Poison’d and the Art of the Short Form RPG

I finally got a copy of +Vincent Baker's Poison’ed and have to talk for just a moment about the first couple of paragraphs because I think it is a brilliant way to present information for a short RPG text.

Brilliant thing the 1st: Presenting a clear, gripping, energized and energizing situation.

Here’s how the game text opens:

In this the Year of Our Lord 1701, did end the bloody career of the pirate Captain Jonathan Abraham Pallor, called Brimstone Jack.

He did not die on the gallows, nor by the sword, nor shot in two by cannon. He died of poison, administered to him by his cook, an assassin under the King’s orders.

This is what happened next.

[Here “Poison’d” appears in pretty script like the title card of a movie or TV show]

Drag forward the cook, the assassin Tom Reed, throw him on the deck. He’s spitting and proclaiming us dead men all, no captain no more, ship listing and hungry, and His Majesty’s Ship The Resolute even now hauls up its anchor over in Kingston Bay.

Right?! This is the starting point for every game. You are pirates about the late Brimstone Jack’s ship, in the moment of a sudden power vacuum, with the assassin before you on deck declaring us all doomed, and an armed ship headed this way to capture us all. You don’t even know the rules of the game and you’re mind is already filled with possibilities wanting to know what you and your friends would do from here. The game doesn’t need to sell you on what you can do and what game play might look like—hell, you’re ready to do whatever it says to do the things that setup already suggests in your revved up imagination! And if the situation doesn’t appeal to you, you can save your energy and skip the rest of the game.

And that’s it. There follows no overview of play or the system or anything else. Without any delay you are thrown into character creation.

Brilliant thing the 2nd: Creating the world through character creation.

The first command in character creation is this:

Choose your character’s position under Brimstone Jack:

Boatswain (“bosun” – sails, rigging, anchor, cables; also the day to day work of the crew)
Boy (light labor, service & training)
Carpenter (the soundness of the ship’s masts, yards, boats & hull, patching holes under fire)
Gunnery Master (the ship’s cannons, powder & balls; the gunnery crew)
Quartermaster (the ship’s purse, books & accounts, and the provisioning & quartering of the company)
Sailing Master (navigation and steering the ship)
Sailor (manual labor, gunnery, fighting)
Surgeon (medical care of all on board)
X’s Mate (eg Boatswains’s Mate, Captain’s Mate, Carpenter’s Mate, Cook’s Mate)

That simple lists of position and their corresponding responsibilities and duties gives you a full overview of what is happening on the ship and how everyone is dependent on everyone else to make the ship run smoothly. We can surmise that we will need to patch holes in the hull under fire, that we will be firing the cannons, dealing with provision decisions and shortages, maneuvering the ship, fighting enemies and prey, and getting seriously wounded. It’s about giving information, but more importantly about stoking our imaginations and getting us all in the same imaginative space.

If the first list tells us about the physical world of Poison’d, the next list tells us about the moral world.

Which of the following sins has your character committed? Choose none, one, any or all:

Adultery
Blasphemy
Idolatry
Murder
Mutiny
Rape
Robbery
Sodomy

You may count a sin twice, if your character’s commission of it has been prolonged, repeated, excessive, and unremorseful, and continues to be so even now.

Okay then! Prepare yourself for some horrible, morally depraved characters to strut the stage! If this is not your thing, bail out now, because this is the moral landscape of the game, and even if you choose to go easy on the sins your character has committed, your fellow players are under no obligation to do the same. And in case you’re wondering, are there female PCs in this game, the next paragraph’s got you covered:

Count it blasphemy if your character is a woman living, acting, and dressing the man. Count it twice blasphemy only if she has also somehow to fuck women as a man.

Just take a moment to appreciate how much information about the world is stuffed into those two sentences. What are we, less than 10 sentences into the game?

And mind you, we still don’t know anything about how to play the game! And that brings us to the third brilliant thing.

Brilliant thing the 3rd: Teasing out information.

The next two paragraphs are these:

Devil is equal to the number of sins you’ve chosen. However, if you’ve chosen more sins than six, Devil is still 6, and if you’ve chosen fewer than two, it’s still 2.

Soul is equal to 8 minus Devil.

This is my favorite introduction of a stat, pretty much ever. Up to this point in the text, you have no idea if the characters will even have stats, let alone what they will be and what they will measure. Now we know Devil and Soul are two of the stats (possibly the only two at this point in our reading), and we know that Devil must represent how sinful we are, since it is bound up with how many sins we chose, and Soul is clearly representative of the opposite. Baker doesn’t have to spend any more time explaining the stats than that and we are left in a state of having information and desperately wanting more information.

And the text does that section after section, item after item. The presentation of information has all the grip and tension of a well-plotted short story, or like the first quarter of a masterfully written sci-fi or fantasy novel, the part where you are making note of every suggestion and unexplained reference in hope of piecing it all together into a coherent whole. In fiction like that, the act of reading is the act of discovery; you are an active reader working to meet the author half way rather than a passive reader demanding to be spoon-fed all the details. It’s an illusory feeling of course, because the author will eventually make everything clear, but as active readers, there is a sense of satisfaction when all the threads come together and our knowledge feels hard fought and deserved.

Each new concept in the game is intriguingly alluded to in one section so that when it is fully explained later, it is incredibly satisfying. Bargains, for example, start out as a vague cool-feeling notion that becomes solidified in later sections until you realize it is a major mechanic and theme in the game, like when a minor character appears in an early scene of a book only to be revealed later as a major player in the overall drama. One of my favorite examples of this approach is in the section about striking a bargain to avoid death. The final option is “Bargain with a guardian ghost, if you have one.” Up to this point, there has been no mention of a “guardian ghost” and it is unclear if that is an abstract narrative concept or some mechanical part of play. What?! There are ghosts in this world? Sure enough, three sections later is the heading “Becoming a ghost.”

This pattern of set up and reward is of course incredibly tricky, because the unintended result is sometimes just confusing and muddled, with the reader in a frustrated sense of being overwhelmed. There is artistry in the technique, and if you are interested in employing it, I highly recommend that you thoroughly study Poison’d.