Rain Falls Like Rubies

being a Scenario Kit for the Mist-Robed Gate

First, let me get something out of the way. Scenarii aren’t the only way to play this game; they are here as an effort of leading by example. There’s a lot of abstract intuitive-level thought that goes into constructing these, and I don’t have the words to give those thoughts to you as procedures and formalisms, but maybe, given enough examples, you can come up with your own abstract intuitions that work for you.

That said.

Rain Falls Like Rubies is a story about the ashes of Shaolin. The five great temples—Shaolin, Wudang, Emei, Zhejiang, and Guangdong—have been burnt and razed, their abbots slain and their disciples scattered. These disciples are trying to rebuild amongst the wreckage.

Here’s a diagram:

Cast

I suggest that, for this scenario, you use the young children as player characters. All the students have weathers and colours, though. If you choose Ma Zhen, Ju Sha, or any of the adults for characters, the tone of the game will change.

The characters in Burned Shaolin are the survivors of the burning, those who have lost family and friends to the great slaughterings. All the children are presently students at Zu Shan. The characters of burned Shaolin are concerned with preserving their traditions.

• San Gui Wu: “Three Ghosts Dancing” was once “Seeking Tranquillity” Li Zhuian, brother of “Cloud Chaser” Li Zhuiyun. San Gui Wu engineered the burning of Shaolin. These days, he only permits his family members to address him by his original name.
• Li Wuyun: “Dark Clouds” is the son of Li Zhuiyun. He is about twelve years old. His colour is grey and his weather is “storm clouds.”
• Li Wuya: “Raven” is Wuyun’s sister. She is also about twelve years old. Her colour is black and her weather is “wind.”
• Vault of Heaven: Vault is the son of Left-Hand Moon, the abbot of the ghost-temple at Guangdong. He is a ghost inhabiting his own corpse, which looks like an elegantly-dressed skeleton, the bones burnt glossy black. There is an incense burner in his chest cavity. When he was alive he was about thirteen. His colour is white and his weather is “mist.”
• Gai Zheng: Zheng is the last survivor of Zhejiang. He is about thirteen. He practices embarrassingly innovative martial arts. His colour is sky-blue and his weather is “sunbeams.”

The Outside People have no history in Shaolin at all. They are all presently students at Zu Shan. Outside people are not a proper faction and don’t necessarily have a formal leader or any overarching goals. This might change in the course of play!

• Ruhi Nankachema: “Snowflakes in Martial Array” is from the Country of Daughters. She is about a year older than Gai Zheng. Her colour is red and her weather, “driven snow.”
• Bai Hua: “White Flower” is somehow in the service of San Gui Wu. She has the talent of the perfect mimic—she can imitate whatever kung fu she sees. She is maybe twelve years old. Her colour is lavender, her weather “plum blossoms.”
• Ju Sha: “Chrysanthemum Death,” an assumed name, is one of the two senior students at Zu Shan. She is perhaps twenty. Her specialty is swordsmanship. Her colour is gold, her weather, “twilight.”
• Ma Zhen: “Truth,” is descended from the northwestern horsemen, thus the family name Ma, meaning “Horse.” He is about eighteen. His specialty is qigong. His colour is green, his weather, “night.”

Zu Shan is the location of the sixth temple, where the survivors of Shaolin are rebuilding their secret societies. There are at least four monks who teach martial arts… The teachers at Zu Shan are concerned with protecting Shaolin from the invading Sparrow People barbarians, and are willing to revamp or discard their traditions as necessity demands.

