Well, it’s the start of the last third of Century. 333 days remain until the last game. that’s bit over 30 game sessions left. 51 players and a couple of more new ones lined up, so I’m expecting a total of around 55 by the time I close the possibility for new players to join up in March. And it means I’ve had a perfect opportunity to play a nice game of “hide things in plain sight” with my players for over six and half hundred days. And I still am, pretty much.

The Century Logo is one of these things that I’ve been storing in plain sight from day one. One of those that aren’t hard to figure out if you just take a look. And a lot of the players have paid the attention, so it’s been a nice detail here and there. It has been serving as a roadmap of the three big things that have been central themes of the game.  That thing above there is the original version. With everything still intact.

It took quite  a while to get it right. Even if I knew beforehand what elements I wanted in the picture, getting them to look just right was a daunting task. The idea was to make the logo look inconspicuous. Sort of “ok, there’s a C with some clock hands and mystic mumbo jumbo in it” so that the individual elements would get ignored beforehand. The only thing that was more or less random was the font used for the C (which ended up being some font I found on dafont.com and then edited it a lot to fit the spherical shape I needed for the design). But the symbols on the background hold a specific meaning in the game and the clock hands are something I’ve used in old illustrations, creating a reference link to those in the process.

The next thing about it is the fact that it’s meant to evolve over the course of the campaign to reflect what’s happening. The variation stems from the way the player characters mess up with the given premise. And since Century is a semi-historical game, with the first game getting set at the Titanic, the first thing that was doomed to get messed with was the timeline. Creating an alternate history for the campaign (ok, to be exact, the alternate history spans a lot backwards, but that’s something the players had no clue of, yet). It took them some 15 games to really mess up historical facts for the first time. They saved Lenin’s life by mystic means, killed Stalin the same night. Made a nice ripple effect that still continues to the present day of the game’s timeline. The logo was updated to reflect this.

And, for a good long while, the focus was on the timeline-aspect of the whole thing, changing history etc. Logo looked so that things were bleeding out. Time was fluid, so to speak. And the players were enjoying doing this. Farking up with history while serving a corporation that was clearly evil. At least that’s what everything kept spelling out. There were people like “Mammon” or “Lucifer” working for the corporation. And the enemies had names like The Choir. And it was all getting very creepy.

But what’s in a name or two? And what’s this thing about there not being any languages in the world anyway? How can we mess our employers up? Why are we called Operatives? Why is there something called The Board there that dictates the actions of Gogam? And Gogam is Magog, spelled backwards, clearly evil corporation if you’ve ever seen one!

Player characters mess up their employer. First by shooting a couple of the big bosses in the head. And then just really ruining everything for them. And in the process destroying the thing that’s been making the world odd – lack of languages. A tower falls, suddenly there’s different languages in the world. (and from everyone’s perspective except the Operatives, this has always been the situation)

So, focus shifts again. This was a bit more an abstract one. Focusing on languages and the utter lack of meaning behind the words that you’ve assumed to hold so much relevance. (The Board, Gogam, Operatives, Seven, Choir, all that) Sort of a deconstruction happening left and right. Structures falling apart (if I had had more foresight, I would have made a tower part of the century logo beforehand and have it shattered as well at this point.), the realization of a greater universe where the stuff you’ve been doing is quite harmless. In comparison to what could have been. And now is turning out to be. The letter C, shattered in the logo, the end of things spelling out what they are.

And now we’re moving towards the final era. Focus shifts towards the third item on the logo. And without explaining further, I’ll just end this post with a picture of it. You’ll figure it out.

It wasn’t any random roll of the die or sheer stupidity of the player, trying to see if their character can fly by having him jump off a tall building. It was the beginning of the latest Century game.

There was Sean, the player character. One of the longest-surviving characters in the game at the venerable 59 years of age. A cult leader, a king of an African tribe, physicist, mystic. And there was Edward, the non-player character responsible for handling the Operatives and sending them off to missions. Basically the quest-giver. Who also, for certain reasons, held Sean responsible for the death of his beloved sister.

