[The Shadow of Pavis] Solar System - what makes it cool?

When I posted about me playing a Gloranthan game, I said I would post something more on the game system. Instead of just telling you how it works, I'm going to try to say why it makes me think it a good match for this game.

One of the features of the so called "Solar System", is that you have something called keys. I guess you could say they are late cousins of the Spiritual Attributes in The Riddle of Steel. For those of you who became none the wiser from that, I'll say they are triggers for things which gain you XP.

So, the fine things with these keys are that you pick them yourself during character generation. This means you get to decide what you want to do to gain XP! Isn't that kind of sweet, eh?

If you have a key like, Key of Hatred of Uz, then every time your character can show some hatred against trolls, you gain XP. Simple.

The second thing I wanted to mention is Pools. In the basic and generic Solar System, you have three pools of points which you can spend on rolls. All abilities are tied to a pool, and chuck in some of those points and you get to roll more dice and have a far better chance of success.

Like you have figured out by now, that means you can decide when something in the game is important for you and make it pretty likely your character get to shine. Also, it is a pretty cool resource management level in the game.

Thirdly, the best name of a game sub-system ever, is Bringing Down The Pain. I love it. Bringing it down is something you can do in a resisted conflict when you are going to fail, and just wont let it pass that easily. Regularly, you can't kill anybody unless you bring the pain. The vanilla conflict, if it's a fight, is a one roll affair to decide who wins.

When the pain is brought down, you go blow by blow in whatever conflict there is. For all those you you who had played a game which glosses over the nitty gritty when you wanted to dive in, this is where it shines. Having a mechanic like this makes it possible to customize when you want to have an involved game system and you just want to move on.

So why would all this make it a good fit for Glorantha? Well, I think that in a world where the mythic and the mundane are juxtaposed like they are in Glorantha, it's crucial to be able to decide when to "zoom in". RQ always had the same scale on things. I means, in a percentile system everything goes from 1 - 100 since that's the maths, right? It always makes it a bit wonky when you try to mix in godlike abilities and the fact that the power scale between a dirt farmer and some of the movers and shakers are so huge. HeroQuest/Wars tried to remedy that with "masteries" for every 20 steps of an ability, and they could then cancel each other out to reduce the system to a manageable level. While that is kind of neat, I think the Solar System manages something similar in a way more too my liking.

Another thing I like with the Solar System is the idea of gift dice. It is a neat way to make communal support a part of the system. In Glorantha you usually can't make much happen without the backing of someone else.

Most important though, I have always wanted to test the system! Now I had, and it was fun.

The Shadow of Pavis

So have I finally joined the ranks of Gloranthaphiles who have fought their way out of the Big Rubble. Last Wednesday, a day that had sucked from when I got out of bed, ended well with our brave adventurers escaping with their lives, and nothing much more.

Way back when RuneQuest was the game of choice for gloranthan gaming, everyone were gaming in the plains of Prax and in the city of Pavis. Far later everyone shifted their focus to Dragon Pass, but latecomers like me never got to experience Prax. Now I have at least addressed that.

There was a time when whatever somebody posted about on Big Purple, the recommendation was to use Savage Worlds instead. The darling before that had been The Shadow of Yesterday. I have the former, but have never played it. The latter I had become very curious about, due to the above mentioned recommendations. Now we had a setting and a system, we all just waited for the lovechild of that union.

After character generation, we started off in media res, but not in the midst of the adventure. After the adventure, having a drink and retelling our adventure!

We had a very peculiar setup. Our GM knew little of Glorantha, the other player nothing, and I know far too many odd little details thanks to my extensive collection. How do that work, do you ask? Well, you just set up a dramatic and appropriate scene based on general knowledge, and when an NPC asks "Tell me more of how that happened!", you as a player with more setting knowledge can step in and add to the background. It was an interesting way to involve the players. There's often talk about player skill, and I found that having the GM set up a tight spot and then as a player have free reins to develop that situation, both by solving the immediate problem and by fleshing out the setting, was an interesting usage of just player skill.

Our brave adventurers was on an expedition into the Big Rubble, which is a dungeon which can contain anything. We ran into some weird plantmen, i.e. elves, which scared us witless. Exchange of gifts according to some ancient agreement with the Pavis cult took place, as we invented that ritual on the spot. After being amazed by a levitating rock, chewed some narcotic leaves and stolen our gift from the elves, our thief managed to loose it in a cesspit. The local occupation force did not detain us, since we had after all our troubles no treasures to tax.

I think the lessons of this session was how a backward narrative with a swapping of tall tales in an inn worked quite fine to set up short and challenging set pieces for us both to solve and embellish. It was a good way to develop both the setting, story and characters without heavy prep, massive reading assignment on the setting and a nice way to keep the session contained and restrained both in time and space. Really good for a one shot.

We didn't exercise the game system that much, but The Shadow of Yesterday didn't get in the way, and the possibility to tailor the abilities you get XP for was interesting. I might write more on the game system at a later time.

Why I love and hate Glorantha

Today I was moving around some of the piles of gaming fanzines I have collected. Glorantha is a game world where most of the interesting things for a long time was published in fanzines, and not by a regular rpg publisher. It's happened a few times before, Warhammer FRP is another good example. Now I found my copies of the Pavis and Big Rubble Companion volumes III and V. Naturally (I am a crazy completist) I felt that maybe it was time to try to track down copies of volume I, II and IV.

For those of you who didn't knew about this wonderful little creation I'd suggest you visit the excellent site Ian Thomson have created in support of the magazine. There you will also find the reason I hate Glorantha.

Did you notice where Ian wrote about his stuff being superseded by Greg's latest thinking on the matter? That drove me nuts. Gobs of cool and gameable stuff was produced, and often with a dash of humour. Much later it would become clear that Greg had been thinking about it, and it would be declared false on a panel at a Glorantha convention or in a much later product from Issaries which usually looked far less like a professionally produced product than the fanzine where the idea first appeared.

Now, Glorantha is Greg's creation, and it is his to do with as he feels like. But, for someone who just wanted to play a game, and not wanting to run into "canon conflicts" with other gamers it was a mess. I have nothing against Greg personally, I have never met him, but this aspect of him as the Creator grated on me. Some Glorantha fans have made it a verb, so to contradict an old fact is now known as Greging. I sometimes, depending on mood, find that hilarious. sometimes I just groan.

The world Greg created contains some very evocative stuff, like the tragedy of the hero Arkat, and the very strange and truly alien trolls. I love that guy Arkat! One of these days I will just try to ignore the hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff on Glorantha I have on my shelves and just game the hell out of it. I hope.