One of the interesting qualities of Elizabethan playwriting is the seamless connection between thought, word, and action. What makes the art of the soliloquy work, for example, is the lack of division between what the character is thinking and what the character is saying: They do not form their thoughts into words, but rather their thoughts leap directly to their tongues and into the ears of the audience. (Which is why Hamlet can advise his players, “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.”) In a very real sense, the heightened reality of the verse essentially gifts the audience with telepathy: In watching Shakespeare, you are looking straight into the mind and soul of the character as it is stripped bare upon the stage.

In a related fashion, Elizabethan plays often rely upon choric speech: Sequences in which the description of an action becomes the action itself as the words of the actor are transformed through the imaginative powers of the audience. In fact, such sequences can often be even more powerful than the action would be in a direct presentation. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud speaks of closure of as “the phenomenon of observing the parts and perceiving the whole”, and when a work of art demands of its audience that act of closure they become “silent accomplices”, “willing and conscious collaborators”. So, too, the Chorus of Henry V says:

Think when we talk of horses that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs in the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: For the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history.

It is a technique which turns a passive audience member into an active participant in the drama itself.

In the character of Richard II, Shakespeare weds the principles of the choric to the mold of the soliloquy in a series of transformative speeches which chart the fall of England’s king. It begins in Act III, Scene 3 as Richard speaks to Northumberland:

A’God’s name, let it go:
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads:
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage:
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown:
My figured goblets for a dish of wood:
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff:
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little little grave, an obscure grave;
Or I’ll be buried in the King’s highway,
Some way of common trade, where subjects’ feet
May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head;
For on my heart they tread now whilst I live:
And buried once, why not upon my head?

The sequence of exchanges described by Richard are intensely choric in their nature: His description of those physical acts force the audience to “deck the king” (or, rather, undeck the king) as they specifically create for themselves the specific reality of those actions.

Of course, the actions in question are not real: They are, at best, a future possibility which Richard conjures up for both Northumberland and the audience of the play. But more than that, they are a metaphor for Richard’s shifting self-image. The change from Divine King to Holy Hermit is not merely a swap of costuming, but rather a fundamental change in Richard himself.

Which all sounds wonderfully abstract and soullessly intellectual, but here’s what the speech boils down to in practical effect: Physical transformation becomes a metaphor for mental transformation, and in the process the telepathic power of the soliloquy is coupled to the audience participation of the choric.

As an audience, we are not only gifted with an incredibly intimate vision of Richard’s thoughts, but we are also invited to participate in Richard’s process of transformation. Just as Richard himself is both the agent of his destruction and the victim of his destruction, we as witnesses are simultaneously both the agents and the victims of that destructive process.

THE CHORUS OF THE MOMENT

Shakespeare uses a similar and yet subtle variation of this technique in the next of Richard’s transformative speeches, which can be found during his deposition in Act IV, Scene 1:

Now, mark me how I will undo myself.
I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of Kingly sway from out my heart.
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;
All pomp and majesty I do forswear:
My manors, rents, revenues I forego;
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny:
God pardon all oaths that are broke to me,
God keep all vows unbroke that swear to thee.
Make me, that nothing have, with nothing griev’d,
And thou with all pleas’d, that hast all achiev’d.
Long may’st thou live in Richard’s seat to sit,
And soon lie Richard in an earthly pit.

Here the elements of the soliloquy become muted, but they are not completely discarded: The physical actions of Richard undoing himself are still serving as metaphors for mental revelation, and thus the passage, like a soliloquy, is still a baring of Richard’s innermost thoughts.

What’s particularly fascinating here, however, is that the choric elements of the speech are amplified by their immediacy: Richard is performing the action in the very moment he’s describing it as the Chorus. And make no mistake, it is a Chorus: Because they’re metaphors, Richard is not literally performing any of the actions he’s describing. Which means that the audience is forced to create those actions in their mind’s eye.

