The Broken City: Political Realities

In my last post about my role-playing game, The Broken City, I talked a lot about the in-game mechanics for determining character and background, and how these two basic choices (Path and Order) have a big impact on the player characters. I also made a brief mention of the fact that I altered the background slightly for my game, and here I'll explore what I changed, and how it affects the game world.

  I talked a lot about Paths and Orders in my last post, but there's one further category the players and other characters get sorted into in the game - their cabal. If your Path is roughly analogous to something like your race or your star-sign, and your Order is where you work or study, your Cabal is your group of friends. Your players can easily belong to different Paths and Orders in a Mage game (in fact, it's encouraged) but having them in different Cabals is a whole other matter - it essentially means your player's characters don't like to hang out with each other. No-one cares if Thor is a Norse god while Iron Man uses technology, or Willow studies at university while Giles works at the magic shop, as long as they still hang out and kick ass.

  In most Mage games, the superhero comparison is fairly apt when describing the relationships between different Cabals (the one made up by your players, and the others you create to fill up the world). The Avengers and the X-Men and the Fantastic Four might get into conflict occasionally, or have different agendas, but they're mostly content to take care of their own business and leave each other alone. However, my initial conception of the game, and in fact the thing that first made me want to run it, was a very different world.

  When I was thinking about the game in the early stages of planning, and describing it to potential players, my pitch was "Harry Potter meets Game of Thrones meets Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere", and the final, unspoken part of that equation was "...meets The Warriors". I wanted the cabals that the players encountered to be at minimum rivals, or at worst bitter enemies.

  Cabals are usually kept in line by the "Consilium" - a sort of ruling council of mages made up of representatives from all the cabals in the area, but for the purposes of my game, I decided that the Consilium had fallen apart due to rivalries, grudges and infighting, so London was sort of a magical Wild West, with very few people there enforcing the laws, and groups of mages fighting over territory and magical resources.

  This obviously immediately ups the stakes considerably for the players - instead of being welcomed into a stable environment where most people are trust-worthy and willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, they're instead dropped into a world where everyone is out for themselves and there is little safe ground to go to.

  Because the Orders are made up of the local mages, this also affects them - it's hard to keep an organisation running when the members all want to fight each other. This meant I shrank the Orders down to a few core members each who gave up their cabal affiliation, making the Orders less about large training facilities and more about one-on-one mentorship and developing a few key characters for each one.

  My players haven't encountered the cabals much yet - I introduced a sort of grace period when they couldn't be approached by other cabals to give the players a chance to get used to being mages and develop relationships with each other and the orders. However, that will soon end, and it will be interesting to see how they cope with suddenly being plunged into what is a very political aspect of the game, dealing with alliances, deals and betrayal. I'm hoping they're up for the challenge, and find the whole thing fun, because it's a large part of what makes up this particular world, and how this game functions.

  In my next post, I'll provide some more details about the world I've created, and the characters who populate it...

The Broken City: Background Goes Splat

Different game systems have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are easy to pick up and play with no preparation. Some have rules that cover every scenario you could want. Some give you a set of tools that are flexible. Some are written in friendly, accessible language. To me, the biggest strength of the World of Darkness games is the depth of background they provide for players and games masters. From the Corebook to the most obscure supplement, every book is packed with story elements to inspire you.

  However, the problem with this is there is so much to learn, and you have to know what to pick and what to leave. It's important to remember as a GM that you get to spend 6 months or however long learning and memorising this stuff, but you'll have to roll it out to your players in game and big chunks of exposition are dull when really everyone wants to be having arguments and blowing things up.

  A big portion of this is how you utilise character classes (what in traditional fantasy games might be things like fighter, thief, wizard, etc) These are sometimes referred to Splats, for reasons too complicated to go into, and World of Darkness games use what we'll call a "dual-axis splat system".

  Okay, here is your warning: this post is about to dive deep into the Mage: The Awakening background and setting. If you thought things were already nerdy and complicated, you ain't seen nothing yet.

