Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

I recently did an interview with RPGamer about Bleeding Edge and some other general topics. I talk a bit about personal stuff, a bit about work routine, and a bit about CCP design philosophy.

Said today:

Mirrors: Bleeding Edge

“World of Darkness with Bleeding Edge is definitely the best cyberpunk game I’ve seen (admittedly, I haven’t gone looking very far), and I’d probably go as far as to say that it’s the only game that gets me for the same reasons that I like cyberpunk novels.”

– Rich Ranallo

White Wolf’s just released my cyberpunk rules for use with The World of Darkness. In Bleeding Edge, you get new mechanics for incorporating your character’s upbringing and career, rewards for loyalty and betrayal, and of course, Plugins.

Bleeding Edge and its companion, Chuck Wendig’s Infinite Macabre, are currently the top sellers on DriveThruRPG, and I’ve been thrilled with the reaction. Thank you.

Here’s a classic: youth, memories, and eternal lifedeath. Most of you probably know what I think already, but let’s give it a roll, shall we? I’ll recap.

Creatures of Theme

“Damnation is doing the same thing over and over, and getting the same results.”

– J. Carlton, Nosferatu Harpy of Baltimore

In vampire media, the damned are not just long-lived, but eternally similar. Nick Knight obsesses over right and wrong. Spike engages in bloody devastation for women who barely know he’s there. Louis… has some daddy issues. What drives them to good and evil deeds remains the same, decade after decade. In order to capture this, Vampire posits that the Kindred are more eternal than even they would like to admit.

Vampire: The Masquiem

Vampires aren’t so much creatures of habit as they are creatures of theme. Being a vampire isn’t about living and growing for another century. Being a vampire is about still being the same person a century later. As young as you are, as old as you are, just as you are.

Does that mean vampires are immune to character development? Not at all. What it means is that a character’s life defines her unlife. Her circumstances change, her ideas change, and the world she deals with changes, but the feelings in her gut remain the same. The crusader becomes the activist, the mother becomes the leader, the junkie becomes the preacher, but she continues to view her world through the lens of emotional experiences as a mortal.

As a player, this can help you ground your character. As the intrigues of the Danse Macabre surround him, as the Beast roars for release, as years of torpor distort the facts of mortal life, it can be hard to connect with your character on a human level. The eternal nature of the Kindred, however, ensures that their strange horrors and alien hungers never separate them entirely from the people they were — people like us.

The Kids Aren’t Alright

On the other hand, not everyone’s Embraced in youth or middle age. Some vampires are born near the end of their natural lifespan… and others, an accursed few, return from the grave much earlier. What happens to a child who can never grow up?

World of Darkness books have dealt with the subject before, but I’m curious what you think. What themes of gothic childhood and innocence entrap these unfortunates? What’s happened in your games?

First one to mention Hard Candy gets shot in the leg.

The World of Darkness is about THINGS BLOWING UP and PEOPLE GETTING KICKED. And most especially it is about CROSSOVER.

When the Pentex Corporation¹  formed an elite force of monsters to test out new Weapons of Mad Destruction, they didn’t expect the bastards to go rogue. Or start saving people. They most especially did not expect them to escape with a copy of the Gehenna Programme and go on a fucking road trip to stop Pentex.

Vampire: Lucita. Her name’s Lucita. Like it’s engraved on the katana, see? She’s a Spanish Lady, and you better not forget that. She is most certainly not Luci Westenra of London, nor does she have four convictions for exposing herself to young boys. Despite the accent.

Werewolf: His real name is a series of grunts and growls your stupid human tongue cannot pronounce. If you must give him a name, let it be written in your blood and entrails. And let it be spelled KILLFUCK SOULSHITTER.

ChangelingBear: Bear is not a fairy. He’s straight. There just seems to be some confusion over that ghost that lives in his balloon. Bear doesn’t like your attitude, hairless one.

Mage: Mage isn’t sure whether he exists or not. He’s especially not sure when he’s talking to Bear’s balloon. He’s pretty sure he knows the nature of reality, though. Or at least he can narrow it down to a few possibilities. One of which involves you exploding. Bai!

The nextwod team have a pocket universe in the trunk of a convertible and all of the firepower you can imagine inside. They are supremely well equipped to shoot and explode anything they may have to to save America.

Fortunately, Pentex has Sam Haight on their side. He has the powers of all supernatural beings, ever. Even some you haven’t heard of. True, once, he got turned into an ashtray, but he fixed that by killing the only dinosaur that remembered he was an ashtray. Killing him TO DEATH. (Mage claims to understand this. Mage may not exist.)

Sam’s leading an army one shitload strong of Fomori.² And he’s got an assistant, Hunter, who hears things wrong sometimes but is a good kid, anyway. And has some friends online that know things. LEARNING IS GOOD.

Now for the dark side of middle school gaming.

There used to be this bit in every White Wolf book. Or most of them. Remember our golden rule, it said. Take what you like, leave what you hate, and if the dice don’t give you a result that makes sense, forget them. Serve the story, not the rules.

Sometimes it was addressed to the Storyteller, the benevolent father-dom-god who rules over the characters’ lives like the Tick Tock Man. Sometimes, it was just there.

Innocent enough, yes? By the authority of the designer — and since the days of TSR, wasn’t that the highest authority? By that authority, you could change anything. Tell the Internet that something’s terribly wrong, that you don’t want your Ravnos gone in a week of nightmares… and that’s what they’ll tell you. Golden Rule.

Who does the golden rule serve, though? From there derives the authority of the Dungeon Master, yes… but was it ever intended for the hands of the Dungeon Submissive? Can the golden rule be a safe word, can it say “no, you cannot break my character for your story because I need him intact for mine?”

There’s another response, of course, also familiar. “Don’t play with groups you don’t get along with.” But that’s just a straw man, or, when the flames come, a wicker one. Because we all disagree sometimes. I can point you to the best, most cooperative, most creatively coherent group I’ve ever seen… and they still disagreed. Came to words, even, looked in rulebooks. But the book’s no defense, is it, not in the face of the golden rule.

The Dungeon Master does more work… supposedly. Does that entitle him alone to apply the golden rule? And if so, isn’t that a different golden rule: that he who owns the books, rules?

I wish I could say I dread moments like these.

If you haven’t seen it, basically:

• We’re at a convention. Player asks a designer why an NPC’s position in a novel isn’t reflected in-game.
• Designer responds that he thought the character was dead.
• Player provides supplementary information. NPC is not dead.
• Designer says they’ll fix it.
• Crowd applauds wildly.
• Internet cites video as evidence that either the player is an undesirable or the designers don’t know their own game.

I’ve been in the… what do you even call it… professional mythology business… for five years now. I worked on EVE Online, the world’s second-biggest MMO. I’ve been in charge of what I think is the world’s most complex vampire property.

And… yeah, I’ve probably given a wrong answer at a convention at some point. It’s not that big a deal, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, continuity gets mussed. Dozens of writers, a half-dozen designers, small mistakes get made. We don’t like that, but it happens. I’m told Star Wars has employees devoted entirely to continuity, and they still have mistakes and inconsistencies. We mess things up, and we have to fix them later. Or we change them, because we’ve got a compelling reason.¹ I object to bad retcons, but not to retcons generally.²

Second, your game designer has to keep everything in their head and notes at once. Whereas a player asking a question is capable of considerably more focus on a specific question. I don’t have all of Vampire memorized: I look things up when I don’t remember them. At a con, I don’t have that luxury. It’s quite possible that someone will ask me a question about, say, the Akhud, at Gen Con, and I won’t get it right.

Mistakes frustrate me sometimes. I remember one, in particular, in a Requiem book. No one’s caught it so far, but it bugs the hell out of me. If it comes up in a future book? I might well contradict myself. I’m certainly not going to shoot the setting in the foot to keep it consistent with something I did wrong in the first place. Any more than I let rules that I wrote poorly dictate the path of new rules I’m doing right.

Should players be mocked for being so into things? For having that focus? Not generally. This guy was polite, reasonable, and apparently had spotted an actual error. Nothing wrong with that. Hell, I’m pretty sure I could ask Green Lantern writer Geoff Johns a really tough question if I cornered him in a public restroom.

So, no, I generally don’t dread getting asked a question I fumble. When you work on big settings, it’s just the kind of thing that happens. You move on, fix mistakes, explain ambiguities, or, sometimes, leave well enough alone.

It’s a day in the life. Have a no-prize.

Rose and the Doctor, Fafhrd and the Mouser, Axe Cop and Dinosaur Soldier. Two heroes, simultaneously different yet essentially the same, facing danger and death.

