The Saga Of The Scions II

I finished the latest playtest of The Scions a month or so back, and realised I meant to do a quick post about it, as I found pulling together my thinking into a post useful last time. Also, no full campaignh diary. However, as I ran it on the Open Hearth, I did decide to put the videos online, whcih I’ll include beneath the cut for those who want to nose, before I move onto what I took from it, and what I’ve been up to.

Here’s a link to the first video in the playtest, but here’s a general list of all the Scions Playtests. Worth stressing: this is a raw pretty document of play. I’ve done some presentation stuff (mainly as it amuses me) but it’s just the game. Also, two players are voice-only, which limits the visuals, and in the first video I hadn’t even worked out how you can put a square for non-camera-people in the display.

Caveats aside, here you go.

I’ll admit, I have fun with the episode titles. The crossfades are also ludicrous, as is the knock off Star Wars font I’ve used for the title pages. Entertaining yourself.

Anyway, the short of it is this one worked much better than the last. Part of that is the changes I made, but the other part is just that I didn’t set up the opening wrong, and so break the game in a way which required constant designing to fix it. Always better if you don’t poop in your space-bed. However, what I learned from trying to save the previous game really did work – the players responded to the new pointed question to determine the nature of the factions. Rather than a stationary idea of what – say – the Solar Navy is like, just asking “So – what does Admiral Raven think is wrong with the Empire?” gets a lot of buy-in and a lot of material. The specific tensions between the factions doesn’t matter – what matters is that there is tension between the factions, and making it customisable opens up the game hugely. In our case, the deeply practical For-fuck’s-sake solar navy, the artistic aesthetes of the Blade Guild and the utter nihilistic death-chasing of the Faith really gave it a firm tone.

Not that I didn’t shit the bed in another way, playing through most of an introductary scene with a Scion before realising I’d given them the entirely the wrong Faction. They’d chosen to be been raised by the Blade Guild, not the Faith… but I’d used the Faith’s NPCs (Specifically, faction leader, the tank-sized mobile Anchorite). Rather than replay the whole section, I flipped the backgrounds, so the faith took the assassins’ role, and vice versa. The only problem there was me keeping that straight in my head.

That is one of the takeaways from this campaign – the last Open Hearth one I did, players noted the cognitive load the game seemed to place on the Chaos Player (aka GM). I was a bit surprised – I didn’t feel like I was strained. However, watching the videos to edit this, I could see it. The load isn’t in the game – it’s in the tabs. Working out a more fluid way for me to find information is important there.

Another element we tried to continue is me releasing the firm grip the system was originally having. I’ve been talking about the Paragon system as basically For The Queen for nerds. This is a game which similarly moves the authority of storytelling around, but rather than the cleanness of Alex Roberts, it’s this big geeky mess of dice. Of course, that Maximalism is the point. In my original drafts, I really kept the hyper-firm structure of For the Queen (or Deathmatch Island) in that way. The game has a perfectly ritualistic structure. You solely deal with missions and fall out of Missions. The game climaxes with a civil war between the players.

In the last time, I introduced the concept of player-agency generated missions, rather than just dealing with spinning plates. Anything a player wants to do? The game can support it, and gives you a firm recipe of how to simulate that. It’s a push against the board-game tech the game uses – trying to make sure that the players get that the board isn’t the play space 1:1, but a way of tracking the fiction. The map is not the terrain. With this, I continued expanding the gentle touch – the Civil War is on the table, but I let let the players drive the game wherever they wanted to go, and trust my ability to make the system follow them. It worked – the end was an epic confrontation with the rebelling NPC warmaster, with the option for the Scions to switch sides to join them. Then, ending the other plot thread, the deals with extradimensional demons came home to roost, and the final challenge was to see if any of them could find a way to escape that fate. Two did, one ended up in hell, which set up our lovely epilogue of the first two invading hell, and the dead Scion leading the armies against them. That’s fun.

Really, Scions is unsual enough in its scale that I want to loosen the hand, just to see what players do want to do when given this level of power. What kind of stories do folks want to tell? Where does it go? What do they find rewarding?

As I believe I said last time, I’m aware of the irony that one of my original goals was for this to be an almost automated fiction generating system, which ideally could be played GMless, and I’m actually just adding more and more “standard” GM tech to it. However, this is also a process of discovery. I’m hoping that when I delineate entirely what GM tech is required, that we may be able to work out how one can take the game and make it use rotating GM-tech to make it work. I suspect someone will be required to be the facillitator, but I have hope that authority could be more distributed broadly. We’ll see.

There were three other big takeaways from the game.

One was when I reached the end of the four-part game and, as fun as it was, we wanted to go longer. The story had a lot more momentum. In other words, it’s time to actually do a playtest that is 10-12 sessions, and see how that works.

The second was a small moment – I was throwing cards on our virtual table, and frowned. It’s a playtest, so I’ve just grabbed images off google search, in a “this will do for now” way. The moment was when I realised that I was pretty sure at least one of them was an AI image. Ugh. No more. It’s now time to actually create my own art for a playtest.

The third one was it works. Or, at least, I can make it work. It’s probably time I got someone else to playtest this – which means finishing this up to a full Playtest Ashcan.

This is what I’ve been up to in the last month…

• Taken the text, and laid it out very roughly, to see the shape of it. It’s also revealed areas which I still need to write – and, even better, structural flaws, which I’ve fixed.
• Spotted the areas where I need to write new stuff to support GMs – much existed from last playtest, but I’ve added more. For example, a structured way of assembling your own End game from parts, depending on where the game is. The Civil War is one option.
• Which goes to the opening of the game – we move the “will the game end in a Civil War?” from a straight question, and something more like the Magic Circle questions in DIE, involving the dictator. “Is this an option we want, one we are open to, or one we don’t want to go near?”
• Finish the actual fictional-wrapper rewrite. At the moment, it’s a mix of original material, things with names from other fictions but completely different and some stuff which is just lifted from Warhammer. Let’s file off the remaining serial numbers. In short: no more space orks.
• Actually do workable art for the cards, using brutal collage techniques. The art here that is something that gives vibe without saying this is in any way finished. At the least, this old zinekid is loving raiding the history of art and then cutting it into pieces.
• And when the cards are ready, try and set up a 10-12 part campaign before Christmas.

The cards one needs to start a campaign are done now, so that’s what I’m doing next. Running a game will make sure I finish the rest before we need them.

Perhaps not immediately, but I’m also thinking it’s time to try and get it working as a Play By Post Discord Game – I’ve got some basic ideas here. I’ll want to try them with a “standard” size group, and then move to “Okay – what happens if we play with 10-20 Scions” and then “What happens if we play with 10-20 Scions, plus an indeterminate number of people roleplaying around it, populating the planets and generally turning this into War And Peace, Chat-RPing against a backdrop of this intergalactic horror.”

You’ll notice the moment when we moved from “practical short term goals” to “Wa-heeeyyyyYyyyYYYY!”

First, finding players and more photoshopping sharks heads onto Napoleonic Hussars’ bodies.