Sorcerer and Sword: The Sodden Lands of Snia Mer, The Final Session

After eight sessions, we brought an end to our mini-campaign using Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer and Sword supplement.  You can access the video by clicking here. 

I’ve now run two games of Sorcerer, and in both cases it took a full 7-8 sessions to bring the kickers to a satisfactory resolution. The players for this series literally ranged around the globe: I’m in central Florida, Rod is in Texas, and Aybars is in Istanbul. To state the obvious, scheduling was a challenge, and it’s a testament to our commitment that we pulled this off.

I have some more sessions recorded, and we’ll see if I have the time to get those edited. This session, however, provides much food for thought, so rather than wait, I’m releasing it now.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I tend to run games that operate on a slow burn, and despite the fact that our session builds to a dramatic crescendo, there are signs of that deliberate style in ample evidence here. Some players will balk at my approach, but I like the way all of this developed in our game. In terms of why the slow burn occurs, I can put my finger on a number of sources.

First, I’m not making it easy on the players. I regularly introduce situations or scenes where you will see the players mulling over their options . . .  and I let them linger in their uncertainty. You’ll see a number of examples in this session.

At the start, for instance, the two Sorcerers have to decide whether to drug their friend (Zeki) who is experiencing an intense withdrawal, or to leave him behind to complete the process. You’ll see them working over that question, until Nagimo (played by Rod) opts for a low-dose drug option, only to have Balder (played by Aybars) rescue the situation by creatively coming up with a creative placebo option (aided by a successful roll of the dice).

And, towards the end of the session, you’ll see the duo encountering a number of fraught situations where they are thoughtfully debating what the best course of action might be: Do we sneak into the compound of the necromancer (named The Prime Herald) or do we take a more direct approach and ask for an audience? Do we try to contact the powerful demon named The Chryxen Butterfly, and if so, what should that timing be? Afterward, should Balder risk a binding with that demon, realizing that, by doing so, he will be initiated into the necromantic arts? The dilemmas come streaming down, and one consequence is that the game sometimes veers into anguished debates over tactics and morality instead of pulse-pounding action.

This session features a number of Humanity rolls. I love the way Balder/Aybars comes to a gradual realization that necromancy is nasty business . . . and there’s even a spot where he tries to justify (mostly to himself) dabbling in this very dark and wicked art (see the sequence starting at 1:14:00). Aybars is in fine form as he works through the ethics, and eventually he arrives at that favorite refuge of morally ambiguous decisions (at 1:18:00): “I have no other choice. . . I’m too deep in this!”

Sorcery and accompanying Humanity rolls are firing on all cylinders as things come to a close. At the 48:30 mark, Balder decides to contact the Chryxen Butterfly, and he uses a wonderfully described blood ritual along with some group sorcery to build up a sizable pool of dice to pull off the Contact. This again takes time (about 15 minutes of game play, some of which is edited out), but it builds up to some memorable rolls and some dramatic and satisfying outcomes.

During planning, I had determined that the Chryxen Butterfly was in a rebellious state with respect to his “current” master, The Prime Herald, though this fact was not known to the players. With the successful Contact roll and some nice role-playing on the part of the Sorcerers, the demon breaks free of The Prime Herald, and Balder then attempts to Bind the demon, In the fiction, this involves a gruesome and excruciating moments as the object demon fuses itself onto Balder’s skull. Normally, the sequence goes Contact ⇒ Summon ⇒ Bind. But since this was a case of an unbound, rebellious demon, we rolled the successes from the Contact directly into the Binding roll. There didn't seem to be any need to Summon a demon who was already there.

Balder ends up losing one of his Humanity checks, which was clearly making Aybars nervous. The session then ends with Nagimo and Balder trying to get the Chryxen Butterfly to reverse the soul entrapment afflicting Nagimo’s friend Zeki (start around 1:30:00). Eventually, the demon comes around to the idea, but notes that this type of reversal draws on necromantic forces--meaning, of course, that a human life is required. The two creatively decide to offer up the life of a former nemesis (the giant named Baseer) whom they knew to be at the complex. So the dark designs set in motion just continued to cascade!

The reversal of the soul entrapment was a puzzle for me: On the one hand it required a human sacrifice, which clearly risked a Humanity loss. But at the same time, the effect was one that was beneficent, restoring a human life (Zeki) to wholeness. In the end, I ordered Aybars/Balder to make two Humanity checks: One to see if he lost a point of Humanity for mercilessly sacrificing the giant Baseer; the other to see if he gained a point of Humanity for restoring Zeki’s soul. He succeeded in both rolls, meaning he ultimately gained a point of Humanity.

