Character setup:

Skills are as follows: Academics, Alertness, Athletics, Brawn, Endurance, Fingersmithery, Resolve, Riding, Sailing, Science, Stealth, Survival, Socializing (Nobles, Pirates, Soldiers, Merchants, etc), Weapons (Bows, Fists, Guns, Fencing, Heavy, etc).

Of these, Fingersmithery covers manual dexterity in general (sleight of hand, lock-picking, juggling); Science covers alchemy and chemistry and other applied-academics stuff (Academics is for non-hands-on stuff, like history, geography, astronomy, etc); Socializing covers charming, bluffing, detecting bluffs, gathering information, etc. Also note that Socializing and Weapons are generics, where the actual skill is one of the listed specializations. If you don’t have a particular specialization of a generic, you can use your skill in another specialization with a -2 penalty.

You can pick 20 points worth of skills, where a Great skill costs four points, Good three, Fair two, Average one. In practice this means one of three layouts: a specialist build, with two skills each at Great, Good, Fair, and Average; a standard build, with one Great, two Good, three Fair, and four Average; or a generalist build, with two Good, four Fair, and six Average.

In addition to the skills you have five aspects, two “primary” aspects and three “secondary” ones. Primary aspects should be things that your character demonstrates most sessions: the most common primary aspects are going to be swordsman schools and sorcery, but you can use whatever your core character concept is (Dashing Courtier, Master of Deception, Man of Will, Crazy Alchemist, etc).

Basic mechanics:

Rolling a skill is done with the Apocalypse World model: 2d6+skill-difficulty*; less than 7 is a failure, 7-9 is a partial success, 10-11 is a full success, 12+ is an advanced success (as shorthand you can say that 2 always fails and 12 always succeeds without much change to the probability). By default advanced successes act as normal successes, but see below about techniques. To match Apocalypse World probabilities better, modifiers are shifted down one from FATE standard — a Great skill is a +2 modifier, a Good is +1, etc.

*Like Apocalypse World, you usually don’t use difficulty modifiers, you just adjust before the roll what the consequences of the roll are, and/or you call for an additional roll to see if you can even make it to the roll you want to make, but the modifiers are there if you want them.

Note that players roll all the dice in this system: to attack an opponent with a sword, a player rolls Weapons (Fencing), and to defend, they roll Weapons (Fencing), Athletics, Endurance, or other skill, depending on how they choose to defend.

Aspects are used to modify skill rolls and effects in two ways. If you have an aspect of any type (secondary or primary) that is related to the roll you’re making, then after you roll, you can pay a fate point to increase the success level by one step, from failure to partial success to full success to advanced success. You can even use an aspect on an opponent or on the situation, as long as it’s relevant (taunting someone with a Hot-Headed aspect, say).

Additionally, only with primary aspects, you can spend a fate point before or after a roll to unlock “techniques” of the aspect. Once unlocked, a technique is available for the rest of the adventure (without having to pay to unlock each time), or until the character refreshes their fate points. The specifics of the technique get decided on at the time you need them, though they should roughly conform to the guidelines below.

Things a technique could do:

• Negate a penalty, either a modifier or a required extra die roll (fighting in pitch darkness for an “Ambrogia Student” aspect; walking on a tightrope for an “Acrobat” aspect)
• Provide a +1 or +2 bonus in some specialized situation (+1 for less-specialized situations, +2 for more-specialized) which isn’t a direct attack (+1 to Alertness rolls about living things for a “Hawk and Wolf Are My Spirits” aspect; +2 to Fingersmithery rolls when picking locks for a “Master Burglar” aspect)
• Get an advanced benefit when you roll an advanced success with a skill relevant to this aspect, instead of treating the advanced success as a normal success (Weapons (Heavy) rolls with a “Wandering Bogatyr Master” aspect; Science rolls with a “Mad Scientist” aspect)
• No mechanical benefit, but allow some really specialized or magical in-world action (retrieving or pocketing an object for an “Apprentice Porte Sorcerer” aspect; some kind of five-finger death punch ability for an “Cathayan Martial Artist” aspect)

…or anything else you feel like of roughly equivalent power (plenty of stunts from the standard FATE rules qualify, like reappearing in the guise of an NPC for a “Master of Deception” aspect).

