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/2009/03/multiple-levels-of-storytelling/ http://www.the-cow.net/2009/03/multiple-levels-of-storytelling/#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:36:24 +0000 Alvan http://www.the-cow.net/?p=324 So, second season of Moving Wallpaper has started and with it, thoughts of play-within-a-play type of storytelling. There are a wonderful lot of takes on this, varying from Shakespeare to Tropic Thunder, from Simpsons to Slumdog Millionaire. It increases the complexity of the story somewhat, but with that complexity comes the freedom of exploring things from a different view.

If I had to make a guess, I’d say the most typical story-within-a-story in role-playing games is the exposition story. While they’re not really independent stories, they still fit the profile enough to be mentioned. The more common type is when the Game Master tells the players a story of what has happened before, through the tales of a non-player character. This is, for example, used to frame the quest the characters will set on. Sort of a mission briefing, one might say. The mirrored version of this is the player-character-back-story-revealed, where the player tells the dark history of his character to the rest of the characters (and thus the players). This is most common in games where the players keep their character histories secret from the rest of the group (because of some creative GM agenda, usually). Usually it is done at a moment of dramatic revelation, even Now, usually both of these are quite short “stories”, more valued by the amount of information it reveals than any artistic merits.

Another quite common thing that gets done in RPGs is things like book-within-a-game or play-withing-a-game. Sadly, these are again more likely to be just brief references to what happens “The story on the stage is a doomed love story.” Period. That’s it. “The book tells the tragic history of the castle’s owner’s cat and how it died by eating a poisoned mouse.” Period. Maybe if someone asks a question about it, there is some more details revealed, like “The cat was brown” or “There is some singing in the play”, but more likely than not, it’s just a few or two to provide a backdrop, not really a story. Sometimes they get interwoven with the story if the GM can be evocative enough, GM bouncing the stage action with combat action, for example. But these are very rare situations.

And frankly, it’s usually just great that they’re not explored in more depth than the very surface. While every GM dreams of a game that is a story told by his great imagination and every player wishes their character could be on the center stage all the time, the time it takes to monologue out a proper story is pretty long. And in a game that’s supposed to be interactive fiction, there just isn’t room for that sort of stuff. Also, neither is fully a story-within-a-story, by the standards usually presented.

xkcd's take on this

While playing a game where players are playing people who are playing a role-playing game might be quite interesting (for example, having players play player stereotypes playing a game could provide an interesting commentary on your gaming culture, or at least your view of how you see typical gaming), it might be surprisingly hard not letting the game slide into a friendly parody as you’re bound to be comment on what you’re doing while playing a guy doing the same thing. And parody tends to distract. But things like playing a game where the players are playing characters who are, for example actors, trying to get a play working, could work a bit better, as the play-withing-the-game comments on things that happen on the game (actor) level.

But, coming a full circle back to the Moving Wallpaper thing, the best experience so-far has been on our BtVS-RPG (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) campaign “Apocalypse, Cleveland”, where the game worked on the level of the production crew and then on the actual game/series level. Looking back, I would have wanted to work on that aspect a bit more in the game. There were production meetings pre-game where things got discussed and the audience’s opinions (decided by random dice rolls) and the creative crew’s responses to that explored. There were also some meta-level things planned, like falling out between actors and surprise pregnancies. Sadly, the game ended when the main character’s player left for Sweden and we (read: me) didn’t feel like going the X-Files last seasons route or recast the character, even if that could have been fruitful, viewed from hindsight. This is one of the things I probably miss most about Primetime Adventures RPG – some sort of commentary on how creating that perfect television series isn’t as easy as it might sound, how there are many things that need to be considered beyond the basic story.

But what else could be done as a story within a story, or at least with the lesser techniques present there. Flashbacks have been mentioned and of course lead to flash-forwards. But how about alternate scenarios. Short glimpses of how things could have ended if they had made another choice. Maybe the next time the characters participate in the wedding of a group of NPCs, you give each player a written role in the “main cast” of the wedding, and have a look at how the oh-so-beautiful wedding isn’t really all that beautiful at all. Or the next time the military commanders do another decision that the players find stupid, you have the players fill in for the roles of the generals, maybe even change the outcome from what you had planned. Or if you had last left one of the characters reading a pirate-love-story comic on a street corner, you spend the beginning of the next game playing out that romance, have players create the main characters for it and let the chips fall as they may. Maybe even have some other player GM the game about the pirates and you play there with the rest.

Including the players somehow where normally there is just a moment of stopping and the GM explaining things. That’s where the beauty might be found.

As a quick dodge at the end, from the computer games point of view, I just have to mention a couple of things currently happening in the game world – the Shakespeare plays on Second Life, where people are using their avatars to bring plays to life. While technically it might be more easily compared to puppet shows or something like that, the way the avatars that people are playing differ from who they are in real life makes me want to give out a shout to them at this point. The second thing is the City of Heroes Mission Architect that’s coming up in a few weeks time, where players are allowed to create their own content to the game, that also might result in some “people role-playing heroes in a virtual world, creating stories for a virtual realm inside the game” action. The closed beta is already on its way and some lucky people could be already doing it as the rest of us are just blogging about it.

I’ll leave spikey to expand on the topic of “why on earth do games rely on cutscenes to convey stories” when he gets back online and writing. I know he has much more to say about it than I do.