The Black Campbell

A quick look at TV and movies and you might notice something, 1) “It’s amazing how England looks nothing like Southern California”, and 2) it’s always sunny…unless something dramatic is about to happen. It always rains at a funeral. It’s never foggy unless there’s a killer stalking in the mist. Weather can be a very good means to not just create a challenge for your players, or for establishing atmosphere in a scene, but it can also help define the space the players’ characters inhabit.

Example 1: Most folks know Scotland is a rainy place…but as we said in the Army, “It’s one thing to know it’ll suck, and another to feel the suck.” Scotland doesn’t just have rain — it’s got a plethora of ways it can rain. It’s often foggy in the mornings around the resepective firths (bays.) There’s “smir” — that mist that is statically charged so it stick to f@#$%ing everything. Wearing glasses? Good luck seeing. Wanted to check the map on your phone? Say that screen got wet faster than immediately, didn’t it? There’s drizzle. There’s a soft rain. There’s downpours of such astounding frigidity as to take your breath away. Snow. Sleet. And it can go on for longer than Noah was floating about.

As one of my cousins once wrote on Facebook, “I’d go for a walk, but I don’t have a boat.” People don’t do well with things when they’re uncomfotable. Sure, they can ride to the occasion — but cold, wet feet are simply the worst!

How could this affect the characters? When there’s a deluge of freezing cold water, people tend to look down. They tense up. They naturally look for someplace where the air isn’t trying to drown them. That’s a bit of a bitch in a footchase down the shops in Sauchiehall Street, ennit? “Whaddya mean ye lost him?” “Well, sir, it was pissin’ doon and…”

Example 2: What’s a car chase like in the snow?

Example 3: You live in Victorian London — or modern day Shanghai — it doesn’t have to be a dark, smoky night for the “London Fog” of industrial filth to have some kind of an effect. Shame you got all dolled up to meet that important person, but your white shirt is now a sort of grey-yellow when you arrive hoping to make the best impression. Maybe you’ll got allergies. Or asthma. Shame about losing that guy in that footchase on the Bund because you were hacking up a lung from your 400 pack a day habit of just breathing the air. What’s it like to try and finish a fistfight when you’re hacking up a lung from the soot?

Example 4: What about it being sunny and warm all the time? It’s lovely in the Southwestern American desert. Except you get thirsty. And sunstroked in a matter of minutes or an hour. Maybe you were fine when you were out there, but not that you’re indoors and mostly hydrated again, you want to sleep. For a week. It’s a bit hard to concentrate on sorting through those clues when you want to collapse on your desk and sleep. Or you’re getting ready for the Nasty Brothers, of whose kin you just shot saving that Wells Fargo stage, but man! this chair is comfortable!

Example 5: You’re in Houston. Or anywhere along the Alabama to Texas coastline. It’s 100F, somewhere between 100 and 600% humidity, and you’d be drier in the shower. Your clothes stick to you. You feel like you’re breathing sweat and decaying fish soup. You’re not certain if you’ve gone incontinent or that sweat in your underwear. You’re only goal is to get into an air conditioned building that makes the climate something approaching a sauna instead of a credible facsimile of Venus.

Example 6: Speaking of space…what’s it like in a spaceship? They outgas a lot of humidity. The air is nosebleed dry and static electricity is a constant danger. What about the spots where there might be heavy water use? Mold and mildew! Better get cleaning.

Example 7: Low or high gravity. Sci-fi games are good about putting this in there rules sets, but I’ve yet to see anyone do more than lip service to different gravity. Even habituated, it’s a beast to have that chase or fight in half gravity on Mars. Or in a centrifugal gravity torus. You thought that ball was going to fly straight, but look at that! Physics! What about heavy gravity? Suddenly, you’re not a svelte 170 pounds, but 210…your knees and feet hurt all the time. It feels like you’re walking or running uphill, all the time. You’re out of breath, headachy, and a bit tired because your blood isn’t getting to the brain that well.

Creating character for your location doesn’t just make for verisimilitude, but creates the space as an ancillary character. The place becomes important not just to the plot, but something interesting in an of itself. How did Miami become a sort of character in Miami Vice, or Burn Notice? How did Louisiana define True Detective? Making the setting ‘real” can create of love of the place — think about Babylon 5: after five seasons, the space station felt like a real place that you wanted to visit; watching her scuttled is nearly painful.

