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Act V, Scene Id: A) Gertrude and Claudius temporarily smooth the waters as the scuffling Laertes and Hamlet are separated.

Hamlet is spared immediate repercussions for his outburst, which is good for him as far as it doesn’t get him into further procedural trouble. On the other hand, he’s spared by his enemy, which can’t be a good thing in the long run. Laertes responds easily to their entreaties, presumably out of his procedural alliance with Claudius. That makes this a persuasion interaction, not a dramatic one, and one between NPCs to boot. This brief beat momentarily arrests the deepening tragic spiral without reversing it, so we represent it with a lateral procedural arrow.

Act V, Scene 2: B) Confiding in Horatio, Hamlet reveals that he had a restless night, and justifies his graveside indiscretion as possibly useful.

Hamlet seeks assurance from Horatio and, as is usually the case with this confidant character, easily gets it. All along Horatio’s role in the narrative has in large part been to give our hero the emotional victories that every other character withholds from him.

This could easily be played by actors as an emotional down moment, however, with Hamlet’s self-assurance seeming like a rationalization, and Horatio’s acquiescence coming off as worried or otherwise double-edged.

Under the theory that the choice that a doubtful interpretation should be decided in favor of the one that grants the greatest rhythmic variation, let’s treat this as an actual emotional victory for Hamlet, and give it a dramatic up arrow.

C) Hamlet reveals further details of his escape from exile, culminating in the news that he’s sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths.

Another powerfully equivocal moment. This news fills in a procedural victory for Hamlet we already knew about. However, his decision to doom his erstwhile friends doesn’t actively further his vengeance against Claudius. He does it out of a sense of betrayal, satisfying an emotional goal by external, active means.

This raises the prospect of a victory for the protagonist that we in the audience don’t share. If we found R & G to be buffoonish poltroons, we probably feel (as Horatio will in the forthcoming beat) that they met a harsher fate than they deserved. The character we’re identifying with feels a sense of emotional victory, but our sympathies are split. Looks like another crossed dramatic arrow.

If this had been a game, we would have seen this sequence play out rather than hearing it in retrospect. That would have made it a suspense scene, as we wonder whether Hamlet escapes, and whether he succeeds in dealing with R & G as he wanted. (And face it, the spite and overkill of his decision is classic player character behavior.)



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I’ve set my faithful LJ client to autopost while I take a brief vacation. Please excuse in advance my failure to reply in a timely fashion to your comments.

Assuming that all has gone according to plan, midnight PST marked the unveiling of the fully refurbished Moon Design web site and the worldwide premiere of the new HeroQuest core rule book. It’s available to order in hardcopy and/or PDF and will be also be available at your DLGS.(As always, the “D” is for “discerning.”)

Glorantha fans will find all sorts of goodies also available on the site, including never-before-fully-available selections from the Stafford Library.

It is fitting that this event should occur on Canada Day. Both Canada and HQ2 are fully generic tool sets giving GMs the rules support they need to collaboratively create RPG stories using the time-honored techniques of authors and screenwriters.

In other exciting HQ news, Moon Design will be making the system available to other publishers through a generous open gaming license. Details are forthcoming to the gaming world at large, but one group has already taken a head start. D101 games has announced the first two open-license supplements, one traditional fantasy, the other hard SF. As of this writing their server is acting up on them, so I’m temporarily linkless. Try Google to see if their site mojo has returned.

Also, check out Darran Sims’ design notes on the new HeroQuest logo, which is on one hand brand-spanking, but also calls back to classic elements of the hallowed Pavis and Big Rubble boxes.

Tags: gaming hut, heroquest, open gaming licenses, self-promotion

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As Pelgrane’s Simon Rogers revealed last week, I am currently at work on Skulduggery, a genericized version of the Dying Earth RPG rules. As of this writing, I’ve done the initial draft, am playtesting in house, and am about to shoot the results to Simon before taking a quick vacation. (If you want to participate in our outside playtesting, drop Simon a line.) I’m basically tweaking and repackaging an existing rules set, so I’m figuring there are no big secrets to conceal and will be occasionally posting about the design process here. Since we’re in the early stages, everything I say here is subject to change as we refine based on playtest results.

Superficially, the task seems similar to my brief for HeroQuest 2 (available at midnight on Wed PST): to take a rules set designed for a very specific and distinctive setting and expand it to fit a wide range of settings.

