Thinking aloud.

Why did we choose that medium? Once we've chosen that medium, what makes the subject material interesting?

I don't think there's an all-encompassing answer to that. It feels like asking "why do you read books?". I believe "exploration" is as good as it gets, we want to discover cool stuff, escape, pretend, be challenged, be frightened, saddened, excited. It's the impulse of the little kid going into the bushes at the end of the garden. It's venture, the pull of the blank space on the map, but coupled with the impulse to fill that empty space. I could write about death of the author and stuff, but maybe that's another thread again. The bottom line is that there is this interplay between a blank space we're filling with our fiction, but at the same time having that fiction separated from us and exploring it as something independent and foreign. The Creative Agendas only come on top of that.

The medium does not have subject material. TV doesn't have subject material. Roleplaying doesn't either. Roleplaying is a medium through which you can explore subject material.

Why is D&D about hard men with big swords going into dark holes in the ground?

Because we have mommy and daddy issues. The mythic underground, a tunnel into Mother Earth, Jung's archetype of the cellar, a dark place filled with monsters of the subconscious, katabasis, an undead lich Father at the bottom.

Only half kidding. :)

Elizabeth, I like that, but I like how the Menaces are Qualities right there on your sheet in EB and it's often a conscious choice (faustian bargain?), to increase them. That's why I'd prefer to keep it a player roll and not just a MC/MB move. The MC/MB can have moves that he triggers when someone blows his Nightmares roll for example, but I'd like to keep Nightmares itself a rollable stat on the player's sheet. :shrug:

Jeff: You're right about clocks...so screw that. So how about this:

Menaces are just like Stats, they increase with use. ie. "When you're caught doing something suspicious, roll +Suspicion"... cue some unpleasant options, including +1 Suspicion. 

If one of them would advance to +4 (like, from stratum 0 to stratum 1), you get a new 12+ option ("Imprisoned in New Newgate." "Banished to the Tomb colonies." "Institutionalised in the Asylum."...), and the "fail" (win in this case) option is removed (as when normal stats increase in stratum).

Much easier to keep track of and handle. Gives you 4 main positive Qualities and 4 negative ones, for 8 core moves altogether. No more than core AW.

Thank you both!!!

Let me specify that. I don't want "good", I want informative. I don't want a video of a whole session, but something that works as a short demonstration of social dynamics at the table and the MCing. Possibly edited. Probably no longer than 7 minutes.

There are videos of Luke running The Sword at conventions on youtube and while they're clearly not the best thing ever, they're pretty entertaining to look at and showcase Luke's enthusiasm and approach to the game, which (for me) is enlightening. Seeing how John is pretty much the Prophet and fo'real Master(of Ceremonies) of AW, I would like to have a peek into how he (or Vincent) runs the game.

That actually extends to any other GM and any other game. Seeing other people run games, especially people from different backgrounds and traditions is imo extremely useful. But that's for another thread and probably another board.

Ok, cool. I read those back when they were originally posted (and I'm pretty confident I understand it all) but I guess I just never made the mental link between those and "CF design".

So ok, I'll try asking more specific questions:

When you design colour-first you start with some colour, then extracts elements of that colour and then the design comes in where you tell these elements how to behave so that they are consistent with the fiction you had in the first place? CF is essentially about starting with fiction, and getting everything else out of that, am I getting this right?

If I am right: In the example of AW, what was the process that led you from colour to mechanics? I think you said you designed the Angel first. Did you have a mental image of the Angel in a situation, kinda like the picture of that guy in "Things on Character Sheets (2)" and then started extracting the Angel's Effective Qualities, Resources and Positioning from that mental image?

Also, were Moves and the shape they come in a direct result of this process? Or were they a tool you already had and applied? Or did you have to invent them precisely to deal with this?

If so, do you have any general suggestions or advice on how to do this stuff, beyond everything you've already written? Those blog posts were darn awesome and expansive on their own so I understand if you have nothing to add.

I'm asking because I have this game in my head - well, it's not a game, it's just a whole load of colour that I want to turn into a game - I'm just not sure of where to start. (Although this conversation is already pointing me in the right direction, I think.)

Initially, I intended SotI to be a game of its own. I was struggling with how to recreate these archetypes in game mechanics when the AW playtest dropped in my lap and I saw the light, kinda. Initially, I just tried to rewrite the original playbooks, but something was bugging me, I forget what exactly. I started from scratch. I believe it was Jason Morningstar (the expert on all things Sagas) that pointed out to me that it was probably impossible to have a thoroughly gender-agnostic archetype for this kind of game, so for the next iteration I decided to break them down according to the way roles were originally divided in viking society, sort of.

My sensibilities were sort of offended at this. I am no fan of gender divisions, but I was determined to stick close to history and the source materials (the list of my mediography is at the end of the working doc).

So, now we have, on the female side:
The Grandmother - envisioned as the kind of elderly, strong woman that takes up all the business as head of the family in a situation where the man is dead or absent. History has plenty of these, they kick ass.

The Seidkona - the witch, you can't go without one. Bit of a recluse, mysterious, maybe an old crone, maybe a bit of a femme fatale. People are afraid of her.

The Shieldmaiden - A woman with a sword, what else do you want me to say. There are quite a few of them in the sagas, actually. The vikings possibly had the most gender-equal army in the middle ages.

Young Woman - Mostly based on the female character in Hrafninn flygur, I wanted to cover the archetype of the celtic woman, of which there were plenty in Iceland. Vikings took lots of wives, willing or unwilling in Ireland, and they brought a largely suppressed but significant cultural element with them.

The woman's skill, in the source material, is mostly her ability to manipulate, they are excellent at prodding men into action where they are unable to. This would leave them as a sort of passive character who acts through others, so I opted for a more unorthodox approach and gave them all pretty serious abilities for laying down some smack. Which is not to say they aren't able to spin men around their fingers as well.

I'm pretty pleased with all of these character books, except with the shieldmaiden's, which I haven't written yet. I'll probably revise eventually. I'll have to take another hard look at how the Maestro'D, Skinner and Hardholder use their effects on people and their handle on resources to do stuff.



As for men...
The Freeman - just the ordinary everyman. I though it would be silly not to have a playbook for one, even if they are not all that interesting. What's cool about these guys is that in Iceland, people opted not to have nobility. So these people were a kind of anarchist, pioneering entrepreneurs. I'll probably redo this one, mostly taking a look at the Operator.

Chieftain - not having nobility doesn't mean there wasn't a need for rulers. But I wanted to go a more religious way with the chieftain, not unrelated to the fact that the title of Godi pretty much means both a chieftain and a priest. Since the pre-AW drafts of the game I wanted to have an interplay between the old religion and christianity and model mechanically why the later came to uproot the former (but leave the choice to the players). The Godi playbook is part of that.

The Viking - well duh. Not much to say here except that Buliwyf in The 13th Warrior (and Beowulf in general) was an inspiration here, even if anachronistic.

The Wanderer - probably my personal favourite, although I haven't yet figured how to make this character do all the stuff I want him to do. Heavily, heavily inspired by the myth of Odin, the Gestur ("Guest") chracter in Hrafninn flygur and the One-Eye character in Valhalla Rising, this nameles outsider is probably meant to be to SotI what the Battlebabe is to AW, a pin defining the third dimension.

Fuck life, right.