Tag: Xenoverse

With my fiction writing, I coined a saying: “When a Muse comes upon you, you don’t ask which one.”

Once again, it is Melpomene (tragedy).

Clear a Path

Just over 200 words, which is my usual fragment size.

Elmö’s Obligation

Seven-Part Pact is played using a framework….

At the start of each in-game month, every player decides how they plan to Spend Time that month. You have 4 tokens, one for each week (roughly). You can place these tokens on various people, places, and tasks. Place one on your Sanctum to spend time there, maybe change something about it. Place one on a Companion to spend time hanging out with them. Place one on the Grimoire to spend a week casting a spell slowly, patiently, carefully. Place one on your Domain to attend to your Wizardly duties (e.g. managing the wilds or advising the king or looking into the Dreaming or whatever it is you do). Etc. etc., many ways a Wizard can spend their time.

These represent the major stuff. The primary task you plan to focus on that week, the activity that’ll receive most of your attention and effort. It’s simply assumed that your character is still otherwise, y’know, living their normal day-to-day life and attending to mundane affairs….

Once everyone’s placed their tokens, we begin resolving the next month of activities. Going around the table, one at a time, each player retrieves one of their tokens and resolves that action….

You can resolve your…tokens in any order. Additionally, once per month, you may move one of your tokens before resolving it, at any time and for no cost. So you have a little bit of leeway to reschedule things on the fly. In this way, players plan ahead but can still be fairly flexible.

So far, this might sound less like an RPG and more like a board game. “Alright, this week my Wizard visits the island of Ishana to recruit a Bard to join the king’s Royal Court.” Done. Next player. Turns go by pretty fast, which I consider to be an advantage. But when does it feel like a roleplaying game?

Well, let me tell you about…Scenes.

In addition to your four Spend Time tokens, you also get one star-shaped token. Wherever you place your star token is where you get to have a Scene. A Scene is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the part of the game where we zoom in and start roleplaying as our characters moment by moment, speaking in dialogue, moving around rooms, casting spells, etc.

For most players, Scenes are the highlight of the game. But to me, it’s important that they merely punctuate the game. They’re an exception to the baseline mode of play. Instead of asking, “when is it time to zoom out and switch to a downtime timescale?” like in D&D, we ask “when is it time to zoom in and switch to a real-time timescale?” If we’re resolving an event as a proper Scene, then that means it’s important….

— Seven-Part Pact: Time – A Knight at the Opera

Author’s emphases both bold and italic.

I read that blogpost and immediately saw this game mechanic as a sufficiently light structure to use with our leisurely Xenoverse free-form roleplay. My friends and I do not play there much at all these days, but we do continually discuss what we want to play. These are broad strokes that easily fit into week- or month-long “game turns”—with the Scene being a spur to actually have regular in-character (chat) session, however short.

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The finale of the (someday-I-will-finish) Elmö’s Obligation story will lead to Xenograg recruiting a young orc martial artist as a henchman. He will then recruit others of his species into service with Xenograg, forming a small combat unit (~25). I had envisioned them as heavy cavalry, on horses, but willing to also fight on foot. Their primary duty was to be a bodyguard for Xenograg.

Then the Elmö’s Obligation story gained an unexpected detail while being written: the young bravo (to be named Ingraf) who Xenograg duels was originally to be human but is now hobgoblin. He, too, has a small following of his own people. While not a henchman, this hobgoblin will become a loyal retainer. He will likewise end up leading another small combat unit comprised of his people.

The usual depictions of these species is of hobgoblins being more disciplined than orcs; more soldier than warrior. So should Xenograg’s new heavy cavalry unit instead be the hobgoblins? Do I change the orcs to heavy infantry? Do I leave them both as cavalry, with the orcs being reduced to medium?

I forgot one detail: these orcs are unusual within their own people, specifically that they are martial artists, and are more disciplined from it.

In the prior blogpost, I looked at increasing reload time to slow down rate-of-fire. Now to look at reducing the number of shots per load. Returning to the flintlock as starting point, the lowest number of shots before needing to reload is one. What if we retain the modern, fast reload time?

This is actually very applicable to ray-guns. Energy weapons require power cells which are more analogous to magazines than individual cartridges. Modern ergonomics has the bullet magazine in the pistol grip. A convenient button press plus gravity removes the empty magazine, and your off-hand has the new one ready to insert. My change here is to have a magazine-shaped power cell which is empty after a single shot. Reloading only take a couple of seconds, but has to be done frequently. No dual-wielding here, either.

The third “dial” suddenly becomes the limiting factor: sustained fire depends upon the number of power cells readily available—that you can carry. The return of bandoliers!

Still a problematic rate of fire, but the total amount of shots someone has available is lower than speed-loaded revolvers. Also unlike revolvers, this design cannot fire in a rapid burst at need.

This latter design fits Xenograg’s sonic disrupter weapons. It also answers why the Drachen Walde revolver is still his everyday sidearm: much lower ammunition encumbrance.

While the flintlock and revolver pistols mentioned in the prior blogpost have been fully articulated for roleplay by me, the disrupters never have been. Specifically, the number of shots possible before needing to reload the weapon. This is important for the following reason:

The massive impact that guns bring to roleplaying games (and real life, but nevermind that now) comes from the high rates of fire possible in modern firearms.

Thanks to modern bullets, magazines, and speed-loaders, even a semi-automatic or revolver gun generates a sustained rate of fire far in excess of any other missile weapon. This results in high lethality in gun combat. Unless your game milieu is explicitly about that, it is disruptive to roleplaying. To reduce that lethality, rates of fire need to be drastically reduced.

Sustained rate of fire (SROF) comes from the combination of three factors:

1. Number of shots before needing to reload
2. Time required to reload
3. Number of reloads readily available

Adjusting any one of these “dials” will change SROF. For simplicity, I will confine the remaining discussion to pistols. For my first adjustment, I will draw upon the historical evolution of gun development for inspiration. The focus is on reload time.

For 200 years, the best gun technology was the flintlock. At best, it could maybe fire four times a minute. This was due to it being laborious to load and that for only a single shot. I cannot imagine a high-tech weapon being that difficult/slow to reload, though.

The invention of the revolving cylinder in 1836, C.E., predates the invention of the pre-assembled bullet cartridge. A revolver gave its owner 5 (later 6) shots before needing to reload, but the reload process was nearly identical and just as laborious as with the flintlock—now multiplied by that same 5 or 6 count of bullets. The new combatant type called pistoleers carried two or more revolvers because reloading an empty one would take several minutes; better to holster the empty gun and draw another loaded one. Pistoleers frequently held a revolver in each hand. Revolvers with replacable cylinders were developed to speed up reload time (some), but at the cost of dual-wielding.

Even at this point in history, such a rate of fire is going to be problematic to roleplaying. Less sustainable, at least; knowing you have a fixed amount of loaded ammunition does make one more deliberate in their use. That is only a soft constraint.

The next blogpost will look at focusing upon the first dial.

As prologue for a future post, a summary of existing lore:

Xenograg comes from an Iron Age civilization, but has been in Rhydin for over thirty years. He has had plenty of time to become accustomed to higher technologies—including guns. His marriage to Amaltea first introduced them to him as her homeland of Barsi has a tech level equivalent to our Napoleonic Era. Xenograg’s first gun was a flintlock pistol.

Later exposure to Stars End Spaceport and its “spacer” denizens eventually led to an upgrade. Lady Azjah’s family business, Drachen Walde Industries, includes an armaments division. She repaid a service rendered by Xenograg with the gift of a “modern-yet-retro” pistol: a six-shot 12mm revolver (slug-thrower). It has been Xenograg’s sidearm for over twenty years.

Seeing that the quest to avenge Llewys Greymantle’s death would constitute a small war, Xenograg ordered a cache of guns from Drachen Walde Industries: six crates, each containing a sonic disrupter carbine and pistol. Alas, they did not arrive in time for those battles. Only one pair has ever been taken from their crate, and solely for handling practice. Xenograg has never carried either.

The next blogpost will look at the problem of adding guns to a roleplay milieu.

I had the privilege of roleplaying Xenograg with a gamemaster who is an artist. This piece depicts a scene that was “offstage” during live play; it was inserted later in written form and illustrated.

