ars ludi

I admit it: when I’m running Agon I’m a stickler for Classical Greek style. I don’t just want D&D with spears or a fuzzy Xena-barbarian analog, I want it to feel like mythic Greece. Hubris, arrogance, tragedy — the works. That’s a great thing about Agon: the built-in mechanics pack a lot of Greek punch.

But not all Classical texts are the same. There’s one thing that varies a lot, and that’s the overt presence of the gods and (for lack of a better term) the prominence of the supernatural.

So if you are going do mythic Greece, which mythic Greece is it? The one where gods frolic with maidens and hapless lovers are turned into flowers every three minutes? Or where bold heroes fight with javelins or sulk in their tents, watched by the curious yet distant gods?

We can break it down into three major styles, which I’ve named after the Classical authors who exemplify them. These are basically the three flavors of Agon you can run if you want to go solid Greek:

Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War) — Straight real world action: arms and the man, wars and demagoguery, kings and nations. People may talk about the gods — because they believe in the gods — but from an objective point of view the gods are never seen or directly felt. Nothing magical ever happens, and even if there are monsters in legend they never make an appearance. The story is squarely centered on mortal conflicts. Sack of Lemotea (not yet released) fits this style.

Ovid (Metamorphosis) — Yeah, it’s true, Ovid was Roman not Greek, which is probably why this style seems a lot different from many Greek texts. There’s a lot more divine intervention, a lot more maidens being turned into trees (or flowers, or streams). The gods are active, present, and magical things happen all the time. Temple of Hera falls in this category, particularly if Menae starts lashing the heroes with sorcerous fury.

Homer (The Iliad, The Odyssey, duh) — Pretty much the definitive Greek experience. If Ovid sits on the magical end and Thucydides on the realistic end, Homer sits square in the middle, permitting myth but never letting it overwhelm the mortal action. There are gods, and the gods manipulate the affairs of men, and though the reader sees them the mortals rarely do. Sometimes a god will speak directly to an important hero, but often a god takes on the form of a trusted confident and offers advice posing as them (the “divine doppelganger” approach). Later people may wonder if that really was the old mentor or Hermes in disguise, but they never really know. There are monsters like the cyclops but they are rare and important, never commonplace (one could even say mythical). Even when there are supernatural elements like the sirens or the sorceress Circe, it is ordinary mortal deeds that drive the action, not magical solutions. Beast of Kolkoris falls in this category.

It shouldn’t be any wonder that Homer falls in the sweet spot, the middle ground where there are supernatural elements but they don’t overwhelm the core of the story, the deeds of the mortal heroes. As I said, Homer pretty much defines Greek literature.

Some situations work in all three styles, only the emphasis is different. In a Homeric game the gods might proclaim to the heroes that a king be destroyed. The gods are the motivator, the watchers on high, but mostly they stay out of the way as the heroes fight and struggle. If it was a Thucydides-style game, there might be a background oracle that the gods have doomed the king, but the heroes would be doing it for mortal reasons — politics, war or vengeance — less for the gods. In an Ovid-style game the king might have offended a god who physically visited his court, and the heroes might need to accomplish a more magical goal to ensure his doom (like cutting down the tree his father planted that represents the vitality of his bloodline).

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Do you have to pick one and run all your Agon games that way? Nope. Mix it up if you want and do different quests in different styles.

Knowing which style you’re shooting for helps you keep a clear mental picture of the tone you want. You don’t have to break out these categories for the players, but you can if you want to make sure everyone is on the same page. If some of your players are expecting Xena or Kratos, and you’re shooting for Achilles or Alcibiades, it might save you a lot of grief to tell them what you have in mind. “Heroic Greece” doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody.

“Is it pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it’s pious?”
– Plato

I was having brunch with Ping and John Harper, so naturally talk turned to the complicated relationships between heroes and gods.

John was saying he wanted Agon to be a game where in the long run the heroes wound up with complex, even adversarial, relationships with their gods instead of just being dependent on them. After all when you’ve got a d12 Name die, is a d12 god oath really that big a deal anymore?

