Nobilis: Session Design Revisited

One of the reasons people worry about blogging is that they’re worried about making mistakes, but as Game in the Brain blogger +Justin Aquino  likes to say, “Better to open your mouth and be thought a fool and corrected so that you are no longer a fool, than to keep your mouth shut and remain a fool” (or something to that effect).  I said something a few weeks ago, and I was very illustriously corrected.  Curious about the new data, I did some hunting, learned about even more tools available to me, and then re-evaluated how and why I wanted to do session design the way I did.

Today, we’re going to talk about Nights Black Agents, Blowback, Lady Blackbird, and Nobilis itself, and the tools all of them give for session design, and why I want to use the tools that I do, and how, exactly, I’m going to use them.

Nobilis Session Design Principle: Projects

Nobilis loves trees.  The universe itself is a great tree, with each world being a fruit resting in its boughs.  Were Jenna Moran a computer scientist (oh she is?  Look at that), I would suspect she was making a pun/metaphor with a tree structure, where each world is a final node in a great tree-style memory structure, because she creates the same structure for your character in Nobilis.

Raoul finds that system of character creation odd, but I happen to love it.  When you’re done, you’ll have a rich understanding of your character and a mess of questions. You’ll do the same with your Imperator, creating not just your imperator, but what he wants and your relationship with him.  Finally, you’ll create a series of “projects,”  associated with various characters, about the story that you’re trying to create.

In fact, were I to just relax and let Nobilis be Nobilis, I would simply stop discussing session design at all and bore you with stories about the rest of my characters as I ramp up my campaign notes and get started, because Nobilis is player-driven.  I’d let the players write projects and simply run the game based on what they chose.

Yo, Dawg, I heard you liked Projects

So why not just use projects for my players?  Jimmy, for example, has the Project of how he becomes an angel.  So why not just run a story where he becomes an angel?  I’ll give you two reasons.

First, I set up the campaign as a mystery campaign.  That’s its premise.  Therefore, for this arc, there needs to be a mystery structure, which means the story is fundamentally about how the players solve the mystery of Abigail Ng’s murder, which is largely worked out.  That might be a misunderstanding of the intent of Nobilis on my part, but it’s how I set it up and it’s what I’m going to go with for now.

But the reason I set up that structure and why I want to set up further structure is not to limit player action, but to support it.  “The story of how I became an angel” isn’t enough to create a full story. Who is the antagonist in this story? What stop’s Jimmy’s character from becoming an angel?  What sorts of twists and turns will happen?  What can I inject to make it dramatic and exciting?  I don’t know, and there’s the rub when it comes to session design.  Suddenly, I need to have something to kick off that story, to add to it, and that’s where I end up putting all the work into the game, and where my interest in maintaining the game begins to break down.  I want to do the work now, while I’m inspired, not in a crunch time right before game-day.

By having other structures in place, I can grab from them to add spice and flavor to Jimmy’s story.  Maybe Meon’s hatred of Cameron Delacroix makes him opposition for Jimmy’s rise, or perhaps Cameron has decided to switch sides, and another excrucian (that I’ve already worked out) opposes him.  By having structure in place, when a player asks for something unusual, I have an entire spice-rack full of ideas that I can grab from.

But why not use projects as the basis for this structure?  After all, I certainly use the same character creation process for my Powers that the players do (I find it turns a few half-baked ideas into more fully formed concepts pretty quickly).  Well, the project with projects is that they’re player-facing.  They discuss what the players want to do and the questions that they face.  I don’t care about these sorts of things for NPCs broadly speaking.  The game should not be about what they want or what questions they face except in that it might give me inspiration for gameplay for the players.

That’s where the ideas from other games come in to help.  I can use a project-like structure in the design of my session-building structures, but projects as written will only serve as an inspiration for the final structure.

Nights Black Agents, Blowback and the Push Diagram

Kenneth Hite pointed out that I had conflated his Conspyramid with his Vampyramid.  Upon closer examination, I see why I did that, because they’re actually mean to be conflated to a degree.  The conspyramid forms the structure of the conspiracy, and the vampyramid forms how that conspiracy will react, and with what agents.  So, if you poke at the bottom later, you get bottom-layer reactions.  As you poke higher up the structure, delve deeper into the truths of the organization, you get more and more dangerous pushback from the organization.  This fit’s Kenneth Hite’s assessment that, in a spy thriller, the reward for information is danger, and the reward for facing danger is information.  The more you know about the conspiracy, the more dangerous the conspiracy is.