  The "dual-axis splat system" basically means a large part of your character is defined by two choices. For Mage, these are Path and Order. Path is what type of mage you are and what type of magic you are strongest at. Each Path has certain personality traits that are associated with it, and archetypes they fit into. Choosing your Path is a meta-game decision, meaning the players pick it, but their characters have no say. It's a bit like being sorted into a House in Harry Potter - JK Rowling decided Cedric Diggory was a Hufflepuff; Cedric didn't.

Mage Paths
Acanthus - Free-wheeling, easygoing enchanters, strongest in Time and Fate magic
Mastigos - Ambitious, driven warlocks, with dominion over Space and Mind magic
Moros - Grim, stern necromancers specialising in Death and Matter magic
Obrimos - Devout, bold theurgists with power over Forces and Prime magic
Thyrsus - Passionate, wild shamans most capable with Spirit and Life magic

  The second splat is Order, which is what sort of role your character plays within the Mage world. Joining an Order means you get trained and carries both benefits and obligations. Choosing an Order is an in-game decision, meaning your character is the one who decides where they're going, and it can produce some in-game drama and intrigue. It's like picking a career, or a university. My players are at this point in their game - 4 out of 5 have picked Orders and have just started training.

Mage Orders
The Adamantine Arrow - Warrior wizards focused on action and betterment through conflict
The Silver Ladder - Ambassadors and advisers, determined to help Mage and non-Mage alike
The Guardians of the Veil - Spies and secret police responsible for keeping magic hidden
The Mysterium - Scholars and explorers gathering and preserving ancient knowledge
The Free Council - Modern upstart Order of activists and inventors, finding magic in the modern world

  It's easy to see how these two decisions can go a long way to defining your character within the game - you're essentially deciding your personality and your role in the world. Within a group of players, there's usually a fairly even split of choices, but there doesn't have to be. There can be duplicates or omissions, and players can emphasise different aspects of Paths or different roles within Orders.

  As there are five players in my game, I decided that each Path had to represented. There are in-game reasons for this I won't go into, but it also ensures balance in gameplay. Each Path has certain specialties, and if you miss one out, it's harder to tell certain stories, especially early in the game. If no-one is Moros, you're less likely to have someone who can deal with ghosts. If there's no Acanthus, stories about destiny or prophecy are trickier. Forcing players into a "no duplicates" policy restricts them slightly, but I think it pays off.

  The players themselves have decided to split themselves between Orders. There was a lot of in-game discussion about this subject, and as each Order has their own magical traditions and secrets, the group decided to try and game the system and share this information between themselves. We'll see how this works out for them... (cue evil GM laughter)

  Of course, this is the standard background for the Mage game. If you decide to mess with it, things get even more complicated, which is what I'll get to next time...

The Broken City: A Question of Rules

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the role-playing game I'm running, The Broken City. We're on a little bit of a hiatus at the moment, while various players are on holiday (the lucky dastards) so it seemed a good time to write a bit more about the game.

  Role-playing games can seem a bit of an odd duck to those who've never delved into them. They grew out of more traditional war-gaming (the type where two players line up armies on either side of a board and attempt to destroy each other) which, I suppose, grew out of games like chess, but to my mind, their real strength is as a way of telling stories together. Like improv comedy or a well-rehearsed anecdote amongst friends, role-playing games are about crafting a story that entertains everyone.

  However, your audience and your performers are the same people, which leads to some conflict of interest. Everyone wants the story to be filled with intrigue and adventure, betrayal and humour, bitter defeats and hard-fought victories. But when you have spent countless hours building up a character, it can be hard to watch them fail at something, even when it makes for a better story. That's where the rules come in.