Very cool stuff, but as written the Agon rules don’t do enough to support really juicy god-hero relationships. First there’s a pitfall where a hero has a particular patron god but the Antagonist has set up a quest that will clearly offend that god. What’s a young hero to do, take the quest or be faithful to their god? It’s potentially a cool point of friction, but it only works if it presents the player with interesting choices. Right now it’s either do the quest or reject it and blow a Fate — no fun.

A second problem is that a hero’s relationship with the gods doesn’t change. If you do take a quest that offends your patron nothing happens. You can hand wave the god rejecting you, but it’s all arbitrary. Angering gods is also a big part of the genre, but you have no method of tracking all the gods you cheese off along the way.

Here’s an add-on that tracks your ongoing relationship with the gods. Tick off your patron god too much and maybe you better start making sacrifices to someone else next interlude…

Optional Rule: Wrath of the Gods

A hero has a separate relationship with each god. Heroic deeds and bold words can change these relationships, provoking the anger or affection of each god.

Write down god relationships at the bottom of the Oaths section of your character sheet. Use the box to track any god oaths you have as normal, but after the god’s name write your relationship score. A positive relationship means the god likes you, a negative score means you’ve angered the god.

Pick a patron god at character creation as usual — you start with a +2 relationship with that god. You begin with a 0 relationship with the other gods, but don’t bother to write them all down until you interact with them and your relationship changes.

Serving the Gods — Whenever you complete a quest for a god improve your relationship with that god by 1.

Angering the Gods — If you do something that offends a god, like slaying their favored hero or pet monster, reduce your relationship with that god by 1. Deeds that directly attack a god or its name, like sacking a temple or impugning the love goddess’s beauty, reduce the relationship by 2. Refusing a god’s quest reduces your relationship by 1.

Changing Patrons — You can choose a different god as your patron whenever you want, so long as you make a bold pronouncement about it. Take a -1 to your relationship with your old patron. During Interludes you can only sacrifice to your (current) patron god.

Sacrifice — The only mechanical effect of your relationship is sacrifice. When you sacrifice during an Interlude, take your (relationship - 2) as a modifier to your die roll. You’ll always get your divine favor back, but you are less likely to get a god oath and escape impairment if your patron is mad at you, and more likely if your god is pleased.

Let’s say I start with Zeus as my patron god. After a few quests, the bottom of my Oaths section looks like this:

Zeus +1
Ares +2
Hera -1

Now I’m at a -1 when I sacrifice to Zeus. Hmm, I might have to start thinking of switching to Ares as my patron god.

A bad relationship won’t prevent a god from giving you a quest, but it can and should color things. When an angry god issues the quest it might be more of a threat than a challenge — Hera descends in a thundering cloud and demands the heroes do her bidding or risk her wrath. On the other hand a good relationship means the hero is loved by the god and will be showered with affection and pride.

The Antagonist can (and should) use the evolving relationships between the heroes and the gods to guide future quests. Man those heroes have annoyed Hera again and again. Time for her to get some revenge!

For extra fun instead of just showing the total, put the total positive and negative points you’ve accumulated for the god in parenthesis. Apollo +1 tells you how the god feels towards you right now, but Apollo +1 (+7/-6) shows that your relationship with the god has been a divine roller coaster ride.

Because heroes can wind up with a net bonus for sacrifices if they please their patron they’re more likely to get god oaths. Of course the Antagonists can always throw in some quests against the wishes of their patron god to slow that down…

Heroes are free to switch patrons to take advantage of good relationships that develop but there’s a hidden cost: during character creation a player generally picks a patron god with sacrifice abilities that match their hero’s strengths, but the new god might not match up so well. What’s better, keep the god with the preferred abilities or get the bonus for the good relationship? It’s up to you.

For added zing you could also let heroes pick a second god during character creation that is hostile to them and take a -2 relationship with that god. Your father offended Artemis and you may wind up paying the price. You could also let half-divine characters start with a +4 with their patron but a mandatory -4 with an enemy god.

