Errata: Alternative Boons for the Lover

I should first offer an apology for not having posted for a couple of days. Life got in the way, mainly and while I knew the pace of the blog wasn't going to be one I could keep up forever, I still hope to post if not daily, at least five times a week. I still have several essays about pop Atlantises and fractured histories to write, and a bunch of game stuff.

But today, I want to fix something in Chariot. 

Fates #3 (The Iconic One)

VII. The Chariot

OK, this is the last of my Fates previews, and I sort of had no choice about which one to post. It's the Chariot. It's my card, the card of victory through struggle.

It's also the character type that owes the most to a fiction outside of esoteric literature and my own juvenilia, namely The Metabarons, Jodorowsky's saga about that family of ultimate warriors who could destroy galaxies in the blink of an eye but who absolutely couldn't get their relationships in order. Ironically, if the game's played as the rules direct, the Charioteer is the one who gets to see the least combat (because if you're the Charioteer, you don't get to play out fight scenes).

Fates #2

Second of three extracts. Note that in theosophical magic (and hance in the magic scheme of Chariot) physical bilocation is considered impossible.

Fates #1

More extracts. This time, the first of the Fates. A couple more later in the week.

That Relationship Mechanic

Ok, so I've wanted to include a relationship mechanic in Chariot from the beginning. I like relationship mechanics. The question is, how do you do them? Dogs in the Vineyard, which is still one of my favourite games, gives you dice for doing things if you can bring in a relationship, as does Monsters and Other Childish Things, in a slightly different manner. I wasn't sure that I wanted it to work exactly like that. Vampire and its siblings, for which I wrote, well, quite a lot have a set of optional "people you know" stats, Allies, Contacts, Retainers and so on. I felt that was a little too vague, too easy to drop.

This is what I settled on. Feedback is welcome.

Stations in Life #3: Soldiers and Slaves

A warrior of Mentis, City of the Blue Women

Third and final social classes extract. Today Soldiers and Slaves. 

Stations in Life #2

A Nun of the AkâshicCollege.

Second of three extracts on Social Stations. Today, Priests. 

Stations in Life #1

The Seven of Pentacles: Craft.

So it's been a while but you need to know that Chariot is nearly, so nearly done. It's on course for the playtest document to be out in December and the Kickstarter to launch in early January.

I thought I'd share some of the playtest draft this week, and since the most work I've done  on it has been in character creation, well.

So your character in Chariot has a culture, and I've written about cultures at length already, a social station (that is, the economic or social class into which your character was born) and a Fate (the good bit). This week, I'd highlight some of the social stations, which include Citizen, Mystic, Noble, Nomad, Outcast, Priest, Proletarian, Soldier and Slave.

Fated

In Chariot, you play the role of one of the twenty individuals in the world whose destiny is to carry the psychic weight of the human race on your shoulders. 

Atlanteans, the Third People

Kuiorih ka Akhantuih, Black Atlantean priest

What is there to say? The Atlanteans, for good and ill, are arbiters of all there is. They are the explorers, scientists,  philosopher, discoverers. No one is close to them in wealth and achievement.

Clean water. Healthy people who can read and write. Lights on the streets at night. Peace, for the Atlanteans at any rate.

Muvians, the Fourth People

Pharomenes, a Muvian Captain.

According to the diplomats and travellers of the Atlanteans, no culture offers as much threat to the rest of the world as the Justified Children of Mu, the Fourth People.

Your Fate

You learned that you are fated to die, but not now. 

You know innately that the Catastrophe, age of fire, wave and stone, is coming and - crucially - you will live to see it, before it takes you.

Character Creation

All this stuff about characters. All these stat blocks. No mention of how to make one.

Ok, so let's fix that.

Relationships

Rhadamanthes, a Muvian.

No one exists in a vacuum, fictional or not; even the most convinced loner has people he or she communes with in some way (consider the hermit in Maine, who, although he lived utterly alone for 27 years, still depended on locals whom he could burgle to survive).

Chariot is a game themed on the lives of others. Player characters in Chariot have in common the revelation that the catastrophe is coming, and that they're going to die in it, and not before. If you know that whatever the consequences of your actions, you will live to see the final end, wouldn't that change the way you faced the world?

But whatever you do, it can't happen outside of the context of people. Who will escape? Who will you save? Who will you drag screaming into the ocean depths with you?

Tlavatlis, the Second People

Svaathë, a Tlavatli.

Among the children of the Rmoahals,  some travelled north, and there they settled, and there they learned selfishness. There they learned ambition.

Lemurians

The Lemurian from my dad's book. The one that started all of this.

Lemuria is old, older than thought, older than memory, and its original inhabitants are barely recognisable as people at all, or so say the treatises and gazetteers of the Atlanteans.

Rmoahals, the First People

Lemurian, Rmoahal, Atlantean 

The Rmoahals, First of the Four Peoples, are no better or worse than any other people, but none of the cultures of the Twin Continents are so thoroughly, so entirely oppressed.

The more benevolent and progressive of the Atlanteans, those who would consider themselves "good", think of these melancholy blue giants as ennobled by their suffering, but it's the dream of a guilty oppressor: suffering doesn't make you better. You just suffer.

Conflict resolution (in a slightly roundabout way)

Makarakan.

[Edit, December 1st 2015: some of the mechanics here have changed in the writing of the game.]

So aged twelve, I painted illustrations for my game, like actual illustrations drawn only as a twelve year old with some talent and no technical skill whatsoever could, mainly using the idiom of 1980s Marvel comics, and came the with all these ideas, and none of them survive. They were all destroyed in my teens out of acute embarrassment, which is sad, because I would have loved to show them to you.

Chariot character metrics

(My thoughts about my game are, I confess, a bit scattershot, but gradually a picture should emerge. Go with me here.)

In a tabletop rpg, character attributes are how your character interacts with the game world, so they need to reflect the sort of story you want to tell. I mean, this you know. So. Stats.