Starting to get back into writing for Lost Heroes but the first thing I do isn’t writing. I end up re-evaluating everything in front of me – I’m currently working on a character creation guide and despite having actually written up the rules for creating Magic Practitioners, I’ve decided to remove all mention of magic and non-Chosen types (including Magic Practitioners) from what ever thing I make public. I’ll keep the stuff I wrote, but this creation guide will be specifically about the Chosen only.
That isn’t really a radical change. I’m just moving some of the stuff aside. And it was something I had already considered for a while. But then it lays the seed of a change much more fundamental.
I am of the opinion that in game design, mechanics should follow flavour and setting and help re-enforce it or expand it. But I’ve always felt that the current power-system of Lost Heroes does not do that. I’ve invested a lot of thought and design effort into it, built elements of the system around it, but it always felt a little disconnected from the rest of the setting and the other rules which all otherwise have their place in relation to the setting. I did have a design goal way back when I started, not to have a distinct magic system but one that shared it’s core with the basic power system. That however I think is holding back a more refined vision of the RPG.
Currently a character can have gifts and faults, some of these are mundane and some supernatural or divine. Chosen with different Patron Gods will have different gifts and faults. Then there is abilities. There are psychic abilities, which have their place within the setting (a good example would be visions), and then there is the supernatural and divine abilities. These are powered by the character’s passions. Magic then aligns with these abilities (instead calling them paths), using the basic same rules but with a few extra restrictions and some broader concepts, example; Magic always takes time but Abilities are instant, however Magic can be used to create magical items but Abilities cannot. And so on. Abilities have ratings which can be increased via experience points and I’ve built them up using the mythos and elements of the setting.
But I felt they never really reflected the source idea of Lost Heroes. While characters in mythology often gain powers, they don’t work like abilities. They don’t get supernatural skills as such but learn specific tricks and powers. It’s not really something that’s part of the theme of the setting. I think I pulled the ideas for abilities from existing RPGs and martial-art based fantasies where characters only purpose is to train and build on a supernatural martial art (including all the flashy light shows).
I’m considering ripping out abilities completely, replacing them with just a set of gifts and faults. This suits the setting much more, as in the characters are human but have some advantages. They don’t have these supernatural abilities that would make them truly distinct (i.e. alien) to human characters. They are simply different. Another angle on this is to wonder how that these sort of supernatural abilities would affect how one would sees the world. It’s not just gaining an alien sixth sense, but also a new limb to control the world within that sixth sense. It would be not possible to describe how or what that would mean to some without it.
Magic of course can still use the stuff I devised for abilities, but I shall put it aside until later.
The question then I have is, does this make sense from a player perspective?
The current gift system in Lost Heroes allows for tiered gifts and faults. Some gifts and faults can be stacked up to three times, increasing their scope or power. But there is no gift or fault tree. Players can buy new gifts, learning them from gods or other supernatural beings. But anything then with an ability is not a player character and can’t really be. Does not having powers-based skills like abilities weaken the system?
Came across these on G+ this morning. Wonderful simple infographics on the Norse mythology of Yggdrasil and Ragnarok. Both created by Tiffany Thoreson. (I wish I could make my Aesir Family Tree graphics as pretty as these).
In Tolkien the Elves were not human, and you see this reflected more in the early years of RPGs with Tolkien inspired elves in them. But in the 30+ years since they’ve been increasingly humanized (much like Vampires). Now they are just people with pointy ears (and Vampires are people who sparkle) and they’re written and played more or less like any other human character.
Which strikes to core one of the major themes of Lost Heroes setting, or at least something that has been brewing in the back of my mind as I’ve been designing. The weirdness, that inhuman nature is part and parcel of mythology. The Gods may appear human but they also appear alien.
The otherworldly inhuman nature of Elves and other magical creatures is something you see throughout folklore.
I’ve tried to replicate that in the rules by saying that players can only play human and nearly-human characters. You can play a human that can turn into a dragon, but not a dragon that can turn into a human. You can play a half-Dreamling (but not a real Dreamling) or a human who has been changed to join the Elves of Asgard (but you can’t play a pure/original Elf). I create a sub system for Magic Users that is intended to make magic strange and exotic. I also wrote a long chapter called “the world of horrors and wonders”; how our human and mundane world appears to creatures and beings not from here (I hope to revise and extend this chapter in the future). Indeed the world of lost heroes is about entering the supernatural world, with it’s spontaneous festivals and fairy realms, of the supernatural community and the demands of the gods that dwell only in the land of dreams.
This hasn’t been an explicit condition of my design though. It still possible to use the character creation process to create really weird characters that do not fit any ideal of human so really it’s something that the GM will have to watch for.
Thinking on this theme for the last few days has made me evaluate how I envision the final product per say. It doesn’t change my course of action for now, but I keep thinking that the core book should be filled with the strange and weird flotsam of mythology and alien-ness, perhaps containing a cross-section of a god from each of the established pantheons and then a number of examples from the two generic ones and a number of strange realms with alien rules (mostly to highlight the strange hyper-reality of the land of the dreams).
