Campaign Workshop: Gaming the Nolanverse (Part One)

It's no secret that I loves me some superheroes, both on the comic book page and at the game table. And as a moviegoer, it's been an embarrassment of riches the past few years for superhero fans -- these days Marvel is hitting it out of the park, but the current Renaissance began, for me, with Christopher Nolan's dark, realistic take on Batman.

The Dark Knight was in pretty dire shape as a movie franchise before Nolan took him over, made increasingly ridiculous by a series of Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher movies. The former couldn't be bothered with more than creative design work, ignoring the fundamentals of story and character. Schumacher couldn't even manage the visuals. When I heard another adaptation was on the way in 2005, I was skeptical at best. My heart had been broken too many times.

Nolan got it. He understood that the Batman comics were not about bizarre villains and design aesthetics, they were about Batman. The main character's dark obsessions have been fascinating for almost a century, and yet in the 90s films Batman is almost a non-presence, a second banana to lesser characters like Vicky Vale and villains that are alternately comic and creepy. Making Batman the solid, emotional core of the films and setting his story against the background of a Gotham City that seemed real and contemporary, not merely a collection of baroque matte paintings, was the first of many good decisions that make the Nolan movies so great.

So of course I've given a lot of thought to what a Christopher Nolan-like superhero game might look like. (And sound like: Another great decision was using Hans Zimmer to craft a memorable soundtrack. But I digress.)

The foundation elements of making a game like this work are not trappings like realistic combat, so much as the acknowledgement that this would indeed be a High Trust, High Drama game -- one that's all about getting deep inside the heads of the characters and examining the reasons why they do the things they do. The second would be an acknowledgement that this game demands a certain serious-mindedness from all the players involved. Although a lot of games have their comedy digressions, that could be poison to a Nolanverse game -- everyone would have to be on board with the idea that this is serious business.

Another important element is working out the "realism" of the game so that all of the players are on the same page. Saying 'It's like Christopher Nolan's Batman movies' is fine, but as always the devil's in the details -- especially if all the player characters are going to be superheroes. Do they wear costumes? If so, are they all basically jet black S.W.A.T. team outfits like the Bale Batman wears? How realistic are the gadgets that they use to help them fight crime? Where do they get these wonderful toys, if not from a billionaire's mad money? Importantly, if you're talking about a group of obsessed vigilantes, do they even work together at all?

Two options that might solve the too-many-nuts-in-long-underwear-to-take-seriously problem might be a) getting the players to work as a team but possibly not put all of them in combat -- it may be that they take turns wearing the cowl, which the criminals / public assume is all one person, or (if players are okay with it) some of them are straight-up support to a single vigilante (as on the TV show Arrow); the b) option would be to take a SMALLVILLE RPG approach to the material, where the players take on the roles of supporting cast and villains rather than simply play the heroes. This would be a game where you'd have someone maybe playing a Commissioner Gordon type, someone as a romantic interest for the hero, and possibly someone taking on the role of nemesis.

You can also plug all of these important roles into the extended cast of the game by using an ensemble style, where each of the players takes the part of at least one supporting character in addition to their "lead". Elizabeth Sampat's excellent BLOWBACK RPG does this elegantly, having each player take on one 'professional' and one 'civilian' in the Burn Notice mold, to create a delicate balance of personal and professional entanglements.

It should go without saying that Batman wouldn't be the same without his Gotham City, and that Nolan did a lot of work establishing it in his movies as a realistic place. Gone were the claustrophobic, overdesigned sets of the Burton days in favour of shoots on real city streets. I think this approach is very important to grounding a Nolanverse game, and if it were me I'd set it in a real world city entirely (like Chicago, where The Dark Knight was filmed) rather than a fictional one. Or else call it by a fictional name but use a lot of real-world detail from a "model" city.

To be continued...

For the Love of Dice

A visit to Kingston to spend quality time with friends and family is never complete without a visit to the Kingston Gaming Nexus, the store that will always be my favourite FLGS. There's never a shortage of the newest and shiniest game books there, usually more than my modest budget can manage, and this trip was no exception -- I snapped up a copy of Weird Wars: ROME from a display of recent Ennies winners, and could have gone home with many other tasty gaming confections.

