(Entry) The Mask of Juris

[MPOSullivan]

The Mask of Juris

Gameplay Time:
Any number of sessions totalling eight hours

Theme Package Two:
Actor
Law
Team

For as long as there has been time, there has been the Festival of Juris. Every five years the Lord of the Land calls for a week long festival celebrating Juris, the ancient hero of the people, with song, dance, loveplay and revelry. Long has been the Law of the Land that, on the last day of the festival, the Lord will choose the finest troupe of actors in all of his kingdom and call upon them to perform a passion play telling of the Life of Juris. In this play the actors will show the life of the hero as he grew from a young whelp into a man of bravery, faced the monstrous, er-- scorpion god Keftet, wooed the fine woman... uh, Queen.. uh, Beautifica and defeated the evil King Dargen at... darts. Or something like that.

You see, the Age of Juris is so long gone that nobody remembers who Juris was anymore or even what he did that made him into the celebrated hero that he is. Records have been lost to fires and war. Memories decay over time. Ans nobody ever really thought to write down a script. This doesn't stop the celebrants though, as they dance through the streets, paint their faces and demand their entertainments.

As such, it falls to the actors in the troupe to create the Life of Juris whole cloth, telling a tale of heroism, passion, peril, challenge, love, glory, and triumph. And as is the Law, they are to do it in one day. As the sun sinks to rest at dusk, the troupe of actors are told of their lot. From there they must prepare their play and perform it. As is tradition, the last scene shall always end at the fall of midnight.

If the troupe succeeds at this task and is able to create a performance that can sway the hearts of the audience then they are celebrated as heroes, lauded by the people and rewarded by the Lord quite handsomely.

Dissatisfaction with the theatrics is a serious matter. You see, there is another part to the law that created the tradition of the play. Those actors who do not do well in portraying the life of Juris are fed to the lions. Literally.


Gameplay
Okay, very briefly, there's a lot of "meta" to the game. First up, you have the players. That's you guys. There is no GM for the game as the game is instead a co-op narrative RPG with a strong focus, similar to games like Polaris. The players are all the Actors in the Troupe that is to lead the play "The Life of Juris".

Theatre in this setting is based on Greek theatre, including the actor's Mask. Each Character in the play is represented by a Mask, from Juris through to the monsters he might face down to the lowliest peasant. Masks are actually going to be created by the players, using a simple shape form of a human head on a piece of paper that they then color in with pencils, crayons, markers or whatever to reflect the Character.

Characters are represented by their Masks, not by any given Actor. As such, any actor can grab up the mask of any Character and play him. Four different Actors may play Juris by the time the play ends, but no one will mind as the character is the Mask.

The whole time players will also have to deal with On-stage and Off-stage. If an Actor is on stage he must have a mask on. Anything that is said while onstage is in character. Actors can only discuss amongst themselves while offstage. And there can never be a time when there is no one onstage.

Mediating everything that happens onstage is one specific Actor, called the Chorus. It is his job to introduce characters and scenery and to set up scenes. When he calls out that a character is on stage, an actor has to pick up that character's mask and go onstage with it.

The game takes place in real time. The Troupe has eight hours to plan and stage the play "the Life of Juris". It is the hopes of the troupe to win over the hearts of the Audience, which are represented by dice pools. If, at the end of the eight hours the players have won the Love of the Audience, the Actors live on and become heroes. If they find that they have won nothing but the Audience's Loathing, then the lions will not go hungry tonight.


The Players may chose to spend a lot of time preparing their play, eating up the time that they have to perform. Other Players may decide to touch upon a couple of broad ideas before the play begins and then improv the rest. In either case the play will never be set in stone, as the Audience will never react the same way. They are fickle, and if they decide that a storyline you are developing isn't any good, then you'd better be able to think on your feet.

So, Players play Actors, who play Characters, but not just one character and never exclusively. Then there's an Actor whose sole role is to introduce characters and scenes and control pacing. The Chorus can introduce characters that haven't even been made yet, forcing the other Actors to think on the fly.

