​Next up on my reading list: Hero Wars

I have never played in or read in detail about the world of Glorantha, so this will be my first dive.

If you have thoughts about the game, I'd love to hear them! If you have a copy of the game and want to read along, that'd be cool too. I'm not the fastest reader, so you've got time.

"A final word to the Dungeon Master from the authors. These rules are intended as guidelines. No two Dungeon Masters run their dungeons quite the same way, as anyone who has learned the game with one group and then transferred to another can easily attest. You are sure to encounter situations not covered by these rules. Improvise. Agree on a probability that an event will occur and convert it into a die roll - roll the number and see what happens! The game is intended to be fun and the rules modified if the players desire. Do not hesitate to invent, create, and experiment with new ideas. Imagination is the key to a good game."

-Dr. Holmes's parting words, page 41, 1979.

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Michael Miller responded:

Am I wrong to see this not as Rule Zero, but instead as "giving permission" to engage in Lumpley Principle-style group consensus of game system?

I'm not saying it was ever interpreted that way at the time, but that seems to me to be what the words are saying.

----

I responded:

​The reason I think you're right, +Michael Miller, and the reason I think +Christopher Weeks reference to the Advanced Fuckery chapter in AW is a keen observation, is that the "rules" that Holmes seems to be pointing to here are the rules of probability.

He's not making a blanket statement that players should do whatever they want to have a good time. He's talking specifically about either inventing probability for moments not anticipated by the rules he's laid out or shifting the probabilities to suit your game, because in D&D as he has presented it, the game world is set up as a set of probabilities. Whether or not a door is locked, whether or not wandering monsters come by, whether or not you spot a secret door, whether or not you hit a monster or are hit in return - they are all reduced to a percentage chance which can be rolled for. When you play with one dungeon master or another, the particulars of their world are shaped by those percentages (and established rules about how often and under what condition those probabilities are engaged).

So to create a new probability for a new occurrence in Holmes's D&D is very much like creating a new move in the Bakers' AW, it changes how the characters and the rules of the world interact. And as the Bakers say go forth and create custom moves that further customize your particular Apocalypse World, so Holmes says go forth and create custom probabilities to customize your particular fantasy worlds.

At least, that's the way I currently see it.

Back for more #claytalk!

(My first post, in case you’re interested, is here: https://plus.google.com/102721916927145169256/posts/1MqG9M914Ty)

Today I want to talk about the intermixing in the text of fiction, setting information, and rules in The Clay that Woke.

I’ve seen passionate reactions to fiction appearing in RPG texts. I’ve never had strong feelings one way or the other, but I will admit that I usually skip over it. I tried to read the opening narrative in the new_7th Sea_ core rulebook, but when I saw that it when on for, my god, 8 full-sized two-columned pages, I flipped right past them. I knew coming into The Clay that Woke that some significant portion of the text was narrative, and I can’t say I was excited about that. But nor was I dreading it. I greatly enjoyed Paul’s writing in My Life with Master, which is the only other text of his that I’ve read, so I was confident that it would at least be an enjoyable read.

But now that I’m 60 or so pages in, I find the fiction to be much more than merely enjoyable. I think this particular use of fiction alongside passages that detail the setting and passages the explain the rules creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The reason I think it is effective is because we read fiction differently than we read how-to instruction, and we read setting material differently than we read either of the other two types of passages. Switching between them – at least in the specific context of The Clay that Woke - has a cool effect on me. I’ll try to explain further.

The first section of text in the book is a bit of fiction, though one without a narrative. It is more of a vignette that situates us generally speaking in the world. We are obviously in a fantasy setting of sorts, with minotaurs, bronze weaponry, and a crumbling city surrounded by jungle. We are given not only physical features but hints at social structures, a sense of cultural decadence, and a storied past that reaches back millennia. I found myself very patient with the hints and suggestions of things in the world, such as a reference to bygone figures like Sulunia Empyreaus and Veturro the gladiator, and to geographical features like the stone faces whose meaning is long gone, the Tower of Heroes, the Vadhmriver, and the tall, leafless trees that stretch out over the jungle that are simply called “watchers.” I was more than patient, I was excited by the glimpses of the world that could not be contained in this one passage. That excitement is due in large part to the fact that it was fiction. Every science fiction or fantasy story makes reference to a world far larger than what you can see in any opening scene. You read actively (or at least, I do) looking for clues and bits and wonder how it will all come into focus later, for you believe that in fact it will all come into focus later. Using fiction puts the reader in the state of accepting that more will be revealed if you are patient and read on.

