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Worlds In The Wild

I’m getting verified sightings of In This World deliveries in the wild!

In This World books

Books are showing up on people’s doorsteps, which means it’s time to get folks together and make some new worlds. Cats not included.

Update: If you too want to show everyone your beautiful book (with or without pets) drop a link in the comments or send them to me at info at lamemage.com and I’ll share them.

Ben Robbins | February 23rd, 2024 |

Cathy Grant is Captain Danger’s Sister

“Your female characters all sound alike” -the irony, oh the irony

I’ve mentioned before how, when I used to GM a lot, I had a tendency to keep secrets. Deep secrets. Long secrets. Sometimes for years. Longer than most people would consider sensible. Like back in the old Doven campaigns, it was almost ten years before anyone figured out the fundamental structure of the world.

When I buried secrets, I didn’t count on the players ever figuring them out. They were there because they were truths of the world, not because I wanted the players to discover them. Ultimately they were there for me. If the players put the pieces together, that was entirely to their credit. They cracked the code all on their own and could feel proud of their sleuthing, like when parties uncovered hidden treasures in West Marches.

But there was also the opposite case, where I intended the players to figure a secret out, because it was something they needed to know to understand what was going on. A necessary revelation, even if I had no idea how or when they would put the pieces together. Like in our New Century City superhero campaign, the players needed to figure out the big “worlds-in-collision / this is Terra” reveal, because until they did they couldn’t do something to fix it. Did I guess the reveal was going to take nearly a hundred game sessions? No I did not.

This story is also about New Century City, but it isn’t about a big secret, it’s about a very small one. A secret that had no real impact on the main plot, but was just an interesting bit of character development. It was also much shorter, kept hidden for only about a dozen games before the truth came out. This campaign was also a million years ago, so I’d probably play the whole thing quite differently now, as I’ll talk about later.

So let me tell you about the time Captain Danger’s sister fooled everyone…

In This Episode, Guardian Gets A Sidekick

Guardian was Seth’s character, a Superman-like hero (if Superman was sometimes a total jerk) complete with a Clark Kent secret identity as a reporter for the local paper. At the start of Episode 25, “High Society”, he got saddled with a completely green new assistant, Cathy Grant. Cue hijinks as he has this plucky but inexperienced sidekick following him around who he has keep out of danger, all while hiding his superhero identity, etc. An incompetent Lois Lane sans romance. Classic stuff.

What I didn’t tell him was that “Cathy Grant” was not really a new character. She was actually someone who had been in the game since the very start, all the back in Episode 1, “Enter LiveWire”: she was Captain Danger’s sister, Felicity, using a fake name.

Captain Danger was Ping’s character, and she and Felicity had a tempestuous relationship from the start. Felicity didn’t know her sister was one of New Century City’s most prominent superheroes, she just knew she was always behind on her share of the rent for their apartment, because she was secretly too busy saving the city to hold down a temp job. Their main dynamic was bickering and getting on each others’ nerves. Constant sibling rivalry.

The other players were all very familiar with Felicity, having watched numerous scenes of the two sisters going at it, but their characters had never met her, because they didn’t know Captain Danger’s secret identity either. So to Guardian’s eyes, this was honestly someone he had never seen before.

(And yes, because it was a superhero game I named every episode at the start, comic book-style)

So I introduce this situation and in my mind I start a countdown clock. And if this clock had a label it would say “time until everyone does a spit-take and realizes this is the same person”. Because I think it will be a hilarious reveal. And ultimately this is all just a setup for what comes after, which is seeing what Captain Danger thinks about her stay-at-home sister going out and getting a life, and putting herself in danger in the process. What is Felicity doing butting into her superhero life? Doesn’t she know who the main character of this story is?!? That’s the real question we’re building towards. The deception is just a fun way to get there.

Interview With A Superhero

Adventures happen, Cathy Grant keeps making appearances, but no one thinks anything is fishy.

A crowning moment (for me) came in Episode 31, “Interview With A Superhero”. Ping normally played Captain Danger, but she had been running a new up-and-coming B-team hero, Avatar, for a series of side adventures. This whole session was centered around Cathy Grant, junior reporter, landing an interview with Avatar and asking her all about her recent adventures, how awesome it was to work with Guardian (ahem), and then intermixing the interview with flashbacks to play out those interludes. A super fun framing device.