Kenneth Hite borrowed the concept from Elizabeth Samet’s Blowback, which is a pay-what-you-want game about burned spies. As it’s pay-what-you-want, I encourage you to check it out, especially if you’d like to support a fellow creator.

The problem with the Push Diagram for my purposes is that it’s reactive.  The premise assumes that the PCs are fighting against the Conspiracy or the Agency, and that the Agency is responding.  The premise for Nobilis is much more free-wheeling and complex than that.  What Meon wants isn’t the same as what Belphegor wants, and while there are definitely forces moving behind the scene, the intent here isn’t that the players are slowly unraveling Lord Entropy’s conspiracy, or uncovering the vast organizational warmachines of Cameron Delacroix.  Instead, they’re meandering path through this mystery will bring them up against various groups with various agendas.

Still, the core concepts fit with the project structure fairly well.  An Imperator has his powers, powers have their anchors, and anchors have their organizations, monsters, mortal agents and so on.

That chart isn’t perfect, of course. Powers do not share anchors, and organizations/mortal agents/etc can be attached directly to powers or imperators, but it does give an idea of the scale of conflict and how it’ll go.  We have an additional problem in that the players are powers themselves.  They don’t start at the bottom.  Rather, they have their own organization and anchors working against one another’s organizations and anchors.  Thus, in fact, players automatically start at level 3, which means most of these charts won’t have much meaningful depth.

But that’s okay.  I intend to have lots of little charts.  We have several other Imperators.  If each player needed to “work his way up that chart,” for each Imperator, we’d be here forever.  Instead, this chart serves more as a guide of what to do.  For example, Lord Entropy has Meon as a power, and Meon has some desecrated nun-cum-cult-prophetess/lifecoach/scammer (say) as an anchor, and he has his Ogres and Nimblejacks and the Cammora. If I want Lord Entropy to be involved, I have no less than 5 things I can draw upon to represent his influence.

This brings us the the Push Pyramid. Hite has it associated with specific aspects of his conspiracy, but we can’t afford to do that, in that because players aren’t actually working their way up the pyramid.  That is, it’s not that players uncover Nimblejacks and so the cult-prophetess initiates a “recruitment” of one of the PC’s anchors into her cult.  Instead, the moment Jack Livingston, Power of Adventure, starts ripping up Nimblejacks, Meon himself will come over, knock on his door and ask what is up, because they’re peers.  So, again, we have a shallow chart: We only care about the interests and motivations of the Powers and Imperator.

But isn’t that enough? Each character who walks out of the character creation system has two questions.  We can replace that with two goals, the two project bubbles that a particular power wants.  The Imperator can have his as well, and these become Imperial Miracles.  When Lord Entropy states that something is true, then it becomes so, and everyone who acts to make it happen gains a bonus.  These become statements of truth about the world, and as actions occur to create “destiny points” in these project bubbles, they become more or less true.  The Imperators become facets of the setting, with their desires shaping the world, and the story often becomes about how the PCs interact with these miracles and the (relatively) more mundane goals of the powers and how they serve their imperator.

If I have all of these things in place, then a given session can be shaped by the desires of a particular set of Imperators, how they interact and what tools they have at their disposal, in the form of Estate, anchors and mortal assets, that they can deploy to see that their will is done.

Lady Blackbird and Setting Design

Lady Blackbird does something different.  It doesn’t have organizations or charts or diagrams at all.  It just has a series of challenges: How difficult is it to defeat a sky-squid?  How difficult is it to sword-fight a bunch of marines?  How hard is it to sneak into Nightport?  And so on.

By sprinkling names, ideas and random challenges, Lady Blackbird creates a series of little inspirations and invokes thought about what they mean.  If Skysquids are very difficult to defeat, this means, first of all, that there are skysquids and, second of all, that they are scary.

I’ve long pondered how to handle discussing things like Vancouver itself, and again, Nobilis provides the rules: Each setting has its own rules, special semi-estate-like rules that Nobles can invoke for minor bonuses.  I’ve already had these rules for Vancouver and a few other areas (like Toyland) for awhile.  But these tend to be high level.  What’s it like to actually be in Toyland?  What sorts of problems might I face in Vancouver?

Lady Blackbird provides the solution to this.  I can treat each setting as three pieces: the Nobilis setting rules, a series of challenge discussions, and perhaps a minor bestiary/NPC catalog.  Then, when players are in a given setting, if I’m at a loss, I can use the NPCs, rules and challenges to inspire me.

