Welcome, Friends.
The sprout is now growing into a fine sapling. Our Labyrinth Lords game, started on Gio.'s first sessions and a whim with my attempt to wrangle a handful of mostly-strangers at a Tokyo community room rented out for wargamers, has become a campaign now worthy of the term.
Writing after our half-dozenth successful session, below are some thoughts as I attempt to grasp the essence of what we together are trying to create:
Our Approach
Old School: Labyrinth Lords is a recreation of the basic D&D and 1st Ed. AD&D rules. The system itself is older than half the players and simple enough for the GM to still have mostly-memorized from a childhood of collecting and reading the Classics of the genre.
Loose and Free: Dice are something to keep our fingers busy. Gio.'s painted miniatures are second-to-none, but mere props. Character sheets are mostly a fig leaf we use to cover our naked egos as we leave behind our adult lives to speak in funny voices across a table; also to help remember who has the cursed shortsword. The rules were designed for a game we are not playing. You systems-engineers speak up, but this flaw is in its own way liberating -- if you step outside wearing an out-of-style coat three sizes too small you have only your imagination and wits to rely on when greeting the world head-on.
A Collective Story: I take pride in assembling and executing a good session, but it is really the players who own the game. We play with who can make it, characters (made by me but shaped by you) sometimes swapped between players as we settle into our favorite roles. Every session you wrest control and take us all for a ride to test my preparations and ad-lib skills. Sure, the outcome can be messy, but it's our collective mess -- if any of us wanted to write a book or script by ourselves we wouldn't ride halfway across the biggest city in the world to do it.
Themes
A Banal World: We are creating a world, not just an underground dungeon or tableau for high fantasy gear-fetishism. This is a world full of normal people living normal lives interrupted by adventurers, the wrongs they right, and the chaos they leave in their wake. Wounds hurt and are not easily healed, and the dead cannot be raised, even by those who are not charlatans. Magic, when not the theoretical plaything of the literate few, is both rare and terrifying. Thieves are too busy scraping by to organize into guilds of merry miscreants. Magical artifacts too often bring grief upon their wielders (and envy upon their beholders) as much as they bring power.
Tragic Heroes: No one is without flaws. Like in real life, our foibles don't buy us "bonuses" elsewhere; they just make life harder but at the same time infinitely more rich. Heroism is much more heroic in contrast with smothering normalcy and human frailty.
The Core Remains: Despite this, there are still the tropes of the genre -- a party of misfit adventurers bound together for unknown reasons; lists of quests to uncover ancient power; cozy inns filled with big personalities and story hooks at every table; backwoods filled with filthy evil humanoids reflecting the dark side of our own psyches; often-surprisingly lethal battles in the swamps and streets, with or without consequence.
Motifs: Fate, mostly inescapable. The Old Ways, disappearing into memory and legend, but not without a fight. Provinciality, ignorance, and backwardness. Human weakness; emotional, spiritual, and physical. Wrenching ethical decisions amidst moral gray areas. Discomfort from cold, wind, and rain.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Let us get started, here, this record of our adventures!
-RK
24 September 2011
looks good!
ReplyDelete