Second-edition "romance" rules for freeform larps

I've now created a separate site for Writing Freeform Larps, and I've moved this post there.

You can read it here.

Preparing freeform larps for others to run

I've now created a separate site for Writing Freeform Larps, and I've moved this post there.

You can read it here.

Most Trusted Advisors at the table

A few posts ago, I said how much I was looking forward to playing Most Trusted Advisors. How did that work out?

As this was my regular group, we were playing online using Discord and Trello. We play for about two hours – more than that, and I get tired. (This seems to be an issue online, I can cope with longer sessions when face-to-face.)

Character creation

Character creation took us 90 minutes, which was longer than I expected, but I think that was an artefact of playing online. The playbooks seem straightforward to me, and I copied the key sections to Trello. However, a couple of my players struggled with some concepts, and everything took longer than I expected. I’m sure it would be quicker if we played face-to-face.

Our characters were:

• Margrave Hildegard of House Kolero (The Marshal) – a Zobian Traitor
• Earl Mikolas the Just of House Arachnia (The Treasurer) – an Inquisitor
• Count Lorentz the Surreptitious of House Blackgammon (The Blackguard) – a member of the Sky Chamber

Session #1 (what’s left of it)

With 30 minutes left, I kicked things off with the Liege bringing worrying news to his advisors: he’d heard the ruler of arch-rival Zobia has two birthdays. So he wanted another birthday, with the next one in two days’ time. Arrange it!

The Treasurer suggested a three-day holiday, which the Liege liked very much. (Actually, the Liege might have misunderstood the Treasurer, but three days it is…)

So, rather than raise money for the celebrations (which haven’t been decided yet), the Treasurer bought all the beer on the docks (to sell it back to the inns later). The beer is now in a marquee on the dockside, which is where we ended the session.

I felt it was a bit of a rocky start. I’m not sure why, but my players seemed to struggle with their characters. Although I felt they had lots to go on (character creation created plenty of links and agendas), it took a while for them to warm up. I don’t know if that was me, the game, them – or a mixture of all three.

After the session, I looked through their characters. I pulled together a short list of events, based on what came up during character creation, that I could use in future sessions. Where things were undecided, I filled in the blanks.

For example, the Marshal had the following agenda: “A notoriously lecherous and gullible noble knows a vital state secret. Discover it by any means necessary.” I decided who the noble was (Sir Oscar) and what secret they knew. Then, I added an event to my list: a message from the Zobian traitors asking for an update on progress.

I’m glad I took the time to do this, as it’s not something I could have done easily on the fly at the table. If I ever run this at a convention, I will need to think of how I do this. (I suspect the answer is to use cards. The game has tables, but cards are a physical reminder to refer to.)

Session #2: Planning the birthday

In session two, the advisors determined the outline of the birthday party. Day one will be a blessing of the realm, day two will be a tournament, and day three will be a grand ball. The players start to slot their various plans and machinations into the celebrations.

The Blackguard persuaded the wife of Lord Hawett (Lorentz's bitter enemy) to host it at their enormously extravagant mansion on the outskirts of the city.

The Treasurer’s money-making scheme worked (ish), but dockers complained about the high prices, and the innkeepers were unhappy. The Blackguard tried to steal the money, but The Treasurer spent a twist and foiled it.

I pushed an agenda by appearing as the Liege and asking that Father Brian (whom the Inquisition wanted to stop spreading radical messages of kindness and tolerance) speak at his birthday service. The Treasure arranged for Father Brian’s death, but this backfired by turning him into a martyr! (The roll was a partial success).

The Blackguard then spent a twist to get the Treasurer’s execution order and blackmailed The Treasurer with it in return for details of a secret passage into Lord Hawcett’s mansion.

Finally, the Marshal contacted the Zobian ambassador to arrange for the finest Zobian food for the birthday celebrations.

Session #3: The Blessing

Session #3 flowed smoothly as everyone’s plans started coming together:

The Marshal failed to negotiate down the quote for the Zenobian food, and the ambassador challenged the Marshall to a duel. It will be settled at the jousting.

The Blackguard, in disguise as Father Honeyfeather, gave a blessing on day 1 of the birthday celebrations. (I asked the player what he planned, and he gave such a long and detailed description of the service that I didn’t have the heart to make them go through it all again, so we cut straight to the end of the service.)

At the following cheese-and-wine event (held on the prince’s pleasure barge), Judge Strauss handed The Secret History of the Sky Chamber to the Treasurer. The pages were blank, but the Treasurer successfully concocted a potion that revealed the text. 

Over cheese and wine, the Marshall convinced Sir Oscar (see above) to reveal his secret: the name and location of the true Liege! (That the Liege was an imposter had been decided during character generation.)