Putting it Together

So, once I’ve finished my rules, I should have:

• My overarching mystery
• The PC projects
• The Imperator Project/Organization Structures
• Setting rules, challenges and NPC catalogs.

A given session, then, has four inputs that I can draw on. If Jimmy wants to become an angel, and that interacts interesting with a facet of the mystery, I draw both of those in, hunt over my notes for an interesting antagonist (“Hmmm, Cameron Delacroix…”) and look at why he might want to oppose that based on his motivations/projects and what assets he might deploy against the PCs to achieve those aims, and then we pick out some interesting side-challenges and color based on the setting that the PCs are in.

Lady Blackbird Extended

So, with Cherry Blossom Rain out of the way, what is my next big project?  Well, some time ago, I discovered Lady Blackbird and handed it to Bee (Go ahead and look at it.  I’ll wait.  Done?  Great!).  In my experience, Bee doesn’t want to plan a session.  She hates that!  She just wants action and adventure and awesomeness now.  She comes to a game with vague ideas of what she’d like to see happen, and then she simply lets the pieces fall where they may, improvising with her players to guide them to her scenes, but if something else awesome comes along, she plays with that too.  She doesn’t like to play systemless, though.  She enjoys throwing the dice and seeing how pretty they are, relying on unusual results to feed her story and, in a habit she picked up from 7th Sea, she loves to hand out drama dice or action points.

Lady Blackbird is perfect for this.  All of its rules are literally printed on every character sheet, and Bee, as GM, needs to know none of them.  All she needs to know are these three rules:

• The difficulty of the roll is between 1 and 5 “successes.”
• If players fail, she has the option of hitting them with one of the 7 problems listed on their sheet (Hurt, tired, lost, etc)
• She can hand out drama dice in the form of a pool of dice players can use to boost their rolls (actually, that’s not a rule, but Bee does it anyway, and it works well with the game).

That’s all she needs to know.  The players take care of everything else on their own.  Even better, the game is, in fact, a standard adventure that she can play through, complete with suggested difficulties for various problems the players might encounter.

However, if you want to do anything but run the game with those 5 pre-generated PCs, or do an adventure other than that listed in the book, then you’re basically on your own.  Thus, while Bee loves the system because it suits her so well, she has no interest in tearing apart the mechanics to make her own characters or to create her own adventures (she’s refined the art of the lazy GM, and lazy GMs do not redesign systems from the ground up).  So, I’m going to do it for her.  I promised this as her birthday present, which coming from a published writer, is worth quite a lot ^_^

You know, presuming I actually finish.

Now, I’m not the first one to try to expand Lady Blackbird.  The writer himself took a stab at it, and other people have done their own work, but I think most of them are going about it in the wrong way.  Lady Blackbird has a few key features that appeal a great deal to its audience.  

First, it’s very simple.  You don’t have to shuffle through a giant skill list to figure out how to make your character.  This is the first place I think the Lady Blackbird Companion goes wrong: It lists every Trait its writer could come up with alphabetically.  How are you going to build a character like that?  Will you sort through the entire book, looking for something to build your character?  

Second, Lady Blackbird doesn’t really describe its setting.  John Harper very cleverly gave us some common tropes, and then implied the rest of the setting.  He tells us in a few paragraphs that the world is shards of land orbiting a pale star, and instead of space, we have sky, plied by steam sky-ships.  Beyond that, we only know there are imperial nobles because Lady Blackbird is one.  We only know there are slaves because Naomi is an ex-slave, and we only know about goblins because of Snargle, and we only know about Flamebloods and Sky-Squid because they are mentioned in the potential challenges.  The Lady Blackbird Companion tries to fill in the blanks for you, but the whole point of Lady Blackbird are those blanks.  Do we really need to know, say, the culture of the goblins?  We can guess well enough on our own, thanks.

Finally, the real beauty of Lady Blackbird is the fact that it already includes all the challenges you need to run your adventure, and these challenges double as scene-seeds.  Because it includes the challenge rating for a fight against a flameblooded sorceror, you find yourself pondering how you might get the players to a point where they would battle a flameblooded sorceror, for example.  None of the works I’ve looked at (which, granted, hasn’t been exhaustive) do this.  Instead, they expect the GM to come up with all of that on their own because most people who are writing Lady Blackbird material, other than the original author, come at this from a work-intensive, traditional GM perspective.

So, we’re going to take a two pronged approach to our task.  First, we’re going to research the traits, tags, keys and secrets, cobble together our own, and create a list.  Unlike in the Companion, though, we’re going to sort them by categories: Professions, Qualities, Backgrounds, Magic and Races.  That way the player can look through, for example, the profession list to find what his character’s job might be, the backgrounds to explore what his history is, and round him out with a few Qualities.

