Multiparty Processing
Let’s suppose that a GM wants to run multiple parties in the same world. They have two parties A and B which play on different days weekly. Let’s say Tuesday and Thursday for the sake of example. Everything goes well until the following scenario happens:
Party A goes to dungeon X and ends the session mid-dungeon. Before their next session, party B goes to the same dungeon and captures the largest treasure hoard.
There are several ways to prevent or resolve this issue, depending on the priority one wants to put on the real world timeline versus the game world timeline.
If the real and game timelines are tied together, such that each day which passes in the real world causes a day to pass in game, then party A will either have to leave the dungeon by the end of the session or else be forced to spend a week of game time in the dungeon, which is likely quite undesirable. I’m going to call this the “freeing” method, as party A is forced to let others use the resource of dungeon X when they aren’t actively using it. This prevents the problem from occurring in the first place, at the cost of imposing time limitations on the party. There are other problems with this method which will be discussed later.
If the real timeline is held to be more important than the game timeline, then we reject that this is actually an issue. Events happen solely based on their real timelines, so party B can absolutely swoop in and steal the treasure out from beneath party A. I’m going to call this the “ignoring” method. This is a fine solution for many styles of running games, but causes issues for my own style of sandbox games where the game timeline is important. If the GM’s job is to simulate the world fairly and the game timeline is totally subsumed by the real timeline, then when is it fair for the GM to change the world on its own accord? You lose any real ability to answer what day it is in game. My criticism of this approach mostly stems from my own principles and desire to simulate the game world. I feel as though there is more to say here but I’m not in a position to dig into it at the moment.
If the game timeline is preferred over the real timeline, then one must prevent the real timeline from causing issues with the game timeline. In the example, this would mean explicitly preventing party B from going into the dungeon due to party A already being there. I will call this the “blocking” method. This has the advantage of preventing the issue, but also fails my principles for games. Trying to prevent the players from reaching the dungeon without explicitly telling them they can’t go there will likely be immensely frustrating for the players and I would consider this to be classically terrible GMing, but explicitly telling them breaks immersion. Either way this option undermines the reality of the game world. This option could be saved or at least the blow lessened by some diegetic reasoning in this specific example, such as a board the adventurers post their claimed dungeons on, but it’s unlikely that a given diegetic solution will make sense broadly across multiple possible collision scenarios.
Another option might be to split the game timeline. Party A ends their session in the dungeon. Party B steals the loot. When party A comes back the loot is still there. I consider this “splitting” solution to be a hack. I see two possible ways to implement this, either having the timelines be totally separate or merging them after collisions. If the timelines are totally separate, I would argue you aren’t running two parties in the same game world to start with. You wouldn’t have any of the gameplay benefits of multiple parties for the players, and as the timelines diverged the prep benefits of having only one world are also lost. This is why I call it a hack solution. The other implementation of merging the timelines would be something like both parties A and B coming back with two identical copies of the same treasure. Frankly, trying to merge the timelines after every conflicting event sounds like a pain in the ass. It could be justified in-game with multiple timelines being a canonical feature of the world, and I think would be more satisfying to me than doing so for the blocking method, but this is a high level cosmological choice which greatly changes the flavor of the game world and perhaps makes the player characters more cosmically important than I think they ought to be.
My own previous attempts at multiple parties have drawn on the previous work of the bOSR and their patron-style play, which I consider to be the canonical example of the freeing method (though not one that Gygax et. al. used, and certainly the not only way to play D&D). As such I have put more thought into problems with this method. Using the patron-style method of fixing the real and game timelines, we can still run into conflict situations. Consider this second scenario which can only exist with linked timelines.
Party A walks to city Y, which takes them two weeks. They buy a unique magic item, Z. All of this happens in one session. The next Thursday, Party B teleports to the city and plans to spend two weeks there, all in the same session. This means they are in a position to buy Z before party A does. Should they be allowed to do so?
(Following patron-style play, the session happens just as a normal D&D session would (i.e. during the session the players play out traveling to the city and taking any actions there), but the characters are unplayable for two weeks afterwards as the events of the game session play out in real time. The “camera” of the game timeline follows them for the session, but afterwards real time has to catch up to the camera.)
As far as I can tell, in these situations the bOSR actually follows a real-timeline first method here, simply resolving actions on a first-come first serve basis. So party B would simply be unable to purchase the item, either for meta or diegetic reasons. This has the advantage of being easy for the GM to resolve as well as being a general solution, but does restrict the possible actions players can take.
