Raise the Red Lantern

So, on the way to Kelly’s Pesach Seder, Josh and Elizabeth and I developed a LARP hack for the Mist-Robed Gate.

It’s easy.

There’re some central facilitator tasks that you’ll need to assign to somebody, and that person probably shouldn’t play a character, but they may be an audience member, which means they participate in the wirework vote and can frame scenes. Whenever you get to the end of a scene, you should come back to see the facilitator, get a recap of what scenes happened while you were away, deliver your own recap, and then see who’s at the top of the ’scene frame’ list. That person gets to frame a scene immediately with whoever’s present, or you can wait a small amount of time for another scene to end, if you need a character that’s somewhere else and it looks like they’ll be done soon.

You don’t have cards for props and sets. Instead, you should play in a place with several distinct rooms, and you have a supply of physical objects that you’re allowed to use as props. When you need a new set, you assign the set to an unused room, and when you need a new prop, you assign it to a physical object. You own props by carrying them on your person, so you need to think a little about this; if you use a real replica sword without a hanger as a sword prop, you’ll need to keep it in your hand, whereas if you use a pocketknife, you can stick it in your pocket.

You don’t use a real knife for the knife. Instead, each set has a colour-coded lantern; when the knife is covered, there are no lanterns. When the knife is uncovered, the facilitator hangs white lanterns in every set. When the knife is drawn, the lanterns are changed to yellow, and when it is bloodied for the first time, they are changed to red. If you don’t have lanterns, you can use flags or scarves or something. To show that you have the knife, make the ’sword finger’ gesture: Extend your second and middle fingers together, and curl up the thumb, ring, and pinkie. Point the sword finger at the person you are passing the knife to. To signal acceptance, kneel and touch the sword finger to the ground. To stab a person, touch them against the throat or collarbone with your sword finger.

When wirework begins, ring a gong to summon all the players so they can watch and vote.

You should dress up so we can see your character’s colour in your outfit.

That’s basically it.

Long Ago, the people were fighting at the end of the world…

a Polaris~Exalted game, by S. Musgrave, S. Sampat, and E. Shoemaker.

BUT HOPE WAS NOT YET LOST, FOR VENDIR HASTLEBROOK STILL HEARD THE CALL OF THE SUN…

The waves parted obligingly for Vendir’s royal canoe. All was still on the oceans of the world today; even the gulls were silent. Only the sound of water splashing on the canoe paddle could be heard. And, in that splash, a footstep, a sandaled foot landing in the back of the canoe. Assassins. Vendir did not take his eyes off of the water, now ruined with the ripples of his would be murderers. he slowly dropped the reed he had been stirring the water with “You should know that this is a private vessel.” Cold knives, still dripping seawater, touch Vendir just below each ear. It runs down to the hollow of his throat. One presses harder, draws blood.

Vendir looked up to the assassin, his eyes much more serious. “You mean to kill me here, I take it? I have a pretty good guess where you’re from.” The waters surrounding the boat begin to stir. A metallic fin surges above the water’s edge in a accelerating cycle about Vendir’s boat. “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to back out now, brothers?”

“The killing of kings is an amateur sport. We are only here to watch you while our brethren salt your fields, flood your armouries, poison your granaries, and otherwise kill everyone you care about.” A curl of smoke rises from the shore, edged with an ominous alchemical purple.

“There’s no time to waste then.” And in a moment, the metallic fin underneath the water reveals itself, a huge sword who’s blade is rigged to its handle with an extending chain, jumps out of the water by itself, blowing straight through one assassin and into Vendir’s hand, from where he cleaves another.

BUT ONLY IF one entire village is already lost.

BUT ONLY IF Vendir is able to swim to shore before anymore major damage.

AND THAT WAS HOW IT HAPPENED, SO IT WAS.

BUT HOPE WAS NOT YET LOST, FOR ANEMONE PEARL-EATER STILL FELT THE WARMTH OF THE SUN…sitting on a small spy vessel, another clan-member eagerly presenting her with an oyster so that she might provide the clan with insight into this tumultuous battle, her brother Sindbad watching the grey-purple smokes rise up from the shore. Languidly, Anemone runs a single finger along the contours of the mother-of-pearl shell, its creamy sheen glowing slickly brilliant in the light. “Only one village shall fall today, but it will feel like ten.” Her eyes flickered to her brother. “The coast will be thick with purple fog in a fortnight.” The shell seems to vibrate in her hand, almost as if in pleasure. It opens up, and reveals a quite strangely large pearl that is black as midnight, and sparkles with a forboding radiance. Her eyes go wide. “Black pearls mean black hearts. Dark desires.”

Sindbad presses the oyster closed. “One doesn’t need to consult the sea to see that.” He doesn’t release her hand.

Anemone smirks a bit. “Dark desires are ever present, aren’t they?”

Sindbad licks his lips. “Oh yes. Have you -seen- that delicious prince of the land people? He will make a delightful cabin boy.”

