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Game Design Prospectus: A “Silmarillion” LARP

Game Design Prospectus: A “Silmarillion” LARP

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One piece of my game-design history that doesn’t get out much today is that I used to design LARPs (Live Action Role-Playing games) for local conventions. The idea is that with character packets and minimal rules, players move freely around a big room to interact, rather than sitting around a table with paper, pencil, and dice. Games like this tend to be big, negotiation-heavy political things, and you often need two or three GMs to make them work.

Probably my best work was a “first contact” LARP, set in the late 21st century, in which half the players represented human factions – nation-states and such – and the other half were all factions from a Galactic Empire that had just met humans. The result was a four-hour social furball, as alliances formed and shattered, and everyone did their best to scheme their way into an advantage given the rules I had designed for them. The game almost ran itself, and it was wonderful to watch.

Today that piece of my creative brain woke up with a vengeance, while I was listening to my audiobook of The Silmarillion in the car, as one does.

Working title: “The Fall of the Noldor.”

The game would be designed for about 20 players. It would start with each player handed their character packet and a cheap flashlight. Players find that they are to take the roles of children or grandchildren of Finwë – only Fëanor himself is played by a GM. After everyone has a chance to read over their material, the lights are turned out and the next few scenes are played out in complete darkness, to simulate the confusion after the death of the Two Trees.

The game properly begins with a GM walking in and calling the Noldor to a meeting before the king’s house in Tirion. Once the players gather around, probably using their flashlights to see, the GM delivers Fëanor’s speech, in which he kicks off the rebellion against the Valar and the exodus back to Middle-earth. He closes with the Oath of Fëanor.

The rest of the game follows the debates and conflicts that follow while Fëanor leads the Noldor to Middle-earth. Who will follow Fëanor in swearing his Oath? Will all the Noldor agree to follow him, or will some or all of them remain behind? Will they recognize him as king, or will they choose another descendant of Finwë to follow? Will they travel light, or try to bring some of their treasures? Will they negotiate with the Teleri for their ships, or will they try to take them by force? What happens when the Valar intervene? How will the Elves survive, marching thousands of miles in the dark wilderness? How will they make the crossing to Middle-earth? What will happen when Fëanor himself turns against the people he regards as insufficiently loyal?

There should be a web of cross-cutting loyalties and resentments among the characters. I’d want to distribute specific resources among them, so they have to share and trade in order to succeed – also, so there won’t be enough of anything for everyone to succeed. I’ll probably need mechanisms for each Elf-leader to gather and keep a following among the Noldor population, carry treasures or supplies, and meet natural challenges during the march. I’ll need a mechanism for combat against anyone who might try to stop the Noldor – or, if worst comes to worst, among the Noldor themselves.

Since a lot of players probably know the story already, I might need to throw a few curve-balls into the plot. Hmm.

. . . Well, I’ll probably never actually design this in full, and if I do I’ll probably never get the chance to run it. Still, it’s a neat thought-exercise. Besides, any excuse to recite some of the speeches from The Silmarillion is welcome! Tolkien had a gift for dramatic dialogue.

Building a Lexicon

Building a Lexicon

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Currently in my constructed-language work for The Curse of Steel, I’m selecting word roots from my script-generated list of all the legal possibilities.

I’m not being particularly systematic here. I started with the roots for several names I had already settled on during early development, and from an earlier word-list that I built before I started getting my computer to help out with all this. (Along the way, I discovered that I had broken some of my own rules about legal word-root formation. Time to make minor tweaks to the word-lists!)

With that finished, I’ve been grabbing words from a variety of sources: color terms, the numerals from one to ten, and so on. I’ve even pulled down my copy of the Silmarillion and started paging through the appendices for ideas – that’s kind of a ready-made list of vocabulary prompts for any naming language! Not that I’m slavishly imitating any one source, but if my final lexicon ends up sounding vaguely Indo-European and vaguely like Sindarin, I suppose I can be accused of stealing from the best.

So far I’ve got about 80 word-roots. The list follows, taken straight from my growing spreadsheet. A couple of notes first.

You’ll notice the word roots incorporate some numerals and special characters. Those are meant to represent some phonemes that would normally be expressed with more than one character. That way, when I pull them over to be processed by another Perl script, I won’t have to fuss too much with parsing those out. If you know anything about PIE phonology, you’ll probably recognize that I’m using a similar set of three “laryngeal” consonants, that will disappear from daughter languages but give rise to a variety of vowel colorations. Other special characters represent aspirated or labialized consonants (e.g., representing the differences among phonemes we might pronounce as g-, gh-, or gw-).

