So last Sunday we began our In a Wicked Age game. We drew an Oracle from The Nest of Vipers. And so it started... 

• The ghost of a suicide, a person overcome by guilt and shame, who finds in death no release.

• A warehouse on the docks, full of stolen silk and fine stuff.
• A young widower, raging, whose beautiful wife was murdered by sorcery by a romantic rival.
• A court dandy, casually cruel, exiled from the presence of the prince for a petty slight.

From that point on we identified characters in the Oracle and went from there. We actually listed a number of characters and elaborated on how they were connected to each other and the Oracles. After the game we noted that that part of prep overlapped the later establishment of best interests and could maybe be left out. On the other hand we had easier time the rest of the prep when we had done that. So I guess both approaches would work.

We ended up combining the prince and the young widower. The beautiful wife was combined with the ghost and the romantic rival ended up being a playboy wizard. We had a bit more trouble with the docks oracle, but then we established the court dandy as the loser of royal silk and a thief gang which had stolen it from both the prince and the thieves' guild (who were in cahoots).

Warning to the Little Game Chef Judges: Don't read this entry. (This warning is probably pretty useless, I'd be surprised to hear that any of the judges frequented my blog)

I guess I'm gonna have a pretty busy week. I had marked Little Game Chef on my calendar but I didn't actually think about competing - after all, I just got my fridays off from work to work on my dissertation so no reason to take up any more activities, right? Wrong. L'il Chef's theme, immersion, piqued my interest.

And by that I mean that it irritated me, got me out of my comfort zone, made me think. And I got this crazy idea I just had to follow through. See, the biggest obstacle of immersion is other players and their non-conformist ideas. So why don't I make a solo story game supporting immersion. Throw some Stanislavski into the mix to get your creative juices flowing and you should be good and ready. It'll be nothing you can imagine based on that description. Instead it will rock. You'll see.

Btw, the ingredients: blah. Sea, horse, midnight, burn. Are we supposed to write a rpg based on an Iron Maiden song? Well, I'll manage that. In fact, it's not a problem, but I have to wonder how these things are chosen. Yes, I know, restrictions are good. But we can still complain about their inadequacy, right?

I decided to try to take on the additional challenge as well. The Harper challenge for the layout fitting on two pages of A4. Just for the heck of it and maybe to learn something about layout design. I mean, if you have a full week to design a game, you might as well make it a finished product, too. Especially for a ground-breaking effort like this one. Or as some would say, for a un-playable hippie art piece such as this ;)

In this second part I will describe the second part of our third session of Shell Shock in Gaza. I will also address a couple of points that have occurred to me during this play test. These are the influence of writing Actual Play reports on our games as well as the discussion on how our game has infuenced our views on the situation in Gaza.

I had prepared the following course of action as the action-oriented part of our third session: When the bombing of the police station would start, both civilians and Hamas fighters would try to escape from the station towards the locations of the player characters' group. The action would have (again?) consisted of quick decisions that would have to be less than perfect. Who to fire at, who is a civilian and who's a Hamas gunman etc.

The actions of the players changed this scenario. The more conservative line of Cpl. Spielberg which Sgt. Baruch also adopted resulted to the palyers' groups position to be revealed to the Hamas fighters and the police in the station before the air strike and the people tried to escape with more conviction and better planning that I had planned beforehand.

Yesterday I had quite a journey in teh interwebs and the archives of RPG theory miscellany. The highlights included me finally getting the concept of fruitful void and system as Vincent Baker describe it.

I started from an innocent-looking discussion on Story Games titled The Fruitless Structure. The main point of that discussion was that reward mechanics, in time, often make people blind to the actual virtue that is promoted but try to play the mechanics itself to maximum gain. Relating to RPGs it is not enough to follow the mechanics but to look and negotiate around them to find out where they are pointing towards. And also to have common goals and expectations related to the game at hand in your group. Seems pretty logical and many of my own early experiences with story games provide evidence of this effect.