With that, the kickers were wrapped up. Nagimo had not only found his friend Zeki, but managed to have him healed. And Balder had achieved his drive for power . . . though I wonder how long it will take for him to wither in corruption like the previous Prime Herald.

As you can tell from this account, Balder had the spotlight in this session. Nagimo in fact had contemplated whether he even needed to travel to the Prime Herald to bring things to a satisfactory (or at least liveable) conclusion. Had the two Sorcerers decided on a secretive operation when they landed , then Nagimo’s superior physical abilities would no doubt have come into play. Thinking about the sessions as a whole, I believe Nagimo commanded a number of key spotlight moments throughout. Still, given that we knew this was driving towards a concluding moment, I would have liked to have found some way to give Rod more of a closing aria. It may be some consolation that Nagimo clearly has more potential as an enduring character in an ongoing saga.

We have a short session debrief at the end, which will provide some insights from Rod and Aybars. I invite them or anyone else interested to offer additional commentary here. We decided to set the game aside, though as I noted to them, it still lies ready in the dock, and I look forward to continuing to develop the setting if others are interested in trudging through the sodden lands of Snia Mer.

I’m itching to take another dive into Sorcerer. Given the frightening COVID-19 pandemic, I’m mulling over Jared Sorenson’s Schism (which is aptly subtitled “A Virulent Setting for Sorcerer”) as a timely supplement in these dark days.

Teaching Role-Playing Games, Part 1: The Justification

I’ve taken the plunge and have started teaching a unit on tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) as part of my AP English Language and Composition class. My initial plan was to do my trial run at the end of the year following the AP exams in May. But due to some shifts in the college counselling calendar, I had to do some reshuffling in my class.

The end result is that my TTRPG unit is now a fully legit unit being taught in the heart of the course. This alteration in my plans is completely fortuitous. It means that the TTRPG is being treated as a fully fledged, artful medium in its own right . . . which is exactly how it should be.

This post and those that follow will give you an overview of my approach, and I’ll provide some updates detailing the actual play experiences of my students.

At the start, shout outs go to a number of designers who are helping in ways large and small. Ron Edwards has been instrumental in shaping my own thoughts about this medium, and some one-on-one consulting sessions have provided some key guidance. Ron has a background as an educator, so he’s ideally suited to help bridge the teacher / game designer divide.

Thanks are also in order for Emily Care Boss, Ben Robbins, Avery Alder, Jared Sorenson, Ron Edwards (again!), Clinton Nixon, Matthew Finch, Joe Williams, Kathleen Williams, and James V. West who have been generous (unwitting or not) in sharing their creations with my students. In the case of games under copyright restrictions, I asked the designers for specific permission to share the rules with my students through a secured server. Other designers have already made their rules available either through Creative Commons licensing or through “pay what you want” offerings. So I’ve been able to give my students this opportunity with the good conscience that I am operating securely within good copyright practice.

The question for today’s post:

Why are you doing this and how do you justify taking up weeks of class (and an AP course, no less!) to play tabletop role-playing games?

In the grand scheme, TTRPGs hit on a number of key educational objectives, and they do so in ways that are uniquely powerful and effective.

• They spark what I would call active creativity, as both players and game masters (GMs) must work hard together to bring a story into being. When you are reading a story or a novel, one is sparked to understand the narrative that has been stitched together by the author, and such literature requires considerable imaginative work. But with TTRPGs, the fiction doesn’t even exist without the committed involvement of players and GMs to bring it into being.
• They involve collaboration and communication. The driving engine of TTRPGs is a complex, nuanced conversation taking place around the table. The medium requires engagement all around, and it demands that the participants carefully listen and respond in order to propel the story further.
• It involves critical thinking of a high order. Each play session worth its salt requires the players to work through problems, puzzles, and dilemmas of various sorts. And in most cases, there are multiple possible solutions. The open-ended nature of the games, encourages players to be inventive and to consider outside-the-box solutions that are both effective and unique.

Even with these flags in place, however, there is the issue of curriculum and content to face. To put this as a question, How do TTRPGs even belong in an English class, which should be devoted to literature and written texts?

To move towards an answer, I started my unit by having the students read “Introduction: Ergodic Literature” by Espen Aarseth. That was a challenging piece for my students to chew on, but I was able to make headway by continually grounding the discussion in specific texts. The basic argument is that there is a type of literature—not a genre per se, but a kind of modality—that requires efforts which go beyond the direct understanding or reading of a text. This is what he means by ergodic literature.

