Trying Out New RPGs

I did it! I wrote fiction!

Sorta.

Kinda.

As I mentioned last week, one of my birthday gifts was a hand-bound journal and a copy of the rulebook for Sigils in the Dark by Kurt Potts. We waited until my birthday before playing. Well, we actually waited until Sunday, because Hubby's journal didn't arrive until Saturday, but we had Omnibladestrike over (who will be known as dragnime from now on because that's his handle everywhere else...), so the three of us worked on a different game instead, that I'll talk about in a bit.

Anyway. Sunday night Hubby and I FINALLY got around to playing Sigils.... and quickly realized we SUCK at solo RPGs....

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See, as counter-intuitive as it may be for an author, I just... I work a LOT better if I build off of others. My existing characters that feel real and fleshed out? Lia? Willow? Trish? Jolene? Kriv? These were characters I got to play for extended periods of time. They were kind of Generic Archetype characters until I played off of people. Saw how they interpreted the character, and then either leaned heavily into it, or purposefully fought back against it, or found some happy medium ground. Their voices formed as I talked more with the other players. The more social - or anti-social - I was able to make the character, the more alive they felt.

Solo RPG? Eeeeeeeeh....


I get it. A LOT of people probably love that freedom. They have complete control, as if it were a story, and can do whatever they like with the character without having to build off of whatever the other characters are doing. As people who do not yet have a good grip on who these characters are? Without any real concrete structure for the game? Well.... Hubby and I struggled.

On the first page of the journal, right out of the gate, it is suggested that we include information important for future owners of the grimoire to know. Typically, this would be the name of the mage creating the tome - so the character you're playing as - and a location, and why the mage is searching for this dark power to begin with. Their Need, which translates to the game's end-goal. Will the mage reach it, die trying, or give up once the costs become too much?

Hubby and I were stuck here for a looooong time. We both wanted to be careful with the names we picked and the locations we'd give. Hubby wanted this tome to be something he could potentially use for a campaign later, so he wanted everything to sound like it would fit in a standard D&D campaign.

Me? I wanted vagueness. I wanted to be able to use the tome, like my husband, in a potential future D&D campaign. Or in a random other RPG or LARP I might join/create. Or use it as inspiration for a future story. But the trick is that I also wanted it as a potential inspirational prop for an urban or modern fantasy story as well. So I wanted something that sounded Real World/Modern, but also something that would fit in a standard High Fantasy setting.

In the end I went for "Don't include a location quite yet, but know it's 'vague city'" and I decided to tap into my fanfiction author side of my brain.

Hey, Miraculous Ladybug happens to have a thick spellbook. Hey, there happens to be a villain who uses magic to try to get a particular Need fulfilled, and is getting quickly corrupted by that drive. Hey, what if the character whose head I hop into were Hawkmoth's?

I then paused for a moment. A LOT of people probably equate "dark mage" and "creator of a grimoire" with male characters. I'm female, why should I crossplay? Why can't I have a woman delve into dark magics to create an evil spellbook?

What if it was Gabriel who is dead or magically comatose or whatever it is that happened to Adrien's mom? What if Emilie had become Hawkmoth? Or... whatever her Peacock-themed name would have been.

As I said before, I wanted this journal to be a prop for future campaigns or even original stories, so I clearly couldn't just straight up go with "Emilie Agreste" as my character name, but she would be my inspiration. And, truthfully, the name I ended up with wasn't too far off...

Meet Emelia Agraise. Through mysterious means not yet explained in the tome for future owners, Emelia's husband is "no longer with her." Did he die? Did he fall into a coma (just as Emilie did... or... whatever it was that happened)? Did he just walk out on her; fallen out of love with her?

If I'm going the Emelia is Female Gabe route, then it's safe to say that her husband is either teetering on the edge of Life and Death, or he's already dead, but we'll see how it goes.

I do wish I wasn't itching quite so badly to start the game, however, because my excitement poured out as my standard handwriting, and I really regret not taking better care to slow down and write more elegantly and neatly for the first page.... Oh well. I guess what's done is done.

 I, personally, wasn't a fan of just listing the character's name, location, and end-goal in the front of the journal like it was my elementary school books or something: "if found, please return to..." It didn't feel organic. It felt a bit meta; the character KNOWING this journal was going to eventually find its way into other hands, and/or that the character KNEW it was going to be a future prop.

Instead, I went with something that felt more organic, a super-mini diary entry and napkin-style contract.