And yeah, it could use a better name. I would have called it “divine favor” but that was already taken…

For extra credit, take 3 minutes and think how you could use this whole thing as a plugin for any game with lots of relationships with the gods (hint: all you have to do is remove the one line about the sacrifice rules). I knew violating that shrine of Bahamut would come back to haunt me…

Agon includes a quick and painless way to get a quest started: a god descends from Olympus and says “hey, you, go do this thing!” (well, technically three things and you pick which one to do first) That’s excellent if you are doing a pick-up game and want to get straight to the action. But for a long-term game — the Agon campaign — it’s sheer buzz-death. A total passion killer.

Here are some other ways to do quests without killing the love.

The game starts off with normal human action: the heroes are in the court of a king, or attending the great games, fighting a war, ship-wrecked on a lonely isle, etc. Events unfold, people do stuff and the heroes just go about their business as they please, being brave and seeking glory.

Somewhere along the way the quest is revealed, emerging from the events in the game or the things the heroes do. The heroes trespass in a crumbling ruin and anger the goddess of the dawn, who won’t be appeased until her idol is returned to its rightful place. A long night of drinking in the king’s hall leads to bold words and brash oaths to slay the monstrous bull that ravages the fields.

Once the quest has been revealed, a god may or may not appear to cement the deal (see the Silent Gods below). As the heroes sleep off their hang-overs a glowing apparition of Athena rouses them from their sleep to declare that Zeus wills them to complete this task and slay the bull — or is it just a dream?

Spend strife as normal before the quest is revealed, but take it out of the budget for the actual quest. An alternative is to add a “discover the quest” objective and give yourself more strife accordingly.

Instead of an episodic game where each quest is independent, string a bunch of quests together under one overarching mega-quest spread out across multiple games. Bring back the three pieces of the panoply of Apollo spread far across the earth, slay the five heroes who sacked Thebes, etc.

Usually one agency (god or mortal) sends the heroes on all the sub-quests. They might be thematically related (like the examples above) or they might be very different tasks, only related because the same person is sending the heroes to do them (like the labors of Hercules). Depending on the premise failing one quest might end the whole quest chain.

The heroes should know they are doing a quest chain, but they might not know what all the tasks are when they start — they might just learn each new task when they finish the last one. It is probably wise to let the heroes know how many tasks they need to complete from the start. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get a sense of the scope and every quest is a “jeez, how many more are there!” game.

Create and spend strife just like normal for each individual quest. Alternately you could save strife you didn’t spend in each quest and carry it forward to the next quest in the chain — be careful or else you’ll wind up with astronomical strife for the last quest.

Somewhere up there in the clouds of Mount Olympus, the gods want the heroes to complete the quest. They want to see the monster slain or the rash king laid low for his hasty words. And they want to see the heroes do it. But that doesn’t mean they are going to show themselves. They are going to sit up in the heavens and watch, empowering the heroes when they spend their Divine Favor but otherwise just kicking back and watching. What’s the point of being a god and having heroes if you have to do everything yourself?

The heroes start off with a mission, but it comes from a mortal agency, not a god. It could be a task put before them by a king, or an oracle they’ve sworn to fulfill to save their city-state, whatever. Getting the mission might be in the past, something read out as part of the introduction, or it can be something that happens early in the game (like the Emerging Quest described above).

Mechanically it’s not really different from the method in the book (you still get an oath from the god that favors the quest), but it’s a big difference in roleplaying: Athena isn’t in your face telling you what to do, you aren’t “on a mission from god.”

A mortal quest also opens up the door for a lot more player free will — defying the gods is a big step, but defying mortals is fair game. What if you hate the king you’re on the quest for? Maybe you’ll complete the quest as sworn but find a way to twist the intent to screw him over. The king demanded you bring the head of the medusa to him, but he didn’t say anything about not waving it in his face, turning him into stone, and slaughtering his city.

A quest is what one god wants to happen. But what if another god wants something else to happen and the heroes are forced to choose which god they obey? Hera wants the boy slain, but Zeus wants him taken safely to the queen of the Amazons.

Each god’s desires are usually in direct opposition, making it impossible to satisfy both and forcing heroes to choose sides and suffer the consequences. No matter how incompatible you think the goals are, clever players might find ways to surprise you and wriggle through some loophole, fulfilling both quests. To which I say, huzzah! That’s good gaming. Odysseus would be proud.