Characters start off with five fate points. In terms of refresh, the usual fate point economy doesn’t seem to work well in our games (though maybe this is just a lack of practice) so I’m thinking we instead have something like Shadow of Yesterday‘s pool refresh rules, and say you refill your fate points when you relax in a manner appropriate to one of your aspects.

Maneuvers and blocking:

In a conflict, or in preparation for a conflict, you can use skills to do other things than directly damage your opponent. In standard FATE, the two main other things you might want to do are maneuver or block.

A maneuver creates a temporary aspect which can be used for later rolls, with specific effect based on the success level of the skill roll to it: a success creates the aspect which comes with one free fate point to use it once, after which the aspect goes away; an advanced success works the same but the aspect doesn’t go away until the end of the conflict (though you have to pay fate points to use it later); a partial success creates a different aspect than the one intended and/or comes with no free fate point. Maneuvers are usually easier than direct actions, and get a bonus to the roll: +2 if it’s something the target is especially vulnerable to (Social (Merchants) to taunt a hotheaded shopkeeper), +1 in the normal case (Fingersmithery to distract a crowd with juggling), and +0 if it’s something the target is especially invulnerable to (Weapons (Fencing) to intimidate the king’s fencing master).

Since this system doesn’t have opposed rolls, blocks don’t really work the same way. Instead of rolling before an action occurs, you roll a block to interrupt an action in progress. The effectiveness of the block depends on the skill roll to create it as follows: a success stops the action from occurring but not necessarily in a way the blocker controls; an advanced success stops the action from occurring and lets the blocker take control of the momentum of the situation; a partial success hurts the blocker and/or only partly stops the action and/or doesn’t prevent the blockee from retrying their action.

Damage, wounds, and healing:

Damage from an attack depends on the source and the success level of the roll. There are two ways to absorb damage: stress and consequences. You can check off one or more stress boxes to absorb that many points of damage; alternately, you can check off a consequence to absorb some amount of damage (usually more than one point), but that forces you to also gain a new secondary aspect describing the effects of the damage. Stress boxes are cleared at the end of the fight; consequences last some amount of time depending on the consequence or until their corresponding aspect is removed.

You have separate sets of stress boxes and consequences for handling physical and mental/social damage. You start off with two stress boxes, plus an additional one if you have at least a Fair Endurance or Resolve (depending whether this is physical or mental), and another additional one if you have at least a Great Endurance or Resolve. You have three consequences: a minor one that absorbs two points and lasts til the end of the fight; a moderate one that absorbs four points and lasts til you refresh your fate points; and a major one that absorbs six points and lasts til the end of the adventure.

Ballpark for weapon damage is that knives/daggers do two points, fencing swords and arrows do three points, heavy weapons do four, guns do five. A success on an attack roll does normal damage, an advanced success does one and a half times normal damage, a partial success does one or two points; a partial success on a block means you take one or two points, and a failure means you take normal damage.

Enemies and Groups:

Against average-strength minions, a partial success injures one (or takes one out if already injured), a success takes out one, and an advanced success takes out two. Non-minions have custom-designed sets of stress boxes and consequences; at minimum two to four stress boxes and one consequence that absorbs four points of damage and lasts for the duration of the adventure or longer.

Characters get a base +2 to defend against the attack of a group of minions, -1 for each minion beyond the first. Damage is as for a single attacker no matter how many minions are in the group, however. With an appropriate maneuver, characters can limit the number of minions that can attack them at once.

Advancement:

Couple possibilities for advancement in this system.

• Permanently unlock a technique that you unlocked during the adventure/session
• Gain a skill you don’t have at Average
• Gain a new secondary aspect
• Advance an aspect to a more powerful version that allows for more/better techniques (“Porte Apprentice” -> “Porte Master”)
• Make a secondary aspect into a primary one (possibly making room by making a primary aspect into a secondary one)
• Increase the rank of a skill (possibly making room by decreasing the rank of a neighboring-ranked skill)

Examples:

Venzi vs the pirates, sample character and play. Conan and the Dancer, sample character and play.