The impetus behind the projects is quite different, though. For HQ2, my task was not only to generalize the rules for any setting, but to bring the game back to its original design intent. This was to create a system enabling GMs and players to create stories using the same creative processes used by authors and screenwriters. (In the case of the Glorantha-focused original, it was to tell stories like Greg Stafford tells stories.) Over the course of its previous development, HQ had developed a simulation/world-modeling focus it wasn’t built to successfully execute. My objective was to make the new rules much more explanatory and analytical in teaching the narrative techniques it enabled. I also wanted to reduce the complexity of my original design, specifically the extended contest system, and to built in more options to use the resolution system in different circumstances. I’m very proud of the results and hope you check them out.

We’re turning DERPG into the generic Skulduggery because the license to Jack Vance’s famous fantasy world, which inspired the original right down to the reversal-filled die-rolling system, has lapsed. Perhaps perversely, the Dying Earth’s going out of print sale sold crazy numbers, bringing the game to wider attention just as the lights went out.

Here the rules are still well-tuned to their original intent, but need to be presented through a new framing device. My solution has been to make the game playable in multiple settings, but not to try to emulate every narrative well. It’s still tuned for stories of drollery, betrayal and verbal oneupmanship.

More later...

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Act V, Scene Ic: A) Confronting a priest, the priest in charge of Ophelia’s funeral, Laertes demands greater ceremony for Ophelia’s funeral, and is rebuffed.

If we were treating Laertes as a PC, this would be a failed persuasion interaction for him. Since we’re concerned about Hamlet, who watches unseen, we have to see this from the vantage of his procedural or dramatic progress. It serves as another reminder of Laertes’ temper, and thus his danger to Hamlet. The reminder of the threat he poses is procedural, and because it intensifies, we score this with a down arrow. It’s been awhile since we had a suspense beat, and the last one also underscored Laertes’ menace.

B) Hamlet realizes that the funeral is for Ophelia.

The dramatic irony completes itself: Hamlet now shares the audience’s knowledge of Ophelia’s death. He undergoes the shock and horror we’ve anticipated from him since the previous scene. As armadillo_king pointed out earlier, her death represents both a dramatic and a procedural setback for him. He loved her (if we accept the dramatically strongest choice for the actor playing him) and tried (though perhaps half-heartedly) to get her out of the way of his campaign of vengeance. So we mark this with both arrow types, both pointed down.

In an RPG, this would be the moment when the character gains information that the player already had. This is how our form resolves dramatic irony.

C) Seeing Laertes leap into the grave, Hamlet follows. A fight ensues as each seeks to proof the greater magnitude of his grief.

By allowing himself to be overcome with grief and anger, Hamlet sabotages his procedural goal in the course of seeking his emotional goal. He’s seeking emotional absolution, but impulsively employs an aggressive tactic. Not unexpectedly, he fails to get his emotional goal, too. Another pair of matched down arrows.

This scene reminds us of games like Pendragon or Dying Earth (and soon, Skulduggery) where characters must roll to avoid acting on their emotional impulses. It seems as if the player has been forced by his character’s emotional qualities to act against his procedural interest.



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Tags: dying earth, gaming hut, hamlet, skulduggery, turning points

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As sources of communication are cut off and the regime crackdown murderously escalates, developments in the Iran uprising appears to be shifting from Internet speed to a more traditional pace. If you’ve been following the story you’ve probably read many reminders that the ‘79 revolution against the Shah took nearly a year to resolve itself. I wonder how many of the folks who greened their icons as a gesture of solidarity with the marchers will still be paying close attention six months from now, or nine. We burn out on news stories faster when doled out in tiny pellets of information than we would on in the old media landscape, with its daily papers and six o’clock newscasts.

The story would already be over, though, if another developing technology was already in the hands of the regime. I’ve mentioned my fears about pain ray weapons before, but these events put the issue in a stark context. Popular uprisings against repressive regimes are games of chicken played for deadly stakes. The people confront the security forces, hoping that the enforcers willl reach a point where they can’t bring themselves to apply the degree of violence needed to suppress them. Newly effective means of non-lethal force remove this tactic from the equation. A protester can consciously decide to risk her life to stand up to a man armed with a gun, but she can’t consciously choose to keep going when pain shuts her body down.

The weapons are being designed by the US with supposedly the best of intentions. It’s better to incapacitate than kill, right? And of course the technology will only be used to quell the bad protesters, whoever those are. Which you can tell thanks to the Orwellian name, Active Denial System. And from history we know that new weapons technologies never escape their original underwriters, get taken up by the powerful commercial arms industry, or trickle down into the hands of states we disapprove of.

Widespread availability of this technology will spell the end of the popular revolt, full stop. And that’s perhaps two generations away from us.