But I also knew this would be the first time Ping would be in a scene talking to Cathy Grant. Would she notice the similarities and realize this was really her other character’s sister??? After all, I was doing my best to role-play Grant as ‘Felicity trying to pretend to be a real reporter’, since that’s exactly who she was.

Late in the session, in a perfectly glorious moment, after Avatar and Grant had been talking for hours, Ping looked at me, scrunched up her face, and dryly commented how my “female characters all sounded alike”.

Did I manage to keep a straight face? Yes I did. Barely.

Next up: Part 2, in which my hilarious reveal falls completely flat…

Ben Robbins | February 19th, 2024 | , , , | 1 comment

“For other times of loss”

Like all boys, they never walked anywhere, but named a goal and lit for it, scissors and elbows. Nobody won. Nobody wanted to win. It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow. Their hands slapped library door handles together, their chests broke track tapes together, their tennis shoes beat parallel pony tracks over lawns, trimmed bushes, squirreled trees, no one losing, both winning, thus saving their friendship for other times of loss.

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1962. We think of Bradbury as a science fiction writer, but every time I read his work I’m reminded he was really a poet.

Ben Robbins | February 15th, 2024 |

A Whole Stack of Worlds

Does one of these belong to you?

In This World books

If you interpret this glorious sight to mean that printing is done and shipping is underway, you would be correct.

Ben Robbins | February 5th, 2024 |

In This Murder

“Let’s pick a light topic, like Holidays. Or maybe… MURRRRDEERRR????”

The Thursday night hobbits have a knack for In This World that is by now well-documented: sparrow bodhisattvas, mech wars, reimagining the Aliens movies… oh right, I never posted about the Aliens game. Someone remind me to do that.

So when we sat down to play our last game of the year, and folks said “hey, let’s imagine what the world would be like if MURDER followed totally different rules”, I had zero doubts it would be juicy.

We had a “vibe is 1970s Soylent Green” take, where the world is so overpopulated that murder is encouraged, except the government would really, kind-of, much rather you killed less wealthy or successful people. And we had the mandatory social media world, with influencers broadcasting elaborate murder plots for those sweet, sweet likes, even though it’s totally illegal. Killing for clout.

But our most fascinating world, to me anyway, was the very first one we made. Haskell started with the statement “murder leaves evidence” being not true: not only is there no evidence of the crime, but there’s no memory of the victim… at all. When someone is murdered (but not when they die by accident or of natural causes), all recollection and physical evidence of them vanishes. Life goes on as if they never existed. So you murder your husband in a fit of passion, and then promptly forget you did it, or that you ever had a husband. Pictures, momentos, and all signs of their presence in your life promptly fade away.

The result is that a murderer doesn’t even know what they did. Maybe they feel something is missing in their life… but can never know that what is missing is the person they themselves killed.

Police don’t investigate murders, because… what murders? But some investigators have a sense that “something is just not right”, even if they are largely ignored because they can’t prove a thing. They’re the Fox Mulders, fringe-believers on an impossible quest to find the truth.

And even though there’s no memory of them, people who were close to the victim are strangely drawn to each other, even if they had never met before. Fate seems to conspire to bring them together. So the person who killed the lover they were having an affair with starts spending time with the victim’s wife, maybe becoming friends, maybe even becoming lovers themselves, without either of them knowing their forgotten connection.

Why does all this happen? We didn’t know and didn’t care. We were interested in the impact it had on people, not the made-up magical causes.

It had a wonderfully Dark City vibe. All of our worlds were good, but I would play games or read whole books set in this one.

Ben Robbins | January 18th, 2024 | ,

What’s Making This Downfall So Good?

We’re playing a game of Downfall that has rapidly become my favorite. I was going to say it’s up there, but by now there is no question: this is the best Downfall game I’ve ever played.

But because I am a game scientist, complete with lab coat and goggles, I cannot leave well enough alone. I cannot simply say “hey, that was fun!” I must take the machine apart, gear by gear, and see what makes it tick so nicely. I must understand. I must know. And fortunately for me, Ace and Joe, the other players at the table, are just as big game scientists as I am. So we have had not one but several extended debriefs analyzing what is making our game so damn good.

