Play Report: The Clay That Woke

I had been curious about Paul Czege's The Clay That Woke for a long time, and a couple of weeks ago I finally got to play a session of it, run by Mikel Matthews on Gauntlet Hangouts. You can even watch the video if you like.

The Clay That Woke is a fascinating, deeply idiosyncratic game. The most obvious feature is the unique task resolution system. It involves putting various tokens into a pot, pulling out four of them, and interpreting them according to a chart to get the outcome of your task. This is really the only 'mechanic' in the game - at least, all the other mechanics flow into this token economy in some way.

 

The other key component of the game is the setting: a lush, strange, decadent city surrounded by jungle, in which players control minotaurs who form a sort of racial underclass doing menial tasks for humans. A lot of the setting's details are intimately woven into the mechanics. For example, the minotaurs' code of conduct governs how they lose 'Silence' tokens. When a minotaur runs out of Silence, they run wild and go into the jungle, where they can regain Silence - thus creating a natural rhythm between city and jungle scenes.

Because of these connections, it's hard to imagine reskinning the game for a different setting, or even modifying the default setting very much. This wouldn't work if it weren't for the fact that the default setting is extremely compelling. Normally when I read RPG setting material I am filled with ideas for how I would remix it for my own games. When reading The Clay That Woke I was instead filled with a desire to enter into Czege's vision exactly as he describes it.

I won't go into detail about all the events of the session I played. Suffice to say that there were two players and we were working at odds to each other. Often we weren't in the same scene together, but at the end we had a climactic confrontation that ended in both our minotaurs 'running wild' into the jungle.

The way the token-based resolution plays out is very interesting - not just because of the tokens themselves but also the text surrounding the moment of resolution. The book specifically tells you to "play deep into the scene" before drawing, and then to "use the draw as an oracle to inform you as you play out the rest of the scene". For example, during a fight scene, the GM and I worked semi-collaboratively in describing a few exchanges of blows; then we drew tokens that showed a bad result for my character; then we kept playing the scene, both of us angling towards depicting my failure.

This style of resolution feels more collaborative than a trad game of "player vs. GM", but also more concrete than the really loose storygames I've played like Fiasco or Final Girl. I found it helped me to get immersed in my character's internal thoughts in a way I haven't experienced before.

The other unusual thing about the game was that the PCs were often separated, so each player had a lot of 'downtime' spent listening and not playing. The game book specifically tells the GM to set up scenarios in this way. This is quite contrary to trad RPG advice that sees downtime as a negative, e.g. "Never split the party" "If someone dies, bring in their new character as soon as possible".

Czege has stated that this is an intentional choice to give players time to reflect on their character. Weirdly, this reminds me of James Young's blog post about running large groups, in which he states that he will split the party into two subgroups. "the main trick is this - get one group to a decision point where they can discuss what to do next, then switch to the other." Although they're very different play styles, the common thread is that downtime can be positive if the inactive player/s have something worth thinking about, instead of just sitting around waiting.

When I'm GMing, I definitely start to sweat when the party splits up and players are spending a lot of time waiting. In future I'll try to follow this rule of 'give them something to think about'. I wonder if the game mechanics could also support this in some way... perhaps if there was some minigame the players can pursue without input from the GM?

I could say more about The Clay That Woke but I'll wait until I get a chance to play more. In particular I'm curious about the jungle scenes, which we didn't get to in the single session I played.

Towards a High-Level Dungeon Crawl with Muta-Metal & Lumina

Heather Hudson

Muta-Metal: This metallic liquid responds to human thought. Concentrate and you can permanently shape it into whatever form you desire. One vial of muta-metal could become a grappling hook, a sword, a set of lockpicks, a roll of iron spikes, or even a wire cable extending up to 50'. It can be poured inside things and then hardened to form a seal (great for locking doors) and it can be magnetised. With several vials of muta-metal, it is possible to create improvised mechanisms, traps, tripwires and so on.

Muta-metal is available in most towns. It is prized by adventurers but shunned by common folk because of its transient nature: after a few days, the hardened muta-metal rusts away to nothing.

Design-wise, I hope this item will encourage creative play and improvisation, with less focus on pre-planning the characters' inventory. This may seem like a minor variation on the theme of 'Quantum Adventuring Gear' as seen in Dungeon World and various other games. However, I've found that Dungeon World's Adventuring Gear mechanic is generally used to handwave things that the play group isn't interested in. "Yeah, of course I have some rope." Muta-metal, on the other hand, presents itself not as a shortcut but as a toy; hopefully, it will encourage improvisation rather than skimming over it.

Pyeongjun Park

Lumina: True dungeons are not just holes in the ground; they are places where a foreign plane intersects with our own. The environment in such 'Dungeon Fields' is inimical to human life. Even when there is light to see by, the air is filled with a miasma that distorts and dims everything. In the face of this miasma, humans quickly sicken and die (or worse). The only thing that counteracts its effects is Lumina -- the eternal blue flame, given to humanity by the gods themselves.

Adventurers descend into the Dungeon Field with jars of Lumina to fuel their lanterns. While the flame lasts, it not only provides light but can also be used to ward off monsters and burn away corruption. but slowly the miasma wears the Lumina down, and snuffs each flame one by one.

Replacing torches with a magical flame makes their role in the game economy more explicit, while thematically moving things up the spectrum from low fantasy to high fantasy. Letting players expend Lumina to drive off monsters will make them more aware of how many they have left. The miasma offers a solution to the problem of "What to do if the PCs actually run out of light?" Instead of blundering around in the dark, the players are faced with a nightmarish gauntlet-run back to the surface, beset by monsters and by progressively worse penalties from miasma sickness.

These two items, along with the Alchemist from my last blog post, have been kicking around in my head as part of some hypothetical high-level anime-flavoured megadungeon. In each case I'm thinking about how to retain the fun elements of a hardscrabble OSR dungeon crawl, but with a different aesthetic.

Class: The Dungeon Alchemist

Atelier Ayesha

Here's a new class for D&D-adjacent gaming: an Alchemist of the type that commonly appears in JRPGs and anime. Whereas the historical alchemist can be found in dark laboratories trying to create gold out of lead, the JRPG alchemist spends their time wandering in dungeons, collecting monster parts and herbs, and brewing them into potions on the spot. Despite the prevalence of this trope, I haven't seen such a character written up for D&D (let me know if I'm wrong, though!)

The core concept of the class is that you will be hoarding random items and monster organs, then combining them haphazardly to create potions. When playing with this class you must use strict Encumbrance rules - ideally the simple 'Slots = Strength score' or even simpler 'Slots = 10' from the wonderfully terse Moonhop.

D. M. Cornish

Key to the class's balance is that your potions expire fairly quickly, so you will be forced to carry ingredients and only cook up a potion when you need one. The potion you get is semi-random, but there are ways to gain more control over the outcome.

Because the layout of the potion tables is key to the class's function, I present it here as a PDF and here as Word document so you can modify it if you want. This class has not been playtested so let me know how it goes if you use it.

I got a lot of potion ideas from Goblin Punch's Alchemy PDF and handwaved the durations of all the effects using Necropraxis' Hazard Die system.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild