on top of your email, and thanks to Ephriam, we have a fully functional wiki... lloegyr.com.   Instead of fiction, I think I'm going to focus my efforts here and on the wiki... and of course, on the upcoming game.

Maybe, if I get a chance, I might tell some quick stories from Lloegyr's past... there's any stories you particularly want to hear.

Beyond the North

The recent post about languages begs the question... what's beyond the North?

Eventually, the Matter of Vincia will likely affect the heroes of Lloegyr, and the Duchies of Cutane, Naever and Burgen will be of note.  Similarly, the Kraki might have to deal with their (incomplete) subjugation of the Hess, Tets and Thars, as well as their unfriendly Lom neighbors.  But this is a tale of the North, and after those barbarian tribes and the Merov duchies, there's going to be little focus on what's beyond.

That's not to say it isn't there.  Obviously, Tiber, with its fallen empire, obviously affects the North.  Your intrepid storyteller would love to run (or play!) in a game, either tabletop or larp, set in the Kingdom of Ravar (this world's homage to the Kingdom of Moravia).  Such a game would be stark contrast to a Northern game, with a focus on a fully Faithful nation frightened of monsters in the woods while try to attain some degree of civilization.  And there has to be something going on in this world's version of Iberia, even if no one has any idea of what is going on there.

But again, those are stories for another time, for this story is the Matter of Lloegyr, and a tale of the North. 

Languages of Lloegyr

Perhaps the most important setting element of Lloegyr are the languages... while your intrepid ST is no linguist like Tolkien, he still considers language to be the center of the story (and really, this is a tale of languages displacing other tongues, and diverging).  While no one would suggest an actual study of linguistics in Anglo-Saxon England, a general awareness of the similarity in, say, the Kraki and Heorot tongue (or the Heorot, Kraki and Guth languages in general) would be noted by someone with the Well-Travelled merit.

All of this begs the question... what are the languages of Lloegyr?  Further, how do they relate?  A brief discussion might reveal clues as to the history of the island and the metaplot.

First and foremost, there are four languages spoken as native tongues: Heorot, Aelic, Wahlan and Vendol.  Vendol is a language of no relation to the others, while Aelic and Wahlan is closely related.  While Heorot has some similarities to Aelic and Wahlan (suggesting that the Aels are not in fact native to Lloegyr, but migrated from the mainland themselves in pre-historic times), it is far closer to the Northern Tongues (the Tiberians call them the Barbarian Tongues) of the Kraki and Guth.

It is of note that there are dozens of Barbarian Tongues, and its difficult to keep an accurate count.  Kraki and Guth, due to their geographic proximity and history of trade, are almost mutually intelligible: they share most of the same vocabulary, and the same basic grammar.  Indeed, a native Kraki speaker might able to muddle through a Guth text with some labor.  However, the spoken words would be very difficult to comprehend: the accents are virtual incomprehensible. The same situation exists with the smaller tribes that the Kraki have absorbed: really, Hessan, Thar, and Tet are collections of similar dialects than easily categorized languages.  However, if one groups the predominant dialects: Heorot, Kraki, and Guth, as well as Hessan, That, Tet, and Lom, one has covered most Northern languages, save Burgess.

Burgess is an interesting case, because it straddles the divide between the Tiberian languages (which include all dialects of Merovian) and the Northern Languages.  The Merovian dialects are close enough you can muddle through them if you are a native speaker of one, at least in writing, but only the most skilled linguist could converse in, say Cutanian if you speak Vincian.  The exception is Burgess, which has a lost several grammatical elements and a gained a significant number of Northern loanwords, such that Burgess is a relatively unique language.

In any case, every northern language uses the Tiberian alphabet, for literacy was an invention of the Tiberians (as far as the North is concerned), and virtually everyone who learns their letters learns them first in Tiberian, and then in their native (or adopted tongues), essentially transliterating sounds into the Tiberian alphabet.

So, to catalogue the languages of Lloegyr, there are:

One unusual language: Vendol
Two tongues of Lloegyr: Aelic and Wahlan
Seven Northern languages: Guth, Heorot, Hessan, Kraki, Tet, Thar, and Lom
Four Merovian Dialects: Burgess, Cutanian, Naevic, and Vincian
A single literate language: Tiberian

Fate and NPCs

Player Characters start at Fate 3, they receive this for free.  To me as a storyteller, Fate is a sign of dramatic "weight;" it is how important a character is to the story we're telling, and how much of an impact they've had so far.

Which begs the question: how important are the Heroes?  How do they compare to other Fated NPCs? And just how many Fated NPCs are there?

The following is not a complete list, nor is it intended to be.  Some PCs require an air of mystery, and to allow everyone to know their mechanics might undermine the character.  But to give players a sense of what Fate means, and how rare a given level is.

The following list are Storyteller guidelines for NPCs and Fate (at least those that can be publicly shared).  While some players might not wish to have access to this information, it is included because it does give an idea of where the heroes stand (which is pretty high up in the hierarchy).

Fate 7: There's one (and only one) Fate 7 NPC.  There will probably only ever be one as well.

• Angus, Lion of the Aels - The Greatest Warrior Lloegyr has ever known.

Fate 6: There's only a handful of Fate 6 NPCs, they are exceedingly rare, and generally culture heroes. Note that not every culture has a paragon of their culture, and while this list may be incomplete, you're almost certain to have heard of a Fate 6 NPC.

• Castus the Unconquered - The King of the Heorots is a legend in his own time, and his story is sure to endure to the end of time.
• Odvar the Invincible - The Kraki Champion, the slayer of monsters, and perhaps the single most important reason for the current might of the Kraki.

Fate 5: Only the noteworthy, powerful, and dramatic individuals become Fate 5.  Their accomplishments are known throughout kingdoms, and their stories are the most essential stories of the North.

• Guilhelm, the Duke of Vincia - A politician without equal, known for his gentle demeanor and unassailable calm, as well as the vicious effectiveness of his politics.
• Jenevra, Fallen Queen of the Aels - Traitor, savior, priestess, or Queen... no one has done more to shape the current landscape of Lloegyr than Jenevra of Clan Onellon, now in exile.
• Raagar of Vexspar - The grim uncle to King Rolf, the former Kraki champion, and lion in winter.

Fate 4: These NPCs are amongst the movers and shakers of the setting... you know of them and of their formidable abilities.

• Augda, Primate of Lloegyr
• Dannis, the Earl of Lamark
• Finn, Earl of Farpont
• Mark, the King's Chancellor
• Pryd, Prince of Wahla
• Rolf, King of the Kraki

Fate 3: Generally speaking, this level of Fate is reserved for the characters of players, and include well-established or promising individuals.

Fate 2: Most of the "named" NPCs you meet are considered Fate 2 (generally, this is the default Fate for an NPC who could be "promoted" to NPC status.