So
here I am with a moral dilemma.
Not a real moral dilemma. Not the sort that John Wick writes about.
If I were a John Wick character, my dilemma would probably be over leading an army in righteous vengeance against my supposedly evil brother, who, despite the fact that he's killed my wife in a jealous rage because he could never have her and sequestered himself in the Imperial palace, he has done it to prevent the unmaking of the universe and if I had only given his fiendish, deformed, and yet somehow brilliant lackey the time to decipher the messages sent from my dead wife in the dream-world, I could have averted this tragedy, but now, if I kill him, I will not only be a serious asshole, I'll be providing a key step in the destiny of some mysterious guy who I never really understood why he was there, but he gave me hints as part of the whole hero's-journey mythic archetype thing, and I was cool with that.
No, I just have a dilemma about journalistic integrity.
I am, I believe, the first person to thoroughly read Orkworld, John Wick's new roleplaying game and write an advance review about it. I'm also possibly the most biased source on the planet.
For starters, the game's about orks. (Sorry, I'm not feeling very revelatory just yet. Wait a sentence or two.) I co-authored The Ork Nation of Cara Fahd, in which my fiancee' and I deliberately set out to break every conventional gaming stereotype about orks and re-forge them as a varied and interesting subspecies, forming a nation suitable for all-ork roleplaying campaigns. This is, in about the same word count, what Orkworld is trying, except that Orkworld is a self-contained game and Cara Fahd was a sourcebook to an existing one.
Secondly, I am a Wick fan who wants this book to succeed. There is a perception in movies and television that the actors are the stars, the directors are the auteurs of the work, the producers are the ones who get the "a film by" credit, and the writer barely enters into the picture. 'Cause gee, all he did was, you know...make it up.
In the roleplaying game industry, a similar mentality sometimes takes hold. Some companies do not consider the author integral to the project. Some companies give writing jobs to whomever is screwing up everything else. Some companies assign flavor-text writing on their cards as punishment around the office.
I'm not saying which ones.
I think John Wick's visibility has already changed some of these perceptions, and I don't think the changing is done. His name is on the spine of the core rulebooks of two Origins-award-winning roleplaying games; his Internet presence is sizable, for good or ill; and his author's notes are both personal and personable. The Origins awards ceremony as of this year began listing the designers' names, a fact I found rather curious. Will we soon see a star system develop among game designers, in which they can ask for higher fees because their fan base will be swayed by name recognition? If so, will RPGs develop into an industry in which game designers can make a serious living? Orkworld's sales may let us know.
Third, my co-author and I edited this book because of the above two reasons. This piece will not have our signature system of patches, because our job as editors was to review the rough draft of the book and incorporate our corrections into the game. Now they're not called patches anymore; they're called "rules."
Fourth, I like to write ad copy and hype. So get out the salt lick.
But I'd like you to continue reading, because I didn't call this column "Reviews" or "Self-Promotional Lubricant," I called it "How to Use This Book."
And I hate lying.
As a general note, the book integrates artwork and text rather well. Thomas Denmark's work provides a consistent look to the orks and better, is used to illustrate points in the text. I am particularly fond of the sketches in the Character Creation section, where the caption "Every life has a story to tell" is accompanied by two pages of individual ork sketches, to get the players' imagination going.
And hey, no gray-scaling or impossible-to-read text. That gets snaps.
While it may seem long compared to short fiction pieces in other games, there are a few subtleties in the Caius Journals only apparent on a close second reading. Few people in the gaming industry choose to do this in their fiction, which leads me to believe few are capable of it.
What can the Caius Journals do for your game? If you're not concerned with fiction, little. But the basics of story-based GMing are covered with this example of...you know, a story. Beginning, middle, end? Theme? Character growth? There's stuff here that some other games are missing in their fiction. It's showing and not telling what the game should be like -- which has two down sides. If you're not swift on adaptation or don't get the "feel," you probably won't use it. It's also from the point of view of a human, which is later defined as a monster, making it slightly antithetical to the basic game schema.
You know the hunter-gatherer societies down the road from technologically superior civilizations whose way of life is always being wiped out? Like the islanders who had communal property up until a bunch of Europeans introduced a few steel hatchets and all of a sudden they started making ownership laws?
Add some tusks, a second stomach, some subdermal photosynthesis, and you've got orks; some migratory fellows who'd just as soon chase reindeer across a place with a climate about that of Byelorussia. But no, just down the road are Iron Age humans, steel-packing dwarves, and energy-being elves who may or may not have interdimensional and space-time travel capabilities through sorcery. What's an ork tribe to do? Try to survive a few years trying to figure out how to invent the wheel and cuneiform, or "thwak" the dumb critters' tools and develop a civilization hodge-podge style?
Right.