• Hei Feng: “Black Wind” is the abbot of Zu Shan. He is not any age in particular. Having known Li Zhuian, he recognises the art of mimicry that Bai Hua performs, and wonders about it.
• Li Laoshi: “Teacher Yak” is also from the Country of Daughters. She is responsible for the female dormitory. She specialises in teaching Body Hardening.
• Shan He Yue Xia Dai Qiu Luo: or “Qiu Laoshi” for short, “Waiting for Autumn,” teaches qigong. He has some kind of rivalry with Wu Shi Zhong.
• Wu Shi Zhong: “Bell of the Fifth Hour” is the oldest instructor, and he insists on dressing like a magistrate from the last generation; this makes the tiny old man faintly ridiculous. He does not have any specialty in particular, but it seems he is presently teaching swordsmanship.

Sets, Props, and Sound

Sets

Most of the sets in Rain Falls like Rubies have two versions: a “waking” version and a “dreaming” version. Ma Zhen, Ju Sha, Vault, and anyone they teach the ability to are able to enter the dream version of a location. These are places as seen by the sleeping mind; things are inverted or transformed into visual metaphors, and there are some places that can only be reached by travelling in dream.

The sets here are divided into zones; to move from monastery to monastery, you must have a scene in-between them, set in the Travelling zone. The monasteries have Arriving sets; the first time that a monastery is entered, in a story, it must be through the Arriving set.

White Clouds Monastery

There are four sets in White Clouds:

• Arriving by the River: Fed by hot springs, the river water is a rusty red-orange colour, passing through twisted grey mountain stones. Wuyun and Wuya like to skip stones, or themselves, across the river. The monks of the temple usually don’t come here. Two people are comfortable here, four are crowded. The sky here is clear and the air filigreed with steam from the river water. In the dreaming, a man of ashes can be seen on the temple roof, fighting a coiling, mazy creature of fire—a dragon-centipede, a serpent or a flame-lettered scroll.
• The Skipping Stream: Another stream, this one an icy-cold snowmelt source, lies to the other side of the monastery. It’s perfectly clear and surrounded by iron-grey boulders and pale young bamboo. This set is crowded for two; the air is crisp and cold.
• The Rooftops: The roofs of White Clouds Monastery are of tile in shades of sky-blue, white, and silver, and maple trees spring from the courtyards in vermillion fountains. It’s comfortable here for two, but it can be crowded by up to six. It’s very windy and monks don’t generally hang out here, but they will certainly pursue a prankster. In the dream, the roofs are mirrors that reflect a blue sky speckled with clouds, but the sky above churns with black and purple storms.
• The Courtyards: Sinuous walls of pale stone are interrupted by the dark boles of ancient trees here, and pierced with round gates and latticed windows. Red maple leaves drift with the breezes. Six people are comfortable, ten crowded, in a courtyard. In the dream, the trees become ancient, slow-moving men carved of wood, leaves flying out of wounds in their wrists and cuts on their faces.

Guangdong Ghost Temple

There are three sets at Guangdong, the temple of towers:

• Arriving at the Ruin: There is the burned foundation of a temple here, surrounded by the husks of its surrounding buildings, in the deep green bowl of a valley. Smoke rises from the temple ruin. In the dream, a dragon white and curved as the moon, all translucence and wings and light, struggles with another dragon with coal-bright claws, striped red and black like a lantern. This set is large and can accommodate a group of any size. The ghosts of Guangdong never come hee.
• The Temple Gates: Standing in the temple’s foundation, it can be seen that the smoke rises from many incense burners, and the scent of them is thick in the air. In the dream, the columns of smoke rising from the braziers become curving staircases that lead up to a floating smoke hill (or sometimes a smoke lake), where the ghosts of Guangdong dwell in a white metal temple. This set is comfortable for five and crowded by ten.
• Left-Hand Moon’s Office: This set only exists in dream. The abbot of Guangdong, who has cataracts in his left eye, can be found here. His office is full of mirrors made of different metals: iron, silver, tin. The rosewood floors are covered in scraps of silver leaf that flake off the walls in many layers. This set is comfortable for one and crowded for six.