In case you can't read the page, here's what I wrote as my character introduction:

The whispers are stronger now that I have this book. Their promises more believable; achievable with this tome. I do not know what I must do to have my beloved returned to me, but I am prepared to pay any cost.

I, Emelia Agraise, hereby vow to the whispering darkness to follow its direction in order to gain the power I desire. In exchange, I will be taught in the ways of the occult so my sweet husband can return to my side.

I realized the redundancy of that final sentence after I wrote it, but, as I mentioned above with regards to my handwriting, what's done is done. So screw it. I'm running with it.

Hubby ended up making, basically, Hans from Frozen: the youngest in a long line of princes, who is fed up with not having any say on how his country is run, and who is never truly taken seriously with anything he says. His desire is to prove that he is just as valid a leader as his older brothers, and perhaps even MORE worthy to lead than any of them. He wants to be taken seriously finally.

Okay, so our characters are now made up. Kept us an hour or so to come up with them, but worth it. That should be the hardest part, right?

Weeeelllllllllllll....

Next was creating our first spell. It was enjoyable enough. There's a chart of 20 line segments, each with a unique design. These are the "connectors" our characters are taught by The Darkness. We use them to connect either 3, 5, or 7 points placed on a circle. We roll on said chart in order to figure out which connectors we will be using in our circle. Then we roll on a separate chart to figure out which out of 20 effects the connecting line creates.

This is the example given in the rulebook:

For this example, the player rolled a 1 on the Segment chart, and so they drew in that squiggly line with dots as their first connector within their circle. They then rolled on the Effect chart, and got the effect Bind. So now that squiggly line segment will always have the effect of Bind. Every future time that segment is used as a connector within a spell circle, one of the spell elements will include a binding of some sort.

While it was a bit tricky to try to replicate those line segments in such a manner that we could then recreate them again for future spells, it was still fun to build up our spell circles. Also fun to link each segment to an effect.

Once that part was done, we had to roll onto ANOTHER 20-point chart for different symbols that would be used as the subject of our spells. We were instructed to draw the symbol we rolled inside the connecting line segments; signifying that the subject of the spell is trapped by those segments. Easy enough. Much like the line segments, trying to recreate the symbols was a touch tricky, but we both feel like we did a passable job. Next was to assign an object to the symbol so we would then know what the subject of the spell would be.

Here's the rulebook's example of a completed spell circle.

Easy enough. Fun to do. Requires a bit of artistic talent, but simple enough that it's not crucial that you are artistically inclined. And it was exciting to see what each segment and symbol would end up representing.

Then the hard part kicked in.

Now that you know what your spell can do and what it can target it's time to name the spell and describe it in your spellbook.... Once you have your Magic Circle completed roll a d6 on the cost table.... Once you have your cost add it to the spell page with a few notes on how to acquire the cost and any problems acquiring that cost may have caused your wizard.

Doesn't sound too rough, right? Especially when you look at the sample page posted to the game's website.

Image provided by kurtpotts.itch.io/sigils-in-the-dark

Oh. Okay. Easy enough. The Bring Forth connector and the Spirit object are easy enough to deduce: it summons spirits. Bind clearly controls the spirit. Influence is that line of "They will do what you tell them." Super simple to figure out how those components come together for a spell, and what the spell does. Then it's just a matter of coming up with a spell name. Spectral Conjuring. Sounds good. Sounds like a legit spell you'd hear in a show or movie, or read in a book or comic, or find in an RPG rulebook. It also feels powerful enough to entice the character to keep going, but not SO powerful that they don't need any more power.

That was a good starter spell, and seemed easy enough to create. The trickiest part would be to figure out the cost of "A lie; believed" and how that would affect the player character. Oh, it means to use a tear-soaked letter as a sort of conduit of that cost. Okay. I see what they did there. I can do the same. Right?

Weeeeellllllll....

Let's take a look at mine. Hubby and I both did our starter spells in pencil so we can tweak the line segments and symbols if need be, because we both knew we were NOT good enough to copy them down on a first go. So, sorry if my spell page is a touch hard to see.

So, first and foremost, apparently I can't evenly spread out three points on a circle. Look at all that empty space on the bottom. That horizontal line segment might as well be the equator on a globe.