A really good conflicted quest would be crafted so that the heroes’ choice isn’t set in stone until the bitter end — they should be able to complete several objectives without having to pick sides. Once they take steps that absolutely support one goal and defy the other it’s pretty much a straight quest. Cruel Antagonists will also look for ways to make both goals appealing or unappealing at different stages of the quest. Sure slaying the monster sounded like the better choice, but then like the Beast of Kolkoris you meet him and find out he’s a guilt-ridden philosopher king with a crying wife clinging to his knees.

A combination of a few things above. You have been given a mortal quest that you appear to be fulfilling, but secretly the gods have appeared and given you conflicting goals. The king wants you to bring back the sacred apples, but the gods have told you to first pierce them with the fangs of the hydra, so the king will be killed when he eats them.

It’s different from the Conflicted Quest in that the decision is pretty much assumed: unless you reject the quest you’re going to be following the god’s objectives, not the mortal’s. Mechanically if you did fulfill the mortal quest and defy the gods it counts as both a quest win (take normal rewards, earn a Fate) and a quest reject (earn another Fate).

There’s lots of room for high drama, particularly if the mortal the heroes are betraying is likable or a sworn ally, not an enemy or some random jerk.

There’s a prophecy and the heroes are trying to fulfill it. Unfortunately like most good oracles the literal meaning can interpreted a few different ways. Which interpretation is the right one? What is the real goal of the quest?

Part of the heroes’ quest is to feel their way along and figure out the real meaning of the prophecy. It could be a real heartbreaker where the heroes think for most of the quest that they are intended to save a city, only to figure out at the last moment that the vague “it’s people safe behind wooden walls” didn’t mean the city walls would stand, it meant they were going to flee with the few remaining survivors by ship (the prophesied wooden walls).

A good prophecy quest should include lots of people along the way throwing out their own interpretations of the prophecy, just to stir things up and make the heroes look at the words in different ways. Kings and other heroes might take rash actions based on their own optimistic reading of the oracle, sweeping the heroes up in tragic events.

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Mixing it up like this means that not only do the heroes think about what they’re doing inside the quest, they think about the meaning of the quest as a whole and their place in the world. They’re participants in an unfolding story instead of just following some god’s irresistible orders.

I present each of these types separately, but really you can blend them together in different degrees to create new and strange things. A king sends the heroes to bring back all the pieces of the panoply of Apollo (seven labors quest) thinking he will have impregnable armor, but Athena has told the heroes to give the final assembled armor to the king’s usurper son instead (ulterior motive quest), while Apollo demands his armor be destroyed in the mountain of fire since the hero he once gave it to is dead and no other mortal deserves it (conflicted quest).

If you’ve played in any of the basic dungeon crawling analogs, you’ve experienced that magical post-combat moment: treasure anticipation.

There’s loot — you know there’s loot — but you don’t know what it is yet. Your brain is awash with the endless possibilities, visions of the shiny wonders that could be stashed in the ogre’s cave. What could it be? Something wonderful! It’s Xmas morning and you’re a kid again (unless you are a kid, in which case carry on).

And then the GM opens his mouth and ruins it: 200 gp and +1 leather armor.

So dies the magic and the mystery.

Treasure is a GM’s curse. It’s our terrible, spiny cross to bear.

Don’t get me wrong: I love crafting cool treasure. But treasure has a lousy prep vs play ratio: creating truly interesting treasure is a lot of work for a very brief splash of game time. It literally fills as much play time as it takes you to read the text, plus a little extra for fighting over who gets the magic ring. I can spend all afternoon honing the description of a “basket-hilted cutlass, with a grip of cracked red leather wrapped in gold wire and a single deep notch low on the heavy blade” but that’s 12 seconds of game time (party treasurer: “cutlass, check”). Compare that to the pay-off for picking a few critters to fight: hours of potential play.

Players crave treasure, not just because they want the literal loot, but because they want that magic moment, the fulfillment and vindication of their real victory, i.e. what they did to get to the treasure. You defeated the dragon, and the pretty treasure is the proof that it was a mighty deed. It’s recognition of a job well done, the validation that you done good. It’s the victory lap, the trophy for winning the race.