Zu Shan

Here are four sets at Zu Shan; there are probably several others (make them up!):

• Arriving at the Gates: The gate of Zu Shan is at the base of a long staircase leading up to the peak of the mountain and main cluster of buildings. The gate is one of a long trail of gates that arch over the stair, all made of old, weathered rosewood, buried in the black earth and black stones and dusted with snow. Just beyond the gate is a well. In the dream, the stair is a sleeping, heaving serpent covered in wooden scales. This set is good for two, crowded by four.
• Boys’ Dormitory: The windows of the “Free Eagle” dormitory overlook the archery yard, where red-and-yellow arrows plunge sang! peng! into red-and-yellow targets. The floor is covered in yellow parchment scrawled with bad calligraphy, and on the walls are racks of wooden practice weapons in every stage of disrepair. In the dream, the weapons are made of jade and gold, precious and sharp. The ink on the parchment becomes blood, and the characters flow and change, and the arrows are sparrows, chirping as they fly by. This set is good for four, crowded for five. Obviously, females are not permitted here.
• Girls’ Dormitory: The “Lion Hawk” dormitory overlooks the field-of-posts where balance exercises are conducted. Its blue-and-green tiled walls are lined with suits of armour, flags, and tack for the monastery’s horses. There are piles of books and scrolls in the corners. In the dream, the flags unfurl and ripple across the room like sheets of wind-blown water, and the suits of armour are inhabited by expressionless ghosts, murmuring a litany of those that died in the fires of Shaolin. This set is good for four, crowded for five. Males are not permitted here.
• The Qigong Yard: This courtyard, near the top of the monastery, is always exposed to the wind and weather, even under the shelter of the tall black pines outside its pink brick walls. It is divided into many large squares, separated by shallow channels full of water. There are no bridges; the channels must be waded or leapt across, and wading is not encouraged, as it would disturb the ornamental turtles. In the dream, these turtles become black water dragons; they are friendly to children. Most of the monks give this place a wide berth, for fear of running into the fierce Qiu Laoshi. This is a large set, comfortable for six but encompassing up to fifteen.

Travelling

All the Travelling sets are large enough to accommodate any group. Here are some:

• The Hills: The grass is green and sparked with scarlet poppies, the sky is clear and blue. In the dream, it is as though the night sky has fallen to the earth; the grass is black and the flowers white, divided by luminous blue rivers, and above, the sky is a rich green.
• The Mountains: Horses cannot enter the mountains. The yellow rocks rear up against a grey sky, and the wind beats unmercifully at their sides. In the dream, red rain trails down from the mountaintops, alternately hot as lava or as cool as spent blood.
• The Stupa: A white dome rises out of the earth here; in the dream it is wreathed in multicoloured lama-flames.
• The Wood: White-barked birch trees mix with red-leaved maples here, and deer race each other in the distance. In the dream, the trees themselves are the antlers of a great herd of deer that walks slowly along the valley floor.

Props

There aren’t a lot of things in this scenario:

• Zhui An’s Sword: Made of rare five-coloured iron, this sword is as tall as a man and wrapped elaborately in violet silk. It begins the game in the hands of Bai Hua. Otherwise it is in the ashes of Guangdong.
• Zhui Yun’s Sword: Nearly identical to Zhui An’s, this sword is wrapped in yellow and white. Ju Sha is bringing it to Zhui Yun. Otherwise, Zhui Yun already has it.
• The Carp & Diamond Manuscript: The qigong classic, Wu Shi Zhong makes his students copy pages of it for calligraphy practice. It rests in the library at Zu Shan.
• Zhui Yun: He is still a warrior, but his adventurous spirit is broken, and he will only follow in another person’s footsteps. He rests somewhere in White Clouds Monastery.
• A bucket: Gai Zheng has this ’cause Hei Feng makes him fetch water all the time. Otherwise it’s at the monastery gate.

Sound

This scenario has two soundtracks; the waking soundtrack should be used for waking sets, and the dream track for dream sets. The waking track has more emphasis on vocals and, I hope, is more acoustic; I’ve used instrumentals and electric sounds more in the dreaming soundtrack. I’ll post it later.