Earlier in the campaign, Xenograg’s legs had been the focus of a torture session: not crippling, just painful. He and I agreed to keep the scars and some minor disability. It was his idea to have Xenograg wrap his knees over his trousers for support. It makes for a great visual detail. Not the only one, though.

Xenograg wears his sword on his right hip as his right hand was maimed at the time: he was missing his first two fingers. He had to (re)learn to swordfight left-handed.

Lastly, the long sash is of the same exotic material as his cloak, woven by the aastego. It is wound around his waist several times.

For over a year, my attention on the Xenoverse/Rhydinspace has been on Xenograg rebuilding his depleted retinue. Not just rebuilding but expanding it to a size not seen since the Monastery of Arra.

Things are different now, though. Not so much with Xenograg as with me. The monastery-as-warband predates my getting married, buying a house, building a retirement nest egg, and being the primary breadwinner for a (very small) family through easy and rough economic times. My perspective has changed, and I regularly notice how different I see the matter of Xenograg’s responsibilities to his ever-growing extended family. Not just the St. Germain’s but a new generation of retainers.

I used to see these non-player characters (NPCs) solely through the lens of the Dungeons & Dragons rules. Primarily, via their weekly/monthly costs. I did not see the value for quite a long time. Then my game master gave Xenograg three henchmen, at once, to help him survive in what is now called a “duet” campaign. I quickly learned their value both mechanically (e.g., combat) and as a spur for actual roleplaying.

One thing that game master did not include, though, was logistics. Like many roleplayers, he was not interested in the realistic challenge of how Xenograg would manage with three more mouths to feed. His simple solution was ensuring Xenograg always had sufficient wealth to render the issue moot.

I kept that same conceit all the way through the Monastery of Arra. I paid lip service to the realistic necessities by including affectations in my roleplay: Xenograg commenting about being low on funds, regularly monitoring the monastery’s cash flow, fretting the cost of keep construction, needing to take a loan, et. al. But he always had enough.

Good times. Simple times. It is not that I want this gritty realism in my roleplay, now. I just feel that it needs to be there. And that it will have upsides, too, creatively.

“The first phase of a duel is the psychic dominance contest. A duel is often lost before the first physical pass at arms. I have seen a duelist back down and concede defeat, having recognized his opponent’s superiority; it saved his life, in fact.”

“My sorcery is a martial art. Psychically dominating all opponents is a core skill. The training to improve this skill is adversarial. Two sorcerers will intentionally prolong the dominance phase of a duel, pushing the limits of both mental strength and endurance.”

“A disciplined will is the hallmark of someone with significant martial, magical, psychic, or even spiritual training.”

“The exertion of will in this way has a drawing-in effect. Done with sufficient intensity, the local environs can experience a temperature drop and even frost.”

“A sorcerer will also channel power into his body. The most common effect is augmented strength. This energy flows mainly down the arms and out through the hands. This release manifests as heat; You have seen the burned-in handprints on my bokken’s hilt.”

— Xenograg

“What do you know of hobgoblins?” asks Wyheree.

“Only the well-known axiom, ‘there never is just one hobgoblin.'” is Xenograg’s reply.

“How many moons does Rhydin VIII have?”

“Six.”

“No, it has seven. There is one your instruments cannot detect.”

Watching the new streaming miniseries Shōgun got me thinking about my visual representation of Xenograg at his current age of 72. The definitive image that is on my homepage is 18 years ago!   ::gasp::

Had I chosen a film/television character at that time, it would likely have been Tiberias from Kingdom of Heaven, portrayed by Jeremy Irons:

Jeremy Irons, then-age 57

While I have a fondness for the 1980 version of Shōgun, I am very pleased with the new show’s increased role for the character of Toda Hiro-matsu and its marvelous portrayal by Tokuma Nishioka. His gravitas immediately struck me as an excellent visual analogue for Xenograg today:

Tokuma Nishioka, age 78

The core of the following was written extemporaneously during a chat conversation with a friend. It is a “Xenograg in Space” snippet that highlights how unexpected magic can be in a solar system where technology is the default.