Session #4: The Tournament and the Grand Ball

Our last session, and the players seemed to really enjoy themselves. Key moments included:

• The Blackguard married his many daughters off – some successfully, others less so.
• The Marshal killed the Zobian ambassador in a duel.
• The Treasurer foiled a plan by the Blackguard to steal The Secret History of the Sky Chamber.
• The Treasurer created false documents implicating the Zobian ambassador’s widow (who was getting much too cosy to the Liege).
• The Blackguard created a scheme to poison the wine for everyone except for his rival and the Zobian ambassador’s wife, then prevented that plot to turn himself into a hero and expose his rival and the ambassador’s wife as enemies of the state. The plan succeeded, although sadly, some nobles died because they were too eager to drink the wine.

We ended the game there, finishing with the PC’s legacies:

• The Treasurer became the Witchfinder General.
• The Blackguard became known as the famous figure in folklore, “The Black Count.”
• The Marshal changed the political system by installing the true heir to the throne.

Finally, we played ten minutes of How’s it going Geoffrey? This short minigame explores recent events from the perspective of the unluckiest peasant in the land – my players enjoyed this immensely.

So what did I think?

We enjoyed Most Trusted Advisors. We played for about five or six hours (excluding character generation), over four sessions.

While it started slowly, once my players got into their characters and pursued their agendas, things motored along smoothly. I suspect there’s more I could have done to get things going at the start, but at this point, I’m not sure what.

We found it extremely collaborative, with the players chipping in suggestions throughout.

I had a few issues with the rules.

Action ratings: I struggled with action rolls because, often, there wasn’t an appropriate action rating that suited what we were trying to do. Some examples:

• The Treasurer implemented a plan to kill a troublesome priest and make it look like the Marshal was to blame. This was carried out by underlings, as obviously, the Treasurer wouldn’t dirty his own hands. However, there isn’t a “scheme” action rating. We used Ruin for this action, but at a few times, we scratched our heads trying to work out what action rating to use.
• Our characters persuaded NPCs to do things several times. However, there isn’t a “persuade” action rating. We fell back on Appease and Bluff rather too often.

Maybe we were playing it wrong, but it took less than an hour of playing for us to hit some of these issues. So following session 2, I changed the action rolls:

I replaced Ruin with Scheme, merged Survey into Study, and introduced Persuade and Scheme. I grouped the abilities by “base ratings”:

• Physical: Balance, Duel, Shadow, Skulk
• Mental: Bewitch, Concoct, Study, Scheme
• Social: Appease, Bluster, Disdain, Persuade

The players put 3 points into the base ratings (Physical/Mental/Social – no more than 2 points in any one base rating) and then 3 points into the specialisms (no more than one each). Their action rating was their base rating + specialism.

Doing it that way meant that if there wasn’t an appropriate specialism, I could use the base rating. This system worked well – I had no problems with dice rolls for the rest of the game. 

Twists: Twists are powerful; they let the players avoid conditions and introduce new elements into the game. Players started each session with three, but because our sessions were short, my players always seemed to have plenty. Next time I will reduce the number of twists.

Conditions: I found the conditions suggested in the rules (angry, bankrupt, scandalous, etc) hard to apply to our dice rolls. I found it easier to create story-based misfortunes and complications, but I didn’t ever inflict a condition on a PC (although the players used twists to avoid a couple).

While I felt the rules were okay, they didn’t support play particularly well, and I was fighting them before I changed action ratings. 

Scenes: I recently ran a couple of games of Hillfolk at AireCon and have been thinking about the difference between the two games. While I don’t think Most Trusted Advisors needs Hillfolk’s dramatic focus, I wonder if it would benefit from scene discipline. I ran it as I would a traditional TTRPG, and in hindsight, that may have been a mistake.

Revisiting the pdf, I discovered today that Most Trusted Advisors uses the word scene liberally (“scene” appears 25 times in the pdf). But it never explains what it means by “scene”, nor how to set/frame/close them – and whether scenes are framed by the players or the GM.

So what works best? A fluid trad-like approach, or defined scenes? Next time, I’ll try more formal scene framing.

(Bizarrely, even though I’ve done scene framing in other games, I didn’t think to try it. I’ve only thought about it now. I’m not sure what that says about me.)

Overall

For me, Most Trusted Advisors wasn’t quite as good as I had hoped. While the characters and background and secret societies were wonderful, I found two areas let it down:

• Getting started: It took us a while to get properly into our stride. Was that the game, or was that us? I don’t know, but I think the game could have done more (or offered advice) to get things going.
• System: Given its lightness, I found the system fiddlier than necessary (and that’s aside from making a mid-game patch). 

