Wings Over the Pyre - January 18th, 2007

07:51 am - The Doom That Came to Sarnath

Despite the name of the post, this is not a recitation of one of Lovecraft's best surrealist short poems.

No, it's just an odd meta-mechanic that I thought of for giving RPGs a certain taint of old Viking mythologizing. All too often, we forget that most of the really good stories put an expiration date right up front on the protagonist's head, not in numbers so much as in circumstances. We know they'll go down fighting, or murdered, or die of old age in bed, or wander off into the endless sea. It's shown us, up front. And then, later in the story, circumstances start aligning and the reader tenses, wondering, "is this it?" but it's just foreshadowing and the disaster narrowly averted, we go on, reminded of where the road ends. And, finally, satisfied at the end, destiny is revealed and we close the book, nodding.

Not perfect for every story, of course, but good fun on occasion, and not just in high tales of fantasy, but other genres as well. The grizzled veteran of the previous war who mentors one of our heroes who we know will die in the first reel to motivate the youngster, the bitter killer who goes on "one last mission" you know will be the death of him, or the cheerful and fearless kid who we can tell will end the story with his illusions shattered and his dreams burned even as he walks into the mists of obscurity, all are iconic images that the promise of can drive the story forward.

To that end:

The Doom Game

During character generation, in addition to normal chargen, you need to describe three Scenes in which your character plays a pivotal part:

Initiation

What things are present when the character is pulled into the whirlwind of events? What's going on? At the end of the Scene, how is their mind made up about the course to take?

Conflict

Pick an event during the course of the pursuit to come. You don't have to know what you're actually accomplishing, just a Scene during it. Where is it? What are you doing? What things are around? What thing hinges here that pushes you on toward the end?

Death

You are going to die. How does it happen? Who's in attendance? What are the Props, the Location, the Characters in motion? How do you go out, like a punk or a hero, or something darker?

The Scenes take place in the order defined and if more than one of the Players' Characters arrange to have the same Location for one of their Doom Scenes, all the better, though even if they do they might turn out not to be simultaneous.

For every aspect of your next Doom that you introduce during a Scene, you get one of whatever currency that your game uses for authorial control (unless playing Universalis, see below). For Wushu, that would be Chi, for Donjon, a generic Token that can be traded in for a success, for Capes, a Story Token, etc. If, at the end of that Scene, your Doom hasn't come to pass (the Doom Scene didn't come to pass, etc), take an additional Token. If you resolve your Doom Scene, moving toward your death, the other Players can elect to give you one or more of their unspent Tokens as fan mail.

Why would you want to move toward your death, you might ask? Because resolving your Doomed Death results in being given broad authorial control without risk of interruption or contravention about the Scene and events which cascade from it, to the extent of expense. Any and all Tokens you have left can be spent to dictate the eventual results. Want your grandson to sit on the throne of Caldenoia, musing about his grandfather's tragic loss? Done. Want your homeland ravaged by blood-orcs after your fall from your horse? Sure. As long as you have the Tokens to pay for the facts you narrate (roughly one Token per fact, in most systems), you are the Writer for the repercussions of your fall.

Obviously, this works best in games which already have a strong streak of Narrativist engineering going in, but there's no reason you couldn't use it with straight-up D&D as well as anything.

Universalis has a different spin on this, since aside from the time-disjoint, it's very much business as usual for the game:

Rules Gimmick: Doom Scenes

Important characters can have a Doom Scene Component created and attached for 1 Coin which gets a Trait of Initiatory, Conflict, or Death for free. DSC's can (and, in fact, must) have Traits attached which represent Characters, Props, or Locations involved in that Doom Scene. DSC's can be added to just as any other Component, and the connections to a DSC act bi-directionally, increasing the Importance of the person, place, or thing so mentioned and making it harder to remove from the story until the DSC. Further, presence attached to a DSC is a fact which counters bids that would make an attached Component inaccessible.

When a DSC resolves, the controller of the character so resolved receives the Importance in Coins as a bonus.

Why aren't Doom Scenes introduced as every Scene? A Doom Scene can only be invoked for it's bonus once in a number of Scenes equal to twice the Players. Three player Capes game? Each Player gets to call on Doom Scene bonii once every six Scenes. D&D game have four Players and a GM? Once every eight Scenes. And so on.

I was indirectly inspired by an indy RPG called Wyrd, which has some brilliant doom-and-dire-based-mechanics (which I cannot find anywhere hide-nor-hair, so if anyone knows Scott Knipe, tell him to find publication or look me up; we can work something out), as well as ongoing thinking about Elric, Conan, and their space-driven cousins, the Metabarons. Plus, you know, the Eddas and other lovely, uplifting stories of onrushing death.

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