Count Dracula without Felix? The Count personally fucks that noise.

Buddy adventure, whether cops, swordsmen, or time travelers, is pretty much my favorite fiction format. I’ve tried my hand at writing it¹, and it’s been a staple of my gaming forever. Hackan and Marek were pre-steampunk brother swashbucklers. Frankie and London were two kids lost in the night and the city.²

Oddly, it’s a structure mostly ignored in roleplaying games. I suppose it’s partly because the ur-campaigns of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson featured large casts of rotating (and sometimes short-lived) PCs. Besides enjoying the format, one of the reasons I’ve run buddy adventure so much is that it’s been easier for me to gather and focus two players than four.

Most games work pretty well with two players and one GM, though rules occasionally need fudging. What, though, about two players, no GM? I can think of a lot of times in my life when I’ve had one other gamer available and neither of us was keen to take on the sole GM responsibilities.

There are a few good examples, but the best is Emily Care Boss’s entirely excellent Breaking the Ice, a game that follows a couple’s first three dates. Boss has a particular talent for what I like to call “roundtable” games — roleplaying games that aren’t so much based on eliminating the GM as distributing the traditional GM duties. In addition to the base game, which you have to play with somebody who’s not squicked at telling a romance story with you, I’ve run a number of sessions of Meet Your New Partner, the same rules applied to buddy cops.

Since this is an under-explored design space, where could we start exploring it? A game about two characters should be defined by the push and pull between them, as well as their push and pull with adventure. The character contrasts (push) and compatibilities (pull) are what drive our scenes. Their motives (pull) and obstacles (push) define their adventures.

Traditional GMed games make the adventure’s pushing the responsibility of the GM. Players may or may not bring push between the characters to the table. Adventure push is possibly the defining feature of the referee as created by Dungeons & Dragons. In my experience, it’s one of the first things that falls out when D&D-style groups decide not to use a GM.

What about pull? Most games provide a bit of intra-party pull in the form of the characters needing each other — rules and settings are generally designed to make sure no one goes alone by default. The adventure pull is usually also the domain of the GM, although most games provide a default pull, like “treasure beneath the earth.”

I’d suggest that for a two player game, the mechanics should remind players to provide push and pull. Your adventure push could be as simple as “roll for wandering monsters.” Adventure pull’s a little harder: at some point, somebody’s going to have to say “this is what we want.”

Fortunately, your genre’s going to come to the rescue for both of these things: pushes and pulls are usually familiar constructs. Buddy cops? Pulled by justice, truth, revenge. Swashbucklers? The glitter of jewels and the gleam in dark, pretty eyes. Time travelers? The wonder of the unknown.

You have a relatively finite number of goal types, then, and it’s easy to brainstorm new ones, especially if you have random tables or other such divinatory aids.

What about pushes? The genre and divination tricks apply here, too, but I’ve also come to the conclusion that having players cycle through pushing each other’s characters works really well. In other words, I describe my character’s response to the situation and the complications your character faces, then you take those complications and respond to them, then send some more my way.

"This place reeks of adventure and excitement, Sam!"

Gameplay lends itself towards being both cooperative and competitive, which most heroic partnerships are. Rose and the Doctor try to top each other on one-liners. Legolas and Gimli count kills.

So, let’s boil this down into a quick list of questions, starting from the broadest subject (characters) and drilling down all the way to the combat round.

• Characters:
  • What sets your hero apart from your partner’s hero?
  • What do your hero and your partner’s hero share?
• Adventures:
  • What does your hero want from this adventure?
  • What’s the overall nature of the obstacles your heroes face?
• Scenes:
  • What’s at stake in this scene?
  • What’s in the way of what your heroes want?
  • How can your hero top your partner’s hero?
• Actions:
  • What’s your hero doing?
  • What’s going to complicate things for your partner’s hero?
• Are they fucking? The Internet wants to know.

Those are your narrative questions, which should be a good foundation for plugging into traditional roleplaying games (with more or less time statting the obstacles, depending on your system).

How can we go further, though? How can we embed those questions into the rules, so that gameplay is a series of natural reminders to do the things that make these adventures better?

And how can we build a fantasy adventure game that utterly nails them?

For the last few years, alongside developing Vampire: The Requiem, I’ve been working as a content designer on White Wolf’s next generation online game, World of Darkness.

