 |
| Artem Demura |
Perlesvaus
Arthuriana heavily influences the Dark Souls series, so using Arthurian canon as the basis for the Iron Gates would be counterproductive. We already have that. You can play it now.
But some obscure bits are well worth mining for RPG elements. Luckily, there's a team already on the project. The folks at the Maniculum Podcast take medieval texts and examine them with a contemporary dorky lens. It's very fun. I'd be interested to see their take on In Cath Catharda, if they want a medieval Irish text of dubious quality.
Perlesvaus is a 13th century sequel to Chrétien de Troyes Percival. It's very, very weird. The podcasters compare it to bad internet fanfiction.
" 'Is this macabre obsession with decapitated heads another symptom of an abnormal mentality?' "
"Ok but there's a lot of decapitated heads in medieval literature."
"I know. Imagine how many there have to be in this text to make it stand out."
"oh no"
-The Maniculum Podcast, Perlesvaus Ep 1.
I vaguely remember reading a few pages of Perlesvaus many years ago. Evans' 1889 translation is... not great, so I doubt I got past the introduction.
While I wait for a copy of Nigel Bryant's 1977 translation to arrive, here are a few notes from the Maniculum's reading. For convenience (my own, mostly), here are the Maniculum blog posts on Perlesvaus: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
-The text is attributed to "Josephus", who could be Flavius Josephus, Josephus of Aramathea, or some other Josephus.
-There are more timeline and continuity issues than CW's Riverdale series. When is any of this happening? The past. Don't worry about it.
-A major quest item it the sword that beheaded John the Baptist. This is a strange enough item that there's a whole paper on the subject. It's not the Sword of Strange Girdles, but it's still weird.
-Traps!
The Haughty Maiden invites Gawain in and gives him a tour of the local chapel. Within there are four empty tombs and three recesses within the wall, filled with shrines and gems. The Maiden explains that three of the tombs are for the best knights in the land, Gawain, Lancelot of the Lake, and Percival, while the fourth one is for her. She plans to lure them into each of their respective shrines and displays the guillotine-type blades that will behead them once they kneel in the recesses, to collect their heads and keep them forever. She even has knights constantly roaming, looking for them. Talk about a superfan.
Gawain excuses himself after mass the next morning and flees from the castle, but runs into one of the roving knights on his way out. He makes a daring escape, and the tale briefly returns to the Maiden as she realizes just who Gawain really was.
-Arthurian Dwarves!
-Reactive scenery!
As they travel, the narrator explains that the land around them changes according to the will of God, because the local knights in England get bored with normal life and always seek new adventures.
Ever wondered how a knight can go through a forest in Wales, find an island, land on it, then end up in Albania? That's how. God did it. Now roll for initiative.
 |
Schemes and the Iron Gates
Old-school dungeon crawling naturally generates schemes. It is
possible to run an RPG as a tournament-style on-rails board/war game
with strictly defined mechanics, but it's a waste of the medium's
potential. The first time someone threw lamp oil at a flammable mummy,
or used an inventory item in an unexpected way, RPGs left the wargaming
world and became their own thing.
Schemes are a major selling point. Schemes are also inherently ridiculous.
Perhaps it's dramatic irony. Everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop.. Even the most serious scheme, when exposed to the light, tends to have an element of farce in it. Secret names, disguise, last-minute oversights, folly, ambition, and venality.
It is difficult to create a serious, grim, fallen world Dark Souls setting when players have freedom of action.
On the other hand, in the source texts, silly things happen all the time. In Cath Catharda is fairly serious (or, at least, not intentionally funny), but the Alexander Romances are full of PC shenanigans, as is Perlesvaus.
Using Medusa's severed head as a weapon. Using a glowing gem found in a fish's belly as a light in your lantern. Sleeping in your armour because this castle is obviously a trap. Not sleeping with fair maidens because you are on a Holy Quest and are Sufficiently Genre Aware. Etc.
In a normal RPG book, I try to write tools to generate schemes, often with a humorous twist. Gaming should be fun.
For the Iron Gates, I need to write tools to generate schemes with a more somber tone, but the game still needs to be fun. Nobody's going to turn up week after week to be miserable. They can get misery at home.
 |
| Artem Demura |
What Do The PCs Do?
