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Notes for a New Project

Notes for a New Project

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Soon after I stopped spending most of my creative effort on work for the tabletop game industry, I started work on what would eventually become my first mature, original, and complete novel. Its title was The Master’s Oath, and it will never be published.

When I finished working for Steve Jackson Games, I still had a lot of that company’s influences in the back of my mind. In particular, a book Ken Hite had written for GURPS in 2001 (GURPS Cabal) made quite an impression on me. It was that book that made me aware of the Western esoteric traditions for the first time: kabbalah, Hermeticism, Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the Tarot, the Golden Dawn, that whole utterly snarled yet gorgeous ball of yarn. I studied esoterica for years afterward, building quite the library of relevant works, all of which are still in my possession.

Mind you, I’m not by any means a believer or a practitioner. The Western occult tradition was a false trail in our intellectual history, not something that has any pragmatic reality. I still find it useful as a source of creative inspiration. To this day, the attentive reader might notice little scraps of it in my fiction – alchemical or Tarot imagery, that kind of thing.

The Master’s Oath was one product of that period of my life. It was an alternate-history novel, a portal fantasy too, with Golden Dawn-style magic built into the plot. I worked on it from about 2008 through 2012, and that was a fierce and terrible struggle. I learned a lot about planning and writing long-form fiction, about world-building in the service of literary work, about a lot of things not to do. I don’t regret that time spent.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, The Master’s Oath is utterly unpublishable, a fact I only realized after I had congratulated myself on finally finishing my first mature original novel. I’m still proud of the research, the world-building, the quality of the prose in it. Unfortunately, it’s also a deeply problematic piece of work . . . not outright racist, as such, but thoroughly insensitive, with tropes built in that an American White male author really needs to be very careful about. Much more careful than I knew how to be at the time. Probably more careful than I have the skill for even today. So I’ve chalked The Master’s Oath up as part of the “million crappy words” that every novelist probably has to write before he can start making real progress.

Still. Nothing a writer ever learns is likely to go to waste forever. I still have all that esoterica lurking in the back of my head, along with everything I’ve learned as a Freemason, and whole reams of early-modern history.

Finally, I think I may have discovered a way to put all of it to use.

Imagine a world that diverges slightly from our own about the time of Elizabeth I, and becomes significantly different sometime in the early eighteenth century. A world where people like John Dee, Michael Maier, Robert Fludd, and Elias Ashmole were really on to something. A world where the Rosicrucian movement wasn’t just a weird historical joke.

A world in which different ideas and different historical currents might give rise to a different kind of modernity. A different kind of United States, in fact. Maybe even a better one.

As always, when I’m tinkering with alternate-historical ideas, my first impulse is to bring a few games to the tabletop out of my extensive library of historical simulations. For example:

Imperial Struggle is one of the most recent purchases in my library, a grand-strategic simulation of the conflict between Britain and France in the long eighteenth century. Its mechanics are deceptively simple, but the resulting gameplay is deep, rich, and nicely balanced – a great tool for developing alternate histories.

Here’s another one, ironically the very first historical simulation game I ever owned:

1776 is a much older game – my copy has been on my shelves for well over forty years now – but it’s a decent simulation of the American theater of a war that was fought across half the world, and ended with the formation of the United States. It’s nicely customizable too, easy to build alternate-historical scenarios for.

I can think of two or three other games I might be able to bring down and use, too. I have more than enough material to start building a timeline and a “bible” for stories set in this putative alternate reality.

As for the stories themselves? Well, “A Fire in Winter” fits nicely into the emerging structure. In fact, thinking about what else I could write to follow that story is probably what got my hindbrain working on this notion. I’m sure that as I start writing down and organizing all of this, more stories will suggest themselves.

None of which means I’m going to be setting aside other projects, to be sure. I still need to keep making progress with Architect of Worlds, the Human Destiny setting, and The Sunlit Lands. Still, I’ve been in a bit of a rut for the last few weeks, and my creative brain seems to work better when I can shift to a new project once in a while. This may be a promising candidate.

Game Design Prospectus: The Wars of the Jewels

Game Design Prospectus: The Wars of the Jewels

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Still plugging away at Twice-Crowned, with about 20 kilowords down in rough draft and a little more emerging every day or two. That’s still my primary project, and I plan to keep it that way until I really get stuck on something.

Still, my brain has to stay busy the rest of the day, and one chunk of time that I can’t apply to the novel is my daily commute to and from the office. That’s about 45-60 minutes per day total . . . and there’s a single audio-book that I’ve been listening to during that time, over the past many months. At this point, I’ve been through that audiobook so many times that I think I have a lot of passages nearly memorized.

That would be the Silmarillion, by J. R. R. Tolkien.

I’m going to assume that most of my readers are at least somewhat familiar with the book. Even if you haven’t read it, you probably know more or less what place it has in Tolkien’s overall body of work.

The biggest chunk of the Silmarillion itself is the story titled the Quenta Silmarillion, the “Tale of the Silmarils,” the epic history of Middle-earth’s “First Age” that provides deep background to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The bulk of the Quenta tells the story of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord of Middle-earth, who stole three great jewels from the Elves of Valinor. This theft provoked many of the Elves to follow Morgoth to Middle-earth and fight a centuries-long series of wars against him, which eventually ended in their utter defeat. Only the intervention of the Valar and the Elves who had remained behind in Valinor saved anything from the rack and ruin.

