We've actually had quite a full week - with a new one day Con to attend on Saturday just gone (more about this elsewhere). This got me to thinking - Condamned isn't too far away now, June 13th - 15th in fact, and I still had no idea what I was going to run.
The Quiet Year and Microscope have been my go to Indie games for Cons for a little while now, and for something a bit crunchier and dicier I go with The One Ring. However I use a lot of books for The One Ring and don't really want to take them on a flight, and the other two games have been around for a while now. That's when it struck me - I could run Kingdom, and that would be my project for the week - properly reading through Kingdom so I'd be ready to run it for Condamned - and possibly other times as well.
Kingdom is an RPG by Ben Robbins - who was the man behind Microscope - as mentioned above a favourite game of mine. I backed the Kickstarter at the level where I got a physical copy of the finished game - as pictured.
For those not familiar with it Microscope is a game that looks at the whole history of something - a planet, a kingdom, a ship or just about anything people can come up with. It has a start point and an end point and then explores what happens in-between. There will be a number of Eras, Events and Scenes making up the history you are exploring. The actual roleplaying comes into the scenes - you take on the role of someone involved in an event and explore the framed scene. These scenes tend to be quite short - and can only answer the question posed to frame the scene - anything else players want to find out about has to be explored in another scene.
Kingdom plays in a similar way to Microscope, exploring some of the events affecting one Kingdom (I'll come onto what constitutes a Kingdom in a minute). The Kingdom will have Crises and Crossroads - the players explore these and shape their Kingdoms progression. In some ways it can be likened to a series of linked scenes in Microscope - indeed the book includes rules for using the two systems together.
The most important concept in Kingdom in many ways is what actually constitutes a Kingdom - as this is the basis for all the play. Despite many readings I still struggle with this one somewhat myself - so here's how the book puts it. A 'Kingdom' is the game term for the community or organisation that the game will focus on e.g. a pirate ship or a nomadic tribe. Some kingdoms are small, others are larger. A kingdom should have at least 20-30 people but could have hundreds.
In normal game play, the players as a group (this is a GM-less game) come up with a Kingdom, however if you want a quicker start the games has a large number of pre-generated Kingdoms in it - and I think I may be leaning towards these for Con games. Some examples are: Battleship Orion (think Battlestar Galactica really especially as the Kingdom is the entire rag-tag fleet), Cactus Flats - a Wild West township, Dwarf Mountain - funnily enough a dwarven Kingdom, and so on.
Each player takes on a single character within the Kingdom - and will usually only have one main character per a game - although they may be called upon to take the parts of NPC's. Each character will also have a Role within the Kingdom, they'll be a Power, a Perspective or a Touchstone. Each of these interact differently with the Crossroads and Crises a kingdom will face, and the Role a character has may change during play - either by being challenged for the role by another player or through the character shifting through play.
A Power is able to decide which way the Kingdom will go at a Crossroad, a Perspective can foresee consequences of Crossroads and Crises whilst a Touchstone represents the feelings of the Kingdom - the average member of the Kingdom feels as they do.
I'm not going to go any further into the rules and how the game pans out at this point - not least because I'm still not sure of it myself. Basically each player in turn though gets to frame a scene, and at the end of the scene either the Crossroad comes closer to a decision, a Crisis comes closer to actually affecting the Kingdom or time progresses - and can lead to a fairly large chunk of time passing with nothing happening.
I've now read the rulebook a few times, and have to admit I'm still not one hundred percent on how to play the game - I think this is more down to my learning style than a problem with the book itself - I may have reached the stage where I actually need to play the game to learn it. Which probably means running the damn thing at Condamned - as I can't see myself getting a chance to play it before then - we're far too busy.
So this weeks project - did I read the book? Yes
Am I closer to running the game? Yes
Will I run it at Condamned? Probably (as long as people want to play it)
Do I feel ready to run it right now? No, I'll be reading it again before Condamned, that's for certain.
In the meantime Keep Gaming folks and have fun.
Ben
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