The game begins. I inform Sean’s player that her character is in mortal danger. There is a short conversation.

Edward: “So, do you remember anything of what just happened?”
Sean: “No, and I want out. I hate this place. I hate these missions. I’m no use to the firm, why the hell do you keep dragging me back to work for you. I’m useless!”
Edward: “Agreed”

And Edward pulls a gun and shoots Sean, there and then. Bang. The character is dead.

The shock the players had on their faces when this happened was what you can expect. There was a stunning moment of silence. And Sean’s player managed to let out a “That’s not what I was aiming for …” while staring at me and the situation in disbelief. After 50 games of Century, there was a moment’s pause. Something like that could happen. That the “your character is in mortal danger” stated at the beginning of the game actually meant something. Like I always had been saying. “If I tell you you’re in mortal danger, you really are.”

Sean’s player of course made a new character there and then, and we continued with the game. With a very different mood.

I might have killed a Player Character yesterday.

And I think it was the best thing I’ve done as a GM in a while.

There have been over 50 games of Century now. We haven’t yet reached the midway point, daywise (Welcome Frank. There are 532 days remaining), but because of some developments, we’re reached that respectable number. (Previous post like this is here)

First things first. Where are we on Century, statistics-wise? The player pool consists of 42 players. This is people who have actually made it to the games – there are a couple who have wanted to come, but have missed it because of some real-life issues. Of those 42 that have played the game, only about 15 are part of my old gaming groups (ie. people who I’ve played RPGs with before Century). And of the 42, ten or so are people I really didn’t even know before running a Century game to them. Somewhere around the Second World War (in game world time), people started telling other people at parties that there was this campaign where you could come play in. Mass invasion of new players happened.

Over 25 player characters have died. Spikey, my co-blog-host holds the record with 6 deaths. Beyond the deaths, at least two have been possessed by otherwordly entities. One is suffering from a lethal radiation poisoning from a Russian nuclear test. One is permanently unstuck in time whilst on a vision quest of sorts. Etc. That means there have been something like 60ish or so different player characters in the game. And, as said, we haven’t reached the half-point yet. The game is lethal. Sometimes to the point where there just isn’t a matter of luck that can save a dying character’s life. Sometimes, on the other hand, miracles happen.

Oh yeah, and we’ve reached stage two of fragmentation. Or “Level Two” as two players have been told. More or less, a step forward in the structure of the game.

A clear tell-tale marker of “stage two” is that the game is no-longer run just by me. We have a pool of 5 Game Masters. Four of us have ran games, one is still planning on what to run. This is also the reason we’ve reached the respectable number of 50 games way before halfway on the clock. A byproduct of having multiple GMs is that I have actually managed to play a character in my own campaign just like a normal player. Adrian (my own character) has survived two game sessions so-far with incredible luck and skill, once stealing the Olympic flame from Helsinki in ’52 and the second time was exorcising a ghost in Japan in ’59 . I’m still of course the primus motor of the campaign, running a gaming session every 10 days. The other GMs can run games when they want, I’m sort of in charge of setting the constant pace.

The players have managed to completely screw up history already. There is a third superpower in the Cold War thanks to them. A superpower that’s leading the space race, I might add. The Greater Austrian-Hungarian Empire, led by The Undying Emperor von Üdel, hero of the nations and a father of few. Von Üdel is a player character. Yeah. This is one of those games where player characters might actually gain some power sometimes. They also managed to screw up a mission to kill Hitler so bad that the Führer actually got saved from his bunker by the magics the player characters were attempting to kill him with. And Big H is currently living somewhere in Argentinean jungles, waiting to return as a major bad guy later in the campaign. Because, I mean, there are few things as awesome as having Hitler as a recurring villain in an alternate-history campaign. There have been other wonderful things like that have have happened over the years. Usually because of the incompetence of the player characters.