What else did I get? Dice.

These ones. Pretty. Green (my favourite colour!), dark translucent blue, and purple (my wife's favourite). Sweet!

I already owned a nice set of Fate dice, the "Winter Knight" set inspired by the Dresden Files game. That one has fiery orange-red dice, icy translucent light blue, and opaque dark blue. Also sweet. (I also have a set of Fudge dice that have fallen behind a large, heavy piece of furniture which I need to extract at some point when my back is feeling up to it.) I didn't strictly speaking need a new set of Fate dice, because I'm not actually running Fate as an ongoing game right at the moment.

There's just something about dice.

Gamers of my vintage know the maxim You can never have enough dice. Back in the day, they were actually somewhat hard to come by, and the quality has improved exponentially over the years. The earliest dice I owned were the crude "mud dice" that were included with my first Basic D&D set; ugly brown and orange dice with rough edges. You had to use a crayon to fill in the numbers of those proto-dice, wiping them clean with a Kleenex. Still, in an age when polyhedrons with more or less than six sides were rare, they got the job done.

Later, we got an assortment of more aesthetically pleasing opaque and translucent dice in plastic tubes, in a wide variety of colours. The collections of dice that we proudly carried with us to game day in a repurposed Crown Royal bag or a peanut butter jar began to have real variety. At a certain point, it wasn't enough to just have a set that you could play with, you needed a particular set. Colours that spoke to you. A certain mojo you could feel when you gave them a roll.

They were like a handful of gems scattered across the kitchen table. Magical.

All dice were not created equal, of course. There was the hated d4, the lamest of the damage dice, which could paradoxically inflict great pain on your feet if it managed to secret itself somewhere within the folds of the carpeting. There was the seldom-used (but very nice-looking) d12, the almost-as-lethal-as-a-d4-caltrop d8 (which always seemed to be in short supply), and of course the workhorse d20. Everyone back in the day had a good mittful of those, with a few special favourites they used for specific tasks or when the chips were really down.

And the d30. The golf ball-sized cold sore of the dice-slinging world, whose usefulness eludes me after d30+ years of gaming.

d10s have their own special importance, the alternate workhorse to the beloved d20 for games like Call of Cthulhu, Wild Talents, and the White Wolf titles. I like me some d10s, though they don't quite have the same satisfying hand-feel as a d20 when you're making a roll. d20s may bring more randomness to the party, but baby, they roll just right. Maybe that was one of the reasons I loved Mutants & Masterminds so much -- every roll depended on the die that I loved best.

Modern dice are not just more precise and aesthetically pleasing than the neanderthal dice of the 70s and 80s, they've made the leap to full blown art object. One of my players collects obscure kinds of dice, and he has sets of d6s made of heavy marble and volcanic rock. I've also seen metal ones with sharp edges that make those early foot encounters with plastic d4s look like a mercy.

I like a lot of games that use playing cards as a randomizer, and a fair number that use no randomizer at all. But dice are still my favourite. Sometimes I'll buy a new set to go along with a new game I'm running or playing (I got slick gold-with-black swirl d6s in celebration of my pulp game), and sometimes I'll buy a set just because they're cool.

Maybe they're a symbol of a bygone era of gaming, when things were simpler and dungeon crawls went on all day long. When there was no problem so great that a longsword +2 and a lucky roll couldn't carry the day.

Rolling your dice was where the drama began.

Blog: The Backening

Hello constant readers, occasional visitors, kindly staff from the NSA baffled by this roleplaying nonsense but curious if it might be a terrorist plot, and wayward travellers who set out looking for porn but somehow ended up here.

It's been a long time. My apologies for anyone that's been missing High Trust, High Drama -- it's been a busy and stressful summer, and this blog is the thing I kept putting on the back burner for lack of energy.

One thing a busy and unfulfilled summer of work has convinced me of is that I need to get back to writing regularly, and pronto. I have never found summer to be a good time for me creatively -- my thesis advisor remarked on this once, agreeing that he needed the "long shadows of September" to get his creative juices flowing. I prefer that explanation to my having been conditioned by many years of schooling into only being productive during months when yellow buses are on the roads.

