It hasn’t been the calmest week again, what with my brother visiting on a vacation; the intersection of lives is very good at ensuring I get nothing done over the week. Sort of like I’m vacationing as well just because he is. The extra gaming session we agreed on for Sunday is a good example: I guess I’m running a one-shot of Solar System cold after years of not touching the game, because why not.
My genius xianxia one-shot plan
Solar System is the genericized version of The Shadow of Yesterday. I wrote the currently definitive text for SS myself over a decade ago, so it’s not like I don’t know the game I’m supposed to run for a few friends today, but I think I played the game last in like 2013 or something like that, so it’s been a while.
Furthermore, SS is more of a campaign game; it’s possible to run it as a one-shot, but it requires a firm handle on crunch complexity and procedures that don’t even actually exist in written form anywhere as far as I know — you just have to know, by experience, how to structure a single-session SS scenario to be at all meaningful. All this wouldn’t be so bad if I’d had a bit more time to prep this thing, but as it is, I’m going in pretty blind — writing this newsletter is actually most of the prep I’ll be doing.
The cross-section of interested players and my on-going interests suggested running a xianxia one-shot, so that’s what I’m going with. The xianxia theme might be familiar from my first newsletter in the winter; it’s Chinese fantasy drama about kungfu wizards, basically. Suits Solar System rather well.
Setting Work
So as to shortcut setting development for the session, I’m using my “Shotgun Wizard” stuff as a basis. I put this together a couple of years ago for old school D&D, but it’ll serve for a Solar System game’s background as well.
Your bog-standard D&D fantasy world has undergone a xianxiafication process wherein the naturally monastic tendencies of arcane magic have ended up with the vast majority of the world’s magic retreating to the mountain-tops, in Arcane Orders dedicated to magic for magic’s sake. The immortal cultivators of magic largely leave the mundane world alone, barring an Arcane Tithe the Orders collect in the form of magically potent natural produce and talented children. In an infinite multiverse there may be countless worlds where magical wars and catastrophes infuse the very Earth with the taint of magic, giving rise to dungeons; however, here we see another kind of development path, one of seclusion of magic.
The Western and Eastern arcanists have found common ground in their magical interests despite the traditions of magic being rather different. In the west the dominant wizards are Vancian scholars, wielding potent ritual magic in an essentially intellectual, Platonic spiritual pursuit. Eastern magic, meanwhile, revolves around the Cultivation of the human totality and pursuit of godhood. In a world where mundane society is entirely pre-industrial, the Arcane Orders already live in what is essentially a modern, globalizing magical utopia. The magical seclusion enables the arcane world to essentially ignore the mundane.
The greatest concrete fruit of the centuries-long cultural exchange between the east and the west is the Manifold Gate, an inter-planar portal that enables wizards to travel to a magical virgin world to collect the necessary reagents of their craft. While initially a curiousity, the Gate’s importance has grown over the last few centuries such that the Gate Authority jointly organized by most of the Arcane Orders of the world is becoming more important than its constituent parts: today the accidental inter-planar empire of the Manifold Frontier consists of four separate planar realms with several million colonists toiling to extract magical resources for the enlargement of the Arcane Orders on the Prime Material Plane.
The mundane denizens of the Prime Material Plane do not realize that their world and lives are mere shadows on the wall compared to the intense hyper-reality of the immortal world the magical elites enjoy. What those magical elites in turn struggle to comprehend is that the Gate Authority has become a law unto itself on the Higher Planes; neither Eastern or Western, and organized into an effective meritocracy, the Gate Authority remains loyal to homeworld interests mainly for interpersonal reasons.
I was originally thinking of using this world for a specific kind of militarily-organized old school D&D campaign where the player characters are marshals-wizards working for the Gate Authority in the Higher Planes, protecting colonists from monsters and whatnot. Obviously enough a world that’s one third xianxia, one third D&D and one third western works for other purposes as well. School drama, say.
Scenario Premise
For the actual scenario today, I’m thinking that I’ll just steal from Forge of Destiny, one of these xianxia stories that I’ve been reading. No time to be fancy when doing crash development!