A workbook would be one easily grasped example of an ergodic text: To “read” a math workbook (or at least to do so correctly) you are not simply going scan the pages with your eyes and flip pages from front to back. No—you are going to have out a pencil and start writing in the book or perhaps on a separate sheet of paper. Moreover, I might see you flipping about the book, perhaps to compare your answers to an answer key in another section of the book. Or maybe you are going to flip between a problem you are working out on one page and a relevant explanation that appeared a few pages earlier.

I made a point in class that you can often tell if someone was dealing with an ergodic text by simply watching them. Someone reading a novel—even a challenging one—would likely read the book in a linear fashion. You’d see their eyes moving left to right, top to bottom, and then flipping a page, and this process would repeat until the book was finished. With an ergodic text, however, you would probably see the person working in a different fashion—flipping pages, moving backwards and forwards, perhaps writing or doing other forms of manipulation, etc. In other words, there would be additional activities involved that moved beyond the cerebral effort to understand the text.

The other key concept employed by Aarseth is the cybertext. Cybertexts do not necessarily involve computers, but they do involve some type of machine function as a component of their operation. A great example of a non-digital cybertext would be the I Ching, where one employs some type of random number generation as a component of consulting the text. One goes to the I Ching with a question, and then starts to flip coins or to manipulate yarrow sticks in order to come up with the appropriate section of the text to read. Today, one can use a computer to generate the number, but in all cases, there is some type of random-number-generating machine involved.

Another great example of a cybertext is Raymond Queneau’s 100,000 Billion Poems. Queneau writes 10 sonnets, but he does so in such a way that the lines are interchangeable. For example, you can put the first line of the third sonnet together with the second line of the eighth sonnet and then put those lines together with the third line of the first sonnet, and so on. If you want to see how this all looks and operates in hard copy form, go to this youtube video. If you work out the math, you will discover that Queneau’s 10 sonnets end up generating one hundred thousand billion sonnets! This is a poem generating machine that is practically inexhaustible—at least it is inexhaustible for human readers.

Another key aspect of cybertexts is that they involve feedback loops. The reader of a cybertext is also an operator who provides key inputs for the “machine” to process. The machine, in turn provides an output, which the reader must then process. And, in many cases, this reader will take this information and use it to construct a new input which is subsequently fed into the machine.

The argument, then, is this: One productive way of viewing TTRPGs is to see them as examples of ergodic fiction. Moreover, in most cases, they are works that involve cybertextual elements.

Let me break this down and clarify.

The term ergodic is being borrowed from the fields of math and physics, but when Aarseth appropriates the word he is mainly interested in the word because of its Greek roots. Ergon means “work” and “hodos” means path. Thinking about a TTRPG as a “work path” is both appropriate and evocative.

To begin, I like the idea that these are games where a vital part of the fun and importance lies in the work or effort being invested by the players and GM. If someone at the table becomes passive, the game (along with the fiction and the experience) immediately suffers as a result. This is not simply a theoretical idea: When a player disengages with a TTRPG, the effect is immediately palpable at the table.

And TTRPGs provide the players with paths and crossroads to traverse. The trailheads of some of those paths might be given in advance, but it is up to the people around the table to continue with the exploration and at points to blaze their own trails. Aasarth usefully talks about the idea of the labyrinth in terms of ergodic texts and appropriately differentiates between linear labyrinths (such as the meditative paths that one sometimes finds on the floors of gothic churches) and mazes, where the paths fork and which might allow for multiple solutions.

The cybertextual nature of TTRPGs is almost too obvious to need comment. In a typical game of this sort, players are involved in a complex network of feedback loops that connect players with each other and (if there is one) with the GM. Moreover, the games frequently involve additional feedback loops that involve inputs and outputs involving the rulebook, dice rolls, chart consultations, etc.

On the day following our discussion of “Introduction: Ergodic Literature,” I had my students read Ron Edwards’ “System Does Matter.” This led to a discussion about the different types of game objectives, with the useful terms gamist, simulationist, and narrativist being key.  And I also had them consider how a game’s mechanics and system components are crucial in determining whether or not the game is going to be successful in achieving its goal.

Here again, I used concrete examples to aid in the discussion . . . but I was immediately struck by how the students (high school juniors) were often completely unfamiliar with analog games of almost any stripe. I initially started by using chess and backgammon as two games that are communicating very different messages, and that the mechanics are vital to what they are trying to accomplish. Random polling showed that only about half of my students had played chess (though over three quarters had at least an inkling of how the game worked and what it was about), and almost none knew about the game of backgammon! So after my first period, I substituted Monopoly for the backgammon example.

With this discussion of games, I had the students think about how the games’ win conditions, core meaning, and mechanics were intimately connected. Monopoly is a game about rapacious real estate development: You win by building your property empire and bankrupting your opponents. And, while there are some decisions to be made, a large component of the game involves chance through the use of dice. For the most part, in Monopoly, if you are lucky and you follow the urges of greed acquisitiveness, you are going to do fine.