If the fiction had gone on for long, my patience probably would have shifted to anxiousness, wondering when we would be getting to something good, so it is important that at the bottom of the second page, the author assures you that you will be learning about the game, not just the world. This is the paragraph that ends the first section:

“The Clay that Woke is a roleplaying game. You play nameless minotaurs living and working among the people of the Degringolade and the dangers of the jungle. A gamemaster brings the world to life by creating your employment circumstances and creating and roleplaying all the beings of the Degringolade and jungle. You’ll try to uphold the difficult, stoic minotaur philosophy of silence, and you’ll earn a name” (16).

That single paragraph brings in the elements we just read about: minotaurs, Degringolade (the city), the jungle, the presence of humans, and that minotaurs are in their employ. Doing so assures the reader that the fiction is directly related to the game. Even more importantly, the final paragraph points to things that were not in the fiction: the “stoic minotaur philosophy or silence” and the idea that “you’ll earn a name.” That’s the point that I got excited about what this form of writing could do as the fiction launches us into the rules and the rules launch us into more fiction. And indeed, the next bit of fiction brings up the idea of “breaking silence” and earning a name, as well as showing us what sort of encounters one might have in the jungle. Both forms then hint at things beyond themselves and both promise that all questions will be answered if you only read on. Over time, I found myself reading the rules with the same creative engagement that I was reading the fiction, as everything pointed both forward and back in a kind of crisscrossing of information and ideas.

When reading a rulebook, you expect things to be laid out in logical steps. First I’ll tell you about A, which then prepares to you learn about B. And if you understand C and D, you’re ready to see how E brings it altogether. It’s very linear and in a lot of ways an illusion, as everyone who has tried to write such an instructional text knows. As you try to figure out how to present the material, you realize that you need to introduce the idea of B before you can really explain A, but for B to make any sense, C needs to be on the table, which first requires an explanation of A. That muddle is one of the reasons everyone says that you can learn best by playing, because then everything can be taught almost at once, and it’s why a second read is always more edifying than a first.

Paul’s way around that muddle, it seems to me, is to invoke the way we read fiction, a fantasy novel which shows us parts of the world while referencing names and ideas that will become clear in time as we follow our protagonist around. You get things pointing forward and pointing back, preparing you for new stuff and reaching back to pick up and secure things that were only hinted at before. It is the journey through the text that brings everything together, organically. In fact, the index that stands where a table of contents should be is a perfect emblem of the book. There is an order in heading and subheadings, but the numbers that follow the words dance forward and backward, stretching several pages here, and touching upon a page briefly there. Run your eyes down the index and watch the number reach back and forth, sometimes in large steps, sometimes in small. Everything in the dance has linked arms with everything else, both numerically and conceptually.

It’s very neat, and makes, I think, for a very rewarding read.

The reason fiction is traditionally irritating in RPG texts is that they fail to be intrinsic to the text. They are flavor and contribute nothing but that. What Czege does is make it so that the fiction and the rules and the setting descriptions lean upon one another. In the case of The Clay that Woke that decision seems reasonable because the rules don’t exist as mechanics clothed in the setting of Degringolade and the jungle. The sinew of the mechanics is inseparable from the muscle of the world in which they exist. To play the game, you must understand the world, and to understand the world, you must know not only facts about its people, culture, and physical properties, but you must know the living breathing life of those things as they are communicated through the fiction.

Had this game drawn on genre tropes and fictional worlds already familiar to the reader, then there would be no need to present the information this way. You could say, you know this film? It’s like that.

It’s effective also because the scope of the world in the game is limited. The Clay that Woke involves one (albeit vast) city and one (equally vast) jungle, not a whole planet or system of planets. The game involves minotaurs and humans, not an endless network of species and cultures. The restrictions of the scope of the game played limits the scope of the world at issue so that this particular presentation can accomplish what it wants to accomplish.

Okay, that was much longer than I intended. Forgive me if it is long-winded and wandering. I do not have time to revise my writing much due to lack of free time. If I edited these the way I wanted, I’d post one a month. ​

​It’s time for some #claytalk!

What do you do when you first start reading a book? You’ve decided you’re going to read it, you’ve picked it up and have it in your hands – now what do you do? What’s your ritual?

