Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Chimaerae: Royal Mail Raptor

    Chimaere are artificial life forms, built in a laboratory by magicians and quickened with magical and Demonic forces. They could be built in almost any form, and were used in circumstances where a conveyance more specialised than the simple horse was required. They are correspondingly more expensive, and are mostly the province of large companies, the military and wealthy landowners. Although common varieties are described here, many companies and landowners have their own specially developed “signature” chimaerae, which can take on almost any form available in the imagination of a mage. 

    Some companies specialise in the creation of Chimaerics, and many run bespoke departments which can build chimaerics upon request. Chimaerae are not usually under the scrutiny of the government, so people requesting a specially designed creature need not have much fear of their plans being interfered with by the security apparatus. However, construction of specialised chimaerae is a very expensive and time-consuming task.

    The Royal Mail Swift Delivery Raptor, commonly known as the Postal Falcon, was used exclusively by the Royal Mail service to deliver urgent or important documents to distant locations. About 5’ in length and 11’ from wingtip to wingtip, the Postal Falcon was characterised by a ferocious temperament, fast flight and great endurance. It was designed with claws, wing redundancy, sharp teeth and a venomous tail to make it a difficult target for thieves and wild animals, endowments which also made it rather troublesome to keep. Special handlers called peregriners had to look after these birds, and they were an expensive investment for the Royal Mail indeed. A Postal Falcon can deliver a maximum of 11 lbs of weight over a range of 250 miles, at an average speed of 40 miles per hour. The creature is quite intelligent and can be trained to fly between a maximum of 4 different locations (usually Royal Mail stations). All have inbuilt passive detection systems, so those which fail to reach their destination can be tracked and retrieved. The Postal Falcon  became less useful as a delivery animal, and more useful to the military, as the railway lines expanded in the late 19th century, and was slowly phased out of normal service. It was one of the first Chimaerae to be built and used extensively, entering service first in the late 18th century. 

    (Note: obviously the idea of chimaerae owes something to China Mieville, who wrote about them in Perdido Street Station. My Victorian Infernal world owes a lot to China Mieville, which fact will be mentioned again in future).

  • Weapons and equipment of the Essential Compromise

    The equipment and weapons of the Victorian Era were either simplistic mechanical constructions or complicated magical devices. By this time the peoples of the Old World had become so enamoured of magical and Infernal technology that investigation of the natural sciences was seen as a second-rate hobby, interesting in its own right for those with enough time and money to devote to it but of limited use when compared to the great achievements of the magical arts. 

     

    Scientific discovery ended with the discovery of the gas lamp and the steam engine, and since then Architecture and mathematics were the only fields to continue to develop, both being intricately connected with the Infernal and magical arts respectively. Even medicine ceased to be a viable field of study with the development of the Healing Arts and the return of Witchcraft to rural communities. Europe entered the Victorian Era without electricity or medicine, and with no chance of developing them.  

     

    The Europeans also found little use for Gunpowder. Muskets had fallen out of favour with the military after the development of Demon Weapons, and although cannon retained some usefulness in fortifications, especially as magical and infernal arts made them bigger and more powerful, it was generally believed that any weapon devised using gunpowder could be made more portable, more ferocious and more reliable using magic. So the military returned to the Demon Bow, with elite units using rarer and more powerful weapons and officers carrying old pistols only for show and duelling. Some few gunpowder weapons were developed to a better standard but they always remained cumbersome, inconvenient and ineffective. The Victorians also distrusted gunpowder as an Oriental invention, which the Chinese especially seemed to be far better at turning into a weapon than the Europeans. 

     

    Posts on this topic describe some of the common mundane and magical weapons and equipment of the Essential Compromise Victorian era. The era was full of innovation and individualism in the Infernal Sciences, and so there are many other items than these available in the larger cities of England and Europe; but these posts should suffice to display the common themes in adventuring goods of the time. 

    The chief means of getting about Europe remained the Steam Train, the Horse and Carriage, and the Steamer. By 1875 England was well-served by an extensive network of railways; prior to this more extensive use needed to be made of the horse and Carriage. International trade and travel was made possible by the Steamer and (until the very late 19th Century) the Tall Ship. Various magical and Infernal improvements on these standard designs will also be described in the posts to follow.

  • Reconfiguring AD&D

    So, it is my plan to adapt AD&D for use in the world of Compromise and Conceit, perhaps using my colleagues at the London role-playing club as a test group, or using my current skype players (which is harder – explaining rules over skype is difficult). But one might ask (if  one were reading this blog, which one is not): why?

    I think that AD&D used to be a really bad system (back before 3rd edition) and I avoided it like the plague, playing Rolemaster for years, and then my own system. Rolemaster had a complex system of graded success using skills, which I thought was spiffy, but now I have given up on that idea. Long experience has shown me that graded success just doesn’t work practically. In essence I think that the AD&D skill system is effective but simple, and I like it (and I will have more to say on this). But AD&D and Rolemaster shared the flaw of not being universal, and I see a way to fix it…

    By “not being universal”, I mean that the system does not define all the essential elements of the world in a single model  of random chance. Rolemaster had a separate system for saving throws (and by extension magic), hit points, wound effects and skills. AD&D has the same problem. The system I developed myself made a large step towards eliminating this problem, but had the problem (introduced by me) of being completely crap. But I have recently seen a way to modify AD&D so that the entire world can essentially be described through the skill system. So one’s wounds, one’s magic abilities, one’s saving throws and all one’s skill checks are handled under the same model. 

    I have a vision for a magical cosmology which is infinitely flexible, and allows the difficulty of the magic system, all forms of damage and damage resistance, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different supernatural creatures, to be incorporated into a single model described by 4 skills and a simple diagram. I think my system will be extensible, in that instead of having to develop a new set of spells and a new magic system for every campaign setting – or having to try and adapt the Forgotten Realms spells of AD&D to a new world – one simply changes the diagram, and everything else will follow.

    I think I have also found a natural way to incorporate penalties due to damage into all skill checks. If you develop a character which ignores physical toughness, you will die quickly but suffer relatively few penalties on your way out; on the other hand, a character entirely focussed around physical toughness will take forever to die, but will spend most of that time incapable of successfully doing anything. Further, I think the skill system as modified will enable players to develop any character they want without choosing character classes.

    The big drawback of particular systems is that they are only functional in their particular worlds. I tried using Shadowrun outside of Shadowrun once, and it was a disaster. AD&D works very well in a particular type of elfy-orcy-high-fantasy setting, but it doesn’t move well to other settings. But a system based entirely around a skill resolution method, and with a cosmology defined by a single flexible diagram, can be shifted to a new worldview very easily.

    Of course, when I design it the actual system will be crap. But it’s an interesting exercise, no?

  • The world of “Compromise and Conceit”

    I ran the initial Compromise and Conceit campaign for about 2 years in Sydney, Australia with a variety of different players, and I aim to restart it in the next 6 months. The last version was played with my own rule system (which was bad), but I aim to restart it with a variant of AD&D (or just with AD&D 4e if my variant proves to be bad). 

    I think the skill system underlying AD&D is actually really good, and a lot more versatile than I might have admitted to a few years ago. So with some redevelopment it could well suit the kind of world which Compromise and Conceit is.

    Compromise and Conceit was interchangeably referred to as “the World of the Essential Compromise”, and it was based around this fundamental idea, that the Victorian era was an era of Essential Compromise. I never do anything original, and so I got my original idea for compromise from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, in which one of the characters gives a disquisition on the difference between Victorian and modern notions of hypocrisy. 

    In the case of our role-playing world, the Essential Compromise consisted simply of the use of Demons, and more generally Infernal Technology, to power a golden age of Victorian (and more generally, European) power in the world. The Victorians had a similar, real compromise with technology, of course – their rural way of life (still much-valued by the British today) was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution and they had a real price to pay for their newfound wealth and the maintenance and extension of their corporeal power. In my role-playing world, they pay this price in Infernalism rather than Industrialism, and the industrial world develops more slowly, and is infected and overrun with Infernal technology.

    In this world the original Infernalism was discovered in the 16th Century by Shakespeare and his peers – Ben Johnson, Cristopher Marlowe and Spenser. Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus was written as an allegory and a warning about the use of the Infernal powers his peers were uncovering, and he subsequently eschewed the use of the new powers. At that time magical power was derived directly from the conjuring of demons, as described in Marlowe’s play, but in later years this coterie of conjurors started to research the use of magic independently of their conjured benefactors, and magic was slowly reintroduced into the world. By the Victorian era it was highly advanced, being organised into schools throughout Europe, having infiltrated the church as “Divine” magic, and having a profound effect on industry through the discovery of new materials and production techniques. In this Victorian era they have steam trains, but do not use coal – instead a Fire elemental drives the train. By this means the Victorians have avoided the physical corruption of their environment attendant upon industrialisation, but in the eyes of authors like Marlowe they have invited the moral corruption of Infernalism. This, in essence, is the Essential Compromise.

    Such a compromise necessarily involves the conceitedness of believing that the pursuit of English power is so important as to warrant such a hazardous compromise. It also involves another conceit (in the sense used by metaphysical poets) of dealing with the devil to further the will of god. Thus the name of the campaign, and the definition of the essential dynamic driving the adventures therein.

    Interestingly, in this world the non-christian nations also have a powerful magical history, and they use it to defend their interests against European incursion. This gives further impetus to the Infernal project. In this light one cannot view the Infernal project as a European embellishment on existing history, but a whole alternate history of the world, in which European contact with the Orient and the New World reveals to them the importance of having adopted Infernal powers, since all the Heathens were doing it anyway. 

    This campaign is suitable for a system cut from the whole cloth of AD&D. But I have a plan to make a more specific system, in which combat is more deadly and magic more versatile. I have always thought that AD&D wizards were too weak, and now is my chance to test this complaint against reality…

  • Recent reading material

    So, with my partner still living overseas one would think I have been passing time by reading many many books. Sadly this isn’t true, but I have read the odd one or two of late. One was even role-playing related, though terribly embarrassing on the train… Here is a brief review of books I have read lately, role-playing related or not.

    1. The Third Reich in power, Richard Evans: Part 2 of a 3-part series, discussing the trials and tribulations of a youthful Nazi movement preparing for a catastrophic war. I get into these kind of third reich funks, and one started with this book… unfortunately I am not skilled at reading history, and have found it’s very easy to believe a really shoddy historical analysis if one is not trained. I swallowed Hitler’s Willing Executioners hook, line and sinker, and only discovered a year or two later that it was largely a crock. I believe others have done this with Iris Chang’s book on Nanjing, which includes a fake picture, just as the author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners apparently used some pretty shoddy research. So I shan’t give an opinion on this book… 
    2. The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi: Primo Levi’s masterpiece If this is a Man was in my wedding Amazon wishlist, and I pretty much read it twice as soon as I received it. That book was the story of his survival in Auschwitz; this is his attempt 20 years later to understand why and how it happened from a more philosophical viewpoint, and particularly to dwell on those who did it, and those who abetted them. The chapter called The Grey Area is perhaps the core of the book, because in this chapter he attempts to understand the motivations of those (Jewish and non-Jewish) who protected themselves in the camps by coming to an accommodation with the Nazis. This book is a compelling read, of course, as is everything in this topic, but it is particularly compelling because of the balance of Levi’s perspective. He refuses to judge, and also refuses to forgive, while approaching the whole question with a strong sense of sadness and compassion. I think Levi’s is a rare voice, and it’s a shame that he died soon after this book was written.
    These books are totally unrelated to the entire topic of this blog of course, I have just presented them in order to defend my intellectual credibility, since I have also been reading comics, which are particularly unserious: 
    1. Emma, Mori Kaoru: a comic about a maid called Emma (why would I be reading this, I wonder, when my partner is still in Japan and happens to have the same name…) who is currently the object of 4 men’s desire. Emma is set in Victorian London, which seems to be a bit of an object of fascination in the whole maid culture, but it doesn’t have any of the titillatory effects one might expect of a comic about a maid being chased by an elephant-riding Indian Prince. It is more of an attempt to resurrect the well-mannered and archaic society of the time, and portrays Victorian London as the very height of genteel society, in which a man of high birth and income falls in love with his old governess’ maid and (typically of a Japanese boy) completely fails to pursue her. I’m sure it will come good in the end. Unfortunately the comic is in Japanese so I am reading it at a rate of 2 pages a week. (My efforts to read in Japanese are described here). The end will not come for a long time yet…
    2. Daemonifuge, a Warhammer 40000 comic about Ephrael Stern, a Sister of Battle, who is possessed by an ancient power and is a weapon against chaos. Warhammer may be a shit gaming system, but its world rocks, and the whole chaos-war idea is great. This comic has very broody, gothic artwork and a massive amount of slaughter. Everyone who is worth anything dies horribly, anyone who should be trustworthy has long since been tainted by chaos, and you just know that nothing good can happen. In fact, I don’t think anyone fighting chaos uses the word “good” at any point in the novel. They use words like purge, cleanse, eliminate, eradicate. There is no “good”. This is exactly what you expect in a universe beset by Chaos. I love this world but I think it is so replete with allegory that sometimes it is painful to read. Ephrael Stern is the embodiment of teenage male fear of nascent sexuality; or she is the woman every teenage boy wants to protect, simultaneously frighteningly powerful and vulnerable, needing only the guiding hand of a (slightly nerdish, but well-meaning) boy to set her on a … cough … better path. Warhammer is replete with this imagery, like a bad novel written by a nerdy teenage boy living in cold war England. It has a lot in common with Adrian Mole’s diary. And wouldn’t Adrian Mole be fascinating in a post-fantastic technological chaos-warped future? Dear diary… also, just by way of explanation, this Daemonifuge comic is doubly excellent because random words are marked in bold all through the text…

  • A competitive gaming environment…

    Further to my comments on the soullessness of World of Warcraft, the blog Terra Nova have a post about Blizzard’s recent court victory over a Gold Farming company. In their attempt to stop this Gold Farming company, Blizzard state that

    WoW is a carefully balanced competitive environment where players compete against each other and the game to advance through the game’s various levels and to acquire game assets.

    which sounds like the description of a perfectly operating free market. This is what Blizzard set out to create, of course, for the reasons I mentioned before, and in this court case Blizzard are just trying to protect their unique power to intervene in that market. It’s not as if this is a problem per se, and one certainly cannot criticize Blizzard for managing to mesh their commercial interests with the gamers (virtual) commercial interests.

    But I contend that it is soulless. And this particular phenomenon – Gold Farming – has managed to enmesh the world of virtual gaming in the same political dynamic which has overrun the manufacturing industry. Gamers now have the good fortune to be able to choose whether or not to use sweatshop labourers in China so that they can become better equipped with discretionary consumer goods in Kalimdor (or wherever). It’s the classic metaphor of the lazy westerner using cheap labour – now we can’t even be bothered playing our own games.

    One cannot fault Blizzard over the efforts to protect and build their business, of course, and obviously they (and the Gold Farmers) are providing a service a lot of people want. But I can’t think of a better example of the creeping insinuation of the everyday into a gaming experience, or a clearer statement of the role of the MMORPG business model in ensuring it, than this.

    The Gold Farming model is a fascinating one, and now there is a documentary describing it.

  • Capitalism and Warcraft

    I played World of Warcraft for a month recently, while I was wasting time between finishing my studies in Japan and moving to London. It is a pretty world, and it’s fun to run around in, and I chuckle to myself every time a peon says “ready to work!” but ultimately it seemed like a rather soulless experience. There are two reasons for this soullessness, and I would like to discuss them in some detail now, because I think it might represent an interesting fundamental problem of MPORGs.

    The first reason for the soullessness of WoW is just a design problem, inherent to the attempt to make very large or scalable games, and I think Neverwinter Nights (NWN) had it too : everything is the same. The adventures all had the same plot, that simply scaled up as you gained levels. It was just killin’ and returnin’. NWN had this problem in design too – those damn panels meant that every single scene looked the same, just had a different colour. I think this is an inevitable consequence of designing an extensible game, and for example Baldur’s Gate 2 doesn’t have this problem at all. This made the game boring to me but one expects it and it’s no big deal (though I will talk about this again in the future, as I think it’s avoidable).

    The second reason that WoW was soulless was, paradoxically, the consequence of its being populated by people, who in general (Dick Cheney being the obvious exception) have souls. In order to make an MPORG which can accommodate millions of people, much of it has to run itself. You can’t have game designers tailoring things for lots of users, it’s too much work. Partly this leads to the extensibility problem, since in a non-MPORG game, one usually expects to come to the end of the campaign and thus the game. But MPORGs like WoW aren’t meant to end, so they need to be self-perpetuating. And naturally the simplest way to make an MPORG self-perpetuating is to give the people within it the ability to form communities. But since in a computer world there really aren’t many ways for these communities to flourish, the easiest (and I bet, the only) way to make these communities work is to give them the ability to harvest resources, produce things, and barter them. i.e. to introduce a market.

    And this is what makes WoW seem soulless to me. You are basically running around doing the same adventures over and over, with different opponents, so that you can have money, resources and items to barter and turn into goods that you exchange in a market. In order to make the world self-perpetuating the purpose has been shifted from a story-arc to a community interaction, but the community interaction isn’t the whole and complete interaction of human worlds, but the 2-dimensional interaction of a 2-dimensional world.

    But most of us do that during the day, in our meat-lives. When I am in the digital world, I don’t want to be doing that stuff. I want to be following a tight and complex plot, with an interesting character (preferably group of characters) to a fascinating conclusion, and I want it to happen in interesting places with unique NPCs. If I have to buy and sell shit, I want to do so solely for the purpose of being  more powerful and better able to complete my earth-saving mission. I don’t want it to be the purpose of the thing.

    It seems to me that, by loading humans into a self-perpetuating and extensible digital “fantasy” world, we have actually chained them to the least interesting, most simplistic and most boring aspects of the real world. I don’t know if this represents the limits of virtual adventuring or just the limits of most human beings’ imagination (including the game designers’), but I have a suspicion it is the former, and until we are better able to add complexity to digital worlds, MPORGs will remain bland simulacra of the worst parts of our daily lives – compete, harvest, sell, compete, harvest, sell, until you reach retirement level…

  • Testing “A song of Ice and Fire”

    The Warhammer  Fantasy Role-playing campaign in which I am “particpating” (in the sense that I turn up, and fail to achieve anything for 3 hours in a row) was meant to come to its messy and incompetent conclusion on Wednesday, probably with me being eaten by crazed mutant ratmen. However, for the second time in 3 months, half the group just didn’t turn up, so we had nothing to do. We were invited to join a different group, which was running a trial of the new “A song of Ice and Fire” system. This is a system developed for play in the world of George RR Martin’s books of the same name (he’s certainly a beardy chap isn’t he!).

    The adventure was just a tester – a group from the same noble family travelling to a tourney to get famous, and encountering trouble on the way. It was quite refreshing – no intrigue and no double-crossing, just a simple hack-and-slash (though we still acted as if the whole world was after us).  I played a squire who was very good at running and hiding, and not much else – this is 2 ways in which the character was better than my useless bludger from Warhammer. This Squire also had a few secrets, which I shan’t divulge here. 

    The system itself seemed simple enough, of the kind where your character sheet lists only the skills and traits you do have, talents affect your ability to use certain skills (rather than granting special abilities per se), and everything is run by numbers of six-sided dice used to beat some GM-established target. For example, my Squire had a stealth of 4, so got to roll 4 6-sided dice for stealth attempts. Presumably the number said Squire had to beat would be expected to be between 5 and 20 for most tasks, or was set by the target person’s roll. Because my Squire had some special talents, he could reroll 1s, and got to add his agility to the result, which meant that said Squire was pretty good at hiding. Just as well, because I subsequently discovered he really wasn’t very good at fighting…

    The downside of this gaming system was really very simple. No magic and no monsters. What is the point of that? I want fantasy role-playing, not just role-playing. I did plenty of the latter at workplace training in the early noughties, thank you very much. Give me wizards and fantastic stuff, please sirs!

    Fortunately we won’t be going back to it. Next session is the latest incarnation of Traveller. Groovy covers and random character generation… I can’t wait…

  • In the beginning…

    I have started this blog to try and describe in public some of my ideas about role-playing, particularly fantasy role-playing. I am interested in both the theory of role-playing game design and the practice of role-playing, especially refereeing. I’m also interested in some of the cultural phenomena attached to role-playing, and to the related world of computer games.

    I have been refereeing role-playing games for some time, and my favourites have been set mostly in worlds I invented. I aim to describe some of these worlds here, and some of the events therein. My most recent role-playing world (outside of skype) was an Infernal Victorian steampunk world, and my intention to return to a modified version of this world will inform a lot of the material that I put on this blog. That campaign I referred to as the “Compromise and Conceit” campaign, and so hence the name of this blog.

    Currently I am playing, not refereeing. Until I moved to London I was refereeing a middle-earth role-playing world set in the Fourth Age, over skype from Japan. We shall see more of that later.