Wuthering Heights Roleplay

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on December 5, 2004 at 05:15 PM

Last Monday, we were missing one of the players for my Revenge of the Jedi Star Wars game, and so I printed out a copy of Phillip Tromeur's Wuthering Heights Roleplay, printed out a list of Victorian names from Christopher Pound's name generator page and we started to play.

We had one heck of a lot of fun.

WHRP is a game designed to play in the vein of (and make fun of) the great 19th century Romantic potboilers, like Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, or (of course) Wuthering Heights. Characters have three stats -- Rage, Despair, and Oldness. In order to do anything, a character has to roll against one of these stats: to perpetrate violence (such as fighting a duel, or slapping someone, or flinging oneself off a high tower) the player must roll below Rage, and to show self-control the character must roll above it. To be decisive, the player must roll above Despair, and to be sincere the player must roll below Despair. They also have a collection of Problems, such as homosexuality, republicanism, Methodism, etc.

The basic dynamic of play arises from the following rule: depending on the characters' actions, they can gain or lose Despair or Rage. And gaining or losing more than five points of Rage or Despair at a time will provoke a character into doing something rash, heedless, and self-destructive -- which will in turn cause further gains or losses of Rage or Despair. So a vicious cycle kicks in, and whenever the characters manage to get their lives under control, they can use their Problems to get back on the wheel of chaos.

We had an alcoholic republican fishmonger (the hero of the piece, who died a horrible death), the wife of a degenerate lord (who rolled the flaw "You are a bad guy", three times over), a moneylender obsessed with the occult (who was the reason the wife was not going to inherit everything), and an alcoholic Russian doctor.

I started the game with the idea that the players would start out at a funeral, and the player of the degenerate lord's wife suggested that she had killed her husband for his money, only to learn he had gambled away his fortune. We then basically all instantly decided that it would be more fun to start with the murder attempt, and we kicked off play from there. The fishmonger arrived in time to see her poison her husband, the doctor was called in to conceal the crime (by using his incompetence to detect actual murder), and the moneylender showed up to blackmail the wife.

It's really startling how well this played out in practice. As the game moderator, I had to play almost no NPCs, and none of them were of central importance to the dramatic action of the story. (I think I played some police, a barfly, and a servant girl.) As events proceeded, the fishmonger was framed for the murder, ended up robbing graves on behalf of the moneylender, and just before he and his lover were hung he cut off her hand and threw it to him. The moneylender ended up being transported to Australia, and the wife found a new, rich, and dim-witted lord to marry. It was very much an "evil wins decisively" kind of ending. Neverthless, the whole thing was berserk, hilarious, and oddly touching.

My only caveat is that it's worthwhile to make sure that there some kind of tie or relationship between the characters at the start of the game. This helps ensure that their escalating crises will play off and reinforce against one another. The player of the doctor got a little bit sidelined, because his doctor didn't get tied into the action early on, and so the baroque struggle between the other PCs tended to exclude him. This was especially unfortunate, because the big advantage of having all the PCs be linked but at odds is that the action is interesting even when the other -- every scene in which your PC isn't present is just a cut scene in which the motivations and deeds of the antagonists in his or her story are revealed.

This game is strongly recommended -- and it's free!