So what's next for HTHD?

Firstly, I will be returning to the subject I started writing on with "A Safe Place", but it probably won't be for a couple of weeks. One of the reasons I got out of the habit of writing this blog was that the latter piece was a difficult one, and I found it took a lot out of me producing it. I'm glad I did, especially when I see the current shitstorm circling Anita Sarkeesian. Same misogynist shit, different day.

Secondly, I'm going to be working on a series of articles that will be discussing campaign building in a concrete way, much in the same way that I discussed planning my pulp game before it swung into action. I've got a handful of games I'm planning for this, but I would be happy to bat ideas around with any of you kindly folks reading this (more on that in a minute).

Thirdly, I'll be writing here and there about games that I'm reading as I go through them. This won't take the form of reviews, so much as reflections and stuff that I latched on to while reading them. If there's stuff I loved or hated, I'll probably say that too.

As always, I'll talk about games that I'm currently playing in, starting with a half-time report on the ongoing pulp game, SEVEN STARS OF ATLANTIS. What's working? What needs a tune-up? I'll talk about all that and try not to spoil anything for my players, heh heh.

Lastly, I would love it if this space became more of an interactive one -- and this is where you guys come into the picture. Please feel free to comment as much as you please, and let me know if there is stuff you want me to write about. I'm game to turn HTHD into more of a dialogue than a monologue, if you like, and see where that leads us.

For those of you who are returning to these dusty old rooms, thank you for your patience.

For anyone jumping aboard now -- welcome.

Let's talk about some games!

Watch This Space!

Hey gang.

I know it's been a while.

After a long, hard summer it's time to talk about some games.

Stay tuned after Labour Day.

A Safe Place (Part One)

I was eighteen years old as the winter of 1989 began. A high school senior, looking ahead to a university career studying English Literature and Creative Writing. I had a part-time job at the mall selling stationery that kept me in gas money and the occasional night out at the movies (which were still pretty cheap on Tuesday night). I was single and nerdy, and like most teenagers I spent a good chunk of my time depressed about one or the other of those things. Still, my life was pretty good. I wrote my stories, got okay grades, had friends, a job, had worked my way up to the good parts in Drama Club, and there was still time to play long sessions of AD&D or Villains & Vigilantes on weekends. My life was stable.

That changed on December 6.

As stories of the massacre at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique began to reach me, like everyone else, I was horrified and angry at the awful violence. How could this happen? This was the sort of thing that happened other places, not mild-mannered Canada.

I also had an eerie feeling that, somehow, this was connected to me personally. I was hoping to be accepted into a university in Montreal myself -- not Ecole Polytechnique, but Montreal -- and the violence I was seeing everywhere on the news seemed like an awful sign of what was waiting for me in the outside world. I remember my mother saying something like, "What kind of awful place allows things like this to happen?"

I'm not sure whether this was aimed at me, something my mom said to maybe make me change my mind about where to go for my university career, or just an idle remark by someone else overwhelmed by barbarity. As the days went by, and the world tried to grapple with what had happened at Ecole Polytechnique, I fought to justify that choice in my own mind. I was headed for one of the best Creative Writing programs in Canada, after all, in one of the most culturally rich cities in North America. Montreal was the place to be. And after all, it couldn't happen again, right?

But it did.

It did happen again, only two and a half years later, and this time it happened at my own school: Concordia University in Montreal. This time it was an attack perpetrated by a member of the Engineering faculty against his colleagues and employees of the department. I had often used the computer lab in the Engineering department where the tragedy unfolded, and again I felt the eerie sense of awful horror touching my life... closer, this time.

For my roommate, it was much closer. He was studying Engineering, and some of the victims were familiar faces to him.

And now, it's happened again. In California this time, the tragedy perpetrated by another deranged young man furious at women for denying him sexually. Anyone who's been paying attention knows this is not the only act of mass murder perpetrated in the twenty-two years since the Concordia tragedy, it is one of many. Numb, we stagger from one atrocity to the next, turning them into statistics, political debates without resolution, place names now spoken in whispers: Virginia Tech. Columbine. Sandy Hook.

