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.

Through Ultan's Door Session 3: Pulling Punches

Sidney Syme

In the third session of my Ultan's Door campaign, the PCs went way off the map. This was exciting because I got to use some content I had developed myself; it was also challenging because I had to improvise a lot of things on the fly, which is not my strong suit.

The party found the Great Sewer River which lies at the edge of the map in Through Ultan's Door #1. They took a boat and rowed it upriver, which eventually led them to emerge from the dungeon into the streets of Zyan Above. Some of the party got captured by a group of paranoid Zyanese warriors, while one character made friends with some priests. At one point the party was split into three groups which was quite difficult to run. Eventually, through some fast talking and leniency on my part, they managed to bluff their way into escaping and took the boat back down the river to where they had started.

Overall the session was a success, but there were a few points where I think I could have done better. I felt like I pulled my punches a lot when the PCs were interacting with the paranoid Zyanese. The PCs willingly gave up their weapons and let themselves be captured. Based on what I had established about the Zyanese, it would have been reasonable for them to kill the PCs or at least imprison them indefinitely. Instead I let the PCs get away with some fairly outrageous lies.

I think I was reluctant to make 'hard moves' because I was improvising (therefore the danger was not set in stone like in the dungeon areas I had prepped) and because I failed to properly outline the stakes to the players. Two of the players who got captured were new to this campaign and their idea of D&D is shaped largely by a) comedy D&D podcasts and b) my old Dungeon World campaign. Because of time constraints I had neglected to give them the full 'OSR spiel'. I think they were still in the mindset of "we can say silly things to these NPCs and we might get captured but we'll get free somehow" - which was reasonable, because I had not properly set expectations.

In hindsight, I wish I had explicitly framed the stakes before the PCs gave up their weapons. I should have said: "Look, you don't know who these people are, but they look threatening. If you let them take you captive, you might end up imprisoned or executed. At the very least they will probably take your stuff. Are you ok with that?" Then if the players persisted, it would have felt fair if they got killed.

The other weak point in the social scenes was the lack of dice mechanics. I had been set against using Charisma checks because I wanted it to be OSR style - "you just say what you say and the NPCs react accordingly". But there were several spots where I genuinely didn't know how the NPCs would react, and a roll would have come in handy there. I might start using "reaction roll modified by Charisma" to resolve these situations.

Aside from those points, though, the session was a success and I'm excited to see how the campaign grows from here. Depending on what the players want to do next it could stay as a dungeon crawl, or evolve into a citycrawl/political game.

Play Reports from Conquest 2019

I went to my first RPG convention on the Easter weekend (Conquest) and I had a lot of fun! I played in three sessions in total. I generally don't care much to give blow-by-blow accounts of my gaming sessions, since I don't often enjoy reading such play reports from others. However, I was interested by David McGrogan's assertion that we can learn more about gaming from actual play reports with commentary than we can from generalised prescriptive advice. With that in mind, here's three brief play reports with discussion of what I learned from them.

1. Achtung Cthulhu - Savage Worlds

 This was a pretty standard occult-WWII scenario. The PCs got their mission briefing, parachuted into Germany, and made their way to Auschwitz to prevent a team of Nazi sorcerers from sacrificing Jews to summon some kind of demon. (Yes, this was a little bit on the nose.) We spent a lot of time doing D&D-style planning ("We'll all hang off the roof, then throw grenades through the windows at the same moment, then you run down the stairs..."). The combat scene took a while to resolve, so we ran overtime and the GM had to 'cutscene' us through the last part of the scenario. Overall I had a good time.

'Fast & Simple'
I'd be suspicious of anyone who tries to tell you that Savage Worlds is a 'fast, simple system'. The exploding dice, bennies and fiddly initiative mechanics made the combat scene take a long time to play out. Then again, I've noticed that a lot of systems get touted as 'fast & simple' by people who have played them a lot. I'm not necessarily innocent of this myself - there are lots of details in LotFP that make sense to me, but could be hard to grasp for a new player.

The lesson is: if you have mastery over a system, that's great and you should make use of it, but don't fall into the trap of assuming everyone will be as fluent as you.

Pacing in Con Games

The convention timeslots were three hours each. The GM spent probably 1 hour giving us backstory and briefings before we got to the real start of the adventure (parachuting into Germany). We could have avoided going overtime if some of that cruft was cut out using hard framing. Obviously, pacing and time management are really important in a convention game. But also - most of us are adults with jobs now. Our gaming time is intermittent and limited, with an unpredictable lineup of players. In that sense, pretty much every game I run is a 'convention game', so the same principles apply.

2. Night Witches

This game was the reason I had signed up to the con, and I wasn't disappointed. After running Dungeon World for a year and never really grokking it, I felt like this game finally showed me how PbtA games are supposed to be played.

Night Witches is a game about Soviet airwomen in World War II. Most of our time was spent in the 'Day Phase', which meant we were on the ground at our airbase, struggling with obstructive bureaucracy, threatening Military Police and demeaning attitudes from male fighter pilots. The actual bombing run (the 'Night Phase') took about 15 minutes at the end of the session.

GM Mastery

The guy who ran the game was really slick. He was good at asking leading questions that developed our characters, he had lots of interesting NPCs to draw on, and he did a good Russian accent. Unsurprisingly, he told me after the game that he had run Night Witches dozens of times before. The lesson here is simple: if you run a game over and over, you'll probably get good at it. That's easy to say but harder to implement: I tend to hop between systems, never spending enough time to get a deep mastery of them.

'Choose One'

Dungeon World has often been derided for its forced 'character appearance' choices. For example, each Bard player must choose whether their character has 'Knowing Eyes, Fiery Eyes, or Joyous Eyes'. There are similarly bland choices for hairstyle, clothing, and so on.

Night Witches has a similar structure for character creation, but the choices are a lot more interesting. For example, I chose that my character's uniform was greasy, that her home was in Siberia, and that she wrote letters home to no one. These things actually helped to distinguish my character in play, and they also grounded me in a historical setting that I didn't know that much about.

These 'choose one' lists appear in a lot of PbtA games, and they act as a sort of funnel towards the genre or setting that the game is going for. I found this funnel really useful in Night Witches because I needed some guidance as I entered into an unfamiliar narrative space. By contrast, the Dungeon World lists just funnel you into the space of 'generic D&D', which I'm really not interested in.

I might try using these 'choose one' lists in my own games if I want to prime my players for a particular setting. For example, here's a quick draft of what the lists might look like for Carcosa characters:

You wear: Dinosaur feathers; stinking hides; silken robes; nothing.
You hail from: The purple desert; the fungal forests; the pale mountains; the dread city of Carcosa.
You are marked by: A livid scar; a warrior's tattoos; the ravages of a fungal infection; a slave tattoo; something behind your eyes.
Your connection to the tribe: A close family member; a lover; a promise to someone who is gone; a fear of being alone.

3. Game #3

I don't want to name this game because then I'd feel a bit bad about saying this: the third game I played in really sucked. It was painfully railroaded, the pre-planned storyline was boring and hyper-focused on combat, and the GM seemed intent on saying 'no' to any interesting ideas the players came up with.

The funny thing is, I enjoyed it anyway. This was largely because of the other players. I had never met any of them before and never learned their names, but within half an hour we were riffing together like a regular game group, talking in character and making fun of our lame pre-generated backstories. I noticed a similar kind of natural camaraderie spring up in the other sessions. It's pretty incredible how the shared experience of roleplaying can bring people together, even when the game itself is 'bad'.

I wonder if this fact--that even a shitty RPG session usually offers a baseline level of entertaiment--is precisely why the hobby supports so much cargo-cult design and dubious gamemastering advice. People don't always have that drive to excel because, at the end of the day, a roleplaying session is pretty hard to fuck up.

You Can't Force It

In my previous campaign, I told the players straight up that it was going to be a Magnificent Seven-inspired scenario, where they would have to protect an isolated village from a gang of bandits. I started the first session with them in the town, and pulled a few cheap tricks to try to get them attached to the villagers. It worked fine. The players' attitude was: "Sure. We have to protect these people because that's the premise of the story." But they never became very emotionally invested in the town.

In my new campaign, I started out with the PCs at the entrance to a dungeon they knew nothing about. I told them: "This system is more brutal than Dungeon World or 5e. There is a real risk you will die, so play carefully."

They entered the dungeon with trepidation and soon encountered some human-looking NPCs (the Guildless from Through Ultan's Door #1). The Guildless are all mute, so communication was difficult. They seemed wary of the PCs, but the players wanted to make friends. After some deliberation, the PCs laid down all their weapons and allowed themselves to be taken into custody as a show of good faith.

As they were led through the Guildless' outpost, the players were terrified they had made the wrong choice and were about to be killed. Their fears reached a peak when they arrived in a room full of bloodstains and butchering tools. They were very relieved when it finally became apparent that the Guildless weren't going to hurt them. Since then they have helped the Guildless several times and formed a strong attachment to them both in an out of character.

There are two lessons I'm taking away from this. The first is that you can't pre-determine which NPCs the players will become attached to, or which in-character goals they will want to pursue. You just have to let it develop naturally.