We’re playing our 8th session this week. Maybe it all falls apart. Maybe it explodes in tears. That’s always a possibility in the daring creative space we call story games. But in the meantime let me tell you about Luxandre, the Empire of Light, and why we think it’s turning out so awesome.

These are the key things that I think we’re doing differently from other Downfall games I’ve played in the past. These weren’t things we planned, just a series of small decisions that all came together. These are all takeaways from the epic chats with Ace and Joe, and they might chime in with more observations of their own.

Virtue #1: Our Society Does not Suck

Our haven is Luxandre, the “Empire of Light”. It’s a civilized, educated, and advanced society. We call ourselves an empire but we don’t conquer our neighbors, they actively want to adopt the knowledge and advancements we have, because we’re so smart and civilized.

In Luxandre, our Flaw is knowledge, which is normally a very positive trait. It goes wrong when we are unwilling to act unless we understand every side of a problem, or when we don’t recognize that some things are just not everyone else’s business.

But all in all it doesn’t seem like a bad place. Our traditions are pretty reasonable and people seem to have good intentions. The result is that we, as players, are basically sympathetic to our society. We don’t think it sucks and simply deserves to burn, which is something that can happen when you make really flawed societies. We’re rooting for it. Could we have gotten a society that didn’t suck even with a more typical “negative” flaw like greed or cowardice? Sure.

Virtue #2: Our World Is Not Bizarre

In Downfall, the players secretly pick elements (e.g. “trees, ink, and noise”) and then try to combine them to imagine the physical world for the haven. The downside is that this often leads to pretty weird environments, like talking spirit-forests or floating asteroids circling a cold sun.

For Luxandre, we made a pretty normal world. We did use the elements (“empire, echo, and light”), but we incorporated them as themes rather than physical facts: ‘light’ because we’re a shining beacon to the nations around us and we try to bring the truth to light, and ‘echo’ because more and more places want to imitate us and adopt our ways. And ’empire’ because empire.

Since there’s nothing weird about the physical world, we don’t get distracted talking about it. Instead we focus on the society and the people. And it’s easier to imagine living in a more normal world, so put another check in the “we can relate to it” box.

Virtue #3: Our Hero Is Respected (at the start)

In the past I’ve pointed out how the game term “haven” can lead players to imagine a small and isolated community, but Luxandre is huge. So big that it’s divided into many Provinces, each ruled by a Governor with nearly unlimited authority in their domain. That’s one of the traditions we established: the Governors are renowned and trusted for their knowledge. They’re basically considered the wisest person in the Province, which is why they are chosen to rule.

To make your Hero — the one person who sees the flaws of society and rebels against it — the rules say pick a tradition and give them a job related to it. So of course we make the boldest move and decide that our Hero is the Governor. Instead of making our Hero some shifty dissident, our rebel is basically our king.

Grace is a wise old grandmother who’s been Governor for decades. She’s got a keen eye and a quick tongue, and no one knows what she’s really thinking, or that she has secretly questioned our way of doing things for ages. When people talk to her, they naturally think she’s doing her best for the good of society, because that’s her job. They don’t treat her like an enemy.

But even though she’s in a position of great power, she’s still just one Governor in the larger Empire, so she there is some authority above her, somewhere offscreen. And if she tries to wave her hand and change the whole culture, people will freak. No spoilers!

Virtue #4: We Made Minor Characters Without Personal Connections

So that’s all stuff that happened during our setup. We also made a Fallen and a Pillar — characters who totally believe in the benefits of the Flaw and who are just fine with the status quo, respectively. The rules have you give each of them a relationship to the Hero, picking from a simple list: family, friend, guardian, leader, lover. Which is great stuff, because it gives a clear personal connection between characters who are effectively going to be adversaries.

Buuuuut, there’s a subtle downside, which is that because the connections are personal, we can wind up focusing more on the relationships between the characters rather than the issues of the larger society. If the Fallen is the Hero’s grandson, like in our game, their interactions are always going to be overshadowed by this personal relationship.

