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)