Enthusiastick Blog

Part 2: Names of Magic

So in keeping with my teeth-gnashing frustration at the abuse of the name Seraph by the Matrix trilogy, I’ve decided to focus a little bit of attention today on naming and terminology for this game. To that end the game itself has been given a name. It is at least tentatively to be titled HouseLight.

The following is a developing Glossary of Terms for both the game and it’s world:

• Avatar: one of those Iconoclasts whose mind has been freed to the truth, allowing them access to true independence and greater-than-human powers when operating inside the Shell. (E.g. Morpheus and Trinity.)
• Daemon: an artificially intelligent program which possesses an Icon within the Shell. (E.g. the Oracle, the Merovingian.)
• Host: a Daemon who serves the Source, with an eye towards order and control. As with angels, the plural is the same as the singular (a host, the host.) (E.g. Agent Smith.)
• Icon: a consciousness manifesting in the Shell. Most Icons are human minds, bound to a world of false material and blind to the lie. (E.g. random people in the Matrix.)
• Iconoclast: a human Icon which has begun to question the lies of the Shell. Only Iconoclasts may become Avatars. (E.g. Neo at the beginning of the Matrix.)
• The Shell: simulated reality, the false world constructed to imprison human souls and limit their potential. (E.g. the Matrix itself.)
• The Source: refers to both the demiurge which constructed the Shell, but also the truth that underlies the Shell which Avatars can perceive. (E.g. the Architect, although that’s debatable.)
• The Trunk: any of a number of simulated realities accessible from the Shell but which obey different natural laws. (E.g. the train station.)

Clever people will notice that these are all some sort of double entendre, although some are better than others.

A typical game arc would therefore concern player-characters who began as Iconoclasts, came into conflict with the Host, became Avatars, confronted the Source and changed (or destroyed) the Shell forever.

I have also begun to broaden the scope of my influences on the game; while it remains a primarily Matrix-themed RPG, I have begun mentally borrowing elements from Carnivale and the Amory Wars. It remains to be seen whether this is a positive development or will lead to the idea losing focus and becoming a sprawling morass of unfinished ideas.

The preference in the indie gaming community seems to be for play sessions that consist of a series of short, punchy scenes. Scenes are meant to be to the point, a goal which is often accomplished by having them revolve around a particular conflict. Such scenes are framed to drive conflict, and therefore drive the story; once a scene’s key conflict is resolved, it generally ends shortly thereafter.

This is fine, I guess. It works really well for games like Primetime Adventures. But it isn’t always what I want.

Done incorrectly it can cause a game to become choppy. There have been times around the table where I’ve felt that the scene was over just as I was really getting into character. I’m spoiled by boffer-LARPing I guess, where I have the opportunity to immerse myself in the persona of a particular character for whole days at a time.

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I actually enjoy roleplaying for it’s own sake. It’s good if a game can manage to stay on task, to prevent a session from being totally aimless. But one of the things I miss from my days in traditional gaming is the freedom to stretch my legs. I don’t necessarily want every scene to be long and discursive, but I think it would be good if that was at least supported.

My vision for my currently untitled Gnostic Allegory game, for example, is going to require scenes of exposition and also the joyful wankery that is in-character philosophical conversations. If it’s going to conform to my current vision, those things will be vital.

The trouble as I see it is this: I know that a system can support short, punchy and pointed scenes. I’ve seen some good examples of it, and have a fairly good grasp of several effective methods for pushing that type of play. But is there any way to push more rambling and digressive scenes using the system? Should that even be a design goal? Or will trying to create rules that do that just derail any game they’re part of?

Part 1: Throwing My Cap Over The Wall

A few weeks ago on the SGBoston mailing list I casually mentioned a desire to run a Matrix-themed game at some point. Not long after that my friend Dev wrote on his blog a post titled “The Matrix: Unknowable”. I cannot say for sure that he was responding to me, but I suspect he may have been, at least in part. And this post is my own thoughts; it is not a response to his post, except insofar as I read it, and thus his arguments got thrown into the stew pot of stuff about this as-of-yet undefined game that has been on my mind.

I’ve been batting around the idea of using a hack of the Don’t Rest Your Head rules, at least to get the ball rolling. That may or may not happen. At this point I am more concerned with precepts than I am with system. Design will come first, system will be added after. Melody first, and then the lyrics.

I kind of want to pick up a copy of the Matrix and Philosophy before I get too far into planning this game. I’ve heard surprisingly good things about it, for a pop-culture philosophy book. I have a pretty good handle on the Gnosticism in the mythic overtones of the first Matrix movie, enough to understand how on the one hand it was even cooler than it seemed on the surface and on the other hand how totally disappointing it was that the rest of the trilogy failed to deliver on the premise and promise of the original. Such is life. But I’m curious to gather perspectives from smarter and more educated people before I delve too deeply.

What I have in mind is to run a game that is inspired by (and thematically similar to) the Matrix. A game wherein the narrative and play concern a Gnostic Allegory as interpreted through the lens of Cyberpunk and the Jungian dissociation so endemic to modern life. What I do not want is The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix^TM Roleplaying Game. So though I expect the archetypes to appear (or be reinvented by the players over the course of the game) I don’t want to start with a game universe that already contains Morpheus, or Trinity, or the One. I don’t want to prescribe the blue pill or the red pill, the Oracle, the Architect, or Agent Smith.

Also within the game, once the sky cracks open and the first glimmers of what may be the truth begin to seep through, I want to give the players at least the opportunity to paint their mythic overtones with larger brush strokes than were used in the film. I like mythic overtones. One of the most disappointing things to me about the Matrix: Reloaded was their decision to introduce a character named Seraph and then do absolutely nothing of substance with him.

(As a side-note: Seraph? Seriously? C’mon, people! Put not your faith in angels.)

(I’m given to understand that more was actually done with that character elsewhere, either in the video games or the Animatrix or both, and I don’t care. If you include him in the movie at all you become obligated to do something not-sucky with him. See also General Grievous. But I digress.)

Finally, and perhaps most crucially at this stage, I’m starting to think this is the sort of thing I don’t want to do at SGBoston. I do not mean to impune that hallowed conclave and all that it has given me, but I have noted in the past a difficulty in presenting certain genre pieces in that setting. These notions have reached a critical mass in my head; if I’m going to do this at all (and it’s looking increasingly like I am going to) I am going to do it right. And that means getting together the right small group of players, and hashing out something big. Something that will likely take a few sessions to play — more than four and fewer than a dozen, is my current estimate. Something that synthesizes the lessons I have learned from the Story Games crowd and the things I still find useful from my days in more traditional gaming and puts them forth into the world in the first instance of something that is really mine.

It’s funny to say that about a game derived from a movie, but, well, there you have it. More to come.

So why do I have a WordPress blog when I’ve already got a perfectly good LiveJournal? That’s a good question… kind of. Let’s discard for the moment the notion that I don’t need to have any good reason for doing things other than “because I felt like it.” OK?

I am wary of over-compartmentalization. If I’m going to have more than one blog, I want to have a solid idea of what each one is for. They might not need actual mission statements (although those aren’t necessarily a bad idea), but ideally each blog should have a clear focus.

In the Fall of 2007 I started attending a weekly meet-up at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge called Story Games Boston. I’ve been playing roleplaying games for much of my adult life, but SGB broadened my horizons in ways I could never have imagined. There was, I discovered, an entire small press and indie games movement. A movement I learned about firsthand by meeting a number of the writers and game developers involved in it, several of whom participated in SGB (or were its founders.)

I had always considered my philosophy on gaming to be among the standard points of view. I liked systems well enough, but I was always more interested in the roleplaying than the games. I wanted to use games to tell stories; I made primary use of the Storyteller System to do just that. And when the system got in the way of story, well, that was life. It could be disregarded or house-ruled at will.

Little did I know that, up until my first contact with SGB, I dwelt in darkness and ignorance. The Storyteller System, it turns out, was not the end-all be-all of roleplay-driven games. It wasn’t even close. Here was a community of people at the Forge and Story-Games.com who looked at the status quo and were deeply unsatisfied. “Why should the system get in the way?” they asked. “Why shouldn’t everything in the system work in service of a good story?”

It was a revolutionary notion, to be sure. And just like the heroes of old, this fledgling community decided to be the change they wished to see in the world.

My perspective on the gaming world has changed radically in the past couple of years. All sorts of new notions and ideas brew and percolate in my head. Unfortunately, in my adult life, the constraints on my time are different, and my opportunities for gaming are significantly lesser than they once were.

I haven’t had a lot of success writing about these new ideas. I started a gaming quotes community over on LiveJournal, but it never really took off. So I’m going to give game-blogging a shot here at Enthusiastick. Maybe even put a few of the things I’ve designed down on paper. Share some actual play reports, all that funky jazz. Where we go from there is anyone’s guess.

But that’s at least one of the things this blog is for.

I graduated from college in the Spring of 2004. Around that time, I established a web presence at Be-Epic.com. This was just slightly before the release of Gmail, when I was concerned about having a stable email address for the rest of my life. Also I am just geeky enough (and interested enough in the web) that having my own site seemed like a good idea.

3 years later, in the Spring of 2007, I participated in the founding of a LARP called Steam & Cinders. The organization running that LARP decided to incorporate, and I was very flattered when they chose the name Be Epic to adopt as their own. Once the corporation existed the be-epic domain was transferred to its ownership.

Which is all well and good, I suppose, except it left me without a web presence. I sifted through the domains I already owned and found none of them to be particularly satisfactory. After an excruciating and agonizing process of coming up with new ideas for a domain name, only to discover that all the good ones were taken, I settled on Enthusiastick.com. That pretty much brings us up to date.

Why should there be a blog here, when I already have a LiveJournal? Good question. Maybe I’ll get to that in my next post.