And there have been a lot of stories there that have been on and about the human level of things. As said, The Undying Emperor von Üdel is a father of two. Quite many characters have offspring (some have puppies, but that’s another story). Some of the kids have matured enough to become player characters at the age of 20. There are powerful families that stem from these lineages. The biggest emotions have risen from things in the sidelines of the actual missions. To be honest, these days, the average game session deals more in things that don’t have anything to do with the mission than with the things that do. Family ties, new loves, old feuds.

Then there is the disturbing fact how some of the Operatives (a name given by the players to the player characters that has stuck in the game world) have started getting visions of Operatives who have died previously working in the business. Getting their memories in dreams and sudden bursts of insight. Gogam, the company that’s been hiring the Operatives has slowly become worried about what they’re actually dealing with. It’s clear these Operatives aren’t just anybody.

It’s also clear that they’re not alone. The Operatives share the world with countless factions that have their own agendas. There are The Unknown, always dressed in black and standing there in the corner of your eye, watching and opposing the Operatives. There was a metallic alien biomass called The Choir that nearly managed to invade Europe during the Second World War (but thanks to the actions of the Operatives, it was contained in a stable time loop and the world was saved). Russia was controlled by Baba Yaga and her monstrous children. And there is talk of other factions. The Eight, who are rumored to be controlling the States through careful manipulation. The Blue Kings. The Board. And no-one can be sure what all the internal factions of Gogam are up to.

But, to get back on the level of playing the game, there is room to make different choices than one would usually do in a game, even if this doesn’t seem apparent at first. There is room in it to move so that you don’t always have to follow the “typical adventure path” when it comes to solving things. To battle a drought, you can actually ship water in in large containers to alleviate the worst catastrophe instead of wandering around the coutryside trying figure out if there is an Indian curse somewhere that’s causing all this (pro tip: no, there isn’t). There is room to actually go and shoot the people you’re supposed to be working for. In the head. And they die. A lot. There’s room to say “no” in places where you wouldn’t think you could.

Also there’s a room. It’s in a building. You just woke up in it, and you don’t have any idea how you got there.

So, because the previous entry actually provoked some sort of a reaction (even if it was just “I want to hear more about…” on IRC it was still more than I’d heard in ages) from my ever-vigilant co-writer Spikey, here’s the complete (except for the secret things that I cannot say) rules for the “between games” advancement in the Century game.

First things first – Century uses a variant of White Wolf’s WoD system – scale of things is 1-5. In stats, 1 means poor, 2 means average, 3 is good, 4 is great, 5 is as good as it gets. In skills, 1 is amateur, 2 is professional, 3 is great, 4 is an expert, 5 is one of the top names in the world. Instead of the typical WoD attributes, the ones in Century are a bit more ambiguous. Things like “control” and “sanity” and “coldness” And skills are more open, and decided by the players themselves. Some example skills include “spy”, “gentleman”, “British” and “poet”

Between games, time passes. A lot of time, in fact. Years. One of the big points of the campaign is that time passes and things happen. It’s spanning over a century, what do you expect?

So, in a typical game, you are playing your soldier type and go from one game session to the other and buying new shooting skills because that’s what soldier types do and it pays off to concentrate your skills to get bigger skills to shoot bigger things. But in Century, it’s a bit different.

First of all, the game sessions decide the direction your character is heading towards. Using the soldier example above. You start your character in 1943 game as a nice 20 year old British soldier, the game session theme being war and all that, and the GM saying that you need to have a character that can be in the battlefield. So you create your soldier type dude with skills like “killing and maiming” and “playing poker”

The next session you participate is the 1950 one that happens to be a social game where the characters are there to broker a deal with some industrial mogul. In a typical game this is the point where the guy who is playing the soldier type starts complaining that he will not have anything to do in the game because it’s a social session and he’s playing the shoot-em-up character.

But, in Century, he’s actually playing exactly the character that is useful for the game, since his character has changed enough over the 7 years to be the perfect fit. This means that you, as a player, will have to steer the character to become a diplomatic industrialist type during the 7 years that happen in between. Not complain about how your character doesn’t fit the theme.

