Of all the visual snapshots that get etched in my mind during my days, I think this is the one I will remember the best. A lone, solemn birch guarding the crops. A straight, white tree, standing on a rocky island amidst the golden sea of wheat. A sentinel swaying with the winds instead of breaking from them or ignoring their power. Clear blue skies above and behind as a painting-like backdrop. Quite majestic a sight. And approaching really really fast. Well, from my perspective.

They tell us that the people of days gone by thought that the birch represents a connection between the land of the dead and our world. That old birches get their white bark from the bones of the deceased. And that this belief still holds true in the modern age of rationality. The story goes so that when the first sailors who crossed the Great Divide and reached the New World, had seen the wall of white trees, had thought their lives had ended on the way through the great storm. And that they had reached afterlife.

The things that stick to your mind from classes.

In my defense I have state that I’m not a slacker. I just don’t always agree with the methodical way of teaching we’re presented with. I like books, adore all sorts of stories. But can’t just get my head around the whole “magic can be presented in formulas and calculations” thing and can’t be bothered to memorize the mathematics. And that’s probably why this huge snake made out of granite, with eyes of fire and a temper to match, managed to fling me across the wheat field and at that the only birch standing there.

Now, as my field of vision is more and more filled with the impending birchness, there are two surprisingly clear thoughts on my mind. First is that I might be a total sucker when it comes to playing the knight in shining armor to girls who aren’t exactly damsels in distress, and how I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t spent the better half of this semester ogling the fair Alissa (she’s one of the popular ones) instead of paying attention at classes. And the second thing… for a soulless elemental entity, that thing has a really good aim.

Ouch.

Where do we go from there? What got us there? What’s really important, anyways?

Been looking up the old College of War stuff on my computer. Character sheets, mechanics, themes, names. Lots of things to look and consider before going to work on the next one. Really.

The campaign started out as a simple d20 variant fantasy homebrew with IOU flavoring. A silly world, with a strange College, where the player characters were studying to become magicians. This was years before Harry Potter, mind you. A College with the idea “what would a school be like if the world was epic and magic was commonplace.” And boy, did it turn out weird. Parodies after parodies, week after week, for a good year or two. The first campaign ended. But we returned to the world several times. After a few ends of the world, the setting has changed a lot. Toned down on the funny, explored the underlying ideas. The school hasn’t been the focus in a long while.

The definitive College of War campaign was a long one about a group of young Fieon (France expy) nobles finding their place in the world and eventually reshaping it by returning one of the moons to the sky. Lot of the imagery and feeling came from the movie Le pacte des loups (as well as half the family names). And as you can expect, it didn’t have anything to do with the school from the title (it did make a cameo appearance by the end of the game, but that was it), and was really something else than a light-hearted comedy romp. And it’s been going to directions from there.

The latest campaign of CoW I ran got cut mid-way because of a player leaving the country. It is pretty much the thing I’m basing my future work on – There’s a New Continent on the other side of the world. The three major kingdoms have established colonies there. There is a new College of War there, that pretty much mimics and mirrors the one in the Old World. It’s one part colonial America (frontier in the west / foothold in the east), one part Finland from the Swedish rule era, one part <insert baltic country here> under Russian rule. There’s armies, conspiracies, cults. The unease with the natives. There’s themes of obedience, independence, duty and devotion to be found. With everything like this in the air, the atmosphere could be very dark. But the truth is, life goes on as usual and for most part it’s quite light-hearted.

One of the defining things still is high magic, to the point of “sufficiently advanced magic can be viewed as technology”. There’s emergent magical transhumanism going on – magic used to build constructs, such as golems, is getting “commonplace” and the idea of moving one’s soul to a non-human body is out there, even if no-one’s been successful with it yet. Combat has moved from knights in armor to the more agile combatant (if a beginner mage can propel an enchanted rock at the speed of a bullet, then a plate mail armor is more a burden than a blessing on the field against one). Leaps have been taken in areas such as medicine. And there is a lot of flair in everything.