The second lesson is more specific to old-school play. The credible threat of death can obviously be used to evoke the emotion of fear. But I suspect that it also enhances other emotive reactions by association. The fact that the Guildless might have killed them made the players that much more relieved when it didn't come to pass.

Play Report: Through Ultan's Door - Session 2

We had another fun session of dungeon crawling in Through Ultan's Door #1. I can't recommend this module highly enough!

This session, the PCs got caught in a bear trap, found a one-shot Web item in a hidden drawer, fought a glistening dream-pudding, and eventually made their way back to the lair of the giggling white swine.

Player A: "I'll use Spider Climb to climb above the pigs and throw the web down on them."
Player B: "That's the perfect plan because pigs can't look up."
Me: "I... what?"

With some quick Googling, the players managed to convince me that pigs cannot, in fact, look up, and therefore could never see an enemy approaching from the ceiling. After some more research post-game, I think that this is basically a myth, but it was good enough to work in the moment.

So the PCs webbed the swine in their lair, then poured oil on the web, then set it all on fire and wiped out the swine completely. The only one left was the gigantic swine-mother, who has 90hp but no attacks of her own. She was helpless as the PCs summoned their friends from the last session (the mute Guildless of the city of Zyan) and together they butchered and cooked the sow queen.

One thing that came up in this session was the question of whom the enemy would attack each round. Specifically, it mattered a lot whether the Oneiric Pudding would keep on attacking the same PC, or shift to attacking a different PC who had just dealt it damage. This question made the difference between life and death, and I had no real 'objective' way of determining it. I decided to just roll a die, which worked out OK. Nevertheless it makes me think it could be useful to note down a monster's attack pattern along with its stats. Most patterns could be reduced to a few words:

"Attacks weakest"
"Attacks greatest perceived threat" (e.g. Magic-Users)
"Attacks nearest" (but who is 'nearest' is often pretty vague in my games)
"Attacks last attacker" (which might lead to the PCs juggling around their turn order to ensure optimal chance of survival. This doesn't seem like a bad thing necessarily)

Lastly, I've noticed that the way I'm running initiative now is: "The party rolls 1d6 and the enemy rolls 1d6. Whoever rolls highest gets to go first. If it's a tie then we'll reroll". This is functionally identical to a coin flip. Technically in LotFP's rules there is a chance of the combatants all acting simultaneously. But that just seems like a headache to run. So I'm thinking of paring it down to just a bag with a white stone and a black stone. Whichever side draws the white stone gets to go first this round. This would also help with another minor problem, which is that sometimes I forget when one round has ended and it's time to roll initiative again.

Play Report: Through Ultan's Door #1

I ran Through Ultan's Door #1 using Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The players were new to the system and to the concept of old-school dungeon crawls in general, but they seemed to grok the game immediately and had a lot of fun.

The PCs' first encounter was with the black-lipped Guildless. The players loved the idea of the Guildless communicating by flute music, and went to great lengths to make friends with them. To show good faith they left all their weapons at the door and allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. There were some great moments of tension as the players wondered if they were about to be butchered. They were horrified to find that the Guildless were apparently pickling barrels full of severed children's hands. But the players speculated: "Maybe they were some kind of evil children?" - which turned out not to be too far from the truth.

The Guildless shaman sent the party on a mission to kill the sinuous white swine. The party got into a big fight with a swarm of swine protecting their nest. They could very easily have been killed here, but the swine rolled poorly and the PCs managed to set their nest on fire, grab a bunch of gems and escape.

The module was a breeze to run. I didn't make any changes to it, but I did go through the text with a pencil and underlined the most obvious features of each room to help structure my narration. The room descriptions in the module are quite detailed, even florid, but I found them useful in play. For example, having the shaman offer to reward the PCs with "a pearl encrusted bandolier" was much more evocative than just saying "he'll give you 150gp".

The only thing I struggled with was running combat in a timely fashion. I started off trying to run it Theatre of the Mind style, but quickly realised I was losing track of everyone so I drew a quick map and broke out the minis. The OSR dream of running 4-6 combat scenes over the course of one session still seems unlikely, but it did move a bit quicker than Dungeon World and much quicker than D&D4e or 5e.

One thing that really struck me was how, despite my concerns, the players accepted all the old-school tropes without batting an eye. Nobody had any problem with simple initiative, rolling for stats, only getting four classes to choose from, or potentially dying from a single hit. I think I spend too much time reading the opinions of online people who are extremely picky about RPGs, which makes me forget that my real life friends don't know or care about any of that stuff.