Ecole Polytechnique.

That name has become synonymous with tragedy in my mind, like many people of my generation who went to school in Montreal, and it holds a special weight for nearly every woman I know. Many communities in Canada have a small memorial to the women who died in the December 6, 1989 massacre. We have one here in London, which seems very distant from Montreal to me, in a quiet corner of Victoria Park. Occasionally I will pass it, in the midst of one of the raucous summer festivals that bring the park to life in July, and my thoughts will for a few moments drift from summer days and loud music to a cold winter night in 1989.

For the women I know, December 6th is a day that has become filled with dread. It is a day not only about remembering the lives of young women brutally ended too soon, at that Montreal school, it is a day they remember acts of violence that have been perpetrated against women since that day. Always, there have been more women murdered for no crime except their gender, raped, brutalized, kidnapped. The statistics are painfully clear and chilling.

My wife posts a simple memorial every December 6th on her LiveJournal: the names of the women killed at Ecole Polytechnique. Many Canadian women do this. And there is always some young(?) sociopath willing, on that most awful of days, to respond to even the most innocuous of memorials with a litany of hate against women. So it is for women all over the internet, when they remember December 6th, or speak out in anger over the California massacre, or in fact voice their opinion about just about anything under the sun. There's always a guy there to shout them down, scream NOT ALL MEN, and then in the same breath unleash more threats of violence and rape for any woman so uppity as to exist.

Even though the killer himself posted videos full of misogyny, the denials were quick in coming. This wasn't about women, some dudes were quick to tell us, it was about someone with mental health problems yadda yadda yadda. This couldn't possibly be something that has implications for us, the dudes said. We're nice guys, see. Nice guys don't do things like that, and here's a list of the things we'll do to you women if you say we do.

Yeah. Men were saying that back in the early 90s in Montreal too.

A number of women have chosen to speak out this time, under the Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen. I encourage you to read their stories. Listening to women's experiences of casual misogyny and violence in their lives is sobering for anyone who thought incidents like this were isolated or unconnected, and not part of a larger pattern of behaviour that touches all women. As a man, no one has ever shouted sexual things at me on the street. But that's happened to my wife. No one has ever posted a response to one of my blog posts or Tweets with a rape threat. But that happens every day to countless women on the Internet.

And here's the thing, guys, women are asking us to step up this time. Step up and listen to their stories, without feeling the need to get our two cents in. Step up and let other men know that the kind of casual misogyny that poisons our society and breeds tragedies like the one in California (or Ecole Polytechnique) are not acceptable. Women are people, and they need to be treated that way. Always. Doing any less than that makes you an accomplice.

Let me leave you with this thought:

I told you about my own small connection to two horrifying acts of violence in Montreal, and the feelings of dread that it inspired.

Women carry this fear with them all the time.

Every day.

Think about that.

I'll be using this space over the next few days to talk about ways that the gaming hobby can be made more inclusive, a safe place for women and something we can all be proud to be a part of.

Stranger Engines

Hours after releasing yesterday's post, I realized that I hadn't talked at all about one of the most interesting hacks of the Apocalypse World engine: SAGAS OF THE ICELANDERS, by Gregor Vuga.

Now here's an amazing and fascinating oddity in the world of roleplaying: a game that rejects a lot of the typical trappings of what a RPG is, including Awesome Powerz and Buttwyth Magic (mostly - there is some stuff in there, but it's 98% more subtle than most historical settings in roleplaying... we're looking at you, DEADLANDS), so that it may tell a straightforward historically-based story about settlers in Iceland. Well, it helps that settlers in Iceland were Norse -- because Vikings are awesome. But still, this is cool stuff worth a look.

SAGAS has an angle on the Apocalypse World engine that no one else has come near. In addition to the standard Moves and special Moves (which are attached to individual playbooks), this game includes Gendered Moves. This is a game about ancient Icelandic society, and part of how that is modeled is by representing different Moves for men and women in society which emphasize their gendered roles. Fascinating stuff that most games back away from as quickly as their pegasi mounts can flap their lily-white wings.