A more “pure” linked-timeline method might be to consider all actions which occur in the future to be orders and not set in stone until that real-world date has passed. So party B would be able to purchase the item, party A would be out of luck and have to re-submit orders from the point where things changed. This creates a lot of extra work for the players and the GM, having to retcon and then effectively re-play decisions. It would also be extremely frustrating to say, get a really good roll when fighting a powerful monster only to have that version of reality not happen. I could also see it causing a considerable amount of meta grief with players jockeying for position due to their ability to effectively know the future. I haven’t tried to come up with an example scenario, but I also fear that under this paradigm it might be possible to get stuck in an infinite loop of retcons. So though this is a pure solution it is also a much messier one.
This scenario initially involved party A burning down the city, but this was revised as multi-party PvP and indeed PvP in general is a can of worms I’m not opening in this post. But I do want to consider it, and there are some interesting questions such as whether you can fairly interact with a character whose player is not present even outside of a PvP context.
I’m sure there are some solutions to this scenario I haven’t thought of, and that there are implementations of each of them which reduce the impact of their downsides. I’m probably going to stick with the one-to-one method for now as it avoids most of the problems which conflict with my own personal gaming principles, but for people largely unconcerned with a consistent canon or fixed timelines the ignoring method is probably the easiest and simplest. I may consider adopting a modified version of it myself once I can properly analyze and resolve my own issues with it, as it provides a more casual experience for players than one-to-one time and my own players have complained about being forced to leave the dungeon at the end of a session. If I was designing a new multi-party campaign from ground up the splitting method with merging timelines might work well alongside anti-canon tools, but it would need to be tightly integrated with the setting and my current project is not compatible with that.
2023-03-8
Anti-Canon Worldbuilding
Anti-canon is a response to the Tolkien style of worldbuilding typically emphasized in fantasy fiction. It is a rejection of the creation of a world with a complete history, rigid geography, and rigid boundaries. Anti-canon instead sets out to create a world which changes as stories are told in it. While the world is consistent for each story told in it, each new story set in the world is altered in some way while carrying references or motifs to the other stories. The best example of this is M. John Harrison’s Viriconium (which the name of this blog references). An anti-canon setting for a roleplaying book would seek to provide GMs running it with a toolbox to capture the aesthetic, themes, and motifs of the world without saddling them with a rigorous canon. Unlike a traditional setting there is no one true history or geography but a world resulting from the combination of the text and the GM’s imagination.
I think this idea is fucking awesome. As someone who spends a lot of time lurking on OSR blogs, I encounter a lot of ideas spread across the internet which I pull into my games and alter to suit my own needs and preferences. I believe these games to be first and foremost games of imagination, and casting aside rigorous settings delivered from on high facilitates this. Therefore, I want to consider two primary examples of how this has been accomplished by other designers: Logan Knight’s In Cörpathium and Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands.
In Cörpathium is a blog post by Logan Knight detailing rules for generating and regenerating the macabre and titular city of Cörpathium. The city is split into distinct burroughs, each with a description, set of conditional changes, and a table of variances determined randomly. One thing I like about this approach is that as it contains a limited amount of variations the various parts of the setting will recur between iterations in a way which very intentionally mimics the motifs in Viriconium. Also notable are the conditional blocks, where parts of the city depend on the generated state of other parts. One example is that the controlling factions of the city depend on what boroughs are generated. I like this because it explicitly connects the elements while also providing even more new and different configurations for anyone experiencing the city again and again. I do think this technique should be used sparingly, though, as the number of possible combinations can quickly get out of hand. As mentioned, some things in the city are also constant, which provides a throughline and allows the city to always feel like itself.
Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) is a setting book and roleplaying game by Luka Rejec, who coined the phrase anti-canon as near as I can tell. It features a brilliant caravan-crawl game structure across a psychedelic dying earth. While I love a lot of things in this book, its approach to anti-canon disappointed me. Luka’s approach was to never outright state the canon of the world, but to include it anyways through references throughout the text. This does accomplish his stated goal of allowing the GM to fill in the blanks, but my personal experience with this was mostly annoyance as I felt forced to re-assemble the puzzle rather than inspired to invent my own pieces. I think the main issue was utilizing vagueness rather than contradiction. Rather than presenting multiple pieces of information which cannot co-exist and forcing the GM to choose between them or syncretise them, he perhaps broke an existing canon down into snippets he thought the whole could not be restored from. I find this very odd, as the blog post where Luka coins the term anti-canon explicitly calls out contradiction as a tool to establish it. It may also be the case that Luka’s blog post simply changed my expectations of the role anti-canon would play in UVG, as I read it before purchasing my copy.
When looking at these two examples, it becomes clear that there is an underlying tradeoff when writing anti-canon material between detail and waste. At one extreme one can create detailed write-ups of every possibility, exuding a lot of effort on things which will be untrue for a given instance of the setting. On the other, wasted content can be avoided at the cost of not making the canon diverge very much from instance to instance.