The book has a number of nudges to help sustainable game play. By defining the daily life of orks in detail, the author gives the reader an idea of how to roleplay them in nonviolent settings. This is essential for LARPs and campaigns. The communal attitude helps eliminate inter-party conflict; all orks hunt for the tribe, share each others' food, and are considered responsible for the mistakes and actions of their neighbors, a nice step away from the "me strong ork, let weak ork starve" syndrome that might pop up in more stereotypical play. PCs also get to reinforce their team bonds even after death, as orks practice ritual cannibalism that shares the souls of the dead (and his game statistics) among those who consume his flesh.
Oh...and if you kill him to get his bonuses, no magic for you. So there.
I found these to be far more useful than the Caius Journals, since they show the reader exactly what sorts of stories you can tell in Orkworld. "How Bashthraka Lost His Spear" is possibly the funniest RPG fiction I've ever read. (HOL still beats it, but it's not fiction, which, believe me, is harder to write.) The writing style is quick and dirty, but each story has those useful parts called "beginning, middle, and end" that bring them together, as well as a point. In addition, they are meant to be read out loud, complete with drinking game rules printed in an end-note, to give a sense of how orks really spend down-time.
I just wanted to get that out there.
For starters, character creation is done as a team, which fits in well with the communal hunter-gatherer philosophy. Those who stand alone, starve alone. The more players you have, the more points can be put into the household pool. This can make for some really impressive households at convention games. Our playtest had two households, one of nine and one of eleven. Combine this with the drinking-game rules, and you start to see how John really wants to play Orkworld.
Points can be distributed to increase the rank of your dowmga (the house mother who makes all your equipment), your tala (the bard who sings your praises and thus influences your experience awards), or to get your house useful things such as bronze-smithing, reindeer, extra thraka (warriors in your house), good hunting grounds, and each of your characters' skills and attributes.
There are five attributes, called Virtues, reflecting what orks want in their heroes: Courage (which determines Initiative, by the way), Cunning (most mental statistics all rolled into one), Endurance (staying alive), Prowess (physical skills) and Strength (which, considering your home is what you can carry, is handier than you'd think).
Skills? You make 'em up.
I'm serious.
No more screwing around with a list that will never encapsulate all of the skills reality has to offer. Instead, you figure out what you want to be able to do and then make a skill that gives you dice when you want to do it.
The skill names can get very...basic. The book never says that orks are dumb comical brutes...but it is also careful never to say that they aren't. It works like this:
Say I want to have an explorer ork who's figuring stuff out all the time. I write down a skill called "What Do It Do?" When the GM eventually runs me through an adventure, my household finds a dwarven clockwork machine with a detachable hang-glider. The GM asks for applicable skills and I gleefully stick my hand up and grunt "What do it do?"
Then I get to roll my dice.
Same thing goes for magic widgets, maybe even strange and dangerous fantasy critters I find snuffling in the brush. But the GM is free to deny me any advanced information such as how to build the device, use the widget, or catch the creature. There are a few sample skills that instantly get across the flavor of the game, such as "Iron Stomach" and "Overpowering Flatulence." I was in the initial playtest with the guy who came up with the flatulence skill, and he managed to use it to escape from a troll bent on eating him. But if you want to create ork politicians in a huge ork empire with "Spin Doctoring" and "Geopolitical Theory," there's not a lot stopping you.
Actual skill rolls roll Virtue + Skill, using six-sided dice, but as opposed to most games these days, you don't add up successes. Instead, you take the highest die, and that's your Success Value, which is on a scale of two through six...generally.
But you remember Monopoly, where if you rolled "doubles," you got to take another turn? Well, Orkworld rewards rolling the same numerals on multiple dice, too. If you roll additional repeats, each extra one bumps your result up by one. Two fives make (5+1) a six. Three fives make (5+1+1) a seven. This extends the scale to about 2-10, which still makes for a lot of ties. On ties, wackiness ensues.
Rolling a tie in Orkworld means you start bragging about your next highest die...and your next highest, and your next highest, until one of you announces you've got a lower number or has run out of dice, at which point, that person loses the roll. In playtests, this created some cool tension without taking an inordinately long time. It does require a little of a learning curve to reflexively spout off numbers, but immersion therapy cures this quickly.
Getting hit is quite a pickle, since high attack rolls factor directly into damage. The old "soak roll" from so many other games gets a facelift here, where the defender's dice determine the two probable results. None of this "I got five successes on damage and he got two" stuff, either you got out of the way of the full force of the attack and take a glancing blow (one box of damage) or you didn't, and you suck down whatever the opponent generated. If the opponent has a weapon, she gets to add on extra misery -- the numbers on her weapon dice are numbers you can't use from the dice representing your fair flesh. Armor dice are free from this penalty...unless your assailant has a weapon made of a superior metal (bronze vs. iron, for example). If so, the dice remain useful (they are more dice, after all) but they can still get canceled by the weapon dice. The system can take a moment to get the hang of, but it's worth it for quick and deadly combat with a very different feel from most modern games.