Richard creates a ritual in which the rites and duties of his office are systematically stripped away. The process is both a transformation of identity and the loss of identity. But by invoking that intensely personal ritual in the form of physical metaphor, Richard forces his audience (both the audience of the play and the audience of nobles within the play) to become his partners in the act.

THE FINAL TRANSFORMATION

Which brings us to the last of Richard’s transformative speeches in Act V, Scene 5. (A speech which is also Richard’s only true soliloquy in the play.) The speech is long enough that I won’t quote it in full here, but its major framework looks like this:

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it: Yet I’ll hammer it out;
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts:
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world:
[…]
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented; sometimes am I King,
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king,
Then am I king’d again, and by and by
Think that I am unking’d by Bullingbrooke,
And straight am nothing.

The same basic structure of self-transformation is pursued, but in an almost transcendant fashion: Richard transforms himself into the world, the world into himself, and ends himself in nothing. It culminates a sequence in which Shakespeare’s language literally transforms Richard before our eyes from one state of being to another. (And in a play with multiple references to caterpillars, no less.)

POWER AND IMPOTENCE

There is more to be found in this theme of transformation, however. The ability for power to enforce transformation is suggested heavily from the very beginning of the play (Act I, Scene 1):

RICHARD Rage must be withstood,
Give me his gage; Lions make Leopards tame.

MOWBRAY Yea but not change his spots: Take but my shame
And I resign my gage…

Mowbray may resist this change, but he is nevertheless forced to it.

There is a degree to which the play can be seen as an abstraction of the old query: Can God create a rock so large he cannot move it? Can the king’s power to force transformation be used to transform the king into something other than the king?

Viewed through this lens, Richard’s struggle to give up the crown is not merely the mortal struggle of a man who doesn’t want to give up his power; it is a literal struggle between potence and impotence. Richard says:

We thought ourself thy lawful King: (…)
If we be not, show us the Hand of God
That hath dismiss’d us from our stewardship.

Only the Hand of God can remove divinity from the King and thus remove the King from his right. But while the king himself can be said to act as the hand of God, if he tries to take that power from himself does he not take the very power which would let him take it?

BULLINGBROKE Are you contented to resign the crown?
RICHARD Aye, no; no, aye.

Shakespeare presents us with an immovable object and an unstoppable force; he forces Richard to face a crisis both human and divine. And then he gives to the actor both “aye, no” and “no, aye”: The opportunity to express both the mortal and immortal dimensions of the problem (or vice versa) in four simple syllables.

Originally posted on September 29th, 2010.

Tagline: Two words: Bizarre. No wait, that’s only one word. Uhhh… Okay: Really bizarre. How’s that? Good? Good. Great. Okay.

CONCEPT

Government-Funded Robot Assassins from Hell – Mission One: Kill All Evil Game Designers (henceforth, for obvious reasons, referred to merely as Government-Funded Robot Assassins) is a card game dating back to 1995.

Basically it combines a tongue-in-cheek presentation of “government-funded robot assassins from hell” with a satiric look at the gaming industry. Hence you get cards like:

Steve Jackson. He has his own game company! Creator of gaming chaos, this man is wanted by not only the Pentagon, but also the Secret Service! KILL HIM NOW!

And:

Favorable Review. Everyone loves it! It could be because the game is good or maybe the designer slipped the reviewer some cold, hard cash.

(Note: Any game designers wishing to slip me cold hard cash should contact me via e-mail to obtain my snail mail address. I have no scruples. None at all. Honest.)

THE RULES

You win the game by earning a hundred points. Points are earned by carrying out a successful assassination – your targets being various game designers (each of whom are worth varying amounts).

Basically each player starts with a Plain Bot (a really basic model of robot assassin) and a hand of seven cards. You roll 4d6 to determine who plays first (why 4d6? I don’t know). Each player then draws a card and places a target on the table. Then he plays a card (which modifies the score of either his robot or a target, depending on the type of card). Everyone does the same thing.