That’s mostly because for the last month I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo, writing something completely different from Lost Heroes RPG. I’m looking forward to getting back into it though and finishing the character creation (which contains a humongous amount of stuff on the different gods and their chosen). My long term plan still remains the same. Write up/design character creation and rules. Playtest for as long as I’m enjoying it and then create something with fancy graphics and layout.
This fancy something is still up in the air. It’s so far away that it might never happen. I’m currently imagining that this will probably be a core book with full rules and basic character creation for Chosen and only the two generic pantheons, Fair Folk and Dark Gods. I’m going to strip magic, Magic Practitioners and Valiant Mortals out of it but expand and create a viable world for the generic pantheons (which a legion of strange realms and alien things). I’d also, in parallel take one pantheon of gods and create a supplement something. So you could grab the core book plus one set of gods. Hopefully after that I’d be able to create supplements for Magic/Magic Practitioners, Valiant Mortals and the other three sets of gods, each getting a much fuller treatment.
Also over the last little while I’ve discovered that there is a computer game for Nintendo’s 3DS coming out called “Lost Heroes RPG”. What a strange little coincidence. I do own a 3DS and I’m quietly a Nintendo fan boy, so what a strange little surprise to come across.
This bank holiday morning, myself and my kids sat and watched some episodes of Ulysses 31, an 80s sci-fi series. Despite the weaker animation than modern cartoons, the kids still love it. My daughter and myself can quote the opening sequence where Zeus curses Ulysses:
“Mortals, you defy the Gods? I sentence you to travel among unknown stars. Until you find the Kingdom of Hades, your bodies will stay as lifeless as stone.”
I wasn’t a huge fan of it as a kid, though when it was on I watched it. But since becoming an adult, probably fuelled by nostalgia, I’ve become a big fan. It was originally released in 1981 so this year, 2011, makes it is 30th anniversary. A French musician, a fan of the show, is re-mastering the soundtrack and has got permission to release a special edition (his website is in French but there are demos of the track there: www.parallax.fr).
I got the box set of the entire series just a few years ago, before I started Lost Heroes RPG. And it’s only in the last year I re-watched it with the kids. I’ve done a lot of reading of mythology including Greek myths for Lost Heroes and when I watched it with the kids recently, I had a new appreciation of the series. In fact I think subconsciously the genre mashup of far future fantasy plus Greek mythology probably did heavily influence the inception of Lost Heroes RPG (which could be described as a mashup of modern day fantasy plus ancient classic mythology).
Ulysses 31 is set in the 31st Century where a modern Ulysses is travelling on a large spaceship home where they encounter a planet that kidnaps his son Telemachus. Ulysses saves his son but kills the robotic Cyclops in his efforts and so the Olympian Gods curse Ulysses and his crew. It’s originally a French cartoon but done by a Japanese studio. (If you remember the Daft Punk music videos featuring blue humanoid aliens, then you’d have a good idea of the style of animation of Ulysses). Each of the episodes are inspired by Greek myths and stories.
I like the fact that the kids, Yumi and Telemachus act like kids in the show. Modern cartoons put the kids as the superheroes now (thinking Ben 10, Witch, etc.), giving them the power while a lot of the 80s cartoons, the kids are kids. They may be brave and smart and even the main protagonists but they don’t do the fighting or the heroics, that’s up to the adults.
While the main cast only features Yumi as a female character they do encounter a lot of strong female characters along the way from the Rebellion on Lemnos where the women revolt against the dominating men to The Magic Spells of Circe where a powerful sorceress is trying to defy the gods, but still it is quite atypical of the time, where the heroes are white males.
What is cool is their treatment of the classic myths. I love their take onChronos in Chronos, Father of Time where he is exiled from Olympus so he captures Ulysses, hoping to use him to get back into Olympus. There these cool steampunk/clockwork like robots that serve Chronos and in the end Ulysses defeats Chronos by turning the clock of the Universe back! Or when Ulysses ventures to the centre of the universe in At the Heart of the Universe and is tricked into waking Atlas which causes the entire Universe to start to collapse.
I found many of the characters they met were more rounded out than the main cast, like the story of Sisyphus in The Eternal Punishment. They also managed to maintain the tragedy of Sisyphus in the episode, not something you’d find in many kids cartoons. In fact that is one of the qualities of the series, they really managed to keep the tragedy and sadness of many of the original myths, like the story of Orpheus in the final episode or the Minotaur in Lost in the Labyrinth.
I managed to find a video of the intro on youtube, embedded for your viewing pleasure:
For pure fandom, apparently there was a pilot episode created. It followed the same plot as the original first episode but all the character designs are different and it was never translated to English. It was online at some point, but when I found out about it, all the links were dead.
Well okay, back from the French country-side. Three week holiday. No internet. Loads of sleep. And I’m feeling invigorated, though being back at work is quickly sapping that. Still, I did a ton of work on Lost Heroes. A ton, I mean. But I don’t really have anything yet to show you.
I’ve been working on the character creation and the I’ve got the nuts and bolts down and started into detailing each of the different gods, which got me excited about the project again. It’s going quite slowly however and since arriving back, work has stopped (simply because other stuff has taken priority for the moment).
