doctorjackaroo-blog

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so I couldn't fall asleep last night, and I started thinking

about a reverse little mermaid, in which the prince’s sister has always dreamed of life under the sea, and then they are in a shipwreck, and as she hangs onto a piece of driftwood, she sees her brother rescued from drowning by a mermaid. Everybody thinks she’s mad, later, after she’s been rescued. But her brother did turn up alive and unharmed on the beach, and she knows what she saw: a girl, beautiful as the dawn, with a fish’s tail, keeping her brother safe above the waves. She grows sick with longing.

So the princess goes to visit the witch who lives in the woods, and she tells her that she can give her a mermaid’s tail and a mermaid’s breath–but she will always be human in her heart and in her soul, unless she can convince one of the merfolk to fall in love with her. For humans live short lives, and their immortal souls vanish to distant realms after death, while the merfolk live for hundreds of years, and when they die they remain in the sea that is their home. The princess agrees, and the witch tells her she will make a potion that she must swallow when she wants to transform. But then she reminds her that she must be paid–and laughs at her when she offers gold. She tells her that she will have her voice, and slowly the princess agrees, so she cuts off her tongue and throws it into a boiling pot, adds a knot of snakes and a drop of her own black blood, and gives her the resulting potion to drink. At midnight, she takes the potion out to the jetty, and as soon as it passes her lips, her legs are bound together, becoming a mermaid’s tail. She falls–kinda ungracefully–into the ocean, and it feels unbelievably natural to dive down, and she’s shocked by how well she can see, even in the deep water, even at midnight. And then she just sort of carelessly, cluelessly swims on, and she almost gets eaten by a shark, and then she’s trailing blood in the water so she almost gets eaten by another shark, and another, and she can’t find the merfolk city she’s always been taught was under the water, and it’s late and she’s exhausted and is running from all sorts of terrifying creatures who she’d never really thought about existing before, and she only escapes the sharks by dodging past a whirlpool, and then another whirlpool, close to the ocean bottom. She passes through a series of foaming whirlpools like a labyrinth, and then she sees a white house on the ocean bottom, in the middle of a strange forest of polypi. The polypi are half animal, half plant, reaching out and grasping at anything they can touch. The princess swims carefully through it, and she sees that there are things caught in the polypi’s arms: anchors, planks, wooden chests, the white skeletons of drowned men. A little mermaid. She makes it to the house, and recoils when she realizes that it’s also made of bleached human bones.

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[doctorjackaroo-blog]

Technology, the Supernatural, Londwyns, and Gnomes at Knight Realms

I want to start this by saying that I understand completely that supernatural forces are intended to be the primary and ultimately more powerful forces in the game world. It is not my intention to argue this point, or suggest that it should be otherwise.

That said…

The Three Levels of World Interaction

When it comes to the game world, we operate on three levels. The first is the immediate player experience at a live event. Day to day, mod to mod, there is no real difference in power level between “technological” advancements and “supernatural” advancements. You can shoot someone for a bunch of damage with an arquebus, you could throw a fireball at them, or you could hit them with a big stick. These all basically accomplish the same thing: hurt the other guy for some amount of damage. Even our basic weapons become godly methods of destruction with the addition of Master and Heroic lists. Technology vs. Supernatural vs. “just a guy who’s really really good with a stick” is a matter of flavor and roleplay, not mechanics.

The second level is the overarching world plot. The biggest threats to the world (which players usually encounter as mod bosses or weekend plot NPCs) are supernatural. Even the “mad scientists” which have on occasion come out still make heavy use of the supernatural. They almost always need something supernatural to be defeated, as well: a team of sorcerers, a ritual with specific magical components, and the like. Any technology involved is solely on the first level of immediate player mechanics, and not story.

The third level is what lies between. These are the “hold my ale and watch this” moments - people creating their own rituals, or working on personal side plots. The potential exists within this realm for a PC to affect a larger piece of the world than whatever immediate plot threat has been placed in front of them. This is the area in which technology is ill-defined, and so, essentially, Londwyns have been kept from this arena.

Londwyn’s Place So Far

Londwyns have traditionally been encouraged to be played as hesitant - if not downright against - using any kind of supernatural force. They are not supposed to trust it, to make use of it only as a last resort, and the new proposed racials are making it even more difficult (10 seconds between casts is a *really long time* on a battlefield!) to want to take any kind of casting list. Yes, it’s true that you don’t *need* casting to enjoy the game, but when the second & third levels of world interaction rely heavily on the supernatural, you have an entire race being discouraged from getting involved in anything beyond the most basic of “shoot it until it dies”. Any other race with this kind of restriction has the restriction against one specific type of supernatural source, not all of them.