"Norse men and women are largely treated with equal respect, but their roles in society are strict and narrowly defined. Mothers and fathers pass their skills onto children of respective gender from a very early age. In spite of this a woman may sometimes run a farm or go into battle, while a man might take on the practice of seiðr or magic. For women, taking on male roles is often not an issue, but the transgressions of men are often seen as dishonourable."

Most of the presence of the supernatural in the game is more associated with superstition and societal ideas about fate, rather than big set piece battles with trolls and dark elves.

While most of the AW hacks are fannish adaptations of people's Favourite Games to the new rules, without a whole lot of consideration for what you might actually make such a game about, SAGAS dives right off the dragon-headed prow of the longboat into unique material I've rarely seen games take on at all.

If you like the AW engine, or you're just interested in what a serious, no bullshit historical RPG might look like, you owe it to yourself to check this game out.

This Strange Engine

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, trying to absorb everything I can get my hands on that uses Vincent Baker's APOCALYPSE WORLD engine. It's weird, because my first reaction to the game was not a positive one. The first impression I got was that AW was way too structured for my liking, putting up very rigid rules for how things were done on both sides of the GM screen. How was this a revolution in storytelling, as it was touted in the indie RPG world?

Sometimes you find your way to something via the Robert Frost memorial Long Way Round, however, and eventually I came back to AW via one of its many children, MONSTERHEARTS by Joe McDaldno. What seemed like an unnecessary structure in AW really took off for me in MH, because of that game's laser-focus on the messy lives of teenage monsters.

The sex moves -- which I didn't feel AW made a good case for, despite the fact that play at our table often involves sexytimes (though often offscreen) -- really made sense and added something in MH.

I don't know. Maybe I just plain liked McDaldno's writing better than I liked Baker's.

After playing a couple of MH one-shots, which produced good, tense short-term play, I started exploring the wide world of AW hacks. I probably have Sean Nittner to thank for that, because he kindly shared his APOCALYPSE GALACTICA hack with the rest of us, and really got my engine running for this stuff. I've also got excellent hacks of DEADWOOD and UNKNOWN ARMIES (via Peter Goderie's superlative THE WORLD OF OUR DESIRES hack). The latter is very near the top of my list of stuff I'd like to run, because it does a better job than the original game of explaining what an UA game should look like.

Some of the AW engine stuff I'm not so sure about. I've heard almost universally good stuff about DUNGEON WORLD, which I purchased recently and eagerly read through. It seems like a fun game, sure, but the thing that initially turned me off about DW and other games like TREMULUS was that it didn't seem to be about something the same way that MH is about being a horny, screwed-up teen. They just used the rules as a different kind of procedural system, which in my estimation is not quite enough to justify their existence. Perhaps I'll feel differently after I've played them, as opposed to just reading them. Or maybe it's just that I happened to start with an outstanding game that makes the others seem pale by comparison.

It might be that.

Here's where I am with the ruleset as a whole. I think, like many "indie" games, AW intended to teach us how to play games in a certain way. That was AW's spine -- the player-facing rules, constraining the MC to a set of highly-defined "Moves" and explicit principles of action, all in the service of driving the fictional side of the game. The engine makes it concrete that players drive play and the GM cannot abuse his power because his actions are limited to a set list of possibilities. For someone who tends toward shared narrative and emergent play as a general policy, that may be why AW initially felt too constrained. Why did I need all this structure to help me do something I was doing anyway?

But then again, Vincent Baker wasn't necessarily aiming his game at my head. Well, maybe I might get paranoid enough to think that if I had enough coffee in me.

I think those goals of play are satisfying enough to a wide enough range of players (who might not necessarily play games that require so much shared input from players) that we have all these hacks -- some of them marvelous. And yeah, maybe each one doesn't have to justify its existence thematically beyond a commitment to playing in a certain kind of game space.

I'm still left with the feeling that DW and TREMULUS could have done better, though, with a McDaldno-like mind at the helm. A new set of rules for Lovecraftian horror? Fine and dandy, although there are so many now you can't swing a dead shantak over your head without hitting one. A new game that re-frames Lovecraftian horror, and explores its themes -- like Sanity -- from a new perspective?

Now that's a hack I'd like to see. Or maybe Peter Goderie's already written it...?