It is also important to recognize when to utilize anti-canon in the first place. Doing this for your own home game isn’t very useful unless you plan on running the same content again and again between multiple one-shots or campaigns. You could keep regenerating parts of the world when they leave the player’s perception, but I feel like this would get old very fast and should be done sparingly if at all. On the other hand, if writing for an audience in a blog post or published setting, anti-canon can be used to create a variety of experiences in the audience and emphasize each group’s individual experiences while still leaving common touch-stones. Any unused content will be used with enough time or with enough people generating new iterations.
My best attempt to compromise between detail and waste would be to keep all of the content in the world, but changing its status and relationships between iterations. An example of this would be having discrete regions which are placed randomly on a map, then connected by the GM based on proximity. I have considered having players roll pre-detailed homelands, but then have them decide their homeland’s locations on the world map. I think that embracing contradiction in space and time rather than in fact is a good technique, as it allows detailed content which can be reused and forces the GM to invent their own connective tissue.
Take for example a method of generating a region’s factions. Each faction is assigned a status in the world which defines their level of power and relationship with society:
- Embedded: The faction is strongly woven into the fabric of society and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. They are at the height of their power, and represent the norms and beliefs of the region’s populace.
- Marginal: The faction is at the edge of society, whether pushed there or by choice. It may be considered uncomfortable, or is perhaps simply unknown by the majority.
- Ascendent: The faction is rising to prominence and is set to become a major player in the region. It may be conflicting with or embraced by established factions as its power increases.
- Decaying: The faction still holds significant power in the region, but its days are numbered. It may have strayed from its original vision and lost direction, or perhaps it simply did not change with the world around it.
- Nascent: The faction is very young, perhaps only a small band of dedicated believers. They have little power but grand visions of the future.
- Ruined: The faction is nothing more than history, ruins, and perhaps a few bitter old folks. Whatever power they attained is gone, their accomplishments left behind and possibly forgotten.
If six factions were devised for a region, then each could be assigned a status. What would actually need to be detailed for each faction would vary, but a ladder of different power levels for a faction would provide their current capabilities as well as future developments as their power changes. The nascent and ruined statuses would likely waste the most content as such factions are unlikely to use all of the NPCs and locations which might be detailed for a more powerful faction, but if there’s too much content it also allows GMs to add to the amount of variation by picking and choosing as they wish. This method already provides 720 combinations before considering how the factions would connect.
Here’s a lightly detailed example write-up for a faction generated using random words as an oracle. My generator spat out “digress fist”, so I’m going to interpret that as a band of wandering martial monks. Another round for more detail gets me “period height”. Period makes me think of a particular time and place, and combined with height it makes me think of some kind of golden age, which I will also interpret somewhat literally. Let’s call them the Golden Order.
The Golden Order is a band of crusading monks who believe in restoring a mythical golden age to the region. They believe in personal strength and religious devotion to gold and commerce. They believe the spread of their faith will restore this supposedly glorious past.
Embedded: The elders of the Golden Order rule the region from a monastery in its capital city. Merchants and the physically strong are seen as ideal citizens of the monastery-dotted region. The order’s gold-based faith is held by the general public, though actual membership in the order is considered a high honor. The order continues to push its ideals, believing their golden age to be right around the corner as soon as they take care of the remaining dissenting voices. They lead crusades to other regions in attempts to spread their ideas.
Marginal: The Golden Order has a few small monasteries in the countryside. They are considered a fringe religious group by most of the region’s citizens, and are regarded with suspicion. The order believes it will soon be their duty to launch a great crusade, though the details and timing are vague. Some interpret this literally and spend their time perfecting a form of spirit-empowered martial combat while others believe it to be a battle of ideologies and seek to spread their faith.
Ascendent: The Golden Order has monasteries in most major towns. Their faith and ideology is growing in popularity, and they believe the eve of their crusade is forthcoming. Those not holding their beliefs fear the violence this implies.
Decaying: The Golden Order has monasteries in every town across the region. Their order is closed to outsiders unless they can pass grueling tests of physical and spiritual fitness. Members speak of a crusade, but it seems to be long-off and they are more concerned with spiritual introspection and physical self-discipline. They are well-respected by society, but many chafe under the amount of privileges the monks are afforded in society.
Nascent: The Golden Order is a small band of traveling monks and merchants which travel from town to town carrying their golden altar and holding demonstrations of their martial regimens. They stir up talk of the region’s supposedly glorious past, and sometimes pick up a few believers as they go. People generally don’t know much about them, and regard them with curiosity and derision in equal measure.
Ruined: The Golden Order once held considerable sway in this land, and the ruins of their monasteries still dot it. They are believed to have worshiped gold itself, attracting treasure hunters to the region. Their downfall came about when they embarked upon a crusade against the spirit world which ended in ruin for them and the region.
If I were developing this further, I would describe their beliefs and abilities in greater detail while leaving their crusade vague. I would also do a full map of one of their monasteries, which could be used at their prime or as a ruin.