The tradeoff was supposed to be in technological advancement. No, it would never affect the entire world, but it should be able to affect something beyond killing things in a mod. It should provide some cool stories or fun RP in its construction and deployment. To this date, I have seen three technological advancements approved: 1) The weedwhacker; 2) a clockwork dog; and 3) metal guitar strings. The first one was Goggins, and the latter two were mine. Three inventions, over eight years, with 64 Londwyn characters in the database. I think it’s safe to say the system is not working as intended.

This is further compounded by the addition of magitech, and the forthcoming Gnomes as a playable race with a magitech-focused racial. I do not know to what extent player-created magitech is intended to work, but it is my understanding that magitech is the “missing link”. It is “technological” in nature in that it requires specific construction and materials, with solid rules around its operation (such as kith stones to power the Gates of Passage, Aerobark for the airship, etc.), but makes use of Astral as a supernatural power source to techno-babble its way to functionality.

It is the “anything you can do, I can do better” fuck-you to Londwyns.

So, where do we go from here? I have a few suggestions:

Solidify the Actual Tech Level of Londwyn

It’s been very confusing to try and figure out where Londwyn society currently is when it comes to technology. There have been conflicting reports of where they’re supposed to be: anywhere from Da Vinci-level Renaissance clockwork, up to late Victorian on-the-verge-of-electricity industrialization. This *needs* to be figured out, by someone who is willing to put in the time to ensure that the level of tech is internally consistent with itself (it’s really hard to have a London-like city and factories, without having, for example, combine harvesters to make farming more efficient to free up workers for mines and factories; we can’t strip-mine without a good working knowledge of explosives and hydraulics, etc.), as well as not hitting a level that would interfere with the general atmosphere of the world.

This goal can be accomplished by working backwards. Do you want Londwyns to have pocket watches, strip mines, and trains? That means someone has invented the escapement & flywheel. This has the potential for other far-reaching effects, but as has been stated, Londwyn invention is not one-to-one with the real world. Just because someone on Earth has managed to extrapolate the flywheel to convert its kinetic energy into electricity doesn’t mean that someone has managed to do so in Londwyn. But, it should be noted that the possibility is there.

Science & The Rest of the World

How the rest of the world views, understands, and uses technology should also be taken into account. It’s one thing to say nomadic barbarian tribes in the north have never heard of all this stuff - but what about Kormyre? Would Loez completely ignore the use of technology in the capitol, or would they make use of it? They’re not such a heavily supernatural-dependent society that they would have absolutely no use for it. The dwarves, as well, might have begun using some of these concepts (especially in mine shafts).

Materials science & math is also important to understand here. Obviously, at game, we only have a small selection of materials to work with, but the effects/equivalents of standard material types vs. real-world materials is also not well-defined. Similarly, the math behind a lot of this is something of a requirement - there’s only so far you can go without understanding maths. Some notes on the properties and basic uses of these things should be written.

Therefore, at least a basic overview of what kinds of tech has spread to the rest of the world, as well as the general cultural feeling towards it, would go a long way towards giving technology & science a solid place in the world. A bit of general public lore on “what you might know about science” wouldn’t go amiss, either - I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve had to tell people that no, we don’t know if Arawyn is round, and no, we have not discovered the Theory of Evolution.

Technology/Invention Marshal

It’s not escaped my notice that the game STs are incredibly busy all the time. Part of the issue with integrating technology into the game world is that it all needs to go through James, who has zero time to deal with it. Get someone else to do it, someone with a good understanding of engineering concepts and technobabble. That way, the general allowable tech level stays consistent, and if something looks like it might be successful, this person can bring it to James *at that point* for final approval. This strikes me as the kind of job for an atmosphere marshal.

Set up a whole process for this, with steps.

Send Technology Marshal a basic idea of what you intend to do. Tech Marshal can then reject it outright (if it’s too advanced/too ridiculous for the world), or give the player the go-ahead to begin pursuing this.

Player writes up how this invention would function, and works with the Tech Marshal to set up a time for at-game experimentation.

Based on results of experimentation, if it looks like the player might be successful, the Tech Marshal can then approach James for final approval.

Player is given a yes, no, or “keep experimenting” answer.

I’m sure there’s some room for improvement here. I wrote this up in about 3 minutes - with a little more thought, this could be turned into something that works smoothly, gives players a chance to RP invention shenanigans at game, and hopefully helps them feel like they have a place in the story that isn’t totally reliant upon the supernatural. This could also be extended to work with magitech as well.

In Conclusion…

...I clearly have too much time on my hands, technology is difficult to integrate and keep steady without someone dedicated to overseeing it, you can’t have a race that’s all about something that has no support from the game staff, and please fix this before you introduce Gnomes and crush all my tiny dreams.

Love,

Cassie

[doctorjackaroo-blog]

Grimdark vs. Noblebright and why you can’t have both

Man, I fucking hate it when setting, plot, and rules don’t reconcile.

