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.

Oh boy, here I am again shooting far and wide for the sake of perhaps hitting something unexpected out there.

Once again, in an episode of particularly excellent tabletop roleplaying session, I was reminded of two things.

First, characters. Don’t ever resort to mundane characters, be they NPC’s or primary ones. Always incorporate stuff made for legends told later. Always aim for potential towards legends.

Second, as much as you want to design excellent gameplay, don’t let the gameplay break the game flow. Don’t force players to play the game mechanics when there’s a gameplay moment to remember either about to occur, or has already began rolling forward. It’s stretching the concept, but imagine gamemaster snagging character sheets (or availability of inventory menus etc) away from players when something sudden occurs. Things should flow from reflexes at such point. Drop everything and go into instinctive mode.

Sudden occurrence is a funny beast, as it makes us forget stuff we haven’t got programmed down into our spine and forces us to react with what we have at hand, with whatever we can come up with in a few seconds timeframe. If you go “Err……” and bell goes bong, your character very clearly froze because he doesn’t know his strengths yet and is about to get a deserved kicking before he is able to join in the fun accordingly. It’s also a light slap on players cheek – or dare I say learning experience? In situations calling for experience and mastery of character skills, that’s where you measure your character. That’s obvious, and has always been. I’m just advocating it should not happen solely in some damn sheet or a menu we stop to oggle at RIGHT WHEN SHIT SHOULD BE FLYING. Excuse my french. Just take the player further into the game, away from reading numbers and ponderous thoughts when he should be in a hurry and playing by feel. Yes, yes, game mechanics everywhere incorporate initiatives and such derived from your character stats, but what did I just say? What?

No, if you don’t remember a particular trait of your character that would be handy in situation, then your character just isn’t kickass enough to react with it. If your character knows that going for a nightly jog in those black woods full of bloodshot eyes is a good reason to keep a gun in hand, then all the better. He at least has the gun when suddenness jumps up and grabs his face when his player doesn’t expect it. Of course, if he is new to such circumstances, chances are he’ll pull the trigger and shoot in completely wrong direction. End result might as well be a companion character in same party who now carries a character trait called limp, because of a certain instance of a epileptic squirrel accidentally falling on some new guys face. It’s something to laugh about afterwards.

During the time spent with a character, you start remembering stuff he or she is made of. That’s obvious. When the player knows his characters individual traits, weapons, magical items and whatever by second nature, is it wrong if I claim that’s when – and only when – you could call your character experienced. Why not extend that backwards into game mechanics? Measure experience through survived moments of legend. WW2 fighter pilots marked their experience on their planes, didn’t they? They damn well remembered every moment behind each kill mark. Turn your character sheet from an excel sheet into a character memoir worthy of saving. You’re playing story, so you’re part of it and with every influence you force upon game world, you’re also writing it.

When the experience begins to grow measurable, it’s also when you connect with your character and it becomes dear and memorable to you, having gone through quite a bit of legends through mishaps, mistakes, victories and awesome saving throws. Like feminists in sixties called for women to burn their bras, gamers should burn their inventory and action menus or character sheets when they become just a part of game mechanic instead of game itself.  Obviously, all this is as much wrong as it is true, as different people enjoy different games. I firmly believe the wanted mood and atmosphere might have their say on game mechanics as well. If I, lone shepherd helping a stray puppy in woods come across a pack of undead Spetsnatz in the woods, first thing you would see me doing has damn well nothing to do with dices or inventories. I would very much prefer to incorporate such raw instances of reaction in games, seeing what happens after the initial smoke settles and brain is back in gear, even if it results in registering shit in pants and a dead puppy in hand for being handled as a club against improbable enemy.

In the game we played, characters left legends behind and game mechanics never rose to break the flow, even though they carefully churned their cogs and wheels underneath.