What's to prevent a player from coming up with whacked-out new combat skills? Not a lot, except the one guideline that a skill does "one thing," in other words, one roll of the dice. If you want to cheese out and have a skill called "Stay Alive," it could add to your spear and shield skill to avoid getting hurt...or provide extra dice to a roll to determine a glancing vs. lethal blow...or simply be a dodging skill for when you don't have a spear and shield. But if it does any one of these three things, it doesn't do the other two. The GM and player define it. Excepting this, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Lastly, every ork has a Trouble stat, representing how much the forces of the universe (or GM) think he needs to be taken down a peg. Orks gain Trouble through bragging or other hubris, and the GM can keep track of Trouble points to counteract successful rolls, or get the plot rolling (reminiscent of Drama Dice from 7th Sea). A player mouths off? He gets Trouble. He says "Man, this adventure's a cakewalk?" He gets Trouble. The GM wants to spend that Trouble die to make him re-roll his wild success? Go ahead. Some idiot fires into a melee and you don't want to futz with miniatures to re-create the exact angle? It hits the ork with the most Trouble. The contest is a complete tie? Guess which ork loses.
Trouble is the gamemaster's friend.
For example, the world includes a mountain that is known to the orks as...well, duh..."The Tallest Mountain In the World."
One could nitpick over information about this mountain. Is it the size of Mount Everest? Is it subtropical, does the air get thin and give you dice penalties? World detail would be nice, but really, what is the practical story application gonna be? It's The Tallest Mountain In the World.
How tall is that? Bigger than that other mountain. Everybody knows what happens when you fall off: you die. Everybody knows how long it takes you to climb to the top: many days. This assumes the players and the GM can work stuff out in the game, which is an act of faith, well-placed or not.
So what does one do in Orkworld?
Greg Costikyan once wrote that there are two types of roleplaying games: those that try to be able to tell a lot of stories, and those that can tell one kind of story very well. Paranoia was the latter kind of game, as are most games coming out these days with a predetermined setting and type of character, including Orkworld. In designing such a setting, author gamemastering biases inevitably come up, and Orkworld's are in some places that are unusual for some RPGs.
One of my favorite one-shot games was a Bunnies and Burrows session, which, in case you don't know or couldn't guess, was a game in which we all roleplayed rabbits going after Old Mr. MacGregor's lettuce heads. We proceeded to beat up his cat and the albino blind seer bunny nearly got the old coot impaled on his own pitchfork. During this game, the GM was soon at a loss, and we went back to playing more familiar games because he wasn't sure how to run it and we weren't sure how to play it.
A few sessions of Orkworld and you may have a similar problem. Your players may start to create AD&D in reverse. They start finding out where humans live, stealing their secrets, and killing them. This could make for a great campaign...but you could also do it in another game with their system, and have a huge amount of product support besides. If that's the case, Orkworld's appeal mostly rests on its cultural detail and many adventure hooks.
In the same way I recommend starting off Vampire with humans being the preeminent threat and only later moving on to any supernatural woogies, I think establishing Orkworld's feel early on is essential to a sustainable campaign and its presence at conventions. The social order is what differentiates L5R. It's what makes Vampire a "political game." Orkworld is all about the house and the tribe.
So if that food is so important to the author, let's make it important to the players. Let them read that long dietary section. That's what their orks know about food.
Then make them find it.
Create a ton of ork non-player characters, including their dowmga and tala and maybe a few orks from neighboring tribes. This will help set the scene. Get out a copy of National Geographic, point to a bit of scenery, and say "You guys live here. Cool? Now, the adventure for tonight...is finding dinner."
They cannot ignore this. It is not one dice roll and it's over. They just stepped into Survivor: The Roleplaying Game. 'Cause the more comfortable an ork existence is, the less real any threats seem.
Cook up a bodacious amount of food, and announce that nobody gets to eat until their hunter-gatherers come up with the chow. When this happens, everybody can feast, just like their orks. If your players don't think gathering is as sexy as hunting, let them eat only the meat portion of the meal unless they trade for the side dish or "thwak" a few bites. Hell, lock up the cat and hide the food all over your house.
Now give them a minor obstacle like a party of ten dumb humans who are sitting in the best berry patch and scaring the game-animals into hiding by being noisy. Impress upon them that ten humans is a mean fight, and worse, the human smell and tracks will mess up their hunting chances unless they get them to vacate. Then take everything they say seriously. Can they put food on the table? How exactly do they do it? Who's going for the mushrooms? Who's going for the berries and the honey?