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That concludes this scenario, with many thanks for the unwitting help of Jonathan Walton, Thomas Robertson, and Joshua Kashinsky, who wrote the original Ashes of Shaolin stories with me, from which this scenario arises.

The Mist-Robed Gate

I’m really pretty excited about this game; it’s a new move for me in terms of user-friendly design, and also, I think it provides a lot of sensual richness in a package that is relatively easy to handle.Many thanks to Jonathan for ideas given and ideas stolen, and to Elizabeth for being a taskmaster, and many others…

Update: The game’s finished and for sale. Contact me for more info.

Sword of the Soul: Review

by Tristan Brightman

(Hey, tris, is there a place we can keep the text of this game that’s a little more accessible? KF is not totally link-friendly.)

Sword of the Soul is a game that Tris wrote for me for the True Meaning of Friendship Game Design Challenge. Thanks, Tris! It is the seed of something quite cool, I think. I particularly like the idea that each action scene is mapped to a grid, with a meaningful layout. I’m just going to go down section by section, red-penning as I would with a text I’m marking up for revisions.

Setup

Here we learn how to create characters and locations. Characters are constructed out of Motivations, which are things they want or want to do. I like this! On the other hand I feel like we are left out in open water a little with regard to guidance; there are countless different stories you could tell by arranging them in different ways (think about the stereotypical black-and-white fantasy cast, or the tangled, loyalty-blurred wuxia movie, or the swashbuckling story where allegiances are like outfits…) and countless different non-stories you could tell by arranging Motivations poorly (We all want pie! Except Ned, who is a piemaker. Pie for everyone!), and so it’d be beneficial to have an overseeing hand here. Come to think of it, here’s a spot where you could put in an oracle like in a Wicked Age or a genre dial of some other kind.

I’d like some guidance regarding location maps, too, mostly wrt how many features to have and how to arrange them. It’s not a big deal that this isn’t in this version of the text; I think it will take some testing before we can really figure out where the sweet spot lies. Some idea seeds about “areas of interest” would be welcome as well, although I see and appreciate that this is intended as a space to make the game your own. As it stands, it reminds me in a good way of the Set-Piece Battles essay I wrote about running cool fights in Exalted.

I think maybe maps can have walls.

Fighting

On your go, if you have any “Strike” counters next to you, you may either take the blow, or try to defend them, by starting your sequence with a number of blocks, or dodges. Once you have decided, the player(s) who placed the strikes rolls one d6 per strike. Any die showing 4+ is a hit. You then roll your dodge/block dice. For dodging, a 3-6 blocks an attack, but forces you to move the Dodge rate away from your opponent. For blocking, a 4-6 blocks an attack.

I think that we can simplify this, numbers-wise. I like that you are forced to move some distance with dodges. Here is a thing that has a lot of potential—like suppose that your map is a vertical plane cut through a bamboo grove, and you must always Dodge downward a long distance, and the Move rate is significantly lower? Cool!!

I think that movement could use some clarification, maybe the Move rate is a cap on how far you can move in a turn? Else you may be unable to reach some spots on the board (think about chess bishops). What directions are okay?

Your action sequence must be narrated as flowing from one of the motivations used to drive it.

Suggestion: We don’t need this, as long as we narrate this in the defence process. I think maybe the constant harping on motivations isn’t always what we need, but we need it at these critical points, eh?

a remark

What happens when we’re not fighting? How do we interpret dodging and blocking in the context of a battle of words?

Welcome Back

Hey, it looks like Dev’s blogging again. Welcome back, man.

Los Mangos Verdes y Desolados

Introduction

This game was written for the True Meaning of Friendship Design Challenge at the knife fight. My challenge was to write a game for the person described by this blurb:

I’m a warehouse manager, but I also enjoy programming, cooking, and dreaming up games. I enjoy playing a whole host of games, including Weapons of the Gods, Buffy/Angel, and Heroquest. I would really like to play a game that took place totally in the kitchen.

