Entry: Annals of Autumn and Spring - a little long

[itaigreif]

Time frame: Your Game is completely playable in 2 Sessions of 6 Hours, with exactly two weeks passing between the first and second session.
Ingredients: COMMITTEE, ANCIENT, EMOTION

Blurb: The players take the part of Ancient Season Spirits, meeting to decide which part of humanity to carry over to a new age. This is a frame for two separate games, one of story telling and heroic deeds, and the other of problem solving and emotional difficulty.

Structure of the game:
The game is divided into two parts: Autumn and Spring. It is meant for four participants, one of which would play Winter during the first part, and the Operator during the second part.

Autumn
The world is about to fall into darkness. Humanity would return to the dark ages. The Ancient Season spirits know this, and they can do something about it: they can’t stop the fall of night, it’s part of the cycle of nature, but they can preserve a dream of humanity, basically a collection of emotions and racial myths, so when humanity steps out of the caves and into light, it won’t have to start from scratch.
Winter, which bears no love towards humanity, is willing to hold a seed of humanity’s dreams in her frozen bosom, but only if the other three seasons can decide what that seed should be.

Each of the other three players chooses a different season: Spring, Summer, and Autumn. The players should also note in their season sheet Love (a reason to love humanity; something about people they specifically adore) and Agenda (what they want to keep so the reason for love would grow again). Each of the three seasons would tell a heroic tale, and the players may write down their Love right before and right after their heroic tale.

The seasons meet in Dreamtime, that means the world could move through centuries while they meet. The meeting is the same for them: it would end when the dream ends, in 6 hours “real world time”. They have until the dream ends to decide about the seed. In order to convince her sisters, each Season tells a heroic tale, describing the positive attributes of humanity and showing them what about it should be saved.

The game progresses through these three heroic tales. Each season (Spring first, then Summer and Autumn) would be the Storyteller, setting the stage by describing the Quest: a threat to humanity or a part of it (a tribe, a village, a nation), and the Hero that would save it. The Storyteller portrays the hero, while one other season is the Heartwood (an aid to the hero, a companion), and the other is the Thorn (someone whom the hero needs in order to finish his quest, but acts in opposition to the hero’s way of thought and action). The tale is told in Dreamtime, which means the scenes of the story do not necessarily follow each other, but are all linked to the story. Since it is a memory, the other seasons can introduce elements to the story the Storyteller might have “forgotten”: these are threats, problems and complications meant to highlight some element of the story or facet of the people in it. The goal of each Season is to express what in humanity it likes the most in a given story. The mechanic of the conflict resolution is such that failure doesn’t mean the hero failed, but that he must take a different rout to victory. The hero always saves the day; the question is only what he had to do in order to succeed.

During each story, the players do two important things: they score each other for successfully exhibiting the desired attributes during the story, and they note 3 elements of the story they liked or thought important: deeds, problems, expressions of sentiments, and so on. After the three tales are over, each player should have 9 story elements on his sheet, apart from Season, Love, and Agenda.

After the tales are done, the seasons discuss what they learnt. Starting with the lowest scorer, each Season speaks of humanity, what it means and why it should be preserved. In rare occasion, if the season makes a very heartfelt and dramatic speech, it may score some more points here. The key is to move the other players. Once that is over, all the seasons agree to preserve the love of the highest scorer.

During the break:
During the following two weeks before the second session, each player must corrupt the 12 elements written on his sheet: the three attributes, and the 9 story elements. He has to write what he hates or despises the most about the season he played, and find the negative or downside of his Love and Agenda, locating what those elements could do if taken to extreme, or found out of context, or seen in a different light. He has to twist every story element by taking what was meaningful in it, and recasting it negatively. This shouldn’t come from the setting of the game, but from what is universal about the moment. If it was a moment where someone hanged on a cliff to pick a flower, and was very brave, the bravery is more important then the cliff or the flower; it was the act of physical danger in order to achieve a goal. That should be twisted. Optimally, the players would twist something different every day, before giving the sheets to the Operator two days before the session. This is so the players would think about the game and what was important to them during their last session.

Spring:
Like in Autumn, the world is once more facing the fall of night. But this time, the characters don’t know it. The players play in a different setting, one that is thousands of years in the future of the last. In it, the seed was preserved, but twisted: the seasons meaning was not carried out, and they are debating whether or not to do so again.

The players should play a new version of the Thorns they played during the last session, recast according to this new setting. Again, they have three attributes: their Toolset (what it is they are and can do), their Motivation, and their Goal. Their Motivation, a perversion of their previous Love, is something that motivates their character to care only for itself, something that distance them from other human beings. Their Goal is something they’re trying to achieve that would allow independence, free them from what they dislike, or allow them to forever remove it from the world.

In this world, the Powers that Be got wind of the Ancient Spirits meeting. Depending on the setting, the Powers might not fully understand what it is they’re dealing with, but they want to get their hands on the Ancient Spirits. For that, they send the characters.
This session is divided into four acts: during the first, the characters should explore their tools and connections, and understand the threats they face. At the end of the first act, the characters are ready, and begin the mission. During the second act, things do not go their way, and get even more complicated; at the end of the second act they meet their counterparts: a group composed of modern versions of the Heroes, sent for the same reasons they were. Each hero should embody what one Thorn hates about humanity at large.
During the third act, the characters overcome adversity, and achieve their goal: capturing the Ancient Spirits. At the end of the third act they learn the truth: their world is about to be destroyed, and the Ancients wish to preserve a part of it. The Ancients tell them that the time is limited, but have no way of conveying the limit: those six hours exist in the Dreamtime, in the story dimension of the game, and the Ancients have no frame of reference to relate it to the characters.

Now they have a choice: letting the Ancient go, or bringing them to the Powers that Be. Playing along with Winter, who seeks to annihilate humanity, or try to save it. Whatever they choose to do, the Heroes try to stop them again. At the end of the fourth act, if they chose to help save humanity and defeated their respective counterparts, the seed of humanity continues to another age.

During the game, it is the Operator’s job to introduce the twisted elements of the story from the previous session. While in the previous game, the three seasons were scored according to the emotions invoked by their tale, here both the season and the Operator are scored if the twisted element was integrated enjoyably into the game.

At the end of the game, the seasons meet again. Winter decides what happened: did the twisting convince them that humanity failed, or do they decide to keep the seed for another night? Again, this has to do with the scoring.

If played again, the players can decide to play different, wiser seasons, but with the same world, only a different cycle. Every time they can continue to develop the world, but must tell tales from the age they are in at the time.

[Graham Walmsley]

This is a very beautiful setting. Interesting.

When the players tell their stories, are they given any guidance or is there any sort of mechanical structure? And I'm interested in that conflict resolution mechanic.

And what's behind the decision to have two different sorts of games? Are they two completely different rulesets? It's fascinating.

Graham

[kleenestar]