Probabilities:
For reference:

In 3rd edition magic was too separate from non-magic (you can affect non-magic with magic but not vice-versa), while in 4th it’s too similar (the arcane keyword means almost nothing, and you can’t look at a power and tell if it’s magic or not). The ideal is that magic and non-magic are separate but there’s still two-way interaction. So, magic can make somebody invisible in a way you can’t do without magic, but that invisible person isn’t undetectable to a non-magic person — they can listen for footsteps or throw flour or whatever, and a person of equal level to the invisible mage has a good chance (not just a chance) of spotting them, and with prolonged hanging around, they’ll definitely spot them. Magic can make somebody fly, but not in a way that puts them out of reach of somebody on the ground. Magic can lock a door, but somebody without magic can still pick the lock. And note that this all applies to magical monsters, too — medusae can turn people to stone and dragons can breathe fire, but not in a way that can’t be avoided by somebody non-magical with some skill. More about this later in classes, but this is the philosophy.

Healing. More about this later too, but basically I think healing during adventures is weak-ass and 4th edition’s expansion of it was a mistake. Like, you can see their reasoning: if there can be multiple encounters a day and the characters lose strength after each one, you don’t know how powerful the party will be for a particular encounter. But that’s D&D! Unbalanced fights are great! In fact, they’re a reward for skillful play earlier, or a penalty for non-skillful play. I’d go even farther, though — healing ought to be something that only happens during major downtime, like when you rest for the night, not something that can be handled easily with a spell (but 1e/2e went too far with non-magical healing being so slow — you shouldn’t have to sit around more than a week unless you got seriously fucked up; probably healing like 10-20% of your hp a night is the right ballpark).

Actually I think skills are mostly fine in 4e. I’d probably just cut the cord and make them a separate resource from combat stuff entirely, though — forget being able to spend a feat to get more skills. Just say you can learn N skills, and the GM can easily adjust N based on how skilled they want the characters to be. And put in an explicit rule that characters can learn new skills with in-game training.

Basically, look, skills in D&D have two points, flavor and niche protection. Flavor is where you put the skill on your sheet because you like what it says about your character — “my dude is a fast-talking gambler” — but don’t actually expect to use that skill in practice (though if there is a gambling situation you expect to be able to do well). Niche protection is where you put the skill on your sheet because it’s a situation that actually comes up in the game and you want to be the dude that people look at: “Hey, it’s a locked chest, time for Bob to step up”. For flavor picks, your skill in absolute terms doesn’t matter because it comes up so seldom and not generally in crisis situations, and in fact you’re probably not putting it down on the sheet unless you’re either 1) really good at it or 2) really bad at it. So just let people give themselves whatever skill level they want.

For niche protection picks, your absolute skill level matters, but you don’t want people to be able to get too far ahead or behind their level in, say, stealth for the same reason you don’t want them to get too far or behind their level in to-hit rolls — you have to be able to challenge the party as a whole in a skill, and you have to be able to have somebody fill in if the main guy is out. So for niche protection skills, that’s where you go with the 4e thing about they’re half your level +5 if you’re trained or whatever. So the dude trained in it is always your first choice, but if they’re gone or multiple people need to roll, things aren’t impossible. And you have some ‘aura’ rules for things like stealth where the trained guy can give everyone else a +2 or whatever.

After all these steps character classes fall out as pretty obvious. Mages stay pretty much the same as 1e-3e — they memorize spells and carry spellbooks and wear robes, that’s just how shit works in D&D. Keep the rituals from 4e because those are cool, but they don’t cost any gold to cast — things are just rituals because (basically) they require an adventure to be able to do because it’s cooler that way, or because they’re something you can only do back at base, not in the dungeon. They don’t get any spells that auto-hit except maybe magic missile because, hey, magic missile — normally all their stuff can be dodged, evaded, blocked, etc, by a skillful enough opponent (which means that against an equally skilled person, it’ll take multiple spells to get through their opponent’s defenses, just like a fighter takes multiple hits to down their opponent).