In Perlesvaus, the world is falling apart because King Arthur stopped having adventures. That's his job. He's supposed to get out there, meet hermits, rescue maidens, receive ambiguous prophecies, and escape from perilous situations. He's not being a good king, so a variety of poorly explained curses have fallen on the land.
OSR-type games often use wealth as a motivation. Get rich or die trying.
5E-type games often use saving the world as a motivation, but tend to rely on a clear villain, an easily explained plot, and unambiguous (or at least unexamined) morality.
But what is the motivation of the PCs in the Iron Gates? What do they do? Get rich? Gold has supernatural power. They can become the rulers of a doomed world, the latest in a chain of warlords to occupy a throne. Break down the Iron Gates? Even if that's possible, it means the end of the world as they know it. It's easy to create a setting. It's trickier to create a setting that can tell more than one story.
Exploration seems like a sensible goal, but in some games, "exploration" is just another way of saying "listen to the GM read about imaginary places." Novels do that better.
Perhaps a bit of subterfuge? The game starts out with players operating on one layer (getting rich), transitions to a second layer (getting powerful), and then a third (realizing that wealth and power are illusions and the world is doomed, unless...).
Or perhaps a more explicit Holy Grail type quest at the start? Find X item to avoid Doom Y. Oh no, while finding Item X, you discovered meta-Doom Z.
Player motivation is an interesting thing. I think you summed up the process well, Gold is useful to everyone, then some will want to use their power to influence the world, but if their world is threatened, none of their schemes matter anymore.
ReplyDeleteIn "Drive" by Daniel H. Pink he describes Mastery, Purpose, and Autonomy as the motivators for heuristic or creative endeavours. Maybe it is this autonomy component that really sets the medium apart from wargaming. Without purpose, however, autonomy alone isn't enough.
DeleteThis feels like a setting which can/should have several great quests kicking around.
ReplyDeleteI note in almost all the examples you post, armies are mentioned. Yet there doesn't seem to be any large-scale conflict, let alone PC involvement in it. That feels very odd. Alexander was all about battle. The myths you're citing are often about battle. Where are the battles? I would have thought playing through this would be a lot like playing a campaign set in the Blood War.
My own thought would be that it might make sense to have the PCs be mercenaries, then have that structure take them through the setting. Works extra-well since soldiers are never told more than they need to know in any case, and probably encourages the right attitudes. Also works well with potential merchant caravans or what have you.
Also, you're simultaneously trying to recreate a very narrow and limited experience, in a pointcrawl...but also leave scope for multiple stories? Seems a bit contradictory.
Oh, there will be a ton of secondary quests and loops.
DeleteI'm torn on the idea of large-scale conflict. The aftermath of a battle, or a stalemated siege with maddened opponents locked in a death spiral, are better places for outsider PCs to wander through than a traditional battle. Mercenaries/merchants work, but integrating large-scale battles into RPGs is tricky. It can turn into "oh no, the GM is reading descriptive text at us again" instead of an interesting session.
And yes, it is a bit contradictory. That's why I'm thinking about it. :D
Sounds like you need to just come up with interesting mass combat rules. That's an easy thing to do, right? ;)
DeleteMore seriously, I think you reasonably could have the battles resolved 'off-screen' and the PCs deal with the aftermath. Ancient and medieval infantry combat isn't the realm of individual heroism outside of things like sieges or honor duels, which can be represented by normal combat rules. Or use something similar to that war-weather thing you came up with for The War to determine how the battle goes. So you still get battles, but the PCs mostly can't actually influence them - they're carried along by the storm, and get to deal with the results once it passes. I feel like that fits thematically, and if it's kept brief that still works.
If the PCs are cavalry...cavalry charges aren't well-represented on the tabletop. What an opportunity for innovation! Good luck! :P
Re the contradictory bit: personally I'd figure out some grand quests for the world, figure out a few different ways for characters to feel about those grand quests, and assume the players will buy into the conceits of the genre.
As Jeff Vogel once said: "If you are a player, on the other hand, try to meet the DM halfway. Suppose that the gamemaster for the evening, Frederick, walks in carrying a copy of the module Scum Orcs of the Hills. He sets out a box with twenty carefully painted Scum Orc miniatures. An issue of Dragon magazine drops from his pack and falls open to the well worn article "Ecology of the Scum Orc." For the sake of realism, he has carefully cultivated a personal scent very similar to that of a Scum Orc. He lays out a map of the hills surrounding your village. And he asks you, "What do you do now?"
