Where Worlds Collide

I mentioned in the previous post about running convention games using my Kalyr setting. I though I’d post the one page summary of the setting I’ve written to use as player handouts; I’m interested in hearing some feedback on this.

Races

Kandar
Physically, the kandar are a race of slender humanoids, a head taller than humans, with copper coloured skin; some individuals have a purplish or even a greenish tinge to them. Kandar are not native to Kalyr. Millennia ago they were transported to the planet by the beings known as The Guardians, who the Kandar still worship as gods to this day. At one time the Kandar had an advanced technological civilisation, but it collapsed into barbarism following war and plagues. Today’s kandar have rebuilt on the ruins of their own past, but have never managed to get anywhere near the heights of their previous civilisation, whose ruins still litter the countryside. Their present day society is highly stratified and static, and individual Kandar can be arrogant and cruel.

Humans
If the Guardians brought the Kandar to Kalyr, it was the Kandar themselves who were responsible for bringing humans to the planet, by means of a now lost technology involving some kind of dimensional portals. The first humans were kidnapped through time and space to serve as workers and slaves. Today many humans are still enslaved, working the vast farms that feed the Kandar of the cities, but many more are free men, either living as second-class citizens in the Kandar cities, or setting up new communities outside the areas of Kandar rule.

Organisations

The Academy of Knowledge
Often known by the kandar name The Karazthan, the Academy of Knowledge preserves what remains of the technology of the Kandar. They maintain workshops in every Kandar city, which are the sole source of any mechanical or electrical devices, from firearms to vehicles to electric lighting. The means of producing or repairing anything technological is a jealously guarded secret, and the organisation has no qualms about using violence to protect its monopoly power. Two other things of note about them; firstly, they make great effort to keep completely out of the constant political intrigues and disputes in Kandar cities. Secondly, they are one of the few organisations in Kalyr where Kandar and humans work together on more or less equal terms.

The Academy of the Mind
The Academy of the Mind is a powerful guild of psionics. In the past Kalyr has gone though periods of rule by psionic elites, and periods where psis were hunted and persecuted. The relationship between psis and ‘normals’ today is a sort of nervous standoff. Psis do not attempt to rule themselves, but no city ruler is without psionic advisors. They also find psis extremely useful for dirty work such as locating or interrogating criminals or awkward dissidents. In return, the rulers pledge to protect the psis from ‘the mob’. The Academy of the Mind itself is a microcosm of Kalyr as a whole; all the same political and cultural issues that divide Kalyr divide the Academy.

The Academy of Life
The Academy of Life is to bio-tech what the Academy of Knowledge is to ‘dry’ technology. It’s their genengineered crops and farm animals that keep the populations of the cities fed. Unlike the Academy of Knowledge, they’re alleged to be deeply involved in any number of political conspiracies, and there are all kinds of dark rumours concerting ongoing projects in secret research laboratories in remote locations. But people say bad things about the Karazthan too…

This week’s Game WISH asks:

Does joining a game with a lot of background thrill or intimidate you? What do you do to try to learn the background, or to compensate for not having it? If you GM, how do you help newcomers to a background-heavy game? What has worked for you as a player/GM, and what hasn’t?

I love games with rich, detailed settings. I remember the time I first joined the RPGAMES forum on CompuServe many years ago, and reading through the background files for the various games run on the message boards. Two of the first games I joined were the two with the greatest volume of background material: Hawiian Vacation, a GURPS cyberpunk game with a very detailed future history and long lists of megacorps, and Gensalorn, a game using the Runequest rules, with an equally detailed list of cultures and history. The first proved to be one of the most memorable games I have ever played in, the second unfortunately folded not long after I joined because several other players dropped out around the same time (nothing to do with me, I have to say!).