From there I was directed to an anyway post about about The Fruitful Void (anyway is the blog of Vincent Baker of Dogs in the Vineyard and In a Wicked Age fame among other things). You'd best see for yourselves, the actual post isn't that long. I didn't get it at first. I mean I couldn't relate to it; my most recent experiences on playing RPGs was Shell Shock, and I couldn't pin-point the fruitful void(s) of that game even after a little thinking. It probably didn't help that the other game we are playing right now is PTA, which allows for a void but doesn't drive you towards a specific one.

The photo by Steven Fernandez (Creative Commons, attribution) 

I've had a flu for over a week now so I haven't gotten into writing an actual play report until now. As I wrote the original piece I still had fever but I'm feeling better now as I'm translating this to English. My aim was to change the report format a little bit. We've already played a couple of sessions of Shell Shock so the basic mechanics have been tested and found to be working so I'm not focusing on those if there isn't anything special there to mention. Plus, there's a couple of meta-game-level notes that I've been meaning to write about but haven't really had time and space until now. So here's the first part of my actual play report of our thrid session, the second part will follow suite:

First of these notes is the demographics of our gaming group. I think this is of importance at least to Kobayashi, who can then put the rest of our comments into perspective :) Most of us players are so-called lapsed role-players meaning we have been playing role-playing games actively some years ago (5 to 10) and then the hobby has been faded. I being maybe the strongest exception to that case. With the exception of myself, most of the group hasn't had experience on so-called story games or indie rpgs for that matter (Simo and Laku have palyed some 3:16 though). My recent playing history includes 3:16, Dust Devils, PtA, D&D4E and In A Wicked Age. In our group most of the players probably have played most games of the 90's such as oWoD (meaning old World of Darkness products like Mae and Vampire) (A)D&D, Gurps or older games such as RuneQuest and ICE's MERP / RoleMaster.

Otherwise we are a motley crew: Three of four are about thirty, one being a bit younger, three working, one studying. One is a teacher in history and social studies, other is a researcher and the third takes executive studies. I myself am an IT consultant for those who didn't already know it. The gender distribution is absolute, we are all more or less male.

Events of the session

That's it about background. We played the third session on a Saturday (darn, it's over a week ago, I really got to get this published soon). The session was the second part of the second episode of our game. In Shell Shock you are advised to divide the events of the game into three episodes, the first happening at the beginning of the conflict, the second inthe height of it and the third in the end of it. We had started the second episode covering the ground assault of Gaza in the second session and we continued it now.

The second session was set on the events of the 3rd of January, 2009 in Gaza. The ground offensive was just about to begin and the group with the player characters was transported towards the outskirts of the city of Bayt Lahiya in the North West corner of Gaza. Earlier that evening the group had attended a briefing in which they were given their orders: They were to advance towards a police station in Bayt Lahiya, take a position near it and secure a their own sector near the station. Meanwhile the IAF would bomb the police station. The group's mission was to make sure that the Hamas warriors wouldn't escape before or after the bombing. After the briefing IDF commander Ashkenazi addressed the troops chosen to lead the ground assault. In had planned to describe this speech as a flashback scene, but this was left to be used in the next session.

The Set-Up

At the start of the second session a discussion on the Gaza situation rose before we started playing. That day's newspaper had had an article on the destruction in Gaza and the experiences ofpeople living there during the conflict. We spoke briefly about the article and other subjects that came up. One of those topics were the tactics Hamas used. Matti brought up the argument that the tactics Hamas used which hid them in the midst of the civilians really prevented any attack towards them to being safe for civilians. Laku commented that this was only natural as they had a superior enemy in the Israeli army. Afterwards I wondered if they were many Gazans that were against Hamas's policies and what they had thought about this. We also talked briefly about the Israeli colonists and about their relationships with Palestinians, the Israeli army and the Israeli government. Then we sidetracked a bit and started playing.