Clerics are the same as 1e-3e again, but they can’t heal, because as mentioned healing spells are lame. But they can still bless the party and kick ass among the undead and all that stuff (I realize this is another thing that unbalances encounters depending on whether you have a cleric or not, but unbalanced encounters aren’t bad*) and should still be cool.

*Unbalanced encounters are bad if you get xp for killing monsters, but that sucks, as does xp for treasure. 5e should go to totally mission-based xp, and if you (the GM) want to make the mission be “kill a troll”, then there’s your killing-based xp.

Fighters, now here we get a little different. As mentioned way back in the first point, non-magical folks have to have a way to cope with magical folks. So to start out with, fighters get a bunch more skills than they did before, so they can do all the athletic and acrobatic stuff you expect, and in addition they can spot invisible wizards and dodge lightning bolts and otherwise cope. Also we get rid of weapon specialization — fighters can pick up any weapon and be good with it because that’s what they do, and also they need to be able to swap weapons around to shoot down the flying wizard or hold off the dragon with a longspear or whatever. So weapons and armors are the fighter’s tools, and they get different moves with them that gives them something more interesting to do during combat (“hunh, this golem’s skin is harder than I thought, better switch to a hammer” is exactly what you want a fighter to be saying). If you want, give them the 3e thief’s sneak attack ability, which is exactly the right amount of tactical maneuvering for a fighter to be doing in combat.

Thieves are bogus as always. They’ve always been my favorite class but more for the flavor and the endless fiddling they allow (so many percentage points to allocate to thief skills!) than for actually being decent characters. Basically the problem is the theoretical model is Bilbo, who is atypical as an adventurer and hence not a good model. So instead pick somebody like the Grey Mouser or Zorro or Batman: thieves are small, fast, good at combat but can’t rely on brute strength, and dabble in other areas to pick up tricks. In other words, you build them off a fighter chassis, with the intent of them being just as survivable in combat, albeit with a different style (presumably lower hit points, no armor skills, more limited weapon selection, somewhat different set of skills although there’s more overlap than you’d think, and then they can pick up some bonus abilities in gadgets or magic or acrobatics or charm, depending on style).

So that’s what I got! Realistically, even if 5e was exactly like this I wouldn’t play it myself — D&D characters are too incompetent on the low end and have too many fiddly bits on the high end — but I think it’d do a decent job of pulling in people who liked older editions while being different enough to be worth making a new edition for.

So this is a pretty good basis for a game. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before, and the intrinsic level of remove of the player from the game matches the premise — I’m bummed when soldiers die but they’re intrinsically replaceable and what’s most important is advancing the interests of the company, just like a real commander.

Where it mainly falls down, I think, is in the details. And by “falls down” I guess I mean “has as many problems as the typical facebook game”. Like, in theory this is nominally a story about a wily commander building up their company by skillful planning and deployment, but in practice it’s about a commander doing whatever seems like the most obvious thing and hoping it works. To put it another way, there isn’t really much strategic or tactical depth in the game.

For instance, take contracts. A typical contract has a short blurb, then says it costs, say, 10 command points (turns), pays 3200 gold, and requires one infantry squad, one scout squad, and one miscellaneous squad. You assign squads of the appropriate types and hit go, and then it runs one skill test per squad (combat, discipline, and maneuver being the most common) and it tells you if you win or not. If you’re like me, you have a bunch of different kinds of squads so you can take a bunch of different kinds of contracts, which means that you only have a few squads of each type — so when it says you need a scout, you only have one or two to pick between, making that not much of a choice. And since you don’t get to influence the success/failure of the execution, the only thing you can really do is pick which contracts you take. But that’s not much of a choice either — just take all the contracts you can handle, because the only real limiter is waiting for turns to regenerate, and there’s no penalty for not doing a contract if it looks too hard. (If you want to be ultra-efficient you can start skipping contracts with a bad gold/turns ratio, but it’s just a matter of waiting a little longer to get the turns back so it doesn’t really matter.) There’s a little more difficulty when the contract calls for a miscellaneous squad or when the contract has randomized events with it, but this doesn’t add tactical depth, it just means you have to guess what’s going to come up and hope you picked the right squad.