Being that I was one of the people managing the challenge, I knew who submitted this blurb, but I am trying my best to suppress this knowledge. I’ll spill at the end of the post.

This game relies on a deliberate off-reading of the challenge; I think you can interpret “a game that took place totally in the kitchen” to mean “a game whose imaginary events happen in a kitchen,” but to me, “a game that must be played in or near a kitchen” is much more interesting as a design challenge.

I have based the system for this game on that of Shadows by Zak Arntson. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Emily for Heart of the Rose (sorry, no link), Vincent for Otherkind, and Char for TOR (no link).

Materials

This game is an experiment in tools and forms. It’s intended for a group of adept and swift cooks with a well-stocked kitchen. Besides the kitchen (and consequent food, silverware, etc.), you’ll also need a number of six-sided dice in particular colours (I’ll tell you which colours in another post), some drawing materials like paper and charcoal, and some play tokens (like coins, poker chips, whatever), three per player.

Subject Matter

This game is inspired by that particular brand of Mexican magical realism that you find in such as 100 Years of Solitude or Like Water for Chocolate. It’s set in a timeless, rural Mexico, a place with rolling grassy hills, deserts full of saguaro, agave, and eagles, cold dry mountains, and old Indian dwellings carved into the cliffsides.

Playing Los Mangos…

Setup

I suggest that you get yourself an idea of the kind of place you want to use as a setting first thing: Will the story be set mostly in a manor house a little bit away from the village, or maybe in a city? Maybe it’s a farming settlement or a frontier town?

You will play a group of people from this place. At the start of the game, all but one of the characters are members of the same extended family. Make up a family tree together, which spans at least three generations and has at least twice as many living members as players. Think of reasons that about a quarter of them aren’t around right now, but could be.

Out of the remaining three-quarters of the family, everyone picks someone to portray. One person shouldn’t be a member of the family—make up an outsider, someone who’s tied to the family socially but not by blood, like a suitor or a governess or a fellow army veteran or something. Each of you draws a picture of your character when they are happy and another when they are upset, on the same sheet of paper. “Upset” can mean what you want it to mean—sad, hostile, angry, jealous, afraid, etc.—choose one that fits the character you have in mind. On the back of your drawings, write the names of the other characters in a long column down the side of the page, so you have room to write a comment after each.

Get a distinct bowl—one that no one will mistake for a food bowl—and put your dice in it. Print out a copy of the pantry list.

Everyone takes three tokens.

Get in the kitchen. Bring your stuff. Sharpen your knives.

Some Rules about What You Can Say and What You Can’t

You can’t usually say how a character that someone else is portraying feels or acts. If no one is portraying a character presently, that character is a person of no consequence and you can say whatever you like about them. If you cook something and feed it to the players, then you can make a dinner roll, which means you get a chance to tell other players how characters they are portraying feel, but they still get to decide what they do about this feeling.

You can’t usually say anything about stuff that happened in the past. You can give a player a token to describe an event that the character they are portraying was involved in, defining some moment in their history. You can’t give yourself a token for this. That’s silly.

Apart from those things, you can say what you like, and if someone has a big problem with it then you should either talk it out or have them cook something and make a dinner roll (See below).

Playing the Game

The game always starts with the characters hanging out somewhere, except for the outsider, who bursts in and interrupts the festivities with bad news. As Zak says, “What happens after that is up to the players…”

Sometimes you’ll want to pause the game for a dinner roll.

Dinner Rolls

Sometimes the characters in Los Mangos… inadvertently do magical things. They don’t perceive these things as magical, nor do they see them as commonplace; they fly right under the radar. This isn’t a psychologically realistic game, you see, and these magical things are a language of metaphor that’s addressed to the readers. Much like characters in books can’t usually tell when chapters end and begin, characters in this game can’t make the intuitive leap that “Oh goodness, maybe everyone is so sad and needy all of a sudden because I cried into the soup!”