Last night, World of Darkness was announced to White Wolf’s fans at The Grand Masquerade. I’m extremely proud.

This actually isn’t much of a change for me; I’ve already been doing this job for years. I’ll be keepin’ on with it, along with developing Vampire: The Requiem as a tabletop RPG. But now y’all know. And hopefully you’ve got a glimpse of how cool it will be.

Thank you all for taking me this far. The sun’s setting, friends, and we’re going to have a hell of a time together after dark.

The clanbooks, in better hands than mine

(This one’s for Hope. She knows why.)

After writing new material for Requiem for Rome for a few weeks, I was going to pull back from Vampire material a little bit. (I still might. What do you folks think?)

As it happens, though, I was doing a little cleanup, and I ran across the original introduction to Kiss of the Succubus. I thought it might provide an interesting peek into the clan book design process.

Originally, Ayesha of “All Tomorrow’s Bodies” was going to be the book’s compiler. The framing device was going to be you, the reader, traveling cross country right after the Embrace, with only Ayesha’s notes to guide you. The detective story elements that I used in “All Tomorrow’s Bodies” were going to be a stronger theme throughout the book.

The rest of the plan was pretty much the same: the Old Bat and the plot and most of the same stories were going to be in there, though the documents were going to be in a slightly different order.

However, Chuck Wendig wanted to use a fledgling on  a roadtrip as the framing device for Savage and Macabre, and I felt that it was more archetypal for a Gangrel than a Daeva. So Kiss moved over to being a family album. That let me shake up Ayesha more in the parts of the book she kept, which made those stories stronger, and the ongoing story in the series that much better.

That progression of the clan books was important, especially at the start of the series. We didn’t want to jar players who’d been with us and were used to a sort of top-down, scholarly approach to content. Well, we didn’t want to jar you too much.

So the series starts with a history, something that’s almost a World of Darkness book as it would be written from inside the World of Darkness. You pretty much know how to relate to that already. The second book is a family album. It’s a bit more personal to the compiler, it’s a bit more flowery in a couple of ways, which suits the Daeva really well. And then, bang, Gangrel gets even more personal, because almost the entire book is someone’s diary. Which sets you up for a plunge into conspiracy and occultism with the renovated Mekhet, after which you make a blind turn down the wrong alley and meet the Nosferatu entirely on their terms.

And with that, here’s a peek into a version of the book that never quite was.

***

[PRODUCTION -- This is a neatly handwritten document, probably a photocopy, even better if it's a mimeograph. The original author is Ayesha, the lead interviewer used elsewhere in the book.]

Good stories start with dead girls. My upbringing talking, obviously, but I graduated early from Nancy Drew to Black Mask. Did a lot of reading, before I could play. So, here’s the start of your story, and here I am, the dead girl to get you started.

I’m dead. You are, too. That’s why you need to listen to me. I don’t know who did it to you, but from now on: the world’s out to get you. Doesn’t matter who you were yesterday. Tonight, you’re a predator. And you’re probably hungry.

You’re a [PRODUCTION -- put vampire scratched out or markered over or something?]. I won’t use that word again. You don’t get to, either. You don’t say that word. You don’t tell the truth about what you are to anyone, ever. Early nights, that’s going to be very hard. Do you have a girlfriend? Probably not. If it’s a chick that ripped you from the grave: she’s not your girlfriend. Hopefully by the time you see her again, I’ll have taught you enough to keep her away.

Rule one: start lying. Get used to it now because it will be very, very hard. Right now, you’re fighting the urge to go running to your mom or your best friend or somebody and tell them everything you know. Which is not much but is too fucking much for anyone to hear. Do not pick up the phone, do not press send. Do not ever tell the truth again.

Tell anyone, and someone will die. Maybe you. Maybe them. But there is not a single kind of good that can come from you telling what you are. The worst, stupidest lie you can tell is better than someone knowing that you’re a half-step away from opening them like a milk carton. (Oh, and by the way, you are. I’m sorry.)

Why am I helping you? Because helping you helps me. Somebody’s just handed you my biggest secret, and you’re in a very good position to blow it.

What do I want in return? Anonymity. If you make it: rewrite this. Change the personal specifics in this document. Hand it to the next sad sack like you. [PRODUCTION -- Assume this has been done, several times over. If you have any awesome ideas to make that clearer, go ahead!]

Alright. Now let’s get you dinner.