This kind of false tactics also comes up in the selection/design of squads. There’s a whole bunch of different kinds of squads: scouts, light/medium/heavy cavalry, knights, light/medium/heavy infantry, light/medium/heavy spears, medium/heavy pikes, sappers, “veteran” versions of all of the previous, etc. But in practice the distinctions are either obvious or don’t matter. You need at least one scout, one cavalry, one infantry, and one engineer to be able to fulfill most contracts, but in those categories there’s usually a best one and you can ignore the others, or the difference is close enough it doesn’t matter which you pick (this one has 10% to one stat, this other has 10% to another).

I think there’s a combination of things you could do to fix this. Since it’s a facebook game, you probably want each individual event to be resolved in just a few seconds, which means the tactics have to come in the assignments of squads to contracts, not in the execution of those contracts. So the first step is to give the player more information about the contract before they take it up, and have less restrictions on how they approach it. For instance, the contract could say that the fight takes place on the plains and the enemy is known to have two squads of heavy infantry. In that case, you might decide to send in some heavy infantry of your own, or you might decide to use cavalry and take advantage of the terrain. This also adds some strategic depth to the game: you can decide to specialize in infantry and send them in even when they’re less-suited (relying on training to win out, and skipping contracts when they’re totally unsuited) or you can decide to be a generalist, and use the terrain to compensate for weaker units.

Another issue with contracts is you can only execute one at a time, and they stick around until you get to them or decide to skip them. That means you can always send your best troops to the each contract. Instead, what if multiple contracts were running simultaneously, and you had to choose where to allocate your squads? Again, there’re multiple strategies: specialize into a single contract you know you can win, or spread out across several.

Once you add some more tactical depth like this, it becomes easier to differentiate the units. Unit X is good on several terrains and bad on others, whereas unit Y is ok across everything and good nowhere. Unit Z hits hard but takes longer to recover, so if you want to do several contracts in a row you’ll have to leave out Z on later fights.

This has been mostly griping but I do like a lot of the little story touches about the gameplay. Time passes as you spend command points and your soldiers age and eventually retire, meaning you need to keep rotating new recruits onto your squads. The setup that you need the right equipment to make a squad but can then rotate people on and off it (and the quality of the squad is determined by the skills of the people that compose it) works out nicely – if one of my knights dies, I can pick if I want to pull someone out of the heavy infantry as a replacement, or if I’d rather use a new recruit. The events that show up occasionally don’t make much of a difference but they’re a good break in the action from combat and add flavor. I wish there were actually more of the story touches — like, I wish I could name my squads and my company and customize my base more, and I wish there were enough contracts I could refuse those not in accordance with my company’s style.

Overall, I don’t think this game has a lot of long-term play in it, but it’s been totally fun the time I’ve spent on it, and I’m pretty sure you *could* make a more elaborate and longer-term game in this style.

  <hexmap width="800" height="600">
  <legend>
  meadow: 1
  lake: 2
  swamp: 3
  </legend>
  Hau Ndogg (7,3): text
  K1 (6,1): an unexplored lake hex, outlined n, nw, sw, ne
  O1 (10,1): an unexplored meadow hex with a resource, outlined n, nw, ne, se
  K2 (6,2): an unexplored swamp hex, outlined nw, sw
  K3 (6,3): a lake hex with a refinery, outlined nw, sw
  L3 (7,3): a lake hex with a refinery
  M3 (8,3): a swamp hex with a refinery
  </hexmap>

Pretty easy, right? This assumes that you have images corresponding to each hex type, but I’ve included some sample ones in the zipfile to get you started. Anyway, hope this is helpful for somebody. If you do use it, lemme know!

*Even Zeus, which makes the scenes where he is talking to Athena (who, needless to say, they cast as if she were Aphrodite) extra-weird, a situation is not helped by the one distinguishing feature they did decide to give the father of the gods, a child-molester mustache.