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by Birdman Inc

Crappy artwork aside, look at the effects I rolled into! Influence, Transmute, and Grow? What am I supposed to do with those as one cohesive spell? Worse yet, originally I had the effect "Find" instead of "Influence" and I REALLY couldn't figure out what to do with those seemingly unrelated elements. After about an hour or so of trying to figure how what on earth I could do with those elements, and both Hubby and I searching for online forums of other players talking about their spells and maybe suggesting what different effect combinations could be, spell wise, we called a mulligan. I rerolled the "Find" effect and switched it to the new "Influence" effect.

And the fact that my subject is just vaguely "Matter" didn't help one lick. Especially when more specific "matter" is also listed on the object chart: Element, Flesh, Animal, Plant, Machine, Small Item, or Gem/Metal. So now I have to try to figure out what a spell subject of "matter" could be that ISN'T one of those categories????

Hubby's effects were a LOT more straight forward: Move, Redirect, and Send Away. Gee, I wonder what HIS spell does...

The real snag for him, however, is the equally vague object: Plane.

Other options on the object chart includes: Location, Energy, Time, and again Element. If it were a simple teleportation spell, then Location should have been the object, right? Time travel would use Time as the object. Moving the ground itself, "earthbending" essentially, would have used Element as the object. Like, what else would you interpret Plane as?

So I joked that while I'm unofficially using Hawkmoth and the Miraculous as my base, Hubby unintentionally created a Magic: The Gathering Planeswalker, and their Spark ignited as their first spell. Fitting.

However, Hubby's "cost" is also "a pail of fresh-fallen snow." Okay. Something relatively easy to get like that seems fitting for the first spell. Far better than "a family heirloom; taken" because either my character is going to run out of heirlooms, the spell inevitably becomes more difficult to perform as she has to start stealing other people's family heirlooms, or she just can't cast the spell anymore. The real problem is that Hubby decided the effects of his spell all sound like banishing words: move, redirect, SEND AWAY. He couldn't really figure out how to move a plane, redirect a plan, or send away a plane (all of which we just interpreted as "plane of existence") so instead he decided the spell effect is that it's a banishing spell. Sending TO the plane. Having the plane be the subject of the spell by manipulating the plane in order to banish TO it. Fold the plane around the desired object, if you will. To which, Hubby sadly proclaimed, "well, looks like my grimoire is done. If I can just send my older brothers to another plane with something as simple as snow, then I can just get rid of my competition until they have no choice but to put me in charge..."

Whoops. Kiiiinda wish they had playtested this a touch more in order to figure out how to prevent such seemingly over-powered spells from being created your first go, let alone created with such a small cost. Hubby thinks the objects, and maybe even the effects were ranked like the costs were, and you had to build up to the stronger magic the same way you added to the cost of the spell. Either that, or not use such vague objects as "matter" and "plane." Especially when they are basically "catch-all" terms for a lot of objects already on the chart.

Hubby and I might need to workshop a bit. Maybe house-rule different objects instead of the two we rolled and try again.

Alternatively, we'd have to put a LOT more "off-screen" roleplaying into effect. For instance, I told Hubby that, say he has 9 brothers, perhaps the issue he comes across is that people start to become wise to his banishing scheme after the 3rd or 4th brother goes missing. He still has a long line to work through, but now he's wanted for treason and still needs to learn spells in order to finish off the rest of his family and protect himself from the royal army.

Or, he's a prince of a desert kingdom, and it's trickier to get fresh-fallen snow than face value suggests. Maybe he can't use the spell against his brothers because he can never get a full pail back to his kingdom, or he has to come up with another spell in order to keep the snow from melting first.

Or, the spell isn't as powerful as he thinks. It's just a small portal; not nearly large enough to fit a full person. I was thinking of the Fetches from the Trollhunters show on Netflix.

Sorry for the minor spoilers here.

So, like I said, we're still workshopping.

And I still need to figure out more to my first spell's effect than "can manipulate matter" as well as figure out how I paid the cost of "a family heirloom; taken." Does my character sacrifice the heirloom, using it as the matter being manipulated? If so, does that mean she can only create with as much matter as the heirloom provides? For instance, she can't use a necklace to create a gun turret. For that she'd have to use something like a grandfather clock or a statue or whatever.

Or, much like in the game example, does she need to use some sort of physical conduit for the pain a stolen heirloom would create?

The vagueness of the game is great for getting your creative juices flowing and giving you free rein, but both Hubby and I need a bit more... structured storytelling guidance at the moment. So we might have to put Sigils in the Dark on the backburner for a bit. Either that, or, as I mentioned, retool it slightly with some house rules to help us a bit more.