The west is still unexplored. The colonies are not at full peace with each other. The noble families don’t really find each other the best of friends. Lots of fertile ground for teen/tween drama. Yeah. I’m one of those people who love a good romance (gone wrong, just think of Romeo+Juliet). University life the way it should be in a fantasy setting. Whatever that means. Want to go hunt for the legendary beast of the Ash Hills? There’s extra credit waiting to happen right there. And it would make a hell of an impression to that girl you’ve been pining over.

And when the characters walk out there, it should feel like it feels when I walk into the woods here. There should be something mystical there, a deeper connection with life and nature, that just can’t be put into science, no matter how you try. Something out there. Something about that birch tree standing there. Seasons doing their thing. That sort of reflection of where I come from. And of course there’s the giant intelligent elemental snakes who just want to use you for a baseball.

In a way, it’s come a full circle. Taking account from everything that has happened so-far, but putting it back into the original milieu of University environment. Back where we started, without forgetting any of the stuff that happened on the way here.

(The next run of CoW will start December 12th, 2012)

Alissa, the girl mentioned in the fluff. An elf-blooded student at the College. Possible iconic example character for the game text. Of the privileged, wealthy, magical nobility type.

]]> http://www.the-cow.net/2011/12/on-the-majesty-of-the-birch/feed/ 0 http://www.the-cow.net/2009/02/few-memorable-songs/ http://www.the-cow.net/2009/02/few-memorable-songs/#comments Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:14:13 +0000 Alvan http://www.the-cow.net/?p=178 There are some songs that I will probably forever associate with RPGs I’ve played in the past. Here’s a couple with some commentary on them

Negative: Frozen To Lose It All (youtube / spotify)

The main theme from our Buffy: The Vampire Slayer RPG campaign “Apocalypse, Cleveland”. The song actually is very TV-Theme-esque, and in some regards, surprisingly close to the actual Buffy theme. It was played every time there would be a “title sequence” in the “TV show” that was being simulated. An effect that worked quite nicely, even if the players kept protesting about the song (not many Negative fans on that group). We had plans to cut and mix the song to a TV-sized length, but the campaign ended too soon for us to ever get around to it. One of the players made a note after the campaign had ended, that she had heard the song on the radio and it had taken her a while to remember which TV series theme it was. Every time I hear it, I see in my mind the imaginary credit roll that was described during the game.

The nice thing about having an “opening theme” is that it allows a soft descent into the game. Especially if used in concordance with re-introducing the characters at the beginning of the session with it. You can also use it as an audio transition from a pre-story text (like flashbacks, alternate views and such that help set the game without actually being so “part” of it) to the actual story. Think of the James Bond shtick where there is an action sequence before the credits, then the title sequence, then the actual movie.

Depeche Mode: Waiting for the Night (youtube / spotify)

The ending theme for our very long-running Space Master campaign “Quiet Night” from the nineties. The song was used as a wind-down piece after an action-packed game. It was a custom to let the song play a bit before commenting on how the game had been. What has to be said about the song is that it is wonderfully multi-faceted, to the point that new connections between it and the game can still be found even these days. Latest conversation we’ve had about this was only a couple of months ago with one of the original players of Quiet Night, who now runs 3:16 for us. We talked how surprisingly fitting the song is to that game’s themes, some of which are quite much the same as QN’s were.

As said, having an ending-theme helped with many things. It was easier to bomb the characters with a cliffhanger when there was an audio cue to the end of the session instead of just saying “okay, it’s over”. Also, the “agreement” of listening to the ending theme for a while before saying anything gave the song quite big importance – everything done was reflected through the rose-tinted lenses it provided.

Shinjuku Thief: Waltz of the Midwives (sadly no online source)

The bread and butter of my nineties horror campaigns. One of the most disturbing pieces I’ve heard, ever. Starts slowly and bursts into cacophony and laughter of witches. One of our gaming group still starts very loud protests if I pull the CD out, saying that he doesn’t want to hear the damn song. Ever again. If you manage to get your hands on the song, you’ll understand why

There are these rare songs that get played in different games, without it feeling an attempt to somehow undervalue the other game. Usually when you hear a song in a game you’ve heard somewhere else, it doesn’t work that well. The “Imperial March” example on this is probably the best I’ve heard – when you play “Imperial March” when your main baddie enters a scene, you either undervalue your baddie or the song. If your bad guy is original and awesome, it is now tainted with unnecessary burden of the imagery from the song. On the other hand if your bad guy is not as awesome as Darth Vader, you’re paving the way for a disapointment on the players’ part.