A klaxon unexpectedly sounds on the bridge of the pirate ship. They had just waylaid a small, unarmed system cutter and ordered them to prepared to be boarded. The First Mate looks up in shock from his datapad.

“Intruder Alert!” he declares. The pirate captain’s head snaps around to face the First Mate.

“How can we have intruders?! Our shields block Transporters!”

“They did not use Transporters, Capt’n! They teleported aboard using magic!”

“They wha—”

The Captain never finishes his sentence as six bellowing orcs in plate armor storm onto the ship’s bridge. Two are not even bearing guns, just melee weapons. The Captain and First Mate are shot dead without even touching their own holstered sidearms. The rest of the completely unarmored bridge crew die from a single stroke of sword or axe, each.

The orc leader speaks aloud because it makes it easier for him to project his thoughts.

“The ship is ours, General.”

>Well done, Darg,< Xenograg sends in reply. >I am very impressed, in fact. Convey my honored respects to your band.<

I have a new page under Other Fiction that tells of Xenograg’s first trip to Gateway Station which orbits the planet Rhydin III. This will tie into my Rhydinspace setting.

Without further ado, University of Rigel Medical Center at Rhydin.

I have been giving thought to defining the Rhydin solar system. As Rhydin is a cross-genre campaign world, “Rhydinspace” is likewise. So science fantasy. I am starting my definition from the science end of the spectrum (e.g., space is a vacuum) and “softening” the science with fantasy only as needed.

See also Magical Defenders of the Solar System.

Check out this Mastodon thread

(Republished this preface of a previous post as a standalone.)

7 Myths Everyone Believes About Druids suggests that druids should be fractious.

Dojo Storming is but one example showing that martial artists are violently rivalrous about their skills, masters, and/or schools.

So, too, should magicians because it would be an identical situation. Spells are analogous to martial art maneuvers: most are common but advanced ones are secrets known to perhaps only a single master and her disciple. How shall all other magicians in the world learn such secrets? By force, most likely. Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series—a major influence on Dungeons & Dragons’ magic system—depicts all wizards as jealous hoarders (and thieves) of the hundred spells left in that world.

Xenograg’s homeworld of Panadus has not yet advanced to where schools—of any kind—are common. Indeed, the Imperial School founded by Demograg was part of his sorcerous revolution. The three masters that coexisted as the Veler Magi were unique; likewise their College where the sum of their knowledge was taught.

Xenograg is the only person to ever be a student of both those schools. That fact predates this retrospective but this is not a retcon. The old and this new dovetail nicely. The original narrative portrayed Maret, the last Veler Magi, as very wise and peaceful. Amazingly, it is Maret who invites Xenograg into the College. Xenograg did not seek it; would have believed it impossible. To his mind, Xenograg would have had to “storm” the College to get the spells within.

Now there is a “What If…?”

Addendum: I neglected to include the witches coven. Either through temperament or necessity, female magic wielders are often depicted as working together in small groups.

The solar system of the Realm of Rhydin defaults to a technological science fiction setting. It is cross-genre, though, so all fictional milieu are allowed: Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect, et. al. Fantasy, too, but that is very rare since those characters already have a cross-genre setting of their own.

It is that rarity that I am focusing on.

I hypothesize that magical threats can and do physically arrive at the edge of the solar system. Being of fantastic origin, such a threat should be difficult-to-impossible to detect by technology. Even detected, perhaps not accepted or believed. Even believed, technology might not be able to counter the threat.

Thus a need for magical defenders in space. The problem lies in the tiny pool of potential recruits. Very few fantasy characters self-select to interact with the science fiction side of the Realm of Rhydin, let alone take a ride on a spaceship to Gateway Station in orbit.

This new original content is an Easter Egg for myself. One of the first, crude pieces of roleplaying fiction I wrote back in 1983 was a powerful magical sword called the Elemental Blade of Fire. It was owned by Xenograg’s father, and disappeared when he died. Xenograg has always desired it for himself though for childish reasons. Other writings in recent years gave me a new insight into the “how?”, “why?”, and “where?” questions regarding this legendary item. Finally brought together to start the new year.

Without further ado, Elemental Blade of Fire.

“The living fight the living. The dead fight the dead. They are not to fight each other. This is the Law.” — Xenograg