Chess, by contrast, is a game of battle tactics where, apart from the initial assigning of black and white sides, chance plays no role. The world of Chess is gained through strategic positioning and keen wit.

The class has almost no TTRPG experience. I teach 4 sections of the course, and in some of those sections, no student has played a TTRPG, while in others, one or two have a flitting experience with Dungeons & Dragons. Nonetheless, I was able to use “System Does Matter” to introduce them to some basic TTRPG components (character statistics, resolution mechanics, etc.) and to show how, as with chess and monopoly, those systems will reinforce the goals that the games are trying to achieve and the stories they are trying to tell.

That should give you a basic sense of how I got the ship launched. Next time, I will move into the core of the unit which will involve the students dividing into groups, each of which will the play a selected TTRPG over the course of a week in my course.

I feel like I’m heading into largely uncharted waters with this unit. I’m not sure how many high schools teach the TTRPG as an important medium in its own right. So I’m keen for resources and reactions to this endeavor. Should you have any comments or suggestions, please share them.

Lacuna Actual Play: Minding the Gaps

Lacuna Part I (second attempt). The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City by Jared Sorenson is a roleplaying game which lives up to its name. From the outset, the rules revel in the fact that there are gaps and absences. Sorenson uses a deliberately enigmatic approach both to add to the atmosphere of the game and to spark the creativity of the players and GM (called Control).

I had the opportunity to run four 3-hour sessions of Lacuna for The Gauntlet, an online gaming community.

Here are links to our sessions. Note that there is a lacuna: Due to my absentminded nature, I neglected to hit record when we played session 2.

Session 1

Session 3

Session 4 

For real pyrotechnics, see 1:35:30 of session 4 for the final appearance of "The Girl for Blue City" who has found her way into the real world.

I had neither played nor run the game before, and all the players were new to the game. The mechanics of the game, however, made it quite easy to manage. As per the guidelines of The Gauntlet, I ran an open table, which meant that players were free to sign up and to drop out over the course of the month. This created a dynamic situation, requiring flexibility from week to week. But the game is quite accommodating to the situation: Creating a Mystery Agent is quite quick, and explaining the rules is similarly breezy affair. Players only have a few attributes (Force, Intuition, and Access) to monitor, and they have to keep track of their characters’ heart rate. When faced with a challenge or a risky task, players roll a pool of 6-sided dice (impacted by attribute scores and a couple other factors) hoping to get an 11 or higher. Most roll results are added to a character’s heart rate. When climbing into a target heart range, characters become almost invincible, but this leads inevitably to a crash, as the characters move beyond their target heart range and into dangerous “maximum heart rate” territory.

What follows here is not a review but a list of some observations that emerge out of actual play.

Outside Blue City:

Blue City is the name of the dreamscape where the characters are sent to do missions. The idea offered in the rulebook is that characters are being sent to hunt down Hostile Personalities which are actually criminal aspects of a violent or otherwise dangerous individual. While these missions are being conducted, the characters’ body and vital signs are being monitored on a “slab,” and when the agents are extracted from Blue City at the end of a mission, they are returned to their sleeping bodies and woken up. The rules, however, are silent about the agents in the real world outside of Blue City.

In my game, two agents became convinced that Control was not a benign or competent entity, and they decided to rebel. In fact, they discovered that there was an entire revolutionary faction existing of former Mystery Agents. [Note: The rulebook itself suggest that something along these lines is going on. There is a Special Agent named Miner who went MIA, and who has been tried by the spy organization in absentia.] This operation required us to imagine that the revolution was being carried out both in Blue City and in the “real world,” but there are no rules and scarcely any guidance for how to conduct operations in reality. This didn’t stop us, but it did require us to be vague and to rely on some hand waving to move the plot along.

No Back Story:

The “default setting” of the game is for the Mystery Agents to adopt pseudonyms and to “forget” anything about their lives prior to becoming operatives for Control. One of the players who came aboard during session two had problems with the fact that the characters had no back story. The game seems to want the players to give their characters personalities, and other players in my game had little problem diving into the spirit of the game without an anchoring history or autobiography.

But following upon our session 2 debrief, I made this lack of memory a theme. I suggested in session 3 that the Mystery Agents should perhaps find it odd that they had no knowledge of their past lives, and that perhaps Control was responsible for some type of memory wipe. I introduced them to an NPC Mystery Agent who DID recall their past life, and who was surprised the the PC Mystery Agents did not have this type of knowledge. This immediately raised alarms. Why wouldn’t Control want some Mystery Agents to know who they were? Did they have a relationship to one or more Hostile Personalities? Were they possibly part of the insurgency against control?