The purple smoke on the shore seems to dissipate. The attending clan member runs to the side of the boat to spy on it with the attached spy-glass, searching for the sight of his confidant on the shore village, but he’s nowhere to be found.

Anemone raises a brow. “He is quite lovely, though not half as lovely as you, dear brother. It would be nice to keep him.”

“You are lovelier still, my pearl.”

“Miss Anemone! Somethings gone wrong! I smell a foul trap! Please, the pearl.”

Anemone daintily pries open the oyster and drops the pearl into Sindbad’s palm. “Do you mind?” She asks, parting her lips. The attending clan member pulls on his hair as he watches the couple take their leisurely time, but holds his tongue until Sindbad feeds her the pearl. The seer’s eyes roll back in her head, and her brows knit in concentration.

“One of our assassins.. he is in love with a girl from the prince’s kingdom. He sabotaged our efforts. He has a scar below his left eye.” As Anemone eats the pearl, she is jolted by the visions of what she sees. Her marauding clan, snickering as they tear through the lands of Hastlebrook. Giant machines in the shape of men shooting out the fires of hell from their arms to burn them to cinders. Herself in the Arms of Vendir, licking his naked chest. Herself kneeling above the bloody, motionless body of her brother Sindbad, dropping the weapon that battered him. The visions stagger her into a seizure on the floor of the boat.

BUT ONLY IF Sindbad opens his eyes at the end of the vision.

AND FURTHERMORE, As Sindbad opens his eyes, he sees his sister covered head to toe in red blood, her eyes the emotionless holes of a remorseless slaughterer. (Betrayal of the People)

AND FURTHERMORE, As the camera zooms out, Vendir is revealed, blue and dead, Anemone’s hair twisted around his neck. (Betrayal of the Sun.)

AND FURTHERMORE, Anemone feels that it is impossible to struggle against this fate, and views it with inevitability and lust at her conquest of Vendir. She gets experience and the Aspect, Fate: “Conquest of Vendir”. (Forbidden Love.)

AND THAT WAS HOW IT HAPPENED.

The attendant Clan member grabs Sindbad as her sister shakes on the floor “Fughadabout her!! They need us on the shore! Get in the water!”

Sindbad pushes him aside long enough to hold Anemone still just for a split second and plant a kiss on her lips; then he steps out onto the waves, gliding over them like shifting sand, drawing his red-veined salt crystal sword. At the kiss, Anemone slumps into slumber.

AND SO IT WAS, BUT THAT ALL HAPPENED LONG AGO, AND NOW THERE ARE NONE WHO REMEMBER IT.

Risalat al-Ghufran: The Epistle of Forgiveness

for Scooter

This is a game about pain and forgiveness. This group of people, they’ve gone through some rough times, some together, some apart, and they have lots of issues with each other that they haven’t resolved yet. But they have a culture of telling stories, and we, taking on their roles, and telling their life stories in this mode that hovers at the edge of mythology, have the power to deal with these heretofore unspoken issues, and untangle them, and lead these characters to a better place. It’s partly the action of telling these stories that does it, by just sharing with others, and partly because telling stories is prayer, and the angels hear their prayers and reorder the world as they are told, so they’re not hollow stories that mean nothing, but real actions with real consequences.

It may help you, as it helps me, to think of this game as a 1001 Nights hack, although it’s departed from that root far enough that you have to learn the system anew. There’s a lot of the game I don’t quite know, but here is a piece that I have the words to describe:

As you begin a story, take a numbered card from your hand and place it in front of you, face-up. This card sets the theme of the story; say it is the Three of Swords. “This story is about lost love,” you might say. Briefly introduce your story and cast the other players in roles in it, as you would in 1001. Your job as the storyteller is to give the other players an opportunity to suffer.

If you’re a human character in the story, then your job is to know suffering. This consists of several tasks. When you have an opportunity to suffer, play a numbered card in front of you that is the same suit as the storyteller’ card, and describe the nature of your suffering. Let the Tarot inspire you if you know it, and take some note of the number on the card; a higher number corresponds with more suffering.

If you don’t have any suited numbered cards, then you know suffering by binding wounds and watching for angels. To bind a wound, when someone else plays a numbered card, you may immediately say, “I will bind the wound,” and play a lower-numbered card of any suit. Take their card into your hand and leave your card in its place; your character intervenes to lessen the other character’s suffering and change its nature. To watch for angels, when someone suffers, you may play a suited court card. Describe how the character reveals its identity as an angel. Make a note of which angel corresponds to the court card, and leave that card on the table next to the character’s suffering. The card corresponds to this angel for the remainder of the game; this means that, if you identify several characters with this card, they are in fact the same character, having gone through some transformation of likeness.

If you are playing an angel, your job is to be a healing hand. Angels may suffer with any suit. They may bind wounds with numbered cards and with court cards. Binding a wound with a court card is like binding a wound and simultaneously seeing an angel. Angels’ wounds cannot be bound by humans; they must be bound by other angels.

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.