Meanwhile, every word root has a “weight” attached. This is something I built into the script to generate the word roots, to enforce some assumptions about which phonemes are most common.

Ur-Language RootWeightPart of SpeechMeaningNotes
re2n567AdverbParticle for future aspect of verbs
we2489AdverbParticle to indicate negation of verbs
2sper352Adverb“away”
te2n440Conjunction“and”
rey540Noun“chieftain, noble, king”
d2en440Noun“man,” also numeral “ten”
we@420Noun“water”
ke2m392Noun“hand,” also numeral “five”
kest392Noun“head”
@e2n378Noun“tree”
2eng378Noun“iron”Probably borrowed from another language group
%en360Noun“girl, woman”
1kwes313Noun“lake, pond, pool”
me2r@302Noun“fate, doom”
$2er252Noun“home, dwelling”
ke3lm196Noun“hill, knoll, rock”
ye1480Numeral“one”
kens1403Numeral“seven”
tre1s403Numeral“three”
2tes392Numeral“two”
semt1358Numeral“six”
we2rs352Numeral“four”
let3244Numeral“eight”
pen@3189Numeral“nine”
weytN/AVerb“to know, to see (visions)”Not a legal ur-language root, probably borrowed from another language group
1es640Verb“to be” (indicating a state of being)
ken630Verb“to think, to engage in spiritual activity”
ret630Verb“to guard, to protect”
wer630Verb“to die”
ne2r567Verb“to be glorious, to be brilliant”
tren567Verb“to be stiff, to be taut, to be mighty”
mew560Verb“to partition”
re@540Verb“to hit, to strike”
kres504Verb“to mix up, to confuse”
me2r504Verb“to crowd, to form a crowd”
kel489Verb“to be cold, to be chilly”
nek2441Verb“to strip away, to expose”
pret441Verb“to exchange”
terk441Verb“to break”
t2er440Verb“to crash, to smite”
dren2396Verb“to lengthen, to be long”
gre1n388Verb“to sanctify, to make a treaty”
1@em384Verb“to stand”
$er360Verb“to turn”
me3r360Verb“to be large, to be great”
kre2s352Verb“to be black”
ke3350Verb“to bend”
2lew342Verb“to flow (like water)”
kelt342Verb“to hammer, to work with metal”
welk342Verb“to tear”
teym336Verb“to encircle, to finish (a circle)”
de3n315Verb“to give, to receive a gift, to be guest-friends”
dre3315Verb“to have sacred power”
ke3r315Verb“to run”
kre2w308Verb“to make a harsh sound, to croak”
sen2@302Verb“to be old, to be ancient”
2el@293Verb“to be white”
2ewg293Verb“to hear”
te$280Verb“to be wild, to be free”
ske2t274Verb“to hate”
te2lm274Verb“to spread”
#e2n252Verb“to go, to walk”
ke3rs252Verb“to stand tall, to tower”
wer#252Verb“to threaten”
de3w244Verb“to be dark (in color)”
k3el244Verb“to be whole, to be unmarred”
kwe3244Verb“to be loyal”
le3k244Verb“to burn, to set aflame”
we3k244Verb“to speak, to call”
kle2w240Verb“to cut, to slice”
g2els235Verb“to be green”
ske2@235Verb“to darken”
de1#224Verb“to take”
@er#216Verb“to bite”
1rew#201Verb“to be red”
te2$196Verb“to hurt, to harm”
3re$180Verb“to straighten, to direct”
$2ey168Verb“to be blue”
$eyt168Verb“to be white”
de!140Verb“to divide”

I think I’ll probably generate a few dozen more roots, then copy them into a separate spreadsheet where I’ll build actual words. Most of the roots will make perfectly good words without modification, but I’ll also apply some of the word morphology rules I’ve worked out to derive more words. I imagine I’ll have as many as 200-250 words by the time I’m done, enough to form the basis for a decent naming language. Then to build Perl scripts to apply the sound-change rules.

Once that’s done – no doubt with a certain amount of tweaking to suit my aesthetic tastes – I’ll have a system by which I can quickly create and record new words as I write the story. In three different, but clearly related, languages!

Lots of work up front, to save a lot of work and frustration later. That’s what computers are for, right?

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.