When play returns to the first player he may now place a second card and then he needs to attack his target (the card he played back on his first turn). To carry out the assassination attempt he adds up his Assassinate score (his ‘bot plus its modifiers) and adds 4d6. If the total is higher than the defense of his target, then the target is dead and the player collects the points. Play out a new target.

Repeat until someone wins.

SUMMARY

I ended up picking up Government-Funded Robot Assassins because I was ordering a number of products from Propaganda Publishing and my eye caught the title (which is very catchy, you have to admit). Since it was only six bucks I added it to my figurative cart. I’m very disappointed by it.

Basically I would sum the game up by its major problems:

First, the production values are very low. Hand-scribbled lettering in the graphics, which are generally low quality anyway. The game as a whole shows up as a set of cardstock pages (the cards, which you have to cut up yourself) folded into a large sheet of xeroxed instructions. This isn’t too bad, overall, since the whole product is basically one large in-joke – so you’re hardly going to expect laminated perfection — but it’s still a knock.

Second, the game – by it’s very nature – ends up being very topical. And the topic is now half a decade old. To put that in perspective, realize that Magic: The Gathering was new, TSR was still independent, and SHADIS still existed. It’s not a knock against the game as it was originally conceived, but it is a knock against purchasing it today.

Third, the rules are presented in a rather sloppy manner in a couple of places. A far larger problem with the rules, however, is that they just aren’t that effective or fun. Your average assassination almost always succeeds, particularly once you start building your robot up (you can move your assassinate score up, but not down – while you are able to modify defensive scores in both directions).

Finally, the jokes were never that funny to begin with. I picked a couple of the more humorous ones, above, but most of them are just yawners. For example:

Wizards of the Coast. The publishers of a hot new card game. Though they have money, they aren’t exactly in the same league as TSR. If they survive Magic, look out!

(Okay, that’s a little funny now — in an ironic sort of way.)

At the end of the day, this just isn’t worth your time or your money. It has a note of pleasant nostalgia to it for “old timers”, like myself, who happened to be kicking around when the events discussed on these cards were unfolding. But that’s not reason enough to pick it up.

Style: 2
Substance: 2

Author: Philip J. Reed, Jr.
Company/Publisher: Propaganda Publishing
Cost: $6.00
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/03/12

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Go to Part 1

Now we have a basic framework for the urbancrawl: A map divided into districts. Content keyed to each district.

What we need now is a default action that will allow the PCs to engage with that keyed content. In dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls, that action is geographic movement. In the urbancrawl, it’s the investigation action.

In my discussion of hexcrawls, I advocated for the “hidden hex”: The hex is an abstraction that’s useful to the GM for keying and managing content, but which has no meaning for the PCs. In the urbancrawl, however, I believe that you will generally be keying content to districts that are meaningful to the PCs: They know where that ward or neighborhood or landmark or street is located.

So the basic investigation action ends up being pretty simple and very transparent: The player points to a neighborhood and says, “I want to investigate there.” The GM looks at their key and tells them what they’ve found. (If the GM is using multiple urbancrawl layers, then they can randomize which layer has been discovered with this investigation action.)

GENERIC vs. SPECIFIC INVESTIGATION

In actual practice, though, you’re quickly going to want to add additional utility to this basic action.

The first thing you’ll need is the ability to distinguish between generic investigations and specific investigations.

In a generic investigation, the PCs are just looking for anything interesting without any particular agenda. This generic investigation is identical to our basic interaction above.

In a specific investigation, on the other hand, the PCs are poking around with a particular goal in mind. This is where the urbancrawl layers become significant: They’re not just looking for anything of interest, they’re specifically looking for a patron. So instead of randomly selecting content from your available layers, you’ll key the specific content tied to the patron level of your urbancrawl.

(You might also include a chance of them finding something other than what they were looking for. For example, you might roll 1d6 and on a roll of 1 they get information from an urbancrawl layer other than the one they intended.)