Bobby Womack – Across 110th Street (youtube / spotify)

One of the songs defining my old Rakennus campaign. I don’t remember if I used this in the game that much, but it was a song that I listened a lot to when creating the campaign and toying with the ideas for it. The first games were set in the 70s and it really fit that. And later, when years rolled by, it started being about the nostalgia to the good old days. But, as said, I don’t think this one is one for the players, more a personal piece.

The songs that inspire the campaigns can be really varying. I remember listening to the weirdest pop songs when designing some horror-scenarios. These are the songs that never probably get heard by the players, but they’re the ones that usually have the biggest effect on the games.

Songs from the CoW :

College of War has been the longest-running campaign I’ve ever had, which means there are many songs that I associate with it. There’s the Academy theme from Utena (couldn’t find it on the ‘tube or spotify, sorry) that’s been playing every single time the College has been introduced. There’s the Death Theme (youtube) that’s been there for the various incarnations of Death in the game (he’s really a nice bloke, usually). In the latest campaign, there has been Opening (YT/spotify, YT/spotify) and Closing themes (YT/spotify), and character specific songs and whatnot. The latest CoW has probably been the first campaign where I’ve actively used music with Finnish lyrics on the background – A big step for someone who has regarded Finnish lyrics as somehow uncool or “common” to be used in RPG soundtracks.

The Future

Well, I haven’t been using strong thematic music for Henryn viimeinen iso keikka, and will probably steer clear of it for the next 4 games. I’d love to use some stuff like Cobra Starship, Panic! At the Disco, Paramore and Hey Monday on the soundtracks of some future games, but I think the players would want to lynch me if I did that. Technology has allowed some steps soundtrackwise that haven’t been available before – the use of laptops for music management, mixing tools to help having with the sudden pauses caused by switching from scene to another, spotify to create playlists that are collaborative, sharing the work of finding the right tunes with your friends that way. And there are always the friends who make music who can be exploited if push comes to shove.

Henryn viimeinen iso keikka – The current heist mini-campaign I’m running. It’s only 7 games + prologue and epilogue, so I should very well be able to make it happen. The band of thieves have now set their sights on their score and are about to pull it off. Considering we have 6 games and the epilogue to go, and we hopefully manage to do a couple of sessions per months, I’d say this one will be completed somewhere between April and May. I will run a second game of it with fewer game sessions after I’ve completed the first one, and possibly a couple of one-shots, followed by it hopefully giving me a free pass to RoPeCon with a couple of gaming runs. At that point, I also hope I have a nice PDF version ready to show the internets.

College of War – The fourth incarnation of the campaign should continue soonish. University Drama. Magical theory as a science. It’s a lighthearted campaign. Something of a Fantasy Heartbreaker. And most of all, it’s a campaign that I love a lot. And that has been the stage for various stories in the past years. The CoW has something like at least 20-40 game sessions left in it, so barring any players leaving the country (which caused the current pause the campaign is on), we should have more than enough for the whole year.

Sneak:run – This is a campaign that almost got started, and one that I would still like to run. The previous try to start it got horribly mangled by people having ideas and me not having enough preparation to bring to the table a basic proposition what I wanted the campaign to be. Basically it’s a dualistic campaign – two player groups with similar goals but different means. I’ll probably start this campaign after Henry’s is done.

One-shots and playtests – apart from the previously-mentioned Henry-oneshots, I’ll try to have a couple of other small games that aren’t related to things. I’m still rooting to get the play group to try out The Shab-al-Hiri Roach at some point as well as run a game of either Burning Empires or Mouse Guard to them. Also we’re doing playtesting for the Tokyo Rain RPG, so we’ll probably continue doing those playtest runs as long as they’re needed.