Here’s what I do, and here’s what I did with The Clay that Woke:

I read everything on the front and back cover. Seriously, everything. I take in the art and the graphics, and the little bits of information that are hinted at in the text. Minotaurs in a human civilization? Surreal? Trackless jungle? (I don’t know why, but I love the word “trackless” there – a great way to denote its untamed nature?) Immersive? I love the front cover art and the colors, and I love that the back cover art is grayscale on the yellow background. I love that the peacefulness of the front cover art is contrasted with the violence of the back cover art. Damn that backcover art is dynamic! That blood spray! Damn! I make a note of the name Marcel on the art to see who that is.

I see the mythological origins of infant minotaurs being “pulled from the mud of the eternal river.” I linger over the 9 icons and puzzle over them only briefly. I remember that tokens are a part of the game, but I didn’t realize they were part of an “oracle” within the game. The word “injustice” catches my eye.

From there I normally go inside the covers, but in this case there are flaps on the covers that contain additional information. First the inside flap of the front cover. I read the overview of the 11 tokens and their nine icons. Courage, mind, name, silence, gift and life tokens for the minotaurs. No and skull tokens for the GM. Red, bright, and still voices for the “supernatural entities in the jungle that are known to take an interest in minotaurs. I am intrigued. The inside flap of the back cover has play advice about “what to put into the Krater. I learn that there will be dangerous situations that players will want their minotaur to overcome. I learn there is a riskier response to dangerous situations that can put a player’s minotaur’s life at risk. I learn that there will be social conflicts that players will want their minotaur to overcome. Sometimes player’s will be amenable to a compromised solution to social conflict. Sometimes players will want instead to change the other participant’s mind. Sometimes the particulars of the conflict are less important than what you learn, I surmise, since there’s a way to “learn things about the world of the current situation.” I learn you can try to short circuit a potentially violent outcome. I learn that sometimes a player’s minotaur might be in the presence of a “Voice” without knowing it, and that if the player play’s that moment right, the minotaur can receive a “gift of a unique object or power.”

I haven’t even opened the book and I feel like I have a smattering of ideas about what the book and game is about. It’s a pretty great design because on the covers alone the reader is introduced to major themes, flavor, and play content. I know there will be some strategy involved by what tokens a player choses to put into the “Krater.” I’m intrigued and want to know more about these supernatural entities in the jungle and this “Voice”. I want to know about the minotaur culture and how it interacts with the human culture. I’m interested to know how the game balances “dangerous situations” requiring courage and “social conflicts” requiring mind. I’m intrigued by name tokens and what it means to be a “nameless” minotaur. I’m intrigued by the idea of the Krater and how the GM and players create the pools of tokens from which the player presumably draws a result. In short, I’m left with a lot of half-knowledge and suggestions whose questions I know will be answered as I read. I’m struck by the care of what I’ve read so far. I trust the author and the book at this point and am excited for more.

After exploring the covers, I usually look at the end of an RPG text next. There are normally design notes, thank yous, or other parting thoughts that for some reason I like to read first. Here, I find the sentence beginning “The Clay that Woke is inspired by RPGs with rich, troubled settings like Jorune, and Earthdawn, and Ruby, by Greg Saunders, by Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse, and by weird ancient civilizations in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and Paul Park’s The Starbridge Chronicles." I read through from there to the end of the book. I linger on the final full-page art and have no idea what I’m looking at, but I like the slimy insect in the foreground and the quoted line at the bottom reminiscent of the old illustrated stories with the relevant quote at the bottom of each piece.

I riffle through the pages on my way to the front of the book and catch full pages of art, the icons that are slowly becoming familiar, and a clean layout.

Only then do I go to the front page and work my way forward. I read the prefatory information. I wonder if Nash is Paul’s son, or a dear friend, or a mentor of some sort. Then I get to the table of contents. I’m on the second page of it when I realize, wait, that’s no table of contents. It’s an index! Where the table of contents should be! I flip to the end and confirm there is no additional index there. I flip through the book again and see that there are no chapters or titled sections. It’s a clever idea, putting the index in the front, given that structure. You can’t have a table of contents when there are no headings. And why not use the index as a kind of orienting device for the reader. Flipping through the index, I see that the main organization elements are minotaurs, society and culture, the jungle, and the means of play. By this point I’m eager to get to the main text, so I breeze past the index and start at page 15.

So what’s your ritual, if you have one?

And of course, I’m handling the physical book. Those of you reading an electronic version, is there a ritual you engage in, of do you just start at the beginning?

#Claytalk continues with a look at play advice in The Clay that Woke.