How would the character of the place play into where players go willingly, or dragged there complaining endlessly? You couldn’t get me to go to Houston with a cattle prod and the promise of a million a year salary…no, wait, that last bit would work. But I’d hate every second of it. I love the desert, but I’m from environs where it’s cold, wet, and dark a third of the year. Move back? Screw that! (But it’s better than Houston.)

Weather or climate — it fells create your setting as much as the look of a place.

Between rewatching Role Models and reading up on the Jedburgh Ba’ tradition, I realized something that can improve on the verisimilitude (a word I use because i love the sound of it, and it makes me sound smarter than I am) of your RPG setting. People play games, watch games, beat each other up over games…always have, always will.

Here’s some basic ideas for games your players’ characters might play:

There medieval football, the closest to which today would by the Jedburgh or Kirkwall game of ba’ (ball…with a Scottish accent.) You choose two destinations — one for the Uppies, one for the doonies (downies) from either end of town. There’ a designated person to “throw up” the ball, usually a leather hand-stitched thing about 4″ in diameter, sometimes adorned with ribbons, etc. The goal is to get the ball over the destination point up the town or down. You play in a mob — none of this small numbers crap — and it can take all day. The big honor of keeping the ball goes to someone on the winning side.

Rugby/football/soccer — There are other obvious variants of football. Some even use your foot, NFL fans. Rugby is a nice one — it’s like American football, but without all the padding and helmets. Score points by getting the ball into the goal, and have fun pummeling other people into the grass. Soccer is a bit more civilized, with mostly kicking, rather than throwing and carrying the ball, as in football and rugby.

Keep It Up — Volleyball, beach ball, tennis, badminton even jai alia are keep it up games. Drop the ball, the other side gets a point. There might be other rules, etc., but this is the basic game. Jai alia just adds the extra fun of a hard ball moving at high speeds for greater injury potential!

Get It In — Basketball, Battlestar Galactica‘s pyramid, Rollerball — all are versions of this: Get the ball, throw it in the basket/hole/whatever for points.

Ball games typically are team sports, with teams as small as doubles up to the mob scrums of handball. Team sports, like their older brother political parties, inspire intense — often idiotic — loyalty and pride. They can have a lot more subtext than just colored jerseys — they imply where you are from, your religion, your politics. Get asked in Glasgow is you are Rangers or Celtics, and they’re not just asking if you like blue or green; are you Catholic or Protestant. On a Friday night after a few pints, this could lead to a beat down in the wrong neighborhoods.

Speaking of beat downs: Contests of skill, strength, etc. are fun. Arm wrestling over a few pints? Always good. Archery or shooting contest? Obstacle courses? Boxing/karate/cage fighting matches — these are ways to have the characters earn some dosh or respect without having to run a mission of some kind.

The other major gaming you see is racing. People will race anything. If slugs were big enough to ride, we’d race ’em. Dog racing, Pinewood derbies, horse racing, bicycles, trains (yes, there have been train races),motorcycles, cars, boats, planes, spaceships — we either ride ’em or watch ’em. For powersports, half the fun is when the person biffs it. Everything from regulated tracks with warning flags, and rules for not trying to wreck other racers, road rallies where you go from point A to B, timed events (to prevent crashes), demolition derbies — add some nasty terrain and speed and it gets fun.

Games of chance: People love the easy money, and the thrill of maybe winning is enough to have people playing the Redneck Retirement Fund weekly across the United States (the lottery, for those trying to figure out the putdown…) Dice. Cards. Roulette (with or without the gun), pachinko, dominoes….the quick way to handle this in game is to have the players roll some kind of gambling skill or attributes appropriate to the matter. But if the game is the point of the adventure — say, you’re running Casino Royale as a scenario in a espionage game — why not bust out the cards for some high stakes action? Even if it’s just a few hands, it will change the flavor of the session. (I bought triad cards for Battlestar Galactica for just this thing, but the characters have been a bit to busy for games, lately…) Now add gambling to any of the situations above and you can add drama to the events.

Can you make a simple game played in a session as intense and “important” as fighting the bad guys? Have a look at Role Models — a lightweight comedy that is actually much more respectful and understanding of geek culture than something like Zero Charisma. The climactic SCA/LARP battle is not life threatening, but for one of the characters, it is central to who he is — losing the scrum to the “bad guy” really is that important, and despite the characters using boffer swords and dressed like members of KISS (seriously, see this movie!), the audience does feel that this is high stakes, even if it is stupid to some of the characters.