Tags: current events, iran, social networks, tech, warfare, weapons

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Interviewed for the documentary Billy Wilder Speaks, the master director says that there are two kinds of stories—by which he means there are two ways to successfully tell stories. You can tell a simple story in a complicated way, full of rococo stylistic flourishes. Or you can tell a complicated story as clearly and simply as you can.

Roleplaying stories, what with our volumes of rules, branching narratives, dropped story threads and competing player visions of what’s going on, are inherently told in a complicated way.

A dungeon crawl is a simple story. Boy meets dungeon, dungeon plays hard to get, boy loots dungeon. The overlay of above-named complexities adds the necessary crunch to make that simple story entertaining over many, many iterations.

If we follow this analogy, more story-oriented games are in danger of being complicated stories told in complicated ways. The more complex the underlying narrative, the simpler the overstructure of RPG elements ought to be.

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The documentary, by German new wave director Volker Schlondorff, is crude as a cinema but indispensably enjoyable for cinema fans. In their conversations, the two directors focus on technique and story, in addition to Wilder’s famously witty anecdotes. The extra interview material on the DVD is as long as the film itself. By contrast, the similar doc on the excellent Criterion set of Wilder’s sparklingly bleak cult classic Ace in the Hole is by critic Michel Clement, and concerns itself with Wilder’s themes and on drawing a portrait of him as a character. With a famous raconteur like Wilder you’d expect a lot of overlap between the two docs, but there’s surprisingly little.

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Regrets are extended to those hoping to see me at Origins later this week. The show is not typically on my travel itinerary but this year I was slated to appear as a Guest Of Honor. Due to a logistical misunderstanding, this will not be happening.

If you should overhear anyone wondering where the heck I am and why I’m disgracefully blowing off appearances at events listed in the program, please pass along the above word. I have not been eaten by a predator, and there is no cause for alarm.

And please have extra fun on my behalf.

Tags: event announcements, gaming hut

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Members of the tribe, this is for you:

Tags: land o links, politics hut

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Act V, Scene Ib: A) Watching as the gravedigger roughly manhandles the bones of the dead, Hamlet contemplates death’s cruel ironies.

This beat functions like Hamlet’s earlier soliloquies, even though several other characters are present. As such it’s more emotional exposition than a full dramatic beat in which he faces resistance from another character. The moment gives us a status report on his mood before we proceed further. Despite the morbid subject matter, he’s calmer and less agitated than when we last saw him—suggesting that he has regained some of his emotional poise. We’ll score this with an emotional up arrow. Although tempered by the morbid subject matter of Hamlet’s musings, it’s the first such arrow we’ve seen in a long time.

B) Hamlet asks whose grave the clown digs, and gets punning japes in return.

The gravedigging clown supplies another emotionally contradictory moment. This Elizabethan vaudeville routine seems comic on the surface. However, since we know that the grave is Ophelia’s, we feel an awful suspense as we wait for Hamlet to be devastated by the news. Hamlet’s failure to get the information he seeks operates as a procedural defeat for him. Hamlet doesn’t want anything emotional from the clown and tries to persuade him to answer by playing word games, making this exchange a persuasion interaction.

C) Hamlet quizzes the gravedigger for rumors concerning his own activities.

Here Hamlet’s interrogation of the gravedigger seems more successful, although the best answer he gets concerns the time it typically takes for corpses to decompose. As he’s no further ahead, we’ll score this second information-seeking beat with a lateral procedural arrow.

D) Hamlet contemplates the skull of Yorick.

Hamlet’s mood darkens as he connects his ruminations on death to a particular person he knew and loved. This returns us to the quasi-soliloquy of beat A, but this time marks an emotional downturn.



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RPG sessions reveal character in a way that borrows from both literature and drama.

In works of literature character is revealed through action, but also directly through internal monologue. Authors can situate the reader inside a character’s thoughts. One of the masters of internal monologue was Tolstoy. He switches viewpoint characters within a scene to show the pathos of characters completely misunderstanding one another. At a couple of points he even tells us what a character’s dog is thinking. The human character is failing to understand even his own dog.

It’s possible to write without internal monologue, with results that are usually spare and terse. Hammett avoids it, for example.

In film, characters’ thoughts are usually shown indirectly, through the acting. We must intuit the thought process. The better the actor, the more sophisticated the thoughts we can “read.”

Voice-over allows narrated thoughts, but usually falls flat. (A few filmmakers mysteriously make it work. Scorsese is the master. The literary narration in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona shouldn’t work, but somehow does. Some critics didn’t agree with me.)