So similarly, I don’t think I can complain that the gods seem to have the power of Matrix-style slow-time-face-kicking (actually, isn’t that how they worked in Olympos?), but it does seem fair to complain that they don’t seem to have any other powers. Like, in the big fight at the end, you might assume Zeus was going to start shooting lightning bolts at people. But no, his strategy is to pick up a chain lying on the ground and hit people with it. Similarly, Poseidon doesn’t go all Squirtle on them or even go somewhere else in his portfolio and, I dunno, summon killer horses — he just uses his trident to stab people. Poseidon does have the only instance of Relevant Use of Domain in the movie where he creates a big wave, but he does it by flying into the water at high speed, not by waving his hand, which is how it seems to usually work.

I think the deal here is that the writers wrote themselves into a corner when they were putting together the basics of the story. Like, the overall driver for this story is this king had his family killed and swore vengeance against the gods and raises an army to burn down the world. This is a great premise for a greek mythology story (so great that I’m pretty sure it is based on an existing myth, although I can’t dig up who — in the movie I believe they call him King Hyperion, but that doesn’t seem to be the guy in question). Anyway, the problem is this is a standard-issue action movie, which means they need a likeable protagonist who is either a scrappy farm boy all grown up, or a grizzled veteran who has been out of the phalanx for years but then Socrates pulls him back in for one last score. They go for the former and call the guy Theseus.

So, ok, this means on the one hand you have King Hyperion and on the other you have Theseus and the entire greek pantheon. Even if you give Hyperion a big army it doesn’t really seem fair. There are various ways you can deal with this situation, but they all boil down to needing to tone down the gods and make them less interesting to keep the focus on Theseus versus Hyperion. Which is crazy, right? On the one hand, they were like “let’s put the greek gods as active characters in this movie and let them kick ass”, and on the other, they said “but all that ass-kicking can’t accomplish anything because that would detract from Theseus’s accomplishments”. Anyway, the movie’s solution is to have Zeus say that there’s an important existing rule that the gods can’t interfere with the affairs of mortals until the titans (ie, the bad guy gods) are freed.

Now, the Lensman series, which I love, has a similar rule of non-interference for the Arisians and for similar reasons story-wise. The difference is, in the Lensman series there is an existing plan: the Arisians don’t have the upper hand over their enemies, they have a stalemate, and they know that if they can hold off their enemies long enough for the mortals to accomplish stuff, then the Arisians win. Furthermore, the Arisians can’t die if the mortals fuck up, they just get banished to another dimension. By contrast, in this movie the greek gods have the upper hand (their enemies are all imprisoned), the mortals are unlikely to win the day without their assistance, and if the mortals screw up, the gods will die. So there’s much less incentive here for the gods to push a non-interference policy, but they do it anyway. Incidentally, this movie does the war-action-movie thing where one of the good guy mortals, King Dumbass, says “hey, I bet the enemy actually just wants to be friends, we should try diplomacy instead of just fighting them”, and as evidence for the fact that diplomacy sucks and fighting rules, he is slaughtered like a loser as he bleats for mercy. But if you look at the policy of the gods, it’s basically the same thing — Zeus pushes for staying out of war even when it’s the obviously correct and lives-saving thing to do, with the result that it’s a big mess later on when they do have to come down. I think this might be another case where Greek Tragedy and Action Movie are colliding: it’s totally reasonable in a tragedy to stick to your word of noninterference even when that ultimately destroys you, whereas in an action movie, if you have an rule not to use guns, that just exists to make it more badass when you do eventually pull them out.

