More about Nine Worlds

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on April 10, 2006 at 07:32 PM

This is a report about our latest session of Nine Worlds.

So, the basic way I'm running with this game is that I take the PCs' Muses as what the players are interested in, and I have some notes to myself about what I like, and I try to mix the two. Basically, I'm using Chris Chinn's flag framing and conflict posts as my guide to design sessions, basically just listing myself as another player. One difference I'm seeing is that my players have very concrete goals in their Muses, whereas the stuff that I-the-GM am interested in is a bit more vague and large scale.

For myself that I want to run out lots of different oddball politics for the Nine Worlds. So far, each of the gods and Titans have some kind of large-scale political worldview which shapes their rule. For example, Prometheus is an absolute anarchist who believes that mankind should be completely free of all divine meddling, even meddling to prevent a Stalin or Idi Amin. Apollo, on the other hand, sees humans as possessing immense potential, and has taken it upon himself to make sure that people live up to their potential. Solar society is a relentlessly meritocratic, high-culture, and competitive (kind of like if you crossed PBS with a Japanese cram school) with Olympics every four years to determine who wins the Nobel prize.  Artemis, on the Moon, has an ecological worldview, and she values cultural diversity just as much as biodiversity. However, she values individuals only as part of a social or biological ecosystem, and not for their particular personhood.

This is big picture stuff, and what I really like about Nine Worlds is how easy it is to go from the backdrop right to stuff at the level of character and conflict. So, the game started on the Moon, and then I whipped up a Pythogorean agent who was trying to get the Pythagorean philosophy approved by the Cultural Practices Authority. The Pythagoreans are a secret society who want to master the secrets of advanced science and magic, and who are widely believed to pursue such knowledge regardless of the risks. One of our players coined the phrase "weapons of magical destruction" to describe them -- she was the one playing a Solar scholar-Archon searching for their secrets even as she plotted their ruin.

Now, being a Pythagorean wasn't illegal on the Moon, in the same way that being a Communist or Nazi  wasn't technically illegal in 1950s America. However, if the Pythagoreans were an approved form of cultural diversity, then they could work in the open and take government support  -- even though Artemis despised them and what they stood for, they were betting she had enough integrity to accept the CPA ruling.

Naturally, the Pythagorean agent was one PC's (ex-?) wife. The question mark is there because the PC had died and escaped from Hades, and in the meantime she had married someone else. Perseus, that other guy, was of-course terribly honor- and rule-bound, to the point that he would explode when her double life was exposed, even though he was a nice guy otherwise. On top of all this, we had a robot, which Perseus had captured from the PCs in the last session -- and Perseus had been magically compelled to love and care for it. Naturally, the third PC was after the robot.

So the story-level dynamics of this game were great, and the Muses worked really well in letting me integrate all our interests together. I did screw up Perseus's Muses, though -- one wasn't in concrete goal form, so I couldn't resolve it, and the other one I just plain forgot to resolve. I think the game  would have worked better if I had done that right, since Perseus would have been more active and less reactive.  I'm going to edit them to fix these two bugs for next session.

The biggest difficulty I had was that the game just plain flows better when you are constantly running conflicts. Now, when you're doing free narration, you can't really resolve or change Muses. However, the way conflicts work means that it's very difficult to get an interplay going between the players -- one player wins narration rights, and the other doesn't. If we had more give and take, more interplay, I think it would have been easier to actually roleplay. As things stood, a lot of our narrations were quite sketchy, because it was hard to get really adequate support from the other players.

At the same time, the narration is VITALLY important to making the game work. Mechanically, there is a simple and obvious optimal strategy for bidding. This means that if you want to create interesting choices for the player, the different sorts of narration that the player can do (for example, Arete versus Hubris) must lead to very different story-level consequences. At the end of the session, someone suggested that an angry Artemis should show up next session, because there had been so many uses of Hubris. I noticed strong, immediate support for this idea, so I am not going to be fool enough to ignore the grassroots.

So there's a fault line in the game (or at least, in our style of playing it) there. I don't have a clear idea what to do about this, though. If any of my players are reading, I'd appreciate their thoughts in the comments, as well as any observations or suggestions from you all in the peanut gallery. :)