To make a dinner roll, you have to cook something and serve it to the other players. The character you’re portraying also has to do something, but it doesn’t have to be cooking, as long as the other characters are able to observe it. For instance, your character could start knitting and knitting until bits of afghan blanket are bursting out of every window of the house, or scream so loudly everyone in the valley hears it, or cut his wrists and the blood creeps all over town so everyone can see. Don’t be afraid to exaggerate here, and think of your description in terms of 8 colors of crayon rather than subtle layers of oil paint—speak simply and boldly.

Now choose one of the main ingredients in your dish and say what you have chosen and what its effect is on the characters. For example, roses infuse people with romantic passions. I’ll make another post with an ingredients list, telling you what the effects of different ingredients are. No fair using something that’s not on the list and making up your own effect!

If everyone’s cool with this, then that’s what happens. If someone thinks your food/action should cause something else to happen, then he pulls two dice out of the bowl. One is the colour that matches your ingredient’s shelf—a category of similar ingredients. The ingredients list also indicates what shelf each ingredient is from. For the second, he names a second ingredient in your dish, one that comes from a different shelf. He should pull out that die as well and describe its ingredient’s effect.

Now you ask if anyone else would like to add any ingredients. There can be at most four ingredients in a dinner roll. Go around the table starting at your left. Just like the previous person, each person may add one die, as long as the ingredient they name is both in your dish and on a different shelf than all the other ingredients. The third and fourth player may also choose the special ingredient, salt. Salt duplicates the effect of some other ingredient, in the same way that salt used in cooking brings out the flavor of food.

Make a check on the pantry list on each shelf from which an ingredient is being rolled. See if it’s been a season of any of those shelves, and if so, talk over what will happen at the turn of the season. See the section below.

Now, finally, pick up all the dice, remind yourself what they mean, and roll them. The highest die indicates what ingredient takes grip and has its effect on the characters. If there is more than one highest die, then your die takes precedence over the next guy’s die, and so on.

But, tokens! Don’t forget them. After somebody else makes a dinner roll, you can interrupt before she narrates the result and give her a token in order to make her reroll a die of your choice. You can’t pay yourself to reroll dice. That’s silly. You (and anyone else) can keep giving the other player tokens until everyone’s satisfied, gives up, or runs out of tokens.

The Turning of Seasons

When you use a lot of ingredients from one shelf, a season turns. Something happens in the world, and the cast of characters rotates. First, follow the instructions for that season (to be found in the ingredient list). Then, the player with the fewest tokens chooses a different character to portray. If necessary, make a new portrait and stuff for that character, and set aside the old character’s sheet for use later. If the season introduces a new character, then consider using this character, but apply common sense. It might not be that much fun to portray a newborn.

If there’s more than one player with the fewest tokens, set all their old characters aside first, and have them all choose between characters that have not been active in the last season.

A season is five checks long.

My …victim… is Jason Petrasko.

Birth of Summerbird and Names of the Flock

Hey, all. This is my new blog. Later I’ll be posting some games here, but to begin with let me send you to some other people I like, who’ve been posting lately:

Dissolute Games is where my girl Elizabeth writes stuff.
One Thousand One is my boy Jonathan. Jon has about eight million web presences, but this is Ground Zero, and you can find his other things radiating from it.
Deeper in the Game is the phoenix of Chris Chinn. I like it.
Muragami Desu is Jason Petrasko.
Monkey Do, Monkey See is Joshua A.C. Newman.
If you don’t know about Fair Game and anyway., I dunno what to say.
Friends who I haven’t linked, maybe you should update your blogs, huh?

Finally, Raven Swallows the Sun is my old blog, where you’ll find art, games, food, and fiction. As time passes, the food and games will move to their own places, but the art and fiction are there to stay.

Welcome to Summerbird. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay.