attacks of opportunity

The good folks at Story Games have helped me come up with a more descriptive name for my game. The new name is Principia: Secret Wars of the Renaissance.

Principia is now rules complete, which means I won't be making any more mechanical changes except to fix problems that come up in play test. Now I'm fleshing out the content, adding secrets, factions, and adventure hooks. Everyone's gotten really excited about all the crazy over the top renaissance steam punk stuff that I haven't fully fleshed out yet. I guess I'd better get to work on that.

Labels: design, Mathematica, Principia

Posted by Unknown at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments

The form of Mathematica is solidifying. My planned Gen Con release is starting to look achievable. It's now mostly a matter of filling in the gaps. Here's what the game is about in a capsule:

Mathematica is an over-to-top alternate history steam punk Renaissance game where Leonardo Da Vinci builds giant spider war machines and Machiavelli commands a cabal of vampire spies across Europe, or something like that. Or maybe it's The Three Musketeers with lasers, or Henry VIII and his seven undead wives.

In Mathematica, your character's action are tied to a wider war of ideas. Can women decide their own fate? Does the pope speak with the voice of the divine? Is it lawful to worship death? Is torture permissible to fight evil? Are good and evil valid categories at all? These are the kinds of questions that characters can fight for or against and ultimately answer.

Mathematica is built on Clinton R. Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday, a fantasy role-playing game with plenty of room for character change and development, high flying action, and compelling story.

I also just posted an actual play report of a playtest session", and I'm also looking for suggestions for a better name for the game.

Labels: Mathematica

Posted by Unknown at 8:16 AM | Permalink | Comments

Previously posted on Story Games...

I currently need to design an awesome alternate history one-shot to run at Go Play Northwest. Despite the fact that I've got a file full of alternate history ideas, I kind of want to mix it up a bit and also find out what other people think is interested. So I propose this: let me know what alternate/awesome-ized/lasersharked peice of history you'd like to see as the kernel of a one-shot. I'll pick one that sparks my enthusiasm, write the adventure, run it at Go Play NW, and send you a copy.

Here are some more guidelines:
What I need for an entry:

An obscure historical figure you think is awesome and/or

A real historical person or event and idea of how to lasershark it and/or

A real historical person or event and an idea of how to aweseom-o-fy it and/or

A wild macguffing dropped into a historical setting


The setting for Mathematica is rennaisance Europe, but I'm willing to consider ideas in other settings and times (I can just use TSOY for them if they're not appropriate for Mathematica).

You don't need to be intimate with Mathematica, but here's the quick pitch if you're interested:

Mathematica is a game about the war of ideas set in renaissance Europe. But in this renaissance Europe, ideas are made starkly incarnate. This is a world where we might see Michelangelo building giant clockwork war machines, Machiavelli training eldritch doppelganger assassins, or Sir Francis Drake on a daring journey to Avalon to consult with Merlin. It's also a world about epic conflict: the Old Church against the upstart reformers, city states struggling for independence against central powers, threats of foreign invasion, the light of science against the dark of superstition (or vice versa).

Labels: Mathematica

Posted by Unknown at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments

Mathematica has reached the playtest stage. The first post mentioning Mathematica was made here Dec 17, 2002. At the time I didn't think it was anything I'd develop any further. But the idea came back a couple of times after that and I eventually submitted it to Matt Snyder for his "Gamer for Hire" contest (a contest that John Harper's idea 44 eventually won). Matt's comment on Mathematica exactly matched my feelings: "if I had an idea how to do this, it would be awesome."

Sure enough, several months later, I had an idea that I decided to incorporate into Mathematica. That's not to say that the game is anywhere near done, or works, or anything like that. But I do now have a playtest version.

To participate in the playtest, visit the forums here and download the latest version.

Past posts on Mathematica are here.

Update: Apparently there's a problem getting the playtest doc in some browsers. I think I've fixed it.

Labels: Mathematica, playtest

Posted by Unknown at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments

Mathmatica is slowly emerging from the fog. Rather I should say it's emerging rapidly from the fog not unlike a dreadnought bearing down upon a lowly fishing vessel. I need to move fast to keep up with the ideas. System is not my bailywick, so while I think I'm quite capable of designing one that I'd love, I'm going to steal one I really like, The Solar System (AKA The Shadow of Yesterday).

So now, with thanks to Troy Costick, The Mathematic Power 19:

1. What is your game about?
   
   Mathematica is about the War of Ideas, expressed as a physical, emotional, and personal struggle where Ideas are made manifest as technology, magic, and faith.
   



2. What do the characters do?
   
   The characters take a stand for what they believe in, fight nefarious foes, and seek to resolve their personal issues on the way to a confrontation with a specific threat to their way of life.
   



3. What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?
   The players create and resolve the personal issues and beliefs of their characters (as expressed by keys). They use their characters to marshal resources against a particular threat within the framework of a sub-campaign (or Book) of defined length (1-10 sessions). The GM plays a small stable of characters whose fundamental goals stand against the stand the player characters have taken.
   
   Buying off keys is very important in Mathematica. A key buyoff needs to be set up in a particular way that invites other players, the GM in particular to get involved in the buyoff. A key buyoff also moves characters relentlessly towards the final conflict of the Book. This means that resolving a personal issue, even if it’s peripheral to the big battle, moves the action towards the climax.
   



4. How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
   The setting is a steampunk/magical renaissance Europe. The renaissance is a time of emerging ideas, where new ways of thinking challenged old to mold the shape of the world. Where you find a revolutionary idea in History (e.g. Da Vinci’s mechanics), in Mathematica you can create a radical expression of it (e.g. giant clockwork war machines).
   



5. How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
   Secrets in Mathematica are tied to setting elements such as factions and religions. In order to gain access to particular secrets, players will need to take keys that tie them to particular ideas. For example, The Ancient Church of Rome believes in a stable society where everyone has their place. This faction has secrets available to it that are tied to a hierarchy. The gain these secrets, a character will need a key that explains their relationship with this hierarchy.
   



6. What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
   Gameplay will reward players taking keys that motivate their characters, often driving them to extremes in defense of their beliefs. It will reward playing out their keys aggressively. For the GM, gameplay will reward pushing back hard whenever a player pushes on a key. Keys in Mathematica will be connected with a particular person, place, or thing, giving the GM something specific to threaten in relation to a key.
   



7. How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
   The Solar System essentially does this for me. Characters have keys, which are motivations or goals. Whenever a character does something that hits their key, they get XP. Players can also get a big XP hit by “buying off” a key. This means somehow completing, overcoming, or abandoning what the key stands for in a dramatic way.
   



8. How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
   Most types of scenes in Mathematica will require another character. Playing these characters will be divided among the players, so a player always plays to someone else. Players will have some power in setting scenes, particularly color scenes that set up key buyoffs, conflicts, and so on.
   



9. What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)
   The game lets them decide what they want to take a stand on. The stand is something that all the player characters and the GM’s stable are connected to by a key.
   



10. What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
    The Solar System has two levels of resolution. Any conflict can be decided by one die role. In addition, a non-GM player can choose to “bring down the pain”. This launches a more involved task resolution process. BDTP is like a whirlpool that tends to pull other players’ stories in and tie them together. I may include specific special rules for particular types of BDTP, such as large battles, debates, or infiltrations. Players can also create building scenes where they prepare for a future conflict, make a roll, and save up bonus dice for that conflict.
    



11. How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
    Building scenes reinforce the epic component of the war of ideas. Those clockwork war machines? A series of building scenes is the way to get them into the game.
    
    Key buyoff scenes reinforce that this game is about individuals and what they care about. The way to advance the game is to care about something and then put it at risk.
    
    BDTP lets the game have hectic, involved conflicts about the most important things in the game. Everything else can be resolved quickly.
    



12. Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
    Yes. Mathematica will most likely slow down the default character advancement in the Solar System.
    
    In the Solar System, advanced characters can eventually “transcend”. The game will expand the SS rules for transcendence to show how transcending relates to the action of a particular Book. When you transcend, you don’t get to decide the fate of the stand that’s at the center of the book, but you do get to change it in some way.
    
    Since SS characters can advance to transcendence quickly, Mathematica has the idea that players may choose to change characters often between Books, or even in the middle of a Book. Transcended characters can come back later as NPCs. There will also be an option for bringing back a transcended character in an altered form.
    



13. How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
    I’m not sure yet. Transcending should give players a special opportunity to say something definitive about the war of ideas. I’m not sure how that will work yet. I think transcending says that your character is as important to this world’s history as Machiavelli, Queen Elizabeth, or Da Vinci is to ours.
    



14. What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
    Epic but fast paced. Mathematica doesn’t need to follow every detail of an epic from start to end. It can just as easily be jumping into a greater epic at various times and places.
    



15. What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
    Religion. Excepting Dogs in the Vineyard, I’ve never played a game I though made religion even remotely interesting. For example, the game should support playing against the backdrop of the conflicts of the protestant reformation, not as some kind of “us versus them” drama, but as one where individual people struggle to live out the dictates of their faith.
    
    Part of how I’m doing this is by “remixing” religions. For example, the Ancient Church of Rome isn’t Christian. It’s a centralization of the Pagan religion where power is granted to the high priests by the gods, then passed down the hierarchy through a form of investiture. This lets the players explore what it’s like to be related to this kind of hierarchy without carrying a lot of modern religious baggage.
    
    The Christians in this setting, on the other hand, are a loose confederation of local churches who are radically inclusive and believe crazy far-out things like “love your neighbor as yourself” or “forgive your enemies”. This lets players see what it’s like to have a relationship with that kind of belief.
    



16. Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
    The whole game grew out of a desire to create a Tudor England espionage drama. It’s a historical period I’m really into. That setting remains always in the background in what I’m doing.
    



17. Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?
    Mathematica provides a crunchier Shadow of Yesterday, kind of a TSOY meeting Burning Empires.
    
    Mathematica incorporates some of what BE taught me about campaign stakes, but with a lighter ruleset.
    Methematica has a unique setting that encourages alternate history play (yeah, I know there must be other games that do this, but I haven’t seen them).
    



18. What are your publishing goals for your game?
    Big pdf file available online. Small print run if preorders support it.
    
    I have two projects on the burner in front of Mathematica, so mo M playtests until they're done. They are Magicians of England and the City of Forgotten Gods Web game, both of which are ready for beta level testing.
    



19. Who is your target audience?
    Role players with indie sensibilities and a taste for epic campaigns or set-length sets with a solid goal. Possibly some hippie-gamer and D20 crossover on the edges. It doesn’t show in this writeup, but hippie games like Contenders and Universalis are a major inspiration for this.
    

Labels: design, Mathematica

Posted by Unknown at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments

Several of my game design obsessions are starting to converge and it is good: Mathematica (discussed here and here, Campaign Stakes, and Renaissance England spy drama.

Mathematica is a game about the war of ideas set in renaissance Europe. But in this renaissance Europe, ideas are made starkly incarnate. This is a world where we might see Michelangelo building giant clockwork war machines, Machiavelli training eldritch doppelganger assassins, or Sir Francis Drake on a daring journey to Avalon to consult with Merlin. It's also a world about epic conflict: the Old Church against the upstart reformers, city states struggling for independence against central powers, threats of foreign invasion, the light of science against the dark of superstition (or vice versa).

In each 5-7 session set of Mathematica, the player characters will take a collective stand in the War of Ideas. The stand must be for some idea (e.g. freedom), as embodied in some institution (e.g. the Florentine city state, their family). This is what they are fighting for.

Their opponent (played by the GM), is some other institution whose goals and beliefs are contrary to those of the PCs, (e.g. The Holy Roman Emperor seeks to reunite the provinces of Italy under his crown).

This can be further refined by defining one or more battlegrounds. The battleground determines what kind of conflicts can be expected to play a central role. If the battleground is the hearts and minds of the people, social conflicts will be central. If it's political power, espionage and intrigue will be important. If it's control of the land itself, there will be battles.

Other people and institutions which are not at stake in the War can also play a role. Just because your game isn't about science, doesn't mean that you can't have Galileo in the game. In fact, part of the game will be deciding who the important secondary characters, historical or non, will be.
The fate of the PC's stand will be determined by a series of actions and conflicts that represent the back-and-forth of the two primary powers in the set. Each session will probably include a conflict that will change the battleground in some way. At the end of the set, the battleground will change permanently in some way determined by the winner. Naturally, sets can be played in series, or in a loosely linked ongoing campaign. You could be fighting the shadow war against the spies of the Old Church in Queen Elizabeth's court this month and fighting off the armies of the Khan next month.

The game will also include a scene economy. I'm taking ideas from both Burning Empires and Contenders here. Players will have a range of scene types they can engage in, each type providing them with a different kind of leverage on the game world. In a Eureka scene, a player makes some discovery that adds some new possibility to the War. Michelangelo inventing the tank is an example, or perhaps Francis Bacon discovers the mathematical premise for animating dead tissue with life. Building scenes can be used to make macro changes and apply ideas or skills, building a lunar vessel or raising an army are examples. Color scenes can be used to introduce things or people into the world without requiring a die roll (similar to BE), as well as battle scenes, conflicts, and so on. Renewal scenes will allow characters to heal by renewing their contact with their ideals, loved ones, and so on. Threat scenes will allow characters (the GM being a character) to place other characters' sources of renewal at risk.

The point of the scene economy is for the characters to determine what kind of conflicts the game is going to include and how those conflicts will play out. Let's say you want to play the last stand of a few brave knights against the undead hordes of Cardinal Richelieu. Here are some things you might have leading up to the battle:

• A GM color scene establishes that there's an almost endless horde of undead.


• A player building scene establishes the recruitment of a few of the finest knights in the land to stand against them.


• A player has a renewal scene where they bid their family goodbye, possibly for the last time (healing some sort of damage from a previous encounter)


• A building scene where a leader exhorts his fellow knights (negating the GM's "outnumbered" bonus for the upcoming battle


• A threat scene where we see the poor of the city struggling (and mostly failing) to get out of town before the horde arrives

When a set is completed, based on the final result, the players narrate how the world changed as a result.

Labels: Mathematica

Posted by Unknown at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments

Tony will love this.

Maybe the crazy advanced technology of Tony's proposed Mathematica game (not to mention the entire steampunk genre) isn't just because of some mystical understanding of the power of mathematics. Maybe it's also because our conception of history is flawed, and our chronology is off by a thousand years. No, not a thousand years shorter than it actually is; 1,000 years longer.

This is the conclusion (the thousand-years-too-long part, not crazy advanced technology) of an actual, real-world Russian mathematician named Anatoli Fomenko. Using his knowledge of celestial mechanics, Fomenko worked out that the eclipses described by Greek ur-historian Thucydides could not have happened between 431 and 413 BC, but they do match the ones known from AD 1037 to 1053. His conclusion: history is bunk, the Peloponnesian War and the Crucifixion both happened less than a thousand years ago, and all those popes with similar names are actually the same people listed multiple times.

Fomenko's arguments are presented in a book titled The Lost Millennium: History's Timetables Under Siege*. An excerpt is provided, along with some more details, in a book review on Macleans.ca, linked there and above. Take a look, I think you'll be entertained.

(*The author of the book is not Fomenko himself, but another mathematician named Florin Diacu. The book is available on Amazon, if you're interested.)

Labels: Mathematica

Posted by Philip at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

Some time back, the campaign concept Mathematica made an appearance on this forum.

I was re-adapting Mathematica for Matt Snyder's game contest when I had some more thoughts.

To recap: Mathematica is a game set in the rennaisance, only in this rennaisance, DaVince builds giant spider robots, Machiavelli trains ninjas, and one man armed with the power of Euclid can overcome an army.

Originally Mathematica was presented as a campaign setting, but I'd like to revisit the idea as a narrative game. This is a game about the power of ideas made radically overt. When Archimedes says he can move the world with the right level, he means it literally. We're talking moving Jerusalem to the coast so that the Venetian fleets can bombard the city with Greek fire. Players are encouraged to introduce their favorite historical figures, events, and ideas and make them walk the earth as never before.

Yes, I have been drinking.

Labels: Mathematica

Posted by Unknown at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments

Roger's last post in "Has it all been done?" tweaked my brain, and so I present:

Mathematica (with apologies to Stephen Worlfram)
"Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth."
-- Archimedes

In rennaisance Florence, a seemingly random meeting between Machiavelli, Michelangelo and a mysterious stranger from Athens sparks a conspiracy that will change the world. Armed with the secret lost writings of Archimedes, the three hatch a plan to unite the warring states of Italy and rule the world in a new golden age of enlightenment and knowledge. It doesn't work.

At first, armed with their newfound method of manipulating the world through the knowledge of Plato's pure mathematical objects according to the priciples of Archimedes and the laws of Euclid, the cabal makes great strides towards a better world. But the Papcy is not amused. Under the guidance of the newly named Cardinal DaVinci, the armies of rome march armed with engines of war such as the earth has never seen. The engineering geinus of DaVinci forms an equal foe to the mysticism and machinations of the Cabal. Italy seems destined for a long bloody war.

But what of these stirrings in Germany, where un unheralded genius dares to speak that Euclid is wrong, that light has a definite speed, and the parallel lines may indeed meet.

In a universe where fetishized mathematical principles yeild awesome powers and improbable feats of engineering are possible, anything is possible. All your rennaisance favorites are back, with new, amazing abilities fighting the intellectual and even the material battle for mastery of the human soul.

Labels: Mathematica

Posted by Unknown at 11:20 AM | Permalink