But I also have plan. Yes another plan.
One of the problems I have with this character creation process is that I allow the creation of three different character distinct types; the Chosen (of the gods), Magic Practitioners and Valiant Mortals. It’s quite a convoluted/confusing mess, I’m glad that I have the three basic threads down, but I think I want to focus on the core of Lost Heroes. That’s the Chosen. The playtest character creation guide that I’ll put out will detail how to create Magic Practitioners and buy Magic Paths, but I’ll focus on just the Chosen with no Magic (they’ll still have gifts and supernatural abilities) for any games I run.
I love the types of Magic Practitioner characters you can created but it really makes everything complex and I think Valiant Mortals are ignored to an extent.
And then there is the second part of the plan, after I do this character creation guide, I want to try and run a few games with a group of players I know and have gamed with before. I haven’t played or ran a game in months sadly so some organisation will be required. Depending how that goes I hope to seek out others to play test with, but that’s off in the vagueness of the future.
I’m making a series of big chunky mistakes. Currently this draft of rules I’m writing up is very very wordy (about 35,000 words in fact) and I can’t seem to get out of that mode. But but but… I need to finish it. It’s like a block, I need to finish writing up the rules so I can put it aside to move onto the next thing, be it playtesting or working on something else.
I’ve heard the mantra “fail early, fail often” bandied about and while I know it applies to products more than hobbies, I can related to what it means emotionally. It’s better to try lots of small things and fail, then get hung up on one big thing and never finish it or waste all your time on it.
In essence I’ve written two or even three throwaway sourcebooks to get this point and I’m now thinking that to get to a final product, I’d need to start again and split it into smaller chunks of work. That’s daunting. A core book with individual supplements for each of the four major pantheons (Angelic/Demon, Tuatha De Dannan/Formori, Olympian, Aesir) and also separate supplements for Valiant Mortals and Magic Practitioners. This insight come out of first writing a setting doc and now attempting to write a rules doc.
Partly it’s the sunk cost fallacy at work, but partly also doubt. I think I’ve been here before, not once but several times. Doubt is rather evil. It gets into the back of your mind, it preys on your guilt about not being able to work on it enough, it clouds you’re perspective where seeing “similar” projects pop up, questions how you value your project, makes you think that you’re simply not good enough to pull it off.
My plan to try and offset this was to focus on character creation. Get that settled and put it online. Get some folk to try and create characters and see what happens, see what people like or don’t like. Right now the “process” is complete, but I have to detail the different pantheons, gifts/faults and magic/supernatural powers. All the fun setting-specific stuff.
Ah, but as I said doubt is evil. For example, I’ve seen a number of blog posts and tweets about “Mythender” characters. As it turns out, someone had a similar idea (get people to use the character creation as a way of playtesting/feedback), did it before me, with a similar concept (it appears to be an RPG about gods and heroes), they are much further along in terms of progress (and looks better thought out) and written by someone with experience (while I have… well none). You can see how doubt is twisting my perspective, turning it in on itself.
I haven’t looked at it the Mythender character creation yet, so it is quite unfair of me to moan like this. I’m sure it’s very good judging from the amount of folks talking about it and putting characters online. And if I can put aside my own concerns about Lost Heroes, I’ll probably give it a good look over soon.
Okay, that’s it. I’ll stop moaning now. Therapeutic rant over. On to writing that section on Gifts and Faults that I’ve been putting off for the last week.
I never know if I should post about RPGs that seem to cover or overlap the concepts in Lost Heroes RPG or simply ignore them. But this looks quite interesting.
And so thusly I have come across this kickstarter RPG project: Part Time Gods:
We here at Third Eye Games are preparing for the release of our third game line, Part-Time Gods. Players will take on the role of normal, everyday people suddenly imbued with the divine Spark of a god. They must balance their mortal lives (friend, family, loved ones) with the pursuit of their godly existence (adventure, power, legend), constantly riding the line of losing what makes them human. While this may seem serious, no game of Third Eye Games’ is devoid of that touch of humor.
Part-Time Gods is written by Eloy Lasanta, who has already had great success with his other two games, Apocalypse Prevention, Inc. and Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade. The game will have a great mix of ideas that will be familiar to fans of White Wolf’s “Scion” or Eos Press’s “Nobilis”, mixed with themes and moods of other works, such as “Dead Like Me” or the works of Neil Gaiman (not just “American Gods”). We hope that it will be a completely new approach to the genre. We also have the rising star, Melissa Gay, as our lead artist for the game and her style is perfect for giving Part-Time Gods just the right feel.
Part-Time Gods is a game of balancing one’s life and duty. It is full of mysticism as the characters go off to find magical Relics and discover strange creatures. It is full of Action, as they battle terrifying monsters and even other gods. The gods are almost forced to work together, no matter how different their viewpoints on their gifts are, for the sheer survival of humanity. A group of gods that rule over a domain together is called a pantheon. Like the Olympian pantheon of legend, there is no need for the characters to get along, as long as they ensure their mutual defense.