  There's a huge range of rules systems out there, and the one you pick can hugely affect your style of play. Of course, if you want to run a space adventure game, you'll need a system that gives you rules for spaceships, zero gravity and alien races, but there whatever universe you want to create, there are probably at least a couple of systems you could use. Some are hyper detailed, with rules for deciding your characters height and charts mapping how range affects the accuracy of various weapons, while others can fit their rules on three sides of A4. They might use dice, cards or rock paper scissors to determine things.

  In The Broken City, I'm using the World of Darkness system, by White Wolf. World of Darkness is a flexible system meant for contemporary stories with a supernatural bent, usually in a world like ours, but a little worse (hence the name). Anything from Supernatural to Drive could work well within the World of Darkness. As a system, it strikes a nice balance between detail and game flow, which is the trade-off at the heart of most systems. The basic rulebook gives you the foundation for creating characters and running games, and there are various expansions for playing different games - vampires, werewolves, monster hunters and mages.

  Mages, or rather Mage: The Awakening, is the game I am using for The Broken City. The rule book is an intimidatingly thick tome, containing a wealth of background information and a huge section on spells and how to create them. But even with this surplus of rules and figures, there were some tweaks I wanted to make.

  The idea of certain objects or ingredients being necessary for spells is a fairly common one (think Buffy or Harry Potter) but isn't a huge part of Mage, where magic is a more internal force. However, spell ingredients create a sort of economy within the game - they are something to be traded, bartered for, stolen, or quested after. These are all great opportunities for stories, so I tweaked the rules for extended spells (ones cast over a long time, as opposed to in the heat of the moment) to be stronger if ingredients were used.

  There's other examples, but it's a brief glimpse into how changing the rules can change where the story can go. As for changing the background, well. that's a tale for a whole other post...

Welcome To The Broken City

Amongst my nerdy interests, which are many and varied, is pen and paper RPGs - you know, Dungeon and Dragon-style games with weird shaped dice, impenetrable rulebooks and incomprehensible character sheets. My love for these games grew out of my teenage years spent playing Games Workshop's miniature war games, but I was always looking for more ways to include depth and story in the game, and role-playing games were the natural route.

Like many before me, Dungeons and Dragons was my first introduction to the world of RPGs, but it wasn't until I picked up the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game by Eden Studios that the story-telling possibilities of the games became clear. More importantly, I found some friends who were equally interested in using the games as a mechanic to tell stories, rather than a race to the highest level and the biggest treasure.

I've played RPGs and run them over the years, and thoroughly enjoyed being on both sides of the table. For those completely unfamiliar with the concept, one person (called the games-master or something similar) plans out a scenario for the rest of the players to tackle. Each person has a single character that they play, who will change and develop over time, apart from the GM, who portrays everyone else that the group may encounter, from enemies to allies.

My latest attempt at running a game is The Broken City, using White Wolf's World of Darkness system, and more specifically their Mage: The Awakening game. My players' characters are all residents of London who have suddenly developed magical, reality bending powers and find themselves being drawn into the secret mystical underworld of the city, which is rife with gang war, treachery and betrayal. So far, I've run 5 sessions (we play every fortnight for about 4 hours) and between them, my players have managed to scorch their eyebrows off, accidentally cause a localised hail-storm, super-accelerate a raccoon, have an acid trip and repeatedly hit one of the supporting characters (who, if you remember, is played by me). It's been a good start.

The game is a little different to my usual style because I'm leaving the plot super-loose. Most games I've run have worked a bit like TV shows, with individual games containing complete adventures but also contributing to longer arcs. This game is going to operate a bit more like a sandbox-style video game. I've put a lot of work into building my alternate vision of London, and there are plenty of stories out there to be found, but I'm leaving it a lot more in the hands of the players. Their interest will drive the direction of the plot more than any game I've run before, so there's a lot more of a collaborative dynamic at play.

I'm aiming to write regularly about the game, hopefully avoiding spoilers if any of my players decide to read this, detailing the thoughts and work I've put into building the game world and retelling any interesting events from the games as they unfold.