Here's a starter clock for Malqort
Clock 1: Foothold
3: Two missionaries, spreading the word and looking for adventure
6: Tales of heroic deeds of the missionaries are told in bars
9: The missionaries start a church
10: Beginning Lifeless are raised, and start literally cleaning the streets near the church.
11: The People start bringing the bodies of the dead to the Church, and give out small coins to those who show up for Prayer
12: Church is established in the hearts of the locals.
The missionaries will accept any help, and don't mind people of differeing beliefs. They are held by a Vision, and want to tell everyone about how to build a functional society and the proper role of the Church in it. They will wreck the local economy if left alone.
Stopping them:
Violence: You can absolutely kill the missionaries. More will show up, so killing them only delays the problem.
Adventure: They can be destroyed with adventure which delays building the Church, but can fuel their plans
Alternatives: The only way to prevent The People from coming to believe in the goodness of Malqort is to provide an alternative form of support.
That's the first clock. I'm working on more. I've got a few NPCs who're sent from Malqort.
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So... that’s a clock that’s intended to lull the players into letting it go, right?
ReplyDeleteIn the past I've had the impression that you view Malqort's structure as generally positive. But these past couple of posts have given it a more negative spin (things like "ruin the economy", "apocalyptic level event "). Is that intentional?
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch Yes. The next clock they start, like, giving out food and shelter and how is a midevil town supposed to operate if people have (nearly) free food and shelter?
ReplyDeleteMatt Johnson Oh, I do think it's positive. Largely.
ReplyDeleteI for sure think it's better than most fantasy towns I've seen in DnD, ruled over by a mayor who sucks or whose in charge by force of arms.
To that status quo, it's an apocalyptic event. Much as how free food and shelter and health care would be an apocalypse to our free market economy.
Basically, any coercive status quo that extracts labor from the majority is ruined by Malqort's existence.
So, is this a game where people play the missionaries?
ReplyDeleteIn this view, the missionaries are NPCs. In AW terms, this'd be a front. And yeah, having a front established before the game is not something I normally do, but it's a pretty close fit.
ReplyDeleteYou’re designing a front that the players aren’t supposed to want to engage?
ReplyDeleteSo, kind of building on what Tony is asking... what do you envision the point of this game would be? If Malqort is the good guy in this situation and you seem to set this up with them as the antagonists, are the PCs supposed to be the bad guys? Are you attempting to model a "Are we the baddies?" game?
ReplyDeleteIf I'm seeing it right, your typical heroes will be looking for something to punch and while they aren't paying attention the missionaries move in and the world the PCs know changes.
ReplyDeleteNow the PCs have a choice, accept these weird religious people and their zombies as the apparent bringers of salvation, or continue being adventures breaking things that might be bad. Certainly the communities they call home will soon be asking to be saved.
There is a lot of good conflict here.
Are the heroes saving people? Or are they just defending their positions of privilege?
Is it OK to put people corpses to work for the greater good?
Is it a bad thing for some good people to lose their way of life, so that everyone else can live a slightly better one?
Religions can be creepy, but also beneficial?
Brian gets it! Hooray!
ReplyDeleteIf this is a type of conflict your players have expressed an interest in, why are you deliberately downplaying the first clock to make it seem like something they should let go?
ReplyDeleteI think...hmm.
ReplyDeleteViewing this as a front to oppose or ignore is clear, and it certainly looks written that way, but I don’t think that’s the best way to engage with something like this in a game.
Really, if I were running this, I’d expect my players to want to, not stop or let run this train, but twist the path.
What area should have the church?
Are there ways to shield certain guilds and industries from Malquort?
How do we prevent our opponents from leveraging this to hurt us short-term? A street gang or a militia is a lot cheaper to field if you don’t need to feed them yourself or from spoils.
Can you get them to handle one of your problems? Can you get something slipped into the doctrine? Can necromancers use the cover of the Church of Malquort to do other things not part of the Missionaries plans? Can the missionaries be restricted to certain areas by health codes? (No undead inside city limits, due to past experience with Necrotizing Purple Rot) Can the missionaries resources be overwhelmed?