I can’t imagine ever running Most Trusted Advisors as anything other than a one-shot (even though we took four sessions, I regard our game as a one-shot), and it could be simpler and fine-tuned to make that easier.

Most Trusted Advisors

You can get Most Trusted Advisors from the creators’ page on Itch.io, here.

Pardners

I've now created a separate site for Writing Freeform Larps, and I've moved this post there.

You can read it here.

First impressions: Mysteries of the Ancients (part 2 – writing, layout and structure)

This is the second post about Mysteries of the Ancients. Last time I talked about the campaign, this time, I’m looking at the writing, structure, and layout.

Okay, a quick warning. In this post, I am hugely critical of Mysteries of the Ancients – in particular, how it’s written and laid out and the structural decisions that don’t help a GM understand it.

I think a lot about this sort of thing. Making things easy for our customers is a key part of what we do at Freeform Games, and when something I care about gets it wrong, it presses a lot of my buttons.

(And if you think I’m singling out Traveller, check out my reviews of ALIEN’s Destroyer of Worlds and Heart of Darkness, where I’m equally critical.)

So if you are a fan of Mysteries of the Ancients, you may want to look away now.

TL;DR: Overwritten, badly structured, unhelpful layout

I found Mysteries of the Ancients hard to read. I felt it was overwritten, had a bizarre structure that didn’t help comprehension, and would have benefitted from a layout that helped separate background information from adventure text.

So let’s look at each of these in detail.

Writing: less is more

I had three issues with the writing in Mysteries of the Ancients. First, it has a lot of padding – it’s not concise and clear. Second, it’s often vague when it should be clear. Third, there’s too much unnecessary information.

Overwriting: Adventure writing isn’t fiction. It needs to be concise and clear, conveying enough information to the reader so they can run the game for their players. Unfortunately, I found Mysteries of the Ancients neither concise nor clear.

As an example, I edited the text about the enhanced security case (page 56) from 432 words to 225. The result was concise and readable, and it included everything I needed without the superfluous waffle. Similarly, I reckon the section on Omicron Division (pages 24 and 25) can be cut from over 1300 words to around 400 without losing anything important to the campaign. 

So with a good editor, I reckon Mysteries of the Ancients could easily be 50% shorter. Shorter, punchier, livelier and a more enjoyable read.

(It is not lost on me that Secrets of the Ancients is a shorter book but has more playable material in it.)

Vague when it should be clear: In many places, Mysteries of the Ancients is far too vague. It drops hints rather than clarifies. Sometimes explanations turn up later, and sometimes they don’t. It's okay to present the players with puzzles - it's not okay not to tell the GM about them.

Some examples:

• Page 73 contains the first description of a village. It says, “One building stands out, much bigger than the others…” A page or two later, we learn who owns this building, but why not be clear and refer to the page where the building is described? Or use the map reference?
• Regarding an Ancient artefact, page 90 says, "For the present, the purpose of [redacted] remains decorative only." But Mysteries never resolves this. There’s not even a hint as to where or when the artefact’s true purpose might be resolved, whether in this campaign or a later one. I found this tone irritating – why not just explain it to the GM?
• Page 94 refers to a ship that seems to travel without using a J-drive but says, "Either [redacted] was carried aboard another ship during these movements or she travelled by some mysterious means." This is never explained.
• Chirpers are mentioned several times without explaining what they are. (There isn't even library data for them.) I know most GMs will know what a Chirper is, but given the exhaustive detail about trivial items elsewhere, their omission is odd.

Unnecessary information: Mysteries of the Ancients is full of superfluous details that aren’t needed for the campaign. For example, a short scene (maybe one session max) on Egypt starts with around four pages of unnecessary background detail. This includes two paragraphs on the 100th fleet, which does not feature in the campaign.

It’s like this throughout Mysteries. So much of the detail is irrelevant and could be summarised, leaving the GM to improvise should the PCs go off-piste. Instead, I imagine some GMs will be paralysed by the detail, worried that they will get it “wrong.” I appreciate that some might enjoy detailed descriptions of a particular starport or the composition of the 100th fleet, but if it's not relevant to what's going on, that's not me. (I would have less of an issue with this material if it were clearly separated from the adventure material – as I discuss below.)

Structure: creating clarity through structure

Mysteries of the Ancients’ structure is bizarre, so say the least.