I’ll also argue that this is the point where you should start hiding the abstraction again: You’ve arranged the content of your city into urbancrawl layers because that’s a convenient way of organizing it and interacting with it as a GM, but those layers don’t really have “meaning” in the game world. The players shouldn’t be saying things like, “I’d like some content from the Heist urbancrawl layer, please.” You want them to be saying, “We need another big score real bad. I’m going to go hit up my contacts in Oldtown and see if I can find something lucrative.”

(At that point you might look at your key and note not only the Tablets of Shandrala that are being held by the local Sheriff of Taxes (as keyed to the Heist layer of your urbancrawl), but also that Count Ormu on the Vampire layer of your urbancrawl in the same district holds the onyx crown jewels of the Lich Queen of Rasang.)

At this point, you might also be thinking about prepping a random table for selecting specific districts if the PCs attempt city-wide investigations. That’s certainly an option and I’m not going to say thee nay, but I suspect you’ll lose some feeling of the ‘crawl if you do that: Instead of crawling to a specific part of town and poking around (exploring the town and everything it has to offer as they do so), the players are just kind of generically asking for a content handout.

(For similar reasons, I wouldn’t run a dungeoncrawl by randomizing which room they explored next. This is why I think making the district structure of the urbancrawl explicit is the right way to go: It encourages that specific engagement with the geography of the city and requires that meaningful exploration choices are being made. On the other hand, I could certainly be completely wrong about this.)

MECHANICS OF THE INVESTIGATION ACTION

Instead of having the investigation action result in an automatic success, you might want to resolve it mechanically. Obviously the exact nature of the mechanic will depend on the system you’re using, but for the sake of argument let’s assume we’re using D&D 3.5.

The most obvious mechanic here would be a Gather Information check. You could set a universal DC for the check (DC 15 to perform an urbancrawl investigation); or you could vary it by city (DC 15 in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord, but DC 20 in the more tight-lipped City-State of the World Emperor); or you could vary it by urbancrawl layer (DC 10 for the Random Encounter layer, DC 20 for the Vampire layer); or you could define it for each key entry (DC 15 to find the blood den in Midtown, but DC 22 to find the den in the Nobles’ Quarter).

You could also allow for exceptional successes to generate additional information. If you were using a One Roll Engine system like Better Angels or Reign, for example, you might generate “soft rumors” for each additional set after the first. These soft rumors wouldn’t give the PCs a specific hook, but they would tell them about general areas of interest that are available in the local urbancrawl. (For example, you might tell them about rumors circulating through the Temple District about people showing up with puncture marks on their necks. They won’t find a specific blood den that way, but it might prompt them to go looking for it.)

You could similarly use the height of an ORE set to determine if the PCs get additional pieces of actionable intelligence. For example, any simple success tells them where the vampire blood den is. But if they score additional dice in the set you might tell them how many vampires are nesting there or give them a floorplan. (This could also just translate into additional rolls on an old school rumor table about the location.)

CONTEXTUALIZING

Starting off with generic Gather Information checks is probably a good starting point, but I’m guessing it won’t take long for the PCs to start attempting investigatory actions that would be handled better through alternative skill checks.

If we think back to our survey of old school city supplements, we might recall that Pavis had some interesting guidelines for PCs researching information in the city.

Gather Information checks can be used to handle the collection of gossips and rumors from taverns and markets.

Knowledge skills could be used when searching through records and the like. Pavis suggests the records of cults and guilds (diaries, receipts, letters, ledgers). It might also represent tax records or newssheets or libraries or any number of other things depending on the particular setting. Gaining access to these records might require Bluff, Diplomacy, and/or the paying of a fee or bribe.

Knowledge (Local) could be used to generate “soft rumors” like the ones discussed above (suggesting potential avenues of investigation).