So, instead, let's head on over to the OTHER RPG that Hubby just picked up. The one we worked on with Dragnime on Saturday instead of starting our journey into Sigils, or watching anime together as we normally do on Saturdays.

That RPG was the strongly suggested Blades in the Dark by John Harper and published by Evil Hat Productions (we seem to be playing a lot of "in the dark" games right now...).

Hubby finally got his copy of the rulebook - which, by the way, is a lot more detailed than I was expecting considering it's roughly the same size and thickness as a standard novel - and he was itching to jump into the game.

Dragnime, Hubby, and I all created characters Saturday night, and started the basics of creating our criminal crew.

This time, I'd like to introduce you to Mara Basran. She is a native to the main city setting of Doskvol, but she doesn't have the fair skin typically associated with the island's native Akorosi. She's 2nd generation, descended from immigrants; much like how my mother is IRL. Three out of Mara's four grandparents were refugees from the island of Iruvia. To be frank, I picked it because of the island's description: a land of black deserts, obsidian mountains, and raging volcanoes. Can you say "sounds like Lia's paradise"?

The natives are "generally amber-skinned and dark-haired." In other words, they're supposed to have a North-African/Middle-Eastern look to them, which is where I'm going with Mara's look... whose name I TOTALLY didn't pick from the game's suggested names table because it was dangerously close to "Amara"....

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Anyway, for flavor, I decided Mara's father was going to be only half-Iruvian. The other parent would be an immigrant from The Dagger Isles. It's "a tropical archipelago covered in dense jungle growth; now turned dark and twisted from the strange magic of the cataclysm" that happens to be just off the coast of Iruvia. Native Islanders "are generally copper-skinned and dark-haired" so Mara's overall look wouldn't have to shift too much to include this quarter of her heritage.

The more I thought about what I wanted to do with Mara, and realized how I was seated while picturing her - a very powerful, forward leaning, devil-may-care pose - the more I pictured her as the surprisingly (but not really) controversial character design for Abby from The Last of Us Part II.

For reference for those who might not know, this is Abby.

Photo courtesy of the fandom wiki

So, picture Mara with that more muscular body tone, but with darker skin and black hair. I also gave her shoulder-length hair with an undercut so it's easier to maintain, but can still be left down for a more elegant look in case she needs to infiltrate a high-class party or something.

Mara was originally a member of the Bluecoats - the local law enforcement - but, after about 6 years on the force, she got a bit too cozy with an informant. I'm not sure yet if that's just a tight friendship, sexual rendezvous, or if they dated. Either way, it was frowned upon by her precinct, and she realized being a criminal was more fun anyway. So she was dishonorably discharged from the force, and she hit the streets doing petty crimes for about 2 years before meeting up with Hubby's character Ashlyn and Drag's character Syra. Quarthix is coming over today to come up with his character, but for now, Mara's cohorts are those two, and the trio decided to form an official crew. They're all Shadows; basically thieves and spies. They can take on other types of jobs, such as smuggling, selling fenced goods, or assassinations, but basic burglary, robbery, espionage, and sabotage is our crew's wheelhouse.

Another part of character creation for this game is to come up with "Deadly Friends." Each character archetype - of which I'm the Hound, a deadly sharpshooter and tracker - has a list of five NPCs. For the Hound, these characters include Steiner, an assassin, Celene, a sentinel, Melvir, a physicker (doctor), Veleris, a spy, and Casta, a bounty hunter. Out of your character's list of five NPCs, you are to choose one to be a close ally and another to be your greatest rival. For me, I went with Melvir the physicker as my ally, because it's always good to have someone who could patch me or my crew up. As for my rival? I went with Casta the bounty hunter. Figured Casta, whom I'm picturing as a male for whatever reason (probably because I'm picturing Michael Kosta from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah), had always been a bit of a thorn in Mara's side. First, he would bring in bounties and tease that he could bring in "the bad guys" better than I could. Now that I'm on the criminal side of the law, I'm picturing Casta and I going after the same bounties, and possibly evolve to him trying to bring ME in, if the bounty gets high enough.

So there you have it. Not much by way of actual stories to share with you fine folks, but two characters created and some of their opening life stories. As well as an unofficial review of the game Sigils in the Dark.

I did manage to get some fanfiction reading in this week - including rereading a bunch of my own stories to get back into the mindset of a writer - but this post is LOOOOOONG as is, so I'll have to wait until next week, I think.

Until then!

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(Or... at least have as good of one as 2020 will allow...)