Now, I think you could probably have pulled out a reasonable plot from these two genres, it’s just that this isn’t it. Like, one idea is you take the gods out of the movie entirely, and have the world-premise be that they don’t exist (you can keep stuff like the divination of the oracles, since the truth of that is ambiguous). Then the most sensible thing is you keep the tragic structure but leave Hyperion as the protagonist, and the action part is that you actually show his rise to power (he has a side-comment in the movie about how he was born a peasant, which of course has no real point whatsoever outside the scene in which it’s mentioned), how he fights his way to the top and to take on the gods themselves but it still doesn’t bring back his family, and his quest for vengeance ultimately destroys him. You can leave in all the stuff the characters talk about whether or not you should have faith in the gods, and also the weird thing where Theseus doesn’t fight a minotaur in the labyrinth, he fights a dude wearing a bull helmet in the maze of a burial crypt. You’d need some other long-term objective for Hyperion if you’re writing out the gods (and speaking of which, it’s weird that Hyperion doesn’t just deny faith in the gods but deny their existence, but he does believe in the magic bow that will let out the ancient enemies of the gods), but he can probably just be trying to conquer all of Greece and have it work out ok. I see they’re doing a movie of Coriolanus soon, which will probably be another take on this.

Alternately, you can ramp up the involvement of the gods. All the stuff they talk in the movie about how humans just have to have faith in the gods who do bad things for inexplicable reasons and don’t respond to prayers is basically a repackaged take on Christian mythology, not Greek. Greek religious belief is the gods do jerky things because they’re pissed off, and they do those jerky things all the time. So if you’re going to do an action movie involving the Greek gods, you should copy the Trojan war model and have half the gods supporting one side and half the gods supporting the other and Zeus in the middle shouting at everyone to keep it down or he’s turning this pantheon right now. Then it’s totally fine to have Theseus and the gods vs Hyperion, because it’s Hyperion and the other gods, and the divine battles can be ongoing through the movie instead of jammed in at the end. You even get the tragedy, though this time the hubris belongs to the gods — they don’t think they can be harmed by mortals until it’s too late and everything’s fucked up.

So yeah, I think you could have made a good movie with this premise but I don’t think this one was it. One quick closing note: the Han Solo sidekick-protagonist (you can tell he is the Han Solo guy because he is rude to the female lead, although not actually in an attractive way) is explicitly identified as a thief (despite not doing any thief-type activities at any point), and then there’s the priest of the oracle, and the oracle herself (a mystic diviner type), all led by expert warrior Theseus — which means you have the prototypical D&D adventuring party. This explains everything!

Anyway, I bring this up because I thought on the whole the improv worked out really well: the setting felt both large and consistent, there was a good amount of challenge regardless of what people were trying to work on, and stuff that showed up early in the game came back to haunt people as appropriate later on. A few things didn’t work out as well: details of names and places got lost, and “point of interest exploration” never worked out as well as I’d intended. (A bunch of other things worked out well or not well in the game, but I’m focusing on the improv-related things here.)

So, techniques. The main one (which is why it gets to be in the title of the post) is “pick a metaphor and stick with it, but it doesn’t have to be the same metaphor for every situation”. So in this game, the base setting understanding is Star Wars: ships have hyperdrives but it still takes a while to get across the universe, droids exist but they’re mostly menials and don’t take over any interesting human jobs, the standard sidearm is a blaster, there’s a big imperial senate (ok, it’s older star wars). However, for particular of the world-building, some other metaphor comes into play. Like, the politics in the large are all Dune: big powerful feuding Houses, some associated with a particular trade, and the Emperor trying to balance things out. But in the small, they’re parody real-world politics: everybody wants something, and there is a lot of tacking unrelated riders onto bills to try to pull together a coalition to get the thing passed, and balancing who you’re going to suck up to and who you’re going to piss off. For another example, the Imperial culture tends to be HHGTTG but the general culture is 50s space serial.

Once I have this worked out, then when it comes time to talk about what kind of party the emperor would throw, I can say this: it’s going to be expensive, because the empire is rich (Star Wars), but also ridiculous (HHGTTG). I decide they towed in a planetoid to hold it on (roughly equivalent to making the Death Star) but instead of looking like the Death Star or like Cloud City, it looks like some crazy pleasure planet covered in xtreme sports facilities and 24-hour buffets. Then when you ask what’s going on with the party guests, I can tell you that a bunch of the Houses are using the chance to make behind-the-scenes deals (“real” politics), and there are also squabbles between various Houses, mysterious assassins, and fights about the succession (Dune). Or if you want to get a bill passed, then I know the opposition should come primarily from other Houses (Dune), and you should have to work things out with them by horse-trading (“real” politics), but that what they want should be a combination of the more-serious (Star Wars) and the crazy (HHGTTG).