The premise is that the player characters are first-year students at the Gate Authority Arcane Academy (GA3, I suppose), a large school — or a Sect as you would say in the xianxia genre. The one-shot will supposedly fit the entire school year into a single session of play, as follows:
- Players create some teenager wannabe-wizards: some poor, some rich; some eastern, some western; some with their own magic, others starting from zero. A variety.
- The characters are taken through entrance exams and a bit of a school drama scene, maybe a fight between emerging cliques. A bit of an opportunity to impress teachers, and opportunity to get to know some school-mates.
- The players design school schedules for their characters, picking from 4-hour blocks to figure out what the characters spend their time on. This schedule determines who they spend time with at school, and doing what.
- The schedules are processed into scenes, with main emphasis on new situations like various subjects studied at the school, and other slice of life events. The scenes involve drama-for-XP as well as opportunities to spend the XP into character development, as befits a magic school. Going over the entire week once acts as a sort of sampling of how the entire semester goes for the character.
- The characters have a bit of a mid-year crisis event, something rooted into how their year’s been going. A school trip or whatnot, depends on the characters and their stories.
- A new weekly schedule for the second semester, which is then processed the same as the first one. Presumably the things we’ve learned about the school and magic, and the changes in character circumstances, inspire changing schedules.
- At the end of the year we’ll have a promotion tournament: the ten best students of the outer sect gain entrance to the inner sect and so forth. Big drama, big explosions, cool prizes.
Seems barely like something you could fit into a single session, right? The wide cast of NPCs is actually the biggest hurdle here, as portraying those takes time, and the genre requires quite a few NPCs. It’d be quicker if I had the NPCs ready-made with physical cues (illustrations etc.), but that’s not happening on this schedule.
Crunch Work
One-shot Solar System should be extremely minimal, running for the most part on core processes and very few Secrets. Mostly just bonus dice Secrets, in fact: “Gain a bonus die for a specific Ability”.
I’m thinking that Cultivation magic runs off a special resource Pool called “Chi”, which is distinct from the mundane Pools of Vigor, Instinct and Reason in that all Abilities always associate with Chi (so you can use it to bolster any Ability), and that can be used to fix a dice roll after the roll (as opposed to the mundane Pools, that need to be used before the roll). A character would improve their Chi Pool by moving points from their mundane Pools into Chi, thus reducing their mortal footprint. A character that zeroes out one of their mortal Pools would either wither or elevate by discarding the Pool depending on whether they ever got to 5 or more points in that Pool to begin with; it’d be an outright cultivation error to zero out a Pool before training it sufficiently, in other words.
Vancian magic works off the Reason Pool, of course: you have Spells (a Secret each) that are cast ritually and then “hung” prepared for later need in the form of Effects (persistent free traits), which costs a point of Reason. The spell would be potent when released, and the character could spend more Reason to modify it on the fly. Simple and straigthforward, as befits a one-shot.
How it worked out
I was planning to publish this newsletter before leaving for the session, but didn’t have the time, so we’re running a bit late. Not a big deal, and we got a conclusion to the story: the one-shot was a great success! We had a small 3-person crew, and despite the players having quite different backgrounds on this sort of stuff, I think we rocked the fantasy school drama. The setting was very lively, and the player characters were rather appropriate as truculent teenager protagonists.
I particularly enjoyed playing the various adult wizards working at the school. I had an ugly doorman ex-cultivator who trounced an uppity PC first thing, a rough-and-tumble barbarian (as in, a D&D barbarian of the “I’ve got d12 hit dice!” type) running physical education, a beautiful fairy godmother teaching meditation and so on and so forth.
The slice of life via weekly schedule thing worked beautifully, too. As might be expected, we only got halfway through my scenario in seven hours, but it was a good half, and I’m confident that it would have carried through; I had already had successful introductions to a half a dozen students, with the PCs forming some relationships, and the character building (pretty big deal in SS, somewhat uniquely for a narrativist drama game) was proceeding nicely, with the characters discovering their own particular build goals.
Favourite character crisis must have been when one of the PCs was researching ways to eliminate their need to sleep (so as to have a true protagonist charop school experience, cramming both days and nights), which ended up with them going out collecting volcanic rock with the nephew of Randolph Carter the dream magician. The two completely accidentally ended up spying on a pretty female teacher at the hot springs (genre, you know), which made for a neat 5 XP from the Key of Adventure, “confront a mortal danger” indeed. We thought that he’d gotten off scot-free, too, but then that night the character fumbled their meditations, too distracted by the heavenly sight to recover their Chi. Ah, youth.