So when you cough up lame or boring treasure it deflates that victory a little bit. Even if you try your best it can be difficult to come up a worthy bounty that doesn’t cause instant game inflation. We’re tainted by our childhood visions of Smaug sleeping on that mountain of gold. We want the treasure to live up to the same mythic standard as the monsters, or else the victory is hollow, the picture incomplete.

Dilemma, huh? Sounds like you’re doomed to disappoint or saddled with lots of work to give players a little pat on the head. A little good news is that detail substitutes for raw value. A carefully described small treasure with cunning jewelry and artifacts feels more valuable than a huge but generic “um, ten thousand gold pieces,” so detail helps you reward the players without wrecking the game economy. It’s not just a +1 sword, it’s an elvish weapon fashioned in elder days before the great wars.

Which leads us to the secret weapon most GMs overlook: players pay attention when you describe treasure. Treasure is (if you’ll pardon the phrase) a golden opportunity to reveal information.

There are lots of times during a game when players are half-listening, or thinking about other things, or maybe just wandering into the kitchen to get a soda. But in the magical post-combat pre-treasure window, everyone’s attention is high, their curiosity is piqued, and they are clamoring to hear what you will say next.

You want to show the players something? Put it in the form of treasure. Want to tell them about the history of the elves? Tell it through treasure. Want to tell them about the cult in the area? Tell it through treasure. Want them to give them a clue about the dangers that are three doors down? Tell it through treasure.

Why is the bugbear’s rusted breastplate engraved with dwarven symbols of an anvil and thunderbolt? What is a pilgrim’s reliquary doing here in the middle of the wilderness? Why is the hidden strongbox painted with crude wolf symbols?

You can describe some detail about a room they search, or lecture them about history and lore when they talk to random NPCs, and sometimes they’ll listen and sometimes they won’t. But when you drop clues as treasure details you can be certain they will hear you and wonder what it means. They will be curious. Sure it’s just a handful of gold coins, but that faded portrait on them looks a lot different from any coins of the realm. What ancient emperor’s motto is graven in those strange runes? Are they just a stray remnant of an empire lost and better forgotten or the clue to a hidden city..?

And tell me, what’s more interesting: having some old guy in the bar say “hey, here’s a map, go find this not-so-lost city” or having the heroes inadvertently stumble across a few gold coins that lead them to a hidden kingdom? Getting lectured about elven history or finding an ancient elven sword that’s part of that history?

[What's a game plugin? Go read the working definition. Basically it's a rules add-on that can work with any game system, so whip it out when you play D&D, Traveller, Ars Magica, Vampire, Fudge, whatever]

The Instant Rivalries game plugin establishes relationships and dramatic tension between player characters in any game system. Rivalries can be friendly competition or they can be bitter enmities — it’s up to the players and the desired tone of the game.

Brainstorming a few rivalries can jump start the character creation process and give characters solid personal connections right off the bat. Subplots write themselves.

A rivalry is defined by who the rivals are (two or more player characters), what type of rivalry it is (love, fame, wealth, etc.), the specific object or topic of the rivalry (Princess Buttercup, white crane kung-fu, the Swedish scientific community), and how important the rivalry is to each character.

Here are six types of rivalries, but you can add more or omit ones that don’t fit your game setting:

Ability - I want to be better at something than you. My kung-fu is better than your kung-fu! Your theories of the natural sciences are juvenile compared to mine!

Fame - I want to be more famous than you.

Love - I want someone to love me more than you. It could be an actual lover or a friend, parent, child or mentor.

Respect - I want people to respect me more than you.

Station - I want a better position than you or the same position you want. It might be a political post, a military promotion, or a noble rank.

Wealth - I want to be richer than you. I might want to find the ancient treasure before you do or make more money on the stock market.

The object is the target, topic or scope of the conflict — the would-be lover that both are courting, a field that both want fame in, the military order that both want a promotion in. Whereas the type is a broad concept, the object tells you exactly who or what the rivals are competing for in the game world.

Those details are the same for both rivals, but each player individually decides how important the rivalry is to their character. Rate the importance on a scale of 1-3, with 1 meaning it’s a minor concern and a 3 meaning it’s intensely important to the character. Don’t like abstract numbers? Use descriptive terms instead — minor, moderate, strong. Players should know what importance their rival is assigning, and as usual they can negotiate to make sure it works for both of them.