"This is NOT the point where you say "We go to the lowlands and hunt kobolds."
Equally, if the GM plonks down "Dark Souls via the myths of Alexander" you do not say "we set up a peaceful trading concern, dealing mostly in turnips." It's not that sort of game. Dark Souls is a pretty narrow experience, which is one of the things that makes it effective. I think if you want to capture some of the same feelings, a narrow experience is probably wise. I wouldn't say the Arthurian myths tell multiple stories beyond having different adventures.
I may have misunderstood what you meant by multiple stories. Too late, I typed all this. :P
The pursuit of royalty and destruction reflect the drives of Gold and Iron. I'd say that Silver in the form of Mercury is surviving the transition from one age to another (while being transformed by it). Neither hoard not burn the records, re-write them until we ship of Theseus our way through apocalypsed without ever feeling that piecemeal birth/death.
ReplyDeleteAlternately paths which combine, refine or reject these fundamental approaches might be those of Alloy (and alchemy) or Rust. They say that hoary old Bronze still has its agents, eager to bind grand empires by ties of tribute, maybe to return with the resounding thunder of bells and powder...
I went with the trio of Gold, Iron, and Water (though both silver and mercury can be tied to water). Giving water the archivist role makes sense.
DeleteIt's an apocalyptic setting.
ReplyDeleteApocalyptic settings are about survival.
Survival isn't a goal, it's an anti-goal. I.E., you're not traveling towards survival, you're traveling away from death.
"Towards" is one destination.
"Away" is an infinite number of destinations.
That means that "away" can tell more stories than "towards".
Because of these things, you should say that the PCs in Iron Gates try to survive.
As such, you should institute a number of sub-systems to track the ways that they might NOT survive. As such, you might have to simplify sub-systems that are extraneous to that.
You can track XP by saying that the PCs level up simply by staying alive for certain periods of time.
I don't want to make the Iron Gates fully apocalyptic. The world is falling apart but it hasn't completely collapsed. There are still places that function, for a given value of function. I'm not sure a game where food and water, etc, are limiting resources is the best way to get the tone I want.
DeleteAlso, the Bright Conference setting I'm working on is much more suited to a typical resource tracking food/water/shelter/air survival game.
Very well. Do the PCs not eat and drink, then? Or perhaps they simply have an easy time getting water and food?
DeleteLook, if the world is declining in the way you've described in other posts, then it must be a metaphysical force. They are creatures of the civilized phase in a barbarous phase. Perhaps they are not starving, but instead barbarizing? And they must resist this by creating external civilization wherever they can, as a way to metaphysically create internal civilization inside themselves?
Of course, by creating civilization anywhere, they are faced with two terrible realities:
+ civilization in a barbarous phase is itself subject to barbarization, undoing their efforts
+ a civilized area cannot (or cannot easily) be subjected to further civilizing efforts, and so the PCs must continue onwards into barbarian lands in order to civilize those
Give the PCs a barbarism stat and a civilization stat. Get the iron capacity involved, somehow. Get a gold capacity, or perhaps instead just effects for carrying certain amounts of gold. Maybe base them on the PC's level. Figure out what level means, in-universe. Maybe barbarous acts cause gold to whither into Iron. I'm just throwing stuff out here.
I don't want water and food to be major limiting factors in most cases. Personal inventory space for dungeon crawling is one thing, but food security is another. There will still be areas where long-term supplies are important, but I feel like games can bog down as players focus on the necessities of survival vs. the challenges of exploration.
DeleteI think I'm going to do some slightly more interesting things with civilization/barbarism than this comment suggests. I can't really fault you for not getting it, as I haven't written about it explicitly yet, but while a civilizing mission can be a PC motivation, Civilization, with a capital C, is not _necessarily_ a metaphysical force, though people might think it is.
That is a fair point. I think I can take a page from DS1 and have multiple overlapping truths/motivations for what the Iron Gates are, if they "are" at all. Those damn serpents...
ReplyDeleteAn Iron Gates update? Christmas has come early!
ReplyDelete