This is a sympathetic threat. You need space for much more nuanced responses than “oppose” or “support,” and you can really turn the screws with things like “while there’s much good now, it will inevitably do something you find acceptable. How long do you let this ride before you make your final choice?
Also, let me make an earlier question more explicit: have your players expressed an interest in playing nuanced philosophical and socio-economic conflicts? Because if they’re just coming in trying to play a fighty game then this clock is a monumentally bad idea.
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch I don't see the problem. If the players want to punch stuff they can do that, if they want to do politics, they can do that too.
ReplyDeleteIf they want to leave and find somewhere away from the expanding Convocation they can do that too, although that border will keep on expanding...
Brian Ashford : The players certainly have all those options, and more. I still contend that it is a bad choice for the MC to create a front that is all about conflict of a type in which players have not expressed interest. Hopefully that is not what is happening here.
ReplyDelete(excuse me, I need to do some blocking.)
ReplyDelete(ok, solved. Sorry about that.)
ReplyDeleteThis is an extension of the lonely fun I've had in making up Malqort, now in a portable format that can be dropped into other games.
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch OK, I don't really see why that's a particular concern with this concept though. Shouldn't all content be tailored to your group?
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols : If this is a type of conflict your players have expressed an interest in, why are you deliberately downplaying the first clock to make it seem like something they should let go? If it isn’t a type of conflict your players have expressed an interest in, why do it at all?
ReplyDeleteSeems to me like a clock should cause conflict from the word “go”, and this one doesn’t.
Suggested revised clock:
ReplyDelete3: Two missionaries start a cult of death.
6: They start raising zombies, supposedly from willing corpses, and putting living laborers out of work
9: The church of the lifeless has enough of a strangle hold on the local economy that those who will not worship are starting to starve
10: It is now against the religion to trade with unbelievers
11: It is now against the religion for unbelievers to be adventurers
12: The church demands the conversion of the PCs, at sword-point if necessary.
The revised clock looks like a far more conventional threat. One of the things I like about the one in the OP is that by the time the players realise it's a threat, the clock's almost done.
ReplyDeleteBrian Ashford : I consider that a bug, not a feature.
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch can you explain why? It seems to me that having Fronts hit at different rates or unexpectedly would be good for tension, surprise, challenge. What am I not understanding?
ReplyDeleteBrian Ashford : One of the stylistic principles I enjoy is “Play to find out.” This clock de facto violates that principle: because of the way it is structured, any outcome but the success of the Church is vanishingly unlikely. This is because of the combination of two flaws:
ReplyDelete(1). The clock doesn’t provide any conflict until 10 (arguably not even then). So, as you point out, the players are unlikely to respond at all until it hits that point.
(2). There is no fast way to address the conflict. “Violence” and “Adventure” are called out only to state why they will not work. The only option posited that addresses the conflict is to completely overhaul the local economy.
Together, that means that either (a) the adventurers switch modes entirely to social-economic engineers, and fill a full project clock (likely several) before the Convocation can go “11, 12” or else (b) the Convocation wins. The former looks (as I said) vanishingly unlikely, and so the latter is all-but-predetermined.
And if the outcome is predetermined, you’re not playing to find out, you’re playing to tell other people the story in your head. That’s certainly a style, and I’ve played campaigns run that way, but it’s not my thing and I strongly suspect that an AW-derived game is not the right rules system for it.
I don't think the outcome is predetermined at all. Do clock's only tick forward?
ReplyDeleteSome things I could see happening:
The Convocation needs willing citizens, so turn it into a popularity contest. Become the most bad ass dragon slayers the world has ever known, hire a bunch of bards so that everyone knows it and then use your newfound position of adulation to tell the world to turn their backs on the creepy guys who think your dead granny should be doing the streets.
Carefully prepared and deployed stink bombs so that noone prays for three days, combined with a few clerics to clear out the town's active zombies.
Quest into the lands of the Convocation to discover how they started and what their weakness is.
If prayer is powerful enough to animate the dead then let's start our own church and pray for gold!
And there's always the possibility of offering your services to the Convocation and clearing the frontier of dragons, actually evil necromancers and stubbornly undead-averse feudal kingdoms.