Fallen and Pillar players can play other members of society too, but because there’s no step to make minor characters, there can be a tendency to just have every scene be between those three characters. Old Kingdom had the same issue, which is why the new edition has you make minor characters, to flesh out the community more.

Maybe because we play a lot of Kingdom (and Follow) and we’ve learned those lessons, we started bringing more minor characters into scenes. It was also a natural fit because we were making scenes showing the Governor doing her job, which of course involved dealing with a lot of random people. Two messengers arguing who’s at fault? Time for the Governor to lay down judgment, and two more minor characters to add to the list.

The result is that we had a much richer world, but more importantly we focused on the society and the Flaw rather than just the Hero’s personal life. We see how other people in the culture see things. Those are the two competing themes in Downfall: the Hero’s personal problems vs the society’s problems. The personal problems can steal focus from the society’s story.

I can’t overstate how important this was. I think even if this was the one thing we did differently, it would have been a great game. If you’re playing Downfall, I strongly recommend adding minor characters with no personal connection to your Hero.

Virtue #5: We’re Taking Our Time

You can totally play Downfall as a one session, one-shot game. And that’s what I’ve done every other time I’ve played it. But it’s honestly a crime against creativity, because you make all these awesome traditions and this fascinating society, and then blow through some scenes to rapidly burn it all down because that’s all the time you have left to play today.

Those creations deserve some time to breathe and be explored! So instead we’ve been taking our time and playing multiple sessions. It’s a slow burning Downfall rather than three round boom. Again, this was not a decision we made in advance. We wanted to keep playing and take more time precisely because the game was going so well. It’s a virtuous cycle.

It Hasn’t Fallen Down, Yet…

So that’s our unplanned recipe for an awesome Downfall. Like I said, we didn’t plan it or set out to upgrade the experience, but in hindsight it all makes a lot of sense. There are also some other aspects of the game that I’m not going into (no talking about chapter 2! #nospoilers), but we might get into that later…

Ben Robbins | December 20th, 2023 | ,

Making History Out of Order, But With Kingdom

Over the past few years we’ve played some pretty huge Kingdom legacy games. Yes, the rules say you can make each new era in the past or future of your community, but on a whim I wondered just how often we actually played out of chronological order? Luckily I have all the data, so figuring that out is super easy…

As a baseline, this first charts shows what it would look like if we just kept playing in chronological order. Sessions are shown from left to right, with a longer flat line meaning we played more sessions in that era. The vertical axis shows where in the history each era falls, with lower being earlier and higher being later. So this is just each era following the last, forward in time.

default chronological order

And here’s the Kingdo-mon campaign, 13 eras over 112 sessions. The orange line is where in history the first Kingdom we made falls, because I think it’s interesting to see how we do or don’t cluster around that starting “present”.

Kingdo-mon eras

So every time the connecting diagonal line goes up, we’re going forward in time (aka making a new era that is later than the last one), and every time it goes down, we’re going backward in time. The vertical distances are not a to-scale measure of time, like how many years apart things are, just how many eras there were in between.

And then here’s the Witches campaign, 12 eras over 68 sessions (so far).

Witch eras

Just at a glance, it’s interesting how we tend to bounce around in time, rather than stay near the previous era when making the next one. I think it’s the natural urge to change up: we just did a modern era, so let’s do something ancient or far in the future, etc.

Ben Robbins | December 19th, 2023 | , , ,

“To buy D&D, you went to the store that sold the trains…”

I love when interviews stop being “interviews” and turn into conversations about the things we love. That’s exactly what happened during this chat with Craig Shipman on the Third Floor Wars podcast. A very fun time!

Third Floor Wars Podcast, Tabletop Talk with Ben Robbins

We cover a whole range of stuff, from when I started gaming as a kid, through the early days of story games, and then all the way up to new things like Microscope and In This World. Very “this is your life”.

Spoiler: the end is not really the end. There’s a whole post-credit bit with parts that didn’t fit anywhere else. Also one clarification: when I was talking about Capes, I meant it was the first GMless game we played, not the first GMless game invented.

Ben Robbins | December 11th, 2023 | , , , , | 1 comment