Really this-all is the same thing that Vincent Baker talked about with setting principles, but instead of principles we’ve got whole metaphors — it basically works the same way but it’s a little fuzzier.

The thing I didn’t do here and should have was write stuff down after coming up with it. Normally I’m better about keeping transcripts but this time I didn’t, with the result that I’d remember that, say, Seve had to smuggle something from the Planet of Sheep to the Planet of Vaguely East-European Industry, but I wouldn’t remember what their names were. Maybe I should have made a wiki page. Anyway, this made it hard to do some callbacks, and even led for awkward “ok, you finish your mission, and report back to whats-her-face…” moments.

The other place this fell down was the point-of-interest exploration. Part of the original intent of the game was your House exploration would uncover interesting sites, and then your character would go and explore the site. This was fine in theory, but I couldn’t seem to work out a viable metaphor for what exploration should be like, and it caused some problems when trying to come up with a challenge. Like I think my original thought was that it was going to be straight-up D&D-style exploration, and then I quickly realized that wasn’t going to work, so then I figured maybe it would be D&D-parody exploration: like, D&D challenges, but you get to solve them with Star Wars technology. That was amusing for a bit but it didn’t totally work either (for one thing, part of that premise is there can’t be any non-trivial challenges for the characters).

I think at this point I’m inclined to say I made a bad choice in the original concept: points of interest like “these ancient tunnels” are generally too small-scale for characters to have as projects, and the focus (and challenge) should be on stuff more like “explore and clear out the entire city” and skill rolls should be done on that scale, with occasional zoom-ins for color and detail. Like, I’m thinking maybe the right metaphor here is Lensman, where the PC does stuff like “meet evil lady at a party, scan her to find out a description of her boss, search most of the planet for the boss, infiltrate the boss’s lair and destroy him”, and they’re handled at that granularity — searching the whole planet is covered in a paragraph or two, not even as much weight as talking to the lady at the party gets. The thing is, this (in part) depends on some of the opposition coming from social interaction where you can’t bull through with high tech, and the setting itself isn’t designed to support that (the colony worlds are mostly unsettled by “modern civilization”).

Anyway, I feel like overall this is a pretty satisfying technique; I’m going to have to see if I can re-use it in upcoming games.

Gameplay inspirations are Civilization, Diplomacy, Star Saga, and (on the RPG side) Kingmaker and Houses of the Blooded. There will be some space for collaborative world-building, but (I am guessing) this is going to be a lot more “game” than “cooperative writing project”.

Interested? Awesome. I put together a survey about what sort of game this might be like — if you have opinions or just want to show your interest in playing, please fill it out.

Archetypes: Not an exhaustive list.

• Gunslinger-for-hire
• War-weary ex-soldier
• Undercover US marshal
• Fresh-faced kid with a gun they’ve never shot anyone with
• Journalist trying to work their way East
• Bandit, reformed or otherwise
• Pony Express rider
• Surveyor
• Telegraph engineer
• Professor
• Count Mephisto And His Amazing Mechanical Men!

Characters should be a little hungry for something.

Systems: FATE variant, as is become usual. 30 points to spend on skills, Drive is renamed Riding, Pilot is renamed Vehicles, Deceit absorbs Sleight of Hand, and Contacting/Empathy/Rapport/Leadership are dropped in favor of Social. Social is a “generic” skill — Social: (group) is a different skill for each group, and covers things like identifying, impersonating, and interrogating of members of that group. Valid groups for this one-shot include The Law, Back East, Bandits, The Army, and Ordinary Townsfolk. (You could use a stunt to let you use another appropriate skill in place of a Social skill.)

When/Where: January 29th and February 5th at 1pm eastern, probably for four-hours-ish each time.

Beyond the earlier starting date, there are also new awards for technological achievement, feelies, and rejiggering of the best use of medium award. For more details, see the FAQ.