Here we’ve got this noblebright adventure setting - the heroes triumph, the monster is slain, the demons are driven back - with a metaplot that keeps making characters either feel like shit for participating or drive them towards being fucking psychopaths. I’m a between-games actions marshal. I see the day-to-day shit a lot of characters get up to between live games. Some of them do guard duty, or work in businesses, or preach the word of their god. But over time, there’s been a trend towards the bloody and brutal. Serial killing. Self-mutilation. Hard, unmerciful training sessions. As one marshal put it, “Have the PC’s gone feral?” Yes. Yes they have. Why? Because you pushed them that way. It started with Bloodtide - a weapon absolutely necessary to save the world, but forged through vile methods. Yeah, I’ve heard that we didn’t strictly need it, but we only could have avoided it if we were all proactive starting nearly a year prior, in a game where proactivity is generally met with “you get nothing from your research”, aka “we haven’t written the plot yet so stop bothering us” (a whole other post on its own). And then we had to free the ultimate personification of evil for yet another apocalypse prevention method. And then we were punished by neighboring nations for being “evil”. All the while, traditionally evil and dark PC classes began to legally be allowed to operate in the open, by essentially GM fiat of altering kingdom law. When darkness is all around you and even the plot is punishing you for being a decent person, we’ve moved from a noblebright setting to a grimdark one. Characters are going to swing dark. Even the more traditional goodguys are going to abandon years of principles and walk arm-in-arm with evil, because “maintaining balance is necessary to prevent the end of the world”. The problem with the “balance” model is that good needs to compromise and evil does not. Over time, this turns the game into a pile of edgelords and suffer puppets. (An aside, for another post: “BALANCE” DOES NOT MEAN THE TWO SIDES HAVE TO BE EQUAL IN NUMBER. FFS, go YouTube an art class and pay attention to the lesson on negative space and balance.) Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with or bad about a grimdark setting for a larp. There are plenty of larps that do this, and do it well. The problem comes in when your game’s rating and stated setting say “PG-13 high fantasy adventure”, while your plot says “TREMBLE, MORTALS, AS YOUR PATHETIC MORALS BETRAY YOU!” It also doesn’t help when people are encouraged to roleplay the high toll that constant battles, broken limbs, face-stabbing, etc. would have on any normal mind. Spoiler alert: everyone who wants to keep playing turns their characters into psychopaths. They’re only not psychopaths in noblebright because battles are hard but not scarring. (Side note: I’m not saying don’t say “ow” when your character gets stabbed. RP’ing physical pain in the moment and physical/mental/emotional trauma after the fact are two VASTLY different things.) On top of this, we have rules that include magical fixes for... pretty much everything. If you can near-instantly cure literally every ailment except for special plot effects, including *mental* illnesses, this is the antithesis of grimdark. There are no consequences but what we choose. Let me say that again: THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES BUT WHAT WE CHOOSE.

The game will go on. Your PC will have all their shit fixed, usually within 30 minutes or your Feast is free.  We have a noblebright setting, grimdark plots, and rules that encourage the immediate erasure of consequences. Yeah, I think my character’s going to go join the rest of the feral PCs now. If I’m going to have to play a psychopath just to be able to operate in these conflicting structures, I might as well try and figure out how many pins I can shove in an angel before they stop dancing.

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Mercy Me

Lois had promised herself after the last Feast and her endless outside-time-and-space psychotherapy session with Yo-Yo that she wasn’t going to perform any more psychotherapy for at least three months. Then the Harbingers had shown up, and she couldn’t avoid it. Sorrow, Rage, Pain, and Fear all manifested in physical form to torment Travance. She quickly found that she didn’t care at all. It had been the same with nearly everything since that day in June when she had woken up on the barracks field sans half her soul. Everything just felt... hollow. She plodded on for the sake of oaths, but what was left? Just sorrow, rage, pain, and fear. Someone might have said, “Well what about Bob?” As if that love wasn’t the epitome of sorrow. “What about your strange Weave machine?” As if that wasn’t born of rage at being forced to kneel over and over. “And the Barony?” It hurt her, every day, to keep burying parts of herself for the sake of whatever Travance needed.

“Your family?” the nameless voice asks. You mean the one she’s terrified will no longer accept her, now that she’s been broken? Or the one of them that definitely will still accept her, and Lois fears she has more in common with than all the others? So who cares if everyone else felt those things now, too? All at once, every moment of the day, just like her? The heroes will gather their information, and fight the Harbingers, and some of them will do noble and terrible things and make it all worse for themselves, and she would clean it up, as usual. By the end of the Feast she had found that she was no longer capable of summoning up the empathy necessary to help anyone but herself.  “Can I kill the Purifiers?” “Yes, go ahead.” No questions asked, just kill them all, because they interrupted her sleep. “She did this to herself. She’s not worth my time,” to someone else, because why should she be responsible for yet another person’s mistake?  As Lois settled into her workshop to practice turning the Weave into shapes that couldn’t exist in solely three dimensions, it occurred to her that the Harbingers had claimed one last victim: her own mercy. She didn’t cry for that, either.