The campaign starts with an overall summary but goes quickly downhill after that. In the 45 pages of dense writing that follow the introductory summary, we have:

• The Legend of Twilight's Peak.
• Who and What were the Ancients – the truth about the Ancients.
• Ancients Hunting, which describes the Ancients Hunters community and how the Travellers might come to the authorities’ attention. However, there's no list of the Ancient Hunters themselves – they’re scattered throughout the book (it would be much better if they were in one place). Also missing are the various theories that they believe.
• Omicron Division, a secret Imperium department.
• Droyne and the Ancients, which is mostly about the Droyne and not really about the Ancients. (This should have been an appendix.) It refers to someone called Yusote, but we don't know who they are yet.
• Project Gannessa, which starts talking about Research Station Gamma but then morphs into a black project run by Omicron. There are also a few pages about [redacted], which is nasty, but why is it here? This section has paragraphs that start with things like, “This adventure is initially about…” which suggests it was written to go later in the book.
• Glisten subsector and District 268. Well, mostly Glisten – almost nothing about District 268 (which is awkward as one adventure takes place in District 268).
• Incidental characters. Five pages of incidental characters that a GM can use for colour. Why isn’t this in an appendix?

Finally, we get to the start of the campaign itself. Apart from the sheer drudgery of wading through it all, the main issue with all this early material is that it lacks context. Why do we need to know about these things? It’s just dry, overwritten background material.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the structure of the individual adventures is also unhelpful.

In Fleeting Memoriam: This adventure is a monster hunt, starting on page 70 and finishing on page 91. Unfortunately, its complicated structure makes it hard to follow. For example:

• The first three pages describe the planet and could be cut right down. Most of it isn’t relevant to the adventure and could be moved to library data or made clear that it’s background material (more on that below).
• The details of the village are on pages 73, 78 and 81-83. Put it in one place!
• The adventure timeline is covered in several places, making it hard to follow.
• The equipment (the guns and the medical device) could happily fit on one page. (They could even be combined with other equipment in the campaign game in a “Ship’s Locker” section elsewhere in the book.)
• The section about how the investigation proceeds is on pages 80 and 90-91.
• Very little is cross-referenced. There are maps, but apart from the initial description, they’re not cross-referred to at all.
• The adventure is split in the middle by a room-by-room description of a locked starship and its deck plan. While its contents are important for the campaign, the only space relevant for In Fleeting Memoriam is the cargo hold (which is open – internal doors are locked). There’s then more detail about the ship after the adventure – which is where I would put the deck plan and room-by-room description (other than the open cargo hold). In Fleeting Memoriam should focus on the monster hunt – not the extra stuff needed for the campaign.
• Information about the monster hides in several places in the book. I wanted to find out where the monster came from and I knew I'd read that one of the NPCs had tracked it down, but could I find it? It wasn't in In Fleeting Memoriam (which has several "What happened in..." headers), and it wasn't in the chapter describing the monster (and its origins) in great detail. I eventually found it on page 13, which talked about the Legend of Twilight's Peak!

This uncoordinated approach isn’t limited to In Fleeting Memoriam. The whole book is like this.

Layout: making things easy to find

Overall, I like Traveller’s current graphic design and layout. The two-column text is clean and usually easy to read. However, in Mysteries of the Ancients, I found it hard to differentiate between adventure text and setting text. That made it difficult to identify key points that move the adventure on. 

This, for me, is a key element in writing RPG adventures: keeping setting material separate from the adventure. It's not always easy, particularly with a detailed, fictional world like Traveller. But using layout to separate adventure material from setting material would go a long way to making the Mysteries easier to comprehend.

And I don’t mind the background material. There’s more than I need, but I appreciate that some GMs might like the extra detail. What I object to is not being given a choice as to whether I need to read it or not. Keep it separate!

Some easy examples of things Mysteries could have done:

• Made more use of handouts. Mysteries has a couple, but I would add the books (Professor A’s work and the analysis of Twilight’s Peak, perhaps by a student at Regina University) and much of the world background data (perhaps as extracts from travel guides). Some of this could also be library data.
• Provide all the maps as player-facing handouts without the references.
• As I said, I would put the equipment in its own section and cross-refer to it when needed.
• Highlight key sections of the adventure – material the PCs need to progress to the next stage – instead of hiding it in the text.

Overall

“I apologize for such a long letter—I didn't have time to write a short one” – Mark Twain

Fixing the writing, structure, and layout isn’t hard. But it takes care and effort – and the ability to recognise that a campaign book is a game manual to be used by a GM, not a story to be read. It’s a shame we’re in 2024 and still haven’t learned that.

Am I going to run Mysteries of the Ancients? Probably not – it seems too hard to run.

Will I get Wrath of the Ancients? Almost certainly, because I want to see how everything wraps up, and I still like the Ancients.  But I’ve lowered my expectations.