A game of intrigue in the court of a Queen as capricious as she is beautiful, in which character sheets are sonnets composed during play.

A few rules tweaks and some formatting essentials later, here’s the first attempt at a final draft of this year’s game:

Blood_Love_And_Rhetoric

It’s a game of poetry and courtly intrigue where your character sheet is a Sonnet.

Blood_Love_And_Rhetoric_draft1

Enjoy!

See the first link for detailed description if you’re not familiar with the game.
Weekly turns, with the first one starting in one week (April 25), follow-the-phantoms variant (with an additional restriction on the first turn)

The Premise paragraph:
Being an account of the disastrous events of the 49th and final Feast of the Four Nations, in which the leaders of those great nations, representatives of sixteen lesser polities, as well as diverse additional persons of consequence consumed two hundred and twenty five courses over nine days, and during which hope and tranquility were lost.

Please come by and join if you’re interested.

The germ of an idea that began my entry was using time travel to re-use a modest map several times, and then see just how far I could push the ideas of shorthand and compression in this kind of format.  The result is an adventure that would fit right in to most Doctor Who-inspired campaigns, and be usable in just about any game set on Earth in which adding time travel and a touch of mad science wouldn’t strain the genre boundaries too much. It would help for the party to be approximately as averse to initiating violence as your average Doctor Who character, but should work reasonably well even beyond those boundaries.

One of the other Entrants recently put up a post about an entry set in a group of rooms connected by teleporters, and, more generally, about viewing dungeons as directed graphs, which is fairly apropos to this dungeon.  I even happened to draw the directed graph of Godzina House’s temporal maze in the process of designing the thing.  It’s simple and fairly easy to see is inevitable given the constraints: with two entries and two exits at each node and no two-cycles anywhere, it looks like a  Star of David inside a hexagon.  Add in the entry point at 2011 and the exit at 63011 and you’ve got what was on my notes for this.  (There wasn’t enough space to actually put it on the page, and the table format is much more useful for a GM running the thing at any rate.

Here it is: mysteryofgodzina

The introduction:

A Trick of the Light is a roleplaying game for four players. At least one of them is playing the role of a real person who traveled to the ruins at the center of the desert. The others may be real humans, ghosts of people who died along the way, or ancient spirits, good or evil, that have resided in the ruined city for generations. To pass the time as you wait for rescue, you have chosen to tell stories about the journey that led you here. As you tell and listen to these tales, you will slowly gain insights, about yourself and your companions. In the end, if you are real and alive, you will need to make a decision about who can be trusted. If you are a spirit, you will need to lead the living to a decision, good or bad depending on your nature. And if your are a ghost, you will need to name your killer, and hope to serve vengeance or support the innocent.

A_Trick_of_the_Light

A_Trick_of_the_Light_v2

The problem here is that we have a potential violation of the mediocrity principle in that “about 1 and a half years ago” will look like an extremely significant and unique time.  But I can live with that, and explain it away as part of the cause of this whole cosmological stew in the first place.  (Maybe that’s the time it took between the initial vacuum collapse event and the multiversal realignment or something.)

First, I divide the entireity of history into epochs, using a logrithmic scale.   (Base two).  I cut off everything more recent than 1 year ago (as the differences would be hardly noticable) and everything more distant than about 10 million years ago (For simplicities sake.  I’m presuming these epochs do ‘exist’ in the cosmology, but their gammas are too high to let them matter.)

For each time line, starting with the most distant epoch, walk through the epochs.  Generate a random number (a double between 0 and 1). If that number is less than that epoch’s gamma value, record a ’0′ for that epoch.  If it’s more, roll again.  If less, record a ’1′.   If not, roll again, and so on.  For anything that is not a 0, seed a random number generator with  a function that encodes every number recorded so far for the timeline and generate a random year inside the epoch.  That’s when this timeline diverges from timelines with a 0 in this place.

At the end, we should have a list of 25 numbers, most of which are zeroes, so we’ll abbreviate  long strings of them, to get something like “(17Z)1.0.0.0.0.0.0″ (or “(17Z)1(6Z)”). That’s the prime cell’s timeline designation.  (If I use the designations in-setting, I’ll need to add the extra leading zeroes to reach the beginning of time.)  And I’ll also have a list of dates for the divergences.

The tricky part, of course, is getting the gamma values correct: finding a smooth function that gets me a dramatically interesting set of timelines.

I tried to get a map even further zoomed out, but openstreetmap will only give two decimal places in latitude/longitude at that scale, and I need 3 to make things line up sufficnetly well.  You can really see the ordered-ness of the structure at that level, especially with the colors I’m using now, which are dependent on the position in the8-cell repeating unit. When I get distribution down, I’ll change the colors to something based on what type of cell we’re gettin. At this point, the basic categories are “No Humans”, “Utterly Alien Humans”, “Recognizably Alien Humans (who share the same antiquity as our time line, that is), “Cultually recognizable non-technological timelines”, “Bombed out Wastelands”, “Profoundly Illiberal modern societies”,  and “Close parallels”.  The assumptions that lead to this are:

• humanity is lucky to have surived the bottleneck roundabout mitochondrial eve’s time, and doesn’t in anything diverging earlier
• the world’s major religions are apparently not the product of actual divine intervention and so don’t occur in anything diverging earlier than their founding
• The industrial revolution was profoundly unlikely, and doesn’t happen in timelines that don’t resemble ours around the time that it did, for the most part.
• Our timeline was surpassingly lucky to have seen nuclear weapons invented during the last throes of a world war.  If they’re invented any other time, their first use is much more widespread and the reaction to them is not that of a world profoundly tired of war, hence the wastelands.
• The more frequent (which does not mean the same thing as more likely) outcome of the World Wars was a second round of fighting immediately with the soviets, leading to their domination of Europe and a considerably less prosperous and more illiberal America.)