The difference between the values tells you a lot about the dynamic of the rivalry. If one character in a Love rivalry has a 1 and the other has a 3, it tells you that one character is thinking about it a lot while the other isn’t concerned. Does that mean one character already thinks they’ve won the person over or do they just care less? Is the high motivation character obsessed or over-protective? It’s up to the players to decide.

One (and only one) of the characters could instead have a 0 value, meaning that rivalry is actually one-sided and this character is not concerned about it at all — what we call an “unrequited rivalry”. You intensely want to prove you’re better than me and I don’t even know you exist or I’m just not willing to compete.

When you write down the rivalry always include how important it is to your rival:

Brother Wu’s character sheet:
Ability rivalry 3 vs Brother Po 1 (white crane kung-fu)

Brother Po’s character sheet:
Ability rivalry 1 vs Brother Wu 3 (white crane kung-fu)

“It was never about the girl! It was her fortune I was after you fool!”

A rivalry may appear to be about one thing but really be about another. It may seem like I want my kung-fu to be better than your kung-fu (an Ability rivalry) but really I’m doing it to win the affection of our teacher (Love) or to show others that I’m better than you (Respect). The value of the surface rivalry is really the value of the ulterior motive — the character is pursuing or appears to be pursuing the first to get the second.

Any player can choose to add an ulterior motive to their rivalry when it is created. You can make it public knowledge or if your group agrees you can keep ulterior motives secret until they are revealed in play.

Make sure the ulterior motive still involves the rival. It’s fine if I want to win the love of someone who might love you instead, but if I’m trying to win the love of someone completely unrelated to you there isn’t really a rivalry there.

Brother Wu’s character sheet:
Ability rivalry 3 vs Brother Po 1 (white crane kung-fu), ulterior motive Love (old Master Fong)

There are several ways you can decide on rivalries during character creation. The default “pell mell” option is to just let players figure it out — let them pair off as they prefer, and pick whatever type of rivalry they can agree on. You could also pair up player randomly, or have each player secretly choose a type of rivalry first and then look for obvious matches (”You wanted a love rivalry? Me too!”).

Because rivalries are part of character concept, it is important that players like their rivalries. If you want your character to vie for a lover’s affections but that doesn’t interest me, the rivalry is not going to work. Players need to negotiate until there is mutual agreement.

Depending on the game premise you might require all characters to have rivalries. If you have an odd number of players you can let one character have two rivalries of different types with different rivals.

If players are having a hard time agreeing on a rivalry type, encourage them to consider an Ulterior Motive. One player wants a respect rivalry but you want love, so you are only appearing to vie for respect to win someone’s love.

So what effect does my rivalry actually have? Mechanically, none. It’s a guideline for your roleplaying and an overt agreement between you and the other players (GM included) about what kind of plots and tensions exist between your characters. You chose it, so we assume it’s something you want to play.

The basic set up is one rivalry per character with one rival, but you can make things a lot more complicated:

- If you are involved in more than one rivalry, are you willing to sacrifice one to win at the other? What’s more important to me, winning the hand of the woman I love or proving I’m the finest scientific mind in Prussia? Mean GMs (aka good GMs) will inevitably set up situations that pit one rivalry against another.

- Several people could be part of the same rivalry, like three students all wishing to prove they were the true inheritors of their dead master’s kung-fu. If there can only be one winner, that means a lot more potential losers. Do you side with one rival to bring down another?

Rivalries will often change over time, erupting into serious conflict or fading into irrelevance as the game moves on. Players should always be allowed to raise or lower the importance of a rivalry by one between games or at some other reasonable interval to reflect events in the game if they want.

If a rivalry is eliminated for some reason, either by being won, resolved or put of reach by events in the game, you can let the players just drop the rivalry or they can opt to transform it into a new rivalry based on what happened. You were named the queen’s champion instead of me (completed Station rivalry) and now I bitterly want to show that I’m really the better swordsman (new Ability rivalry). The world may laugh at me, but you will know I am your better!