It’s a beautiful story, and I’m quite content with having spent many hundreds of hours of my life reading and listening to it over and over. But my brain sometimes does odd things with the material it encounters . . . and one thing my brain currently seems to be doing is designing a boardgame simulating the epic action of the Quenta.

So that’s what follows: a high-level prospectus for a tabletop game with the working title of The Wars of the Jewels.

The basic design always assumes two players. One player takes the role of Morgoth, while the other takes the role of the High King of the Noldor Elves, whoever that might be at any given time.

The proposed game comes in two levels of play, essentially a basic and advanced game.

The Battle Game can be played stand-alone, with as many as a dozen or so distinct scenarios portraying the various major military campaigns of the First Age. Each scenario provides a fixed order of battle for both sides, possibly with some special rules to reflect specific situations from the original story. The Battle Game involves very traditional wargame mechanics: small chits representing military units and heroes, moving across a hex-grid map that represents most of the region of Middle-earth called Beleriand. The scale of the Battle Game would be about 20-30 miles per hex and no more than 2-3 days per Battle game-turn; most Battle Game scenarios would be no more than 8-10 game-turns long, and some would be much shorter. I would envision even a long Battle Game scenario as something players could complete in a single afternoon or evening session.

The Epic Game is a grand-strategic simulation, portraying the ebb and flow of the whole series of conflicts. Here, the scale is about 40-50 years per Epic game-turn, so that the whole period of conflict between the Noldor and Morgoth can be played out in 12-15 game-turns.

The Epic Game would be the most challenging to design, I think. Right now I’m leaning toward a card-driven scheme, in which both players draw cards from deck of random events, and can either trigger those events or use point values on the cards to carry out actions. The basic mechanic would probably look a lot like some of the card-driven games published by GMT Games.

The two players wouldn’t be entirely symmetrical in the actions they could take. Both sides could probably do things like build up manpower, settle in empty or uncontrolled provinces, build fortresses, deploy heroes, or play a game of influence among the disparate Elven and allied factions. All of those would play into the possibility of a military campaign to be fought at the end of the Epic game-turn, using the Battle Game to determine the course of a war.

The Elves would also have a set of actions involving sending heroes out on Quests. A Quest would require the Elven player to gather a few heroes (how many would depend on the commitment of action points) and then send them through a series of challenges resolved with die-rolls on a set of tables. Quests could be used to rescue heroes currently captive in Morgoth’s dungeons, to kill dragons or Balrogs, or to attempt to sail to Valinor and persuade the Valar to help. One critical Quest would be to try to steal one of the Silmarils back from Morgoth – very difficult and risky, but probably a necessity if the Elves are not very lucky with their military campaigns.

One mechanic would involve manpower. Almost every faction, on either side, would maintain a Manpower score, indicating its current population. Factions of Men or Elves would have to be able to support their current Manpower with controlled provinces – they need land to supply their armies. Elven factions would replace Manpower lost to combat casualties very slowly, but Men would replace lost Manpower fairly quickly (hence giving the Elven player an incentive to set aside lands for Men). Dwarven factions wouldn’t need provinces under their control since they’re based in big underground cities, but their Manpower would be rather severely capped. Orcs have no limits on their Manpower, but they wouldn’t grow naturally, so Morgoth would have to commit actions to build up his Orc armies.

Available Manpower at the start of a Battle Game war would determine the force pool available for each side. Units lost in the course of the war would result in lost Manpower. The overall effect should be that the Elven player will have to worry about every unit lost in the Battle Game, especially the hard-to-replace Noldor Elves. The Elves and their allies will be crippled if they lose all the rich provinces of Beleriand. Meanwhile, Morgoth’s armies should seem nearly inexhaustible.

Another mechanic in the Epic Game would involve politics among the various factions opposing Morgoth. Half of the tragedy of the Quenta has to do with distrust and outright treachery among various factions of the Elves and Men. So in the game, Morgoth will never have to worry about the loyalty of his own armies, and the High King of the Noldor will always be able to rely on his own faction . . . but every other faction of Elves, Men, or Dwarves will be more or less unreliable.

Each Elven or allied faction would probably have a Loyalty score, indicating its current willingness to actively oppose Morgoth in warfare. Factions with high scores will commit all available forces to a war, and will forward-deploy them so as to come at Morgoth more quickly. Factions with lower scores might hang back, or might refuse to send some or all of their soldiers to fight. In a few cases, a faction might even treacherously go over to Morgoth’s side! Meanwhile, if a Silmaril ever comes into play, Morgoth might be able to this system to trigger outright warfare among his opponents, as they fight for possession of the great jewel.

I envision some “chrome” systems, of course. There should be a system keeping track of who the High King of the Noldor is from one Epic turn to the next – what if Fëanor had survived the first years of the conflict? More generally, if an Elven faction loses its current leader, there has to be some line of succession. There should also be a system to generate heroes from the Elven-allied houses of Men each Epic game-turn, and possibly marry one or more of those heroes into the Elven royal houses if certain conditions are met. That’s likely to be on the critical path to Elven victory if they can’t keep Morgoth’s armies contained.

I think that sums up most of my thinking on the subject so far. I can see the whole game in my head, and I begin to think I could design and test it to completion if I had the time. Of course, it would have to be a complex bit of freeware, since there is no way the Tolkien estate will ever license this particular piece of the legendarium for such an application. Yet another creative project that’s never likely to come to fruition – although man, it would be neat to see.