Sounds strange and I admit that grasping the concept can be difficult, but in Century life, as it usually is in reality, is unpredictable. Looking back 7 years in my own life I couldn’t have pinpointed where I was, I most certainly am not where I was planning to be. This holds true for shorter periods of time as well, like last year. If someone had asked where I was going to be this summer, I would have never guessed that I was back working at that one company that I quit 3 years ago.

So “I used to be a sniper 7 years ago, but now I’m a successful businessman” isn’t really that huge a deal, once you think from the perspective of “I’ve heard stranger stories”. Life just sometimes gives you a different path than the one you were planning on taking.

The other part of life being unpredictable is the fact that for each year in between games, your character gains an experience, in form of drawing a Tarot card from the deck. This represents how that paritcular year has been for the character. So, you draw a card that represents wealth, you have had monetary luck (or something). Draw “Worry” and that has been the theme of your year.

Now, the system allows leeway in how you read these things. It’s more or less up to the player to interpret the card, but from what I’ve seen so-far, the people who “let go” of their character during this phase are the ones who have enjoyed it more than those who have clear “my character will be doing this” attitude.

Prime examples include a “I will never marry” type of a girl, who during her card-phase picked cards like “love”, “happiness” and such and found her party-girl type married to a loving man, who passed away just before the game session she participated next. And the bittered angsty type who couldn’t find his place in the world, until he by some odd chance found his place and purpose in the First World War, suddenly becoming quite stable and clear minded.

There are of course some players who want to keep their character the way they’ve been, and while I don’t mind it, I have a fear that they’re not getting as much out of the system as those who are actually just letting life take hold of their characters during the time when they’re not playing.

The reason I brought up character stats back there is that during the Tarot phase, your characters statistics change. If you draw a minor arcana, you can move one dot from one stat to another, or from one skill to another (but not from a stat to a skill or vice versa) and if you draw a major arcana, you get one additional “dot” to your skills. So, quickly you can see that your skills will increase over time, but your stats will only change.

Oh, almost forgot the rule that you can kill your character at any point of the Tarot drawing. No-one has yet used this option, but I can see it being a valid option at some points of some character arcs, so it’s there, in the rules.

And it should be mentioned once again that there are rules that I am not allowed to talk about, either because the players haven’t researched them yet (I’ll get to that in another blog post) or because I’m not allowed to talk about them.

Until next time

The first hundred days have passed. Welcome to the next nine hundred.

The following post is incoherent, but so am I.

The Century game (the site is in Finnish, sorry about that). Oh, The Century game. I am not allowed to talk about it in full because of some meta-rules that are in effect, that for example require me to answer any and all theories (with a few exceptions) the players come up with the phrase “that’s an interesting theory.” But, what I can talk about without the rules preventing are the general things about the system and such.

Doctor Alexander Smythe

The underlying idea of the Century game is about 15 years old. Well, the first bits of the idea that eventually molded into games like Rakennus, Snake Urn and others. Might be better to say that the underlying metaphysical groundwork has been done over a dozen years ago.. As one of my old friends/enemies commented last winter “It was funny to read the game website and notice all those familiar names.”

The system used for the game is about 5 years or so old, with some fine-tuning happening over the years. Players have a spread of tarot cards in their hands that they play to deal with challenges that aren’t  with descriptive texts that they play – if the text on the card fits the situation, it’s a success. (or a dramatic failure if the player has really bad luck). If it doesn’t fit, then numbers come to play. Really simple and you have a sort of a feeling of foreboding. You know you’re going into a dangerous situation and the only cards you have in your hand are “The Fool” and “Death” … if you’re planning to survive, it’s going to be an extreme solution.

A lot of the things in the game are practical solutions to things I’ve done wrong over the years when running games. One of those things that are worth mentioning is the persistence of the game world. A big mistake (not the only one, but one of them) I remember making with my large-scale Vampire LARP campaigns was trying to keep the world persistent between the games. It drains you a lot as a GM when someone calls you on a weekend and asks if it’s okay for their character to go explore the dark mill on the hill between the games. In Century, the problem is solved with a certain level of asynchronism. To explain that, I probably need to get to the basic structure of things first.