(My last #claytalk post is here, if you’re interested: https://plus.google.com/102721916927145169256/posts/W1jRsDenCdS)

RPGs are somewhat unique in the world of tabletop games insofar as there is usually a layer of instruction beyond the rules of the game themselves that guide players in how to approach the game to get the most out of the experience. It is somewhat analogous to strategy tips in competitive games that tell players how to think about the game to increase their chances at succeeding. Only, succeeding in an RPG means having a particular play experience that the game is designed to create.

This play experience is related to but different from what you are playing to find out. In The Clay that Woke we are told that we are playing “until it’s clear whether the watchers will frondesce and bloom again for society’s entrance into a new age of greatness or not” (22). Players are also told that they will “try to uphold the difficult, stoic minotaur philosophy of silence” and “earn a name” (16). Those goal posts tell us about the larger narrative that will unfold through play and the smaller play goals that get us there. What I want to look at instead is the particular philosophy of roleplaying that underpins the playing the gets us to those goals.

In The Clay that Woke, Czege lays out his particular philosophy through the parable of the Chimera and the Gargoyle:

“[T]he Gargoyle is a moment in time, a fabricated thing. It fights time for its existence. The Chimera is time. The beasts come together as an expression of shared self-imagination, self-realization, heterogeneous but gloriously, committedly permeable throughout. The beasts test and prove the identities of one another, penetrate and define each other. And the secret is we can all do this. We can bring into existence a shared self that expresses more about ourselves than any of us could say individually. It is a triumph of becoming time. Consider the Gargoyle and the Chimera. The Gargoyle is a made thing that fights time for its legacy. It must be perfect to even exist. We aspire to its perfect fabrication, but we cannot achieve its lofty, impossible perfection. The Chimera brings itself into existence and has no shame for its imperfection. At any given moment in time the Chimera is a triumph. Its imperfections are throughout its existence, and throughout time before and after, and not within any moment of its triumph. You might say the Gargoyle is an artifact of a triumph, and the Chimera is the anecdote of its triumph” (97).

We are told on the following page that “[t]he goat, the lion, the snake, and the flames [that merge to form the Chimera] are like a group of roleplayers coming together to play The Clay that Woke” (98). The power of the Chimera, the power of roleplaying, is in the “com[ing] together as an expression of shared self-imagination, self-realization.” Whereas the gargoyle is a thing complete and unchanging, the Chimera is the process of discovery. Specifically, what is discovered is about the players who have come together to roleplay. While the process of playing The Clay that Woke reveals things about the world of the narrative and the minotaurs and gamemaster characters we play, the true act of discovery is of what’s within us, according to this passage. As Czege says, “Your starting minotaur character seems undefined, but he’s really not, because you the player are present within him, just the way the essences of goat, lion, snake, and flames are present in their play among the jungle slurry of history and culture. Your interests drive his actions” (98).

Character creation is rather sparse in the game. The character sheet tells you what tokens you begin with and what actions your character can take to refresh their various tokens, but there is nothing on the character sheet that makes your character unique. The character sheet gives you an archetype, and who your minotaur is is discovered only through play, and according to the parable of the Chimera and the Gargoyle, that discovery necessarily involves revealing something about yourself, the player. You’ll notice there are no background establishing questions or ways to define how one minotaur character is related to another character on the sheets or any part of character creation. The game is not interested in creating and character full of charged connections and backgrounds the way a lot of currently popular RPG’s manage character creation. As the text says, the game “isn’t about unwinding drama from a made snarl of inter-character stress” (98). Instead, your minotaur character begins as a seemingly clean slate so that you don’t distance yourself from your character with all these fictional features. The game wants you the player to be “present within him” and your the player’s interests to “drive his action.” Only by doing so can the process of play be a tool for “self-realization.”

And play is not just a process of self-discovery as an individual, but about the greater discovery that can be achieved by everyone at the table roleplaying together. The game is “about submitting to the mechanics of an alien world and engaging a primordial ability to communicate across the boundaries of your human differences with other players to find progressively the mutual incitement of your essences” (98). Damn. That’s a lofty and beautiful expression of the end goal of a successful session of roleplaying The Clay that Woke. Just give yourself over to the mechanics of the game and the fictional setting of the world and we’ll be able to reach out beyond ourselves to a true connection with each other that will “incite[]” our “essences.”

