Captain Anorak's
Guide to Gaming
The King's Men
TKM is a game which I started writing in 97, and
which I've been developing ever since. It's a gameworld
of my own design, which has grown from the original
anecdotal concept in my head to a living world which I
know in detail. Since 99, I've also been writing a novel
set in this world.
My first roleplaying was in 'fantasy' games: I played
a little Middle Earth (the Tolkien game) and Maelstrom
(set in a Renaissance Europe where magic exists), then
spent my adolescence playing Dragon Warriors, which is
subtitled 'The Ultimate Fantasy Roleplaying Game' but in
reality is just a hack-and-slash system. I like the idea
of this genre, by which I mean a world of pre-industrial
technology with magic, but I've never found a game that
does it well. (MERP would do it well if it followed Tolkien
strictly, but that relies on having a GM who cares and doesn't
just make it into AD&D.)
THE CONCEPT
My biggest problem with the way fantasy RPGs are
written is the assumption that most of them make, that
player characters will be 'a party of adventurers'
who wander around a fantasy land getting in 'adventures'.
(I discuss this in more detail in my essay on
character purpose
and my rant on wandering fantasy adventurers.)
I wanted to write
a fantasy game that avoids this, so I had to come up with
something for the player characters to do, which would be
written into the game.
The idea I came up with was this: the country in which
the game is set has been in a civil war for the last thirty
years. One side has finally won, and the winner's armies are
tied up holding the major urban areas. Now the new king must
win the peace. In the far-flung parts of the countryside,
order must be restored, so the king has formed a sort of
emergency police force to go and apply his rule by whatever
means are necessary. This force, of which the player
characters were members, is made up of volunteers,
but criminals get a pardon for their crimes if they volunteer,
so most people who end up volunteering do so to escape the
noose or the axe.
I liked this set-up because it gave the characters a
responsibility without too much supervision. They had a job
to do, but no-one was there telling them exactly how to do
it. They had to plan their own actions, but in the long term
they were responsible to their superiors in the new government.
They couldn't go to their superiors for back-up all the time,
but had to make do mostly with what they had. Since they were
a new force that had been hastily rushed into service, their
powers were ill-defined, so they would be unsure of what they
could really get away with.
THE SOCIETY
I started writing the game from the above set of basic ideas.
I found myself putting into it many of the ideas I'd had about
the way games should be written. First, I created a society
in which the characters lived. This is very different from most
fantasy games, which simply describe a world in which characters
move. My characters were part of the world they lived in. In this
world, there were three races, the Jilani, the Ying and the Aruzo.
A character would have to be a member of one race, or of mixed
blood. That made him part of the racial conflict that had been
going on for centuries. People would pre-judge him for being
a member of his race, and treat him accordingly.
THE MAGIC SYSTEM
Magic in most fantasy RPGs strikes me as silly, because
usually the lowest level of magic is really quite powerful.
It seems to me that if someone learns magic, the first thing
that he will learn is how to do something very minor, and then
he will build up to bigger things. For instance, in Dragon
Warriors, a 1st rank sorceror can cast a jet of flame from his
hand, yet there is no way to produce a tiny flame capable of
lighting a candle. The reason for this is that the writers only
thought of spells that would be useful in a dungeon-bashing
situation. This makes sense if you're writing a combat game in
which characters will only be doing combat actions. But if you
write a game in which characters want to do everyday things in
their lives as well, it's ridiculous to ignore the kind of magic
that could be used for this.
So I made magic widespread but low-level. Everyone had access
to some magic (if only through the religious rituals of hearth
and field), but very few people had studied magic so intensively
that they could do anything showily amazing. Magic or religion
(there was no clear distinction between the two) could make the
crops grow, bring about good fortune in a general sense, and
make people stronger and healthier, but no-one could fly or throw
fireballs. You'd have to achieve a god-like level of power before
anything like that became possible.
Another important point is that I made the magic system work
in an understandable way. All magic revolves around two things:
life-force (called itran in the Jilani language) and spirits,
which may be the spirits of dead people, or naturally-occuring
spirits of the world (such as the earth-spirits which make the
land fertile). The human body can be improved by manipulating the
flows of itran within it, so magicians learn to meditate to
consciously alter their own itran flows for temporary purposes,
such as making themselves stronger, or more agile, or more
clear-headed. Healers can speed up the healing of themselves or
others by changing itran flows into healing channels. (You may
notice the influence of Chinese and Indian practices like yoga
and tai-ji-quan on my thinking here.) Diviners can learn secrets
by speaking to their dead ancestors, and sacrifices to the
earth-spirits make the crops grow.
The upshot is that people can see how magic works - it's an
everyday part of their lives which they understand. I find this
much more satisfying than something like AD&D or Dragon Warriors,
in which something 'just works by magic' and you have to accept
it as such without any understanding of how it works, or any
consistent framework to determine what is or isn't possible by the
use of magic.
THE GAME MECHANICS
So far (at the time of writing, early 2001) I've only run this
game once. When I did, I kept the rules system secret from the
players, and made all the dice-rolls myself. The player knew their
characters' stats, so it was fairly obvious to them that they were
basically using the Call of Cthulhu rule system, but there
were some things they didn't know, like the stats of weapons, or
the game-mechanics effects of magic or armour.
I did combat like this: I gave each character two 'actions' in
each combat round (attack, parry or dodge). The players told me
what actions they were doing, I made all the rolls myself,
determined the results and described the effects in words not
stats. I kept track of Hit Points myself, so people didn't know
in mathematic detail how badly injured they were. This all went
pretty well, and the players didn't seem to have a problem with
in as I had worried they might. There was one embarrassing
incident where a character was saved by some very lucky rolls
and people said 'This is really unrealistic' (recounted in
detail here) but apart from that it
went like a dream.
HOW IT PLAYED
The most surprising thing about the game was that the player
characters did everything right. In most games I've seen, players
show at least some ineptitude, but here they got it all right.
They made military plans which were sensible, then carried them
out properly (disobeying the maxim that 'a plan of battle lasts
until the moment you engage the enemy'). There were one or two
comedy moments of course (one PC was the unfortunate Private Togo,
a footsoldier who was the only character who could not ride a horse;
several times, the other PCs charged on their horses, and Togo
came running up behind lugging his heavy spear, and arrived at the
battlefield only once the fighting was over) but all in all they
did a very competent job.
Although the players only really scratched the surface of what
I had written, they did manage to deal with some of the major
plot elements, and the campaign ended very neatly with the slaying
of a major NPC bad person. It was one of the most well rounded off
campaigns I've ever seen.
All in all, I do look back on it with a rosy glow because it
all worked out so nicely in the end, and I finally managed to
run a game which incorporated all the elements I've wanted to have
in for so long: sensible magic, a proper world background that
involves the players, and game mechanics taken away from the
players and left to the GM.
Marvellous.