There are currently around 15 players in the campaign. Each one of them is playing one character, until that character dies (or something Worse happens). Each character starts as a 20 year old. Each game session represents a year in the game world. So the first game session was set in 1912, the second one in 1913, and so on. In a single game session, there are 2 or 3 players present, so not every player is in every game session. This means that your character might be in the sessions of 1934 (as a 20 year old), 1940 (as a 26 year old), 1944 (as a 30 year old) and gets killed at the end of that one.  The next time you come play it might be the session of 1950, and you’ll be playing a new 20 year old character.

The players can interact directly with the world only during the game sessions they are playing on. There is no calling me on the weekend after someone has been playing in the 1944 game and telling you about it “Ooh, I heard interesting things about the game, I think my character will be doing this now.” I might be interested in hearing what you have planned, but the world won’t react to it until it’s your turn to play. This creates a certain asynchronism to the world – your characters’ actions during the years you have missed have to be retconned into reality when you come to play. And you are limited by what others have said before you (there is an interesting example of this with a married couple of characters with kids, who decide what happens to their marriage depending who happens to get to the game session first).

So basically, the game session begins with the character (and player) catching up the “lost years”, year by year. This is another neat use of the tarot system, basically drawing a tarot card, and interpreting the year through the card. It becomes impossible to plan what’s happening beforehand, which again eliminates the need to try and preplan.

And from preplanning, I think I need to get back to the “only 2 or 3 players are present on a game session” thing.

Meeting on a riverboat on the Nile

This part of the game design is a sort of a reaction to the utterly disastrous Changeling campaign I ran. Timetables were impossible to manage as everyone was busy with everything. The solution? Large enough player base with limited amount of people per game session and a fair system so people who haven’t been playing a lot/lately have priority over those who have been playing more. Each game session is a story, with a beginning, middle and an end, so there are no cliffhangers that continue from one session to another. You come when you have time, you play for a session and then you don’t have to worry until you feel like coming back. Also, the styles of the games vary a lot. From horror, to spies, to temporal paradoxes, to P.G. Wodehouse, to urban fantasy. So I won’t get bored running the same kind of thing for three years.

Which brings me to another thing worth mentioning (that I kind of touched on already). In Century, the game forces things on your character. You are not in total control of who you’re playing. If a game session you’re attending says that the characters are assassins sent to kill Rasputin, the Mad Monk, it means that your character has been chosen for the mission because he or she is the perfect match for it. By attending the game you’re basically saying “yes, I’d like my character to live such a life that in the year 1917 she would be perfect to send to Russia to kill Rasputin”, even if in 1913, the last game she was a pacifist noblewoman. Add to that the fact that the “themes” of the years in between games are decided by drawing cards from a tarot deck, and you’ll find out that life gets nice and unpredictable.

A lot of things still need to be explained, but…

90 games to go. 896 days, 11 hours and then some. I have plenty of time to explain more to you later.

(pictures used in post (c) 2010 Sebastian Pensasto, used with permission)

I am looking at my new wall calendar that I’ve filled up with my schedules for the upcoming year. At this point, I know for certain about 30 game sessions I’m going to run and the approximate dates for them. The first of these sessions is on the 27th March, when I start running a campaign I could consider a worthy finale to my gaming career, if I manage to run it through and if I would end my gaming career to that.

Century game. The basic idea is a  campaign that runs for a Century in the game-time. With the world moving at a fast pace between game sessions and games being individual one-shots from the lives of these people. First of the games is set in April of 1912, on a boat called Titanic, and things move on a steady pace from there on.

By the end of the year, we should be around World War II. I’m quite hyped about all this.

Some Century -related picture material

Century wikisite. At the moment, only in Finnish, will add summary in English later. To get username/password to edit, let me know.

(thanks to mekanismi)

If nothing fails, the website for the next big RPG campaign of mine will be up in 10 days.