Then, we’re going to make challenges for everything I can think of: Different regions mentioned in passing in the book, The various houses, the different kinds of sky-ships, the different races I come up with (including Goblins), the various conditions the book lists on the character sheet.  These challenges will be sorted together in themes.  For example, I’ll find a large, beautiful picture that might represent Nightport, then create a list of challenges that one might find in Nightport, with possibly a few keys, secrets and traits that might be unique to Nightport.  In this manner, I’ll offer the reader not only the potential skeleton of a story, but I’ll also tell him a great deal about Nightport implicitly, rather than explicitly.  That is, by reading the challenges associated with Nightport, he’ll get an idea of what Nightport might be like.

In this way, players should be able to construct their own characters quickly, and Bee should be able to simply flip the book open to some interesting part of the world or some interesting concept, start grabbing challenges, and just run the story.  If I play my cards right, it should be the great book of pick-up games.

Allegria is already pregnant

I just finished the Spring Weekend, and I’ll tell you more about it when I’m better recovered.  Spoiler: It went great.  Probably one of the best weekends that I remember.  But with the weekend over, and Cherry Blossom Rain revealed to the world, it’s time for me to let that field lie a little fallow, lest I burn out, and to focus on my next big project: Extending Lady Blackbird for Bee, her birthday present.

Bee plays very differently than I do, and so expanding Lady Blackbird involves thinking very differently than I generally do.  What does this have to do with Allegria and why she’s pregnant?  Let me explain:

Desiree ran a game about “Steampunk Gypsies.”  I’ll tell you more about it later, but for now, I want to tell you what I discovered after the game was over and I peeked at her “notes.”  She had a few pictures of NPCs, a list of a few names, and a small list of events, including “Allegria is already pregnant.”  Allegria was one of the NPCs, a beautiful dancing girl who fell for my character, and at no point was she pregnant.  So why had she written this fact down? Because, as Desiree explained, she didn’t know how the story would play out until she actually began to run it.  She had listed numerous little “ideas” to draw inspiration from on the spur of the moment.  Perhaps a romance bloomed with Allegria too quickly and she needed conflict, and thus, it would occur that she was already pregnant.  Or perhaps Desiree would need some other complication to keep the game spicy, so she’d draw on something else.  Or perhaps, as was the case this time, the player would feed her a neat idea that she could run with.

In some ways, as I said to her, that’s really not different from how I run things.  She notes interesting ideas as a sentence, I note them as a full paragraph, but in retrospect, I don’t actually think that’s true.  When I put together a game, I envision it in great deal.  I can see scenes playing out in my mind.  For example, I ran a scene in Cherry Blossom Rain where the Witch of Jukai offers to “free” Yukiko from the terrible grasp of Ren.  I could see her fox, could smell the scent of her swamp, see her j-horror features looming in Yukiko’s mirror.  I write those paragraphs because I can see them, like a movie, and I need, very much, to make those scenes more likely, more probable.  I come in the game knowing, more or less, what I want.  I still need to be surprised, I still need the game to flow and change based on what the players do, but those scenes often drive my inspiration like no other source.

What she does, what Bee does, is ultimately different, I think.  I believe they simply walk into a game with no expectations.  They have a premise and little else, and what happens, happens.  They want to have a fun game, and like me, they want to drive the action, though they drive it less towards actual, concrete scenes and more towards general themes that they enjoy: Desiree drives her game towards romance and tragedy, and Bee drives her game towards action and adventure.  What they need isn’t details, but inspiration that they feed into the game like one feeds tinder into a dying flame.  They guide the flame, they stoke it, but they don’t truly control it.

Returning to Lady Blackbird, what I think Bee really needs amounts, essentially, to a giant book of lists containing things like “Allegria is already pregnant.”  Lady Blackbird, in particular, excels at this.  The game master needs only supply the difficulty level and, if necessary, the consequences of the players’ action.  It presents those difficulties in the form of story-ideas: “A sky-squid attacks! Difficulty X to defeat it, with the danger of being lost or wounded if you fail!”  It gives you a difficulty, yes, but mostly, it just suggests that Sky Squids exist, and offers the idea that, perhaps, one might attack.  Instantly, you have a potential story idea, one that’s useless for many GMs, but one that’s rich fodder for one like Desiree or Bee.  I need more, but they need less.  Simple, small and beautiful, little seeds that bloom into full stories.

That’s what my book will be: Little seeds.