In all honesty, i'm half tempted to make the game into a LARP, simply because it seems to lend itself to it in my head. We'll see. Don't think a LARP has ever come out of one of these events before.

And that's the thing that i'm working on. I'll come up for air in a day or two.

-M. P. O'Sullivan

[Antti-san]

[kenjib]

[Doug Ruff]

Oh, this looks like it could be fun.

However, as with other entries, I think that 8 hours could be quite a stretch, especially if that is mainly character acting.

A suggestion, if you're up for it: cut the time to two hours, the actors are actually criminals who have been chucked together at short notice. They get, say 15 minutes to plot stuff together.

Then, during the play, turn over cards from a 'heckle deck', representing what the audience wants to hear. Remember, they've seen previous shows, and they know what they like!

For example:

"Where are the penguins?"
"More blood!"
"Isn't the villain meant to turn up now?"

Players have to incorporate the heckling into their performance in order to earn the audience's favour, and more importantly, to avoid becoming lion chow.

[Mathias Jack]

Oh, I hate making nothing more than an agreement post here, but I think Doug has some nice refining thoughts on the great and inspiring game being created here. This is a game I would definitely play as outlined, MPO - nice work!

And hey, Annti, someone can whip out a mask as described above pretty quickly. It depends on the talent of the mask maker and to the depth of detail desired. You know, that gives me an idea - what if the masks were blank to begin with, and with each suggestion as to what the Mask is, a detail is drwan/painted/whatever to the mask itself. As the Mask is filled out in play, more detail is added or characteristics changed...

"My brilliant blue eyes stared straight through you."
(Hey, where's the blue crayon?)
"That is, until he remembered one eye was milky and blind since he was Juris, so covered with a patch!"
(Hand me the black pen, I need to draw that patch in...)

You get the idea, I think, despite my half-baked example...

[Antti-san]

Hmm, my first thought about the masks that they were premade at the beginning (just like character sheets), but modifying them during play sounds more interesting and not so time consuming. Another thing that crossed my mind first was that they were custom made from plaster. That's why I said it would take time. (If they couldn't be done beforehand, which I guess is acceptable)

[MPOSullivan]

[Antti-san]

[MPOSullivan]

i think i've figured out my issues here. i have two diametrically opposed game concepts sitting at the core of my game.

first is my desire for the game to be a loose Narrative experience, allowing players to really explore the characters that they create and to develop their own stories. I tihnk it's essential that players not be forced to conform to certain storytelling devices in order for them to be considered successful in game terms.

this isn't to say that the system as it stands is a bad one. when excised entirely from the game you actually get Once Upon a Time, which is a great game. Totally improv storytelling, but storytelling working within limits assigned by an outside force, in this case the cards.

the other end of it is the idea of the Audience. The mechanic for the Audience i feel must be something that reflects how they react to the developing story set out by the players. If the audience likes it, yay, if not, boo. It must be something that adds tension to the game.

But, at the same time, the players MUST be able to influence the audience. Performance as a concept is exactly that. It is the ability of an actor and the quality of the work that he is performing that sways me when i'm in the crowd, not the kind of story that i want to see.

In short, the system should not create story, it should react to it. my demand for the Audience is that its opinion can be swayed. The Audience should act as a measure of the overall quality of the play and how well they are reacting to it. It should be something where, when the Actors see how the Audience is reacting, they should be able to feed off of it.

and here i am trying to create a game that rests purely on a mechanic that is about the ability to incite emotion.

So i think that i need to approach the idea of the Audience from a completely new perspective or just drop the game entirely. As it stands right now the game is simple Parlor Narration, as Ron Edwards calls it, taking the onus of power completely out of the hands of the players. How I can get the game to head in the other direction i have no clue.

All in all though, I want to have something in the running, and with ten days left in the contest my time is running a little short.

i'm meeting with my gaming group tonight and we'll probably talk about MoJ , as well as the Glass Bead Game. Hopefully i can take something from that. Otherwise, it's back to the drawing board.

-m

[kenjib]

Maybe the audience has to involve some kind of feedback mechanism from the players? Otherwise I can not see how you can quantify something subjective, as you seem to want to do.