In an RPG session, you can reveal character strictly through action, or you can narrate your characters’ thoughts. By instinct we tend not to. But few of us are Philip Seymour Hoffman or Daniel Day Lewis. We don’t have soundtrack music to obliquely suggest inner turmoil. A little explanatory narration can go a long way toward illuminating a character’s inner conflicts.

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One of the great pleasures of working on the GUMSHOE line has been the opportunity to watch the blossoming of illustrator Jerome Huguenin. His stuff just keeps getting better and better. Jerome art-directs himself, reading the manuscripts and choosing the scenes he wants to draw.



This latest preview is the cover for a Trail Of Cthulhu supplement Pelgrane honcho Simon Rogers is hoping to have for Gen Con, print deities willing. The book is so secret that I’m not sure what it is.

Tags: gumshoe, illustration, trail of cthulhu

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I was planning to kick off the week with a few ramblings on my use of social networking sites. With events in Iran—including reformers’ use of Facebook as a messaging tool and the regime’s blocking of the site—that feels like something that ought to wait.

The regime’s clumsy election stealing and brutal show of force have increased the stakes. If the reformers prevail, they’ll be able to go much further than if Mousavi had been allowed to take the Presidency. The reformers face heavy odds. Modern totalitarian states crumble either when the leadership exhausts itself, or when the security forces lose their will to inflict mass casualties on civilian protesters. The turning point comes not when the regime loses the support of the governed, but when they or their proxies are unwilling to muster the violence required to secure renewed acquiescence. Burma is a recent example of what happens when a well-rewarded and emotionally isolated enforcer class looses itself on a rebelling populace. If we see hopeful signs here, it will be of backpedaling by the high leadership or their abandonment by cops, militias and soldiers.

On a note of lesser importance, the failure of all three US cable news networks to engage with the story as it unfolded shows how increased competition can lead to a degraded product. To keep up with Fox and MSNBC, CNN gutted its expensive foreign bureaus and international coverage in favor of much cheaper in-studio chatter. The Turner-era CNN would be all over this. Here competitive pressure led to a cheaper, not a better, product.

Tags: censorship, current events, politics hut, television hut

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In this week’s exciting episode, we are forced to add a new symbol to our map key—forced by clowns!

Act IV, Scene VIIb: A) Gertrude describes Ophelia’s drowning.

In a game, this would be our first player character death. Clearly Ophelia has been completely removed from play after failing her Sanity check. In a game we’d describe it directly rather than hearing it through an NPC.

This is clearly a down moment, and a big one (marked with another double-deep arrow.) But is it a procedural or a dramatic low? I’d argue that this is a point where the two strands dovetail, as is appropriate at especially important moments. Ophelia is an unintended casualty of actions taken by Hamlet to further his procedural aims—his mistaken killing of Polonius, and perhaps his feigned madness. Yet we also anticipate that her death will take an emotional toll on Hamlet. If anything, we feel more pity (the hallmark of a dramatic down moment) than suspense (the marker of a procedural down beat) at this moment. Our concern for how this will affect Hamlet’s s plans are pushed to the background.

The scene is also a choice point, in that a character takes action without resistance, and we see the result. In this case, Ophelia has chosen to kill herself.

B) Laertes’s rage flares again, prompting Claudius to fear that his success in calming him will now be undone.

This beat brings the procedural suspense back into play. This is something of a wild card moment. On the surface, it might seem that anything that worries our antagonist is good for our hero. But we know that Laertes’ fury won’t be good for Hamlet, even if it prevents also scotches Claudius’ exact plan for cleverly disposing of his nephew. If we’re worried for Hamlet, this must be a procedural down beat.

Act V, Scene I: A) The two gravediggers (billed as First and Second Clown) engage in Elizabethan badinage, casting satirical doubt on the decision to grant Ophelia a Christian burial, despite her apparent suicide.

Whether this scene, featuring previously new characters who promptly vanish again after popping up to comment, chorus-like, on the action, constitutes an up or down moment is a matter of interpretation. If you buy the idea that their Elizabethan badinage is pure comedy relief, it provides an up moment for the audience—one that none of the main characters, as the story spirals toward tragedy, is now capable of providing. GMs often throw in comedy relief walk-ons and underlings to lighten the proceedings, but rarely need to keep all the PCs offstage while they do it.