“Submitting” seems like a key word in that sentence. You cannot fight the system. We are told not to “hack[] together a narrative within some defined story structure” (98). Let what happens happen and don’t work towards a story, and that goes for the minotaur players as much as for the GM. Players are warned not to “come to the game as a player with a goal of authoring a drama with your minotaur . . . . Come to it to discover your minotaur in the context of the game” (107). Play is first and foremost an act of discovery (of both the character and yourself), not the creation of an authored drama. That authored drama is the Gargoyle, dead and perfect, not the Chimera, living and an expression of shared self-imagination. Further advice: “If your scenes don’t seem fun, try to make gamemaster characters important by the things your character does” (107-108). That, to me, is the surprising bit of advice that sent me back to the instruction to submit. We are used to playing characters who are the center of the stories that unfold, and it many other games, I have read instructions for the GM not to get caught up in their own NPCs, to remember that the game is about the PCs. Yet here is an instruction to the players to use their characters to make the gamemaster characters important!

This importance of submission is directly related to the minotaur characters being second-class citizens in the Degringolade. You play menial laborers whose rights in the city are never made clear. At times you seem like laborers and at other times like slave labor. There is the story in the book about the duel two minotaurs fight on behalf of their “psychotic employers” (88), but the minotaurs only just met the men in the jungle and were drafted into service to fight a duel to, potentially, the death. Truly free members of the society could have told the two men to go fuck themselves. In this context, it becomes clear that “employer” is a kind of euphemism. Minotaurs must submit to their social situation. To not do so is to break silence. And as the minotaurs must submit, the game wants the players to submit. The advice the GM gives to the creation of situations in which the minotaurs are placed focuses entirely on the interests and observations of the GM. The situations are created without thought about who the minotaurs might be or which character plays which minotaur. The minotaurs themselves, at least at the start of the game, are completely interchangeable, and any minotaur can be assigned to any employment opportunity. There is some allowance made for the archetypes of the minotaurs in play, but that’s where the consideration ends.

This is not to say that the GM is like the human masters and the players like the minotaurs. The GM and players are clearly working together through play on the path of discovery - discovery of the world, the unfolding story, the characters at play, and the players themselves.

I was saying to Slade Stolar in the comment sections to my last post that I was surprised that the GM section of the text didn’t give explicit commands to the GM to push at the boundaries at which the minotaurs would and would not break silence. Having reread that portion of the book, I see now that such a stance in unnaturally aggressive to meet the author’s end. The text tells the GM to create situations born out of their personal irritations and experiences with their culture and society, translated to fit the Degringolade. Then you place the minotaur characters in a position to be a part of that situation, receiving requests and commands from the gamemaster characters. In responding to the situation, the character may or may not break silence; the game doesn’t really care. The strictures of silence put productive boundaries on the behavior of the PC and hardwire inner tensions into the minotaur characters very existence to ensure that whatever response they have will necessarily be thoughtful and interesting.

A lot of important features of The Clay that Woke run contrary to the way a lot of other RPGs are run. Let’s take Apocalypse World and games that are inspired by it. Those games set up a “snarl of inter-character stress” from the first session and then let the players drive the action of the game, with the MC playing the world responding to those actions. The unfolding narrative centers on the PCs, and the NPCs are there to play against the PCs to show off how awesome they are. In The Clay that Woke, it is the doings of the gamemaster characters that drive play, even as the individual minotaur characters’ actions are driven by the players’ interests. The PCs are responding to the actions of the gamemaster characters rather than the other way around. Certainly, once things are in motion, everyone is responding to each other, but the focus is on the doings of the gamemaster characters. Czege even warns the GM that players “are often noncommittal in their early interactions, and also often interpret silence as calling for disinterest or outright rejection of the doings of gamemaster characters, so you’ll have to work a bit and use various methods to provoke them to get involved” (123). That puts a lot of the initial onus on the GM, but once things get moving, once situations are established and the minotaur characters are invested in the goings on of their human employers, I imagine the game moves along smoothly and creates fascinating moments.

There is more to say, but at the moment I have neither the time nor the energy. If I were to go on, I would look at the role of the jungle in the game, as compared to the city. The city is where the GM prepares social and culture problems for the characters to explore, but preparation for the jungle is much lighter, involving the Voices and a few exciting encounters covering all four inflection types. I would want to explore the language of the game, especially words like “inflection,” “intrinisic,” “Voices,” and “externals.” I would want to explore the Krater and the unique nature of tokens as bids on possible outcomes rather than economic unit that can be spent to achieve a desired outcome (and the unique exception of name tokens being spent that in the one condition that allows it). So much to discuss and so little time. If you discuss any of these things, I hope you tag me so I can be sure to read it.