GM Roleplaying and Static: 

Lacuna leads the GM into a rather unique and exhilarating roleplaying situation. During the game, the GM plays Control, who is an entity in charge of monitoring the agents and assisting them in carrying out their missions. Control’s role often overlaps with the GM’s role in a typical roleplaying game, so it becomes quite natural for the GM of Lacuna to slip in and out of that Control role in ways that are often subtle and ambiguous. That is, there are moments when it became somewhat unclear whether I was speaking as a GM or speaking as Control.

Adding to the spiciness of this situation, Lacuna involves a mechanic called Static. During a mission, various events can lead to the increase of Static which the GM monitors. These triggering events are determined in advance by the GM, and they can involve anything from “arguing with Control” to “ignoring a designated PC.” In my game, which was played online, I included “experiencing a technological glitch” as something that would increase Static!

The impact of increased Static is also GM determined, but the game suggests that sometimes this Static should result in erratic, strange, or oppositional behavior on the part of Control. This creates great drama during the game, as the players look to the GM to provide clarity at certain points only to discover that a “Static-charged Control” is now throwing other monkey wrenches and delirium into the mission.

Spiraling Story Arcs and the Mystery Girl: 

The default setting of Lacuna leads to an episodic framework. A game session will typically involve a small group of Mystery Agents being sent into Blue City to stick a “Lacuna Device” onto a Hostile Personality, essentially eliminating them. Afterwards, the agents get extracted, promotions might be in order (leading to increased talents and/or techniques), and the process then repeats.

But the game also leaves open the possibility of a wider story arc which might involve an insurgency within the agency supposedly running the operation. This happened in my game, and in a major way. Not only did the agents discover the existence of rebel Mystery Agents, but they also discovered that some of the indigenous denizens of Blue City (who normally act like automatons) were becoming “woke.” That is, there were some entities in Blue City who were NOT from reality, but who were becoming self-conscious. They were also becoming alert to the fact that their world was being invaded by conscious minds from beyond Blue City (i.e. from reality).

I picked up Sorenson’s idea of the “Girl from Blue City” as a pivotal figure in this developing narrative. Control regularly expressed concerns about this strange young lady with light brown hair and hexagonal glasses. She occasionally made an appearance in the adventures. During the inaugural mission, for example, the agents were instructed to plant bugs at certain banks around the city. They discovered mid-way through the mission that they were being trailed by a number of individuals wearing black jeans and t-shirts. During a climactic attempt to find an extraction point, the girl appeared and for some reason intervened in a chase which allowed the player characters to exit from Blue City.

In an even more momentous development, it became clear that the “Girl from Blue City” was making incursions into the real world. It turned out that the movement to Blue City might be a two-way street and that entities from the dreamscape might be able to make their way into our reality. In fact, the “Girl from Blue City” occasionally appeared on the video screen behind Control (i.e. me). My daughter just so happens to wear hexagonal glasses and have light brown hair, and I set her up to walk behind me at some key moments during our session. For he final star performance, start watching around 1:35:30 of session 4.

Genres and Play Styles: 

Given their intentionally fragmented nature, the rules of Lacuna can lead to a number of different types of genres and play styles. Gritty spy narratives, Lynchian surrealism, Matrix-inspired tales, straight mission-oriented sessions—these are all possibilities for Sorenson’s game. It is a remarkably flexible system. I could imagine someone writing out a traditional “city-crawl” scenario for a more traditional group. That’s not the way we went, but I appreciate the fact that Lacuna is so accommodating if the GM and players are willing to put their creativity into the effort.

In the case of our sessions, we were freely borrowing from a number of genres, but effectively weaving them into something fresh, new, and unplanned. Our last session pitted one rebellious Mystery Agent against two others who were willing to go along with the desires of Control. I hadn’t fully planned for a player vs. player scenario, but the game accommodated the development. Again, we had to fill in some gaps in the rules, but when Lacuna is the name of the game, we had a sense that we were squarely in the spirit what this wonderful oddity is all about.

The close of our final session involved a rather intense and moving scene as the rebel tried to persuade the others to join the revolution. The lead agent was wavering over the momentous decision, but then—in poignantly noiresque fashion—he opted to remain true to Control and placed a Lacuna Device on the other player. 

I loved the melancholic ending, and there were some heady philosophical and dramatic vistas opening before our eyes. Embedding the notion that the line between Blue City and reality was dissolving within a story exposing the rather dysfunctional nature of Control made for some wickedly delicious fun.