Are they splitting up? Ever? In the entire game? Two words: Blair Witch.
Every day is an adventure. That's the first impression to give.
When this gets old, go play with the serious conflict. John mentioned to us that his game design philosophy includes giving the characters something to argue about. In this case, it's tribal politics. Ork campaigns should be full of other tribes challenging yours to hunts and "monster-slaying" that gets out of control. Within the household, you get dowmga politics (a.k.a. "Adult Orkworld" or "sex and relationships"), tala politics (a.k.a. "Who's gettin' the credit and experience points 'cause they're friends with the bard?"), and in a pinch, plenty o' monsters and magic.
Which brings us to...
Basically, it's a game where you're a bunch of fighter-types wandering around in the wilderness.
It's the job of the designer, GM and players to make this an advantage, not a disadvantage. The game has given you the reason you're out here; it's your way of life, and it's being threatened. Now, all the info on diseases? Use it. Anything you know about the discomforts of camping? Use it. All that culture? Create a bad guy for each cultural norm, and have him or her break it. Then figure out the consequences, and where in the story line the players should come in.
If you've read a lot of Wick's other games or half the advice on-line, you'll have an idea of how to populate a world. If not, the GM should definitely work out personalities for the rest of the tribe, 'cause they could be the only other people the characters will see until it comes time for the annual moot. Figure out their migratory route and their food prospects, then throw in complications left and right.
There is no introductory adventure in Orkworld, but there are a lot of hooks, and a reasonable selection of monsters to fight. I should know...my job before it went to press was to quite literally kill them all.
(If any of you are saying to yourselves, "Oh, cool! I wish I had that job!" I should remind you that lots of people also think "porn star" sounds like a great occupation. Neither job is, and for much the same reason.)
The somewhat sparse monster section may remind you that this is a story-oriented game. If you're going to get any use out of the monsters, you have to treat them as reasonably real critters -- a list of which ones you've killed will be very short before your players start reaching for another game. Give these creatures a premium and unique role in the story the way the opening fiction handles them, or else you will convince yourselves you have "been there and speared that" very quickly.
Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, and the rest of the "Earth's Children" series by Jean M. Auel. The later books turn into prehistoric romance novels, and Ms. Auel's conceits have unfortunately been progressively disproven despite her accurate research at the time the books were published, but they can ground you in inter-tribal relationships. They also have a few fun action scenes such as the canoe-wreck-while-spear-fishing-in-underground-icy-rapids which translate great to Orkworld games.
Elfquest. Replace "elf" with "ork" and proceed to kick narrative ass. The original four graphic novel volumes (comic book issues 1-20) are the story of a tribe of about twenty elves stuck in a world in which the humans are the enemy, trolls are untrustworthy, and the wolf-riding heroes are pretty savage themselves. Ideas to lift? Peaceable desert orks, vicious snow and forest orks, sick magical orks living in a mountain, the mad half-ork/half-elf genius, the astral projection/dream-world, "recognition" through ork pheromones, and Madcoil...ancient ork magic gone bad.
Grunts, by Mary Gentle. It has some funny moments. It has some sick moments. Not high art, but an Orkworld humor one-shot would do well to keep in mind the dominatrix halflings and the "casual evil" chic. Orc-ball comes to mind. (CHOP! "We got a ball! Let's play!")
Blades, Prelude to War, and The Ork Nation of Cara Fahd (yes, I'm promoting my own product, here, but the information in the book really is relevant), originally produced for Earthdawn by the FASA Corporation, now under Living Room Games. Orkworld, though it has campaign suggestions, doesn't have much of a campaign scope laid out, and these supplements can give you a hand. Blades and Prelude to War start off the adventures that unite the orks into a nation. As for Cara Fahd...well, imagine 110,000 orks with the cultures of Mongols, Hessians, and Masai herders, who suffer heartburn if they bottle up their passions. Now force them to work together to establish modern-day Israel. If you pay attention, the book has about fifty ready-made non-player-characters, and giving them Orkworld stats won't take more than a night. Some mini-adventures, creatures, ork poetry, and magical items round out the all-purpose ork supplement.
Even if they do have dorky last names.
Reindeer Moon, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. The life of a prehistoric woman, told simultaneously from her childhood forward, and from after her death as she becomes an ancestor spirit (read: Orkworld's "Dreaming"). She then tries to protect the life of the child she died bearing. Interesting ideas and settings for Orkworld-style games.
Ratha's Creature and Clan Ground by Clare Bell. These are young adult books about a tribe of sentient cats and their discovery of the secret of fire. Orkworld's orks are a bit more technologically advanced, but who's to say that the secret of steel, or agriculture, or "the one true god" won't send their tribes into cults and chaos just like fire does in this series?