We play role playing games because we want to be something, if only for a few hours in the safety of fantasy, extraordinary. The brave fighters, the canny wizard or hacker, the fighter pilot, the plucky thief, the social diva — whatever…we want something larger than life.

Most games are set in different periods from ours. Maybe it’s the faux medieval fantasy world, Renaissance or Enlightenment pirate settings, Victorian science fiction,  interwar pulp action, or futuristic settings. the draw is the difference from your modern day life. Even espionage games typically do the spy-fi settings where you drive expensive cars, sleep with comely enemy agents, shoot things indiscriminately, and maybe — if you’re lucky — you get to blow up a volcano secret base. The point being: it’s not reality.

However, the need for verisimilitude in a setting is important for audience (your players) buy-in. So how real should you go? The societies of pre-industrial nations aren’t known for their open-minded stance on gender, race, or sexuality. Combine that with class issues and the thought of living pre-1920 should put most people off. Set that reality dial too high and you will exclude certain character types, and by extension, certain demographics of players.

Race relations were not exactly stellar prior to …well, ever. And being a woman before the first sexual revolution of the 1920s was not conducive to a life of high adventure and being treated as an equal. And what if you were poor? Not a lot of crofters had the option to race off and explore the world unless they were wearing army red. How do you handle this?

First off, no matter how real it is for the NPCs, the players are special. There are always exceptions to the rule in history. Boudica was a warrior woman who wasn’t about to take crap from anyone, but lived in a world where women were second-class citizens of the Roman Empire. We’ll get back to her in a moment. Joan d’Arc was a peasant girl and maybe a lunatic, but she was an excellent general. Mary Read was a successful pirate. Jane Digby and Lola Montez were different stripes of female adventurer when is was not acceptable. Tom Molineaux was a successful boxer, despite being black, in the 1830s. The Lafayette Escadrille had a black pilot, and plenty of women and minorities found escape in early aviation.

They are the exceptions, the special ones…the ones the players are playing.

Gender and class come together here very well — the women mentioned are not middle-class. The typical view of the domestic goddess raising kids and doing what her husband told her, while quaint, was typically a middle class thing. Aristocrats like Boudica (a Welsh queen), or Jane Digby (the former Lady Ellenborough), or the spy Lady Hamilton had the freedom to buck convention because they were wealthy or well-connected, and their eccentricities — while decried — often made them popular figures. Conversely, the poor woman could find herself with more options than the middle class woman by sheer virtue of having nothing to lose, and that they were “invisible” to proper society. By the time you get noticed, like Lola Montezz, you’ve used you talent or sexuality to become the lover of the King of Bavaria. Lower-class women pretty made the West — that madam, that landowner whose husband died…they were the ones that made Western society, not the cowboys and prospectors.

Similarly, even during the height of the slavery issue, freed or scaped blacks like Frederick Douglass traveled freely and openly spoke their mind. Jews might find themselves in a sticky situation in Nazi Germany — unless the were much-needed scientists — but with money and connections, you might still slip by. The exceptions should be the exceptions.

That doesn’t mean you should shy away from race or gender or class issues. Giving your players realistic impediments can (and should) be frustrating, but they should be able to outsmart, outfight, or out-politic their foes. They should have detractors who decry their stepping out of place or take steps to ruin the character socially, but there should always be those folks that back them. It’s actually pretty realistic, historically.

Example 1: I often ran Victorian sci-fi games. One of the players chose to play aristocrats almost exclusively. Why? Because of the freedom than money and connection gave her characters to flaunt convention and get away with it. She played almost exclusively characters that were socially adept and attractive — the sort that thrived in the nooks and crannies of the Victorian period.

Example 2: A young Chinese street urchin, female, who was able — because she was young, a girl, and Chinese was the perfect spy and go-between for the Western male characters in 1936 Shanghai. She was always in danger of physical or official abuse, was often hungry and dirty…but her utility allowed her to tag along on adventures.

Example 3: A black woman who had gone into prostitution in our Victorian game, but who managed to seduce the right men, gain some level of financial stability and notoriety, then launched on a series of adventures with the other characters who — being the exceptions to the rule — were at least tolerant of the character.

Example 4: A female Martian in a Space:1889 game got involved with an American cowboy wandering the Red Planet. Despite their string of high-profile adventures and relative acceptance by Martians, human religious types viewed their union as “bestiality.” this caused them troubles, but not insurmountable ones because they are the heroes.