However, this is a prime example of a Shakespeare clown scene that is darker than it might appear on the surface. In mocking the decision to bury Ophelia on consecrated ground, the gravediggers cast a jaundiced eye on the privilege of our entire main cast. They cynically undercut the proceedings in general, and our sympathy for Ophelia’s fate in particular. In this interpretation, they offer another twist of the emotional knife, confronting the audience with a subtle but troubling irony. That would make it an emotional down note arising from the drama, but not from any of the main characters. In a game, a GM might convey this with a quick aside, for example a description of cynical or doubtful onlookers to the main action.

Let’s map the irony by giving this jarring comic moment both an up and a down arrow; by crossing them we show the mixed emotion. This beat mixes unease and relief and relates more to the emotional than the procedural thread of the story.

As a scene of commentary on the action, as opposed to action itself, this beat creates a need for a new symbol. Let’s make that a pair of observing binoculars.



If you refer to the full map to date in all its sprawling splendor, you’ll see that we’ve reached our lowest point ever.

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Scanning the tweets and status updates of one’s fellow writers, a theme emerges: sleep, or, more to the point, the lack thereof. Also coffee. This may seem like the mundanest of cheese-sandwichery but from the inside this is clearly shop talk of the first order. Creative work is not about waiting for inspiration; it’s about waiting for brain activity.

Jeff Warren’s 2007 book The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness is by no means billed or framed as a guide to better sleep. Nonetheless I’ve found it enormously helpful in, if not always scoring high-quality slumber, understanding what’s happening when I’m not. The sub-titular wheel of consciousness is the cycle of states each of us goes through over the course of a day, both while sleeping and waking. Accompanied by his charmingly naïve cartoon illustrations, Warren chronicles his pursuit of mental states ranging from the hypnogogic to deep REM sleep, lucid dreaming, and the Watch. This last is thepreternatural period of superconscious sleep we post-industrials have eliminated from our mental routine with our regimented schedules, electric lights, and alarm clocks. Waking states range from the creative “Zone” struggled for by writers and athletes alike, along with hypnosis and meditation. I found the book stronger in its first half, mostly because Warren largely fails in his quests to penetrate the altered states of the daylight hours.

I found the book’s discussion of the 90-minute cycles of rest and alertness that strike us throughout the day invaluable. Now I know what’s going on when 4:30 hits and a wave of brain fog yanks me out of the writing zone.

Also intriguing were Warren’s thoughts on dreams and their relation to our assumptions of narrative. I always figured that our dreams have been imprinted with cinematic devices since movies and TV became an omnipresent part of the modern sensory diet. Warren raises the possibility that dreams have always used these editing devices, leading one to speculate that the power of movies derives from their ability to mimic dream.

If you live in your head, whether as a vocation or hobby, Warren’s book serves as a fascinating travelogue of its outer reaches.

Tags: book hut, cognition, dreaming is free, health, land of nod, psychology, science, writing life

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As of Thursday, we’ll be taking a break from our long-running 4E game to tackle a new project I’m designing. (Really a new take on a previous design, but that’s a story for another day on the riverbank.) The PCs have just reached paragon tier. In keeping with the too-short blocks of play time the group can devote to the game, I’ve been leveling them up once every three sessions. Mostly this translates to once every three fights, with the occasional all-characterization episode skewing that number.

I’ve been relying on DDI Compendium for creatures, sometimes reskinning to match the campaign’s ongoing plot threads and signature villains. Orcs still have to matter, for example.

One thing I’ve learned to be on the lookout for is the creature who does less than the standard damage as given in the charts on p. 185 of the DMG. When creature damage is substantially lower, it’s always because it does some other funky thing that’s supposed to make up for it. My experience has been that the funky thing rarely wreaks a sufficiently significant toll on the PCs to justify the reduced damage. When it happens, it’s more flavorful than decisive. As a matter of course I now upgrade low damage/funky effects creature powers to the standard damage expressions.

Ongoing damage is not a funky effect for this purpose, but I do check to make sure that the base damage + (ongoing damage x 1.5) is roughly in line with the standard damage expressions.

When we return to D&D I’ll also be looking to add creature powers that jazz up the last attritional rounds of a fight. Action movie fights build, becoming ever more furious and exciting. D&D monsters deflate, with their coolest moves happening in the early rounds. The dynamic isn’t quite the same for PCs, who tend to pull out their big guns mid-fight, after weighing the need for the resource expenditure.

This might mean grafting on more reactions that occur when the creature is bloodied or reduced to 0 hit points. Another theme would be effects that kick in when a standard creature is left alone or nearly alone on the battlefield, allowing it a quasi-upgrade to solo or elite status for its last round or two of existence.

Tags: 4e, d&d, gaming hut

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