Monday: Coup de Main #6
In Flanaess last Monday we had that favourite of sessions, a loot disbursement. The party had been delving in the Ysgrame mansion for four sessions now, three of them consecutively without retreating to town. Some treasure had been garnered, so it was about time to start thinking of cashing in. You can’t enjoy wealth if you’re dead, after all.
My favourite character, Wee-Will the Evil Fighter (yes, I just like him because of his name — and because he’s Evil, of course) unfortunately didn’t make it, as the crown jewel of the party’s loot so far was a shiny, shiny crystal chandelier that had to actually be taken down from the rafters in the dining room. Unfortunately the room was infested with poisonous centipedes, and the fact that the party knew about them in advance ultimately failed to help them completely avoid the danger: one of the centipedes got a bite in on Weevil, and that’s all she wrote, as nobody in the party had a clue on how to treat the poisonous bite. Sven of Two Worlds, our dimension-traveling 2nd level Barbarian got bit as well, but when you’ve got like 19 HP it’s not that big of a deal. What was a big deal was that Wee-Will was the one holding the rope on the chandelier as the centipedes attacked; the chandelier sure did crush a bunch of them as it fell, but it also lost like half of its resale value in the crash.
Anyway, the party spent enough time in the haunted library (of course it was haunted; would have been too easy otherwise) to figure out that they wouldn’t be carrying off any books right now, and then finally built some travois and sledges and whatnot to drag the loot and the bodies of their comrades out of there.
The last part of the session involved a cursory run-through of a two-week downtime period, as the party traveled up to the City of Greyhawk to get rid of the crystal chandelier and other quality items they’d found. They had some forewarning that they’d probably attracted the curiousity of the city’s Guild of Magicians by shopping Mad Archmage regalia around town, but what’s done is done.
Overall the first expedition was a great success. Only one character (a Thief with XP bonus) actually leveled on this, but others are close, and there’s still more haul to be had in the manor, surely! I expect that we’ll go back there next time, which means I’ll need to figure out whether anything important has happened since the last visit.
The leveling was a personal record, by the way: I’ve never GMed old school D&D that went so fast as to gain the first 2nd level of the campaign in only 6 sessions. The former record is 20 sessions (tied once, too!). I mostly credit the fortunate choice of starter scenario (it is frankly a casual thing, the manor), but the players being quite experienced at this by now definitely plays a part.
Session #7 is scheduled for tomorrow, Monday 20.7., starting around 15:00 UTC. Feel free to stop by if you’re interested in trying the game out or simply seeing what it’s like.
Thursday: Land of Nod
Our Thursday session of the on-going Land of Nod mystery twilight zone stuff was actually pretty nice as a story game thing. The story is coming together in general. I don’t know that I feel like recounting actual events, as it’s mostly a bunch of highly nuanced scenes that involve implied philosophical themes revolving around existential philosophy, homosexuality, serial killer thriller stuff and absurdism. Nice to immerse in as a collective story-creation exercise, but probably not that interesting to read about.
I understand that the game’s creator, Paul, has found the exercise thought-provoking, which for me very much is a core justification for playing the game. I rather like game development, and a large part of that is that even games that are only passably entertaining are still worthwhile for the long-term development benefits.
We’ll probably wrap up the game next week, after which I understand we’re going back to Flame/Star/Night and such in-development games.
State of the Productive Facilities
Eh. I’ve got a draft of the crowdfunding spiel for the old school primer now, so I can’t say that I’d have done nothing this week, but of course I’d like to get more than that done. It was a pretty difficult week in terms of scheduling work; I feel like I spent a lot of time waiting for others and sitting around in hot, hot summertime premises instead of working.
The one-shot today was surprisingly nice, though. I could see developing something like that as a worthwhile gaming product; a snappy ~20-page Solar System scenario or campaign seed on how to do the magic school teen drama thing well.
Next week the goals remain the same: write some essays if I can, and push the practical details on the crowdfunding campaign forward. At this pace it seems like I’ll only actually launch the campaign on August, but perhaps that’s not so bad. It takes however long it takes.