I think the reason like detailed settings as a player is because I like my characters to be grounded in some kind of context. Unless the game is set in some variant of the real world, in which case the real world can stand in as the setting, I have difficulty coming up with character concepts unless I have a clear idea of the character’s place in the world. If so much of the world is unspecified, I then have to create bits of the world myself, which risks treading on the toes of both the GM and of other players, whose vision might be different from mine.

This isn’t to everyone’s taste, though. I know gaming groups and have heard of plenty of others that think a defined setting is an anathema, because it ‘restricts what can happen’. That is a perfectly valid style of play, especially for campaigns that lean heavily on the tropes of Hollywood action movies; it’s just not to my taste. I’ve heard such campaign styles described as “Truman Show Games” after the film, in which the PCs and the immediate plotline exist in a vacuum, and there is no wider world that either affects or is affected by events within the game.

Putting on my GM’s hat, the problem with detailed complex settings is making them accessible to new players. It’s a fact that many would-be players aren’t prepared to wade through a hundred or more pages of closely-spaced text explaining weird cultural customs and the complex interrelationships of clans, cults, guilds and megacorps.

One approach to take is for the starting player characters to have as little knowledge of the gameworld as the players themselves. This was the approach, I believe, taken by Empire of the Petal Throne, in which the initial PCs are assumed to be crass barbarians newly arrived in the empire. I’ve tried taking a similar approach when I decided to add a couple of new players to my online Kalyr game. The existing characters encountered an ancient space/time portal, and I asked the two new players to generate characters from present-day earth, who then ended up falling through this portal, to land in a strange and exotic world.

Another is to narrow the focus, an approach I’ve also used for convention style one-shots for the Kalyr setting. Don’t try to explain the whole world, just the bits necessary for the character’s backgrounds. For my Kalyr one-shots I’ve made all characters agents for the same guild. Hero Quest takes a similar approach; rather than overload players with details of all the myriad races and cultures of Glorantha, focus on just one or two of them as the settings for beginning campaigns.

The Non-Euclidian Staircase now has it’s own domain! I wondered where it had gone….

WISH 91 is about Appropriating From Fiction

How often do you appropriate bits from books, movies, comics, and other sources as a player or GM? Do you like to steal names or flavor or go more whole-hog? Is there a difference between stealing for background and stealing for in-game plot?

Please take care to file off the serial numbers first! I like game universes to at least give the appearance of being unique creations of the GM and players, and I find things lifted wholesale from works of fiction detract from this. I remember being slightly annoyed with one of my online players who introduced a lot of background elements that I didn’t realise had been lifted straight from Jack Vance’s Alastor series, names and all. On the other hand, I did allow a player in Kalyr to run a character who’s a refugee from Andre Norton’s Witch World (“The Kolder are responsible for everything!“), who wandered in through an interdimensional gateway.

I’ve never had (to my knowledge, at least) any player in my games using names from other works, and it’s not something I would allow. Names just have too much baggage associated with them. I wonder what prompted Steve, the GM of the Victorian age Vampire game at Gypsycon, to name one of the characters “Max Hastings”.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with basing a character on someone from a favourite book or film, provided you make a reasonable attempt to file off the serial numbers. I’ve done this myself, with one of my favourite characters, Karl Tolhurst, who was at least partly based on Dan Ward from Iain Banks’ “Espedair Street”.

On the third tentacle, I doubt that many of us have the imagination or the time to create complete original setting from the whole cloth. It’s also hard to sell a game concept to potential players unless you can point at some points of reference. Therefore, unless you’re playing in an established commercial or licensed setting (DnD generic fantasy counts as such in my book!), you pretty much have to borrow significant setting elements from somewhere. My own Kalyr game is a case in point. It started out as combination of some elements from Julian May’s Pliocene Exiles sage mixed with other bits from Gene Wolfe’s New Sun and Long Sun books. The overall flavour of the setting has ended up resembling more than one of Jack Vance’s planetary sagas. The theme of a static and rather hidebound society at the point where things are starting to break down is a recurring theme in Vance’s novels.