Specific types of urbancrawl layers might also suggest other skills. For example, maybe an Appraise check would make the best fit for the hypothetical Heist layer I keep using for examples. Players are also likely to suggest all kinds of specific hijinks that could trigger other skill checks (like a Forgery check to gain access to property records or a Decipher Script check to figure out the graffiti patterns the local gangs are using).

The point here is that, like any action resolution, you want to contextualize the investigation action and you also want to respond to the contextualization provided by your players: Don’t just tell them “the vampire den is on Highborn Street”, tell them how they learned that piece of information.

A good technique for this is to make the skill check and then (assuming success) frame the scene just before the information is acquired. For example, if they make a Gather Information check to figure out where Don Carlo is holed up don’t just tell them, “You talk to Don Carlo’s driver and he tells you that he’s got safehouse on the east side.” Instead, cut to the point where they walk into a seedy bar and find the driver half drunk. That lets you play through the moment, which can set the mood, allow for memorable roleplaying opportunities, or lead the investigation in unexpected directions.

Go to Part 12: Exploring the Advanced Urbancrawl

Since we’re talking about urbancrawls lately, my attention was immediately arrested when I saw a couple of pretty amazing city generators over at Last Gasp.

Both of them are dice-drop generators, which reminds me of the fun you can have with Vornheim, but they’re integrated with prodigious random tables. The first is a generator for small, Lovecraftian-style fantasy towns: The dice drop generates a layout for the buildings and the faces of the dice are used iteratively to form factions, feuds, leadership… It’s fantastic. Check it out here.

The other generator creates a particular iteration of the ever-shifting magical city of Cörpathium, which draws its inspiration from M. John Harrison’s Viriconium. The dice drop in this generator determines the relative locations of city districts and then (this is the cool part) generates a whole bunch of conditionals based on which districts are present and how they relate to each other. You can find it here.

Go to Part 1

The pair of questions I keep coming back to are: Why are the PCs urbancrawling? And what are they actually doing when they “crawl”?

And I think the reason I’m struggling with those questions is because, in an urban environment, their answers are very dependent on the specific context of the PCs’ actions.

This dependence is the result of the city being an extremely dynamic place: In a dungeon there’s generally just one interesting thing happening in a room. In the wilderness the interesting thing is separated from other interesting things by miles or leagues of scenery. But in the city there’s so much activity so densely packed that any given block (or even building) will often have dozens of different things happening in it. The question of which of those things you’ll end up engaging with is highly dependent on the experiences that you choose to seek out.

Having recognized this Gordian knot, we now have to seek the sword that can slice through it. And I think the key here is to stop thinking of the city as a monolithic entity and start thinking of it as being made up of diverse parts. We need to manage the dynamic nature of the city by breaking it apart into distinct layers. The city is not a single urbancrawl, but rather a multitude of urbancrawls that lie on top of each other in a simultaneous coexistence.

LAYER 0: THE GAZETTEER AND THE MAP

Let’s start with the base of the city: The gazetteer. This is the Baedaeker’s travel guide version of the city. It’s the list of useful shops, taverns, inns, and Important Public Locations.

The gazetteer isn’t an urbancrawl. Although it might be interesting to build some of this stuff into an “Explore the City” urbancrawl layer for those completely new to the city, the stuff in the gazetteer constitutes the elements of the city that will generally be visited through targeted travel. For ease of reference, putting these locations in a gazetteer format makes the most sense.

The other thing you’re going to want forming the foundation of your city is the map. And you’re going to want to split that map up into naturalistic divisions. For ease of reference, I’ll refer to them as districts, but in the game world they could be anything: Neighborhoods, wards, sectors, gang territory, streets, or whatever. You’re aiming for districts that make sense to the characters actually living in the city (they’re labels or divisions that they would recognize and talk about). But you’re also aiming for a districting concept that scales to the amount of material you’re planning to include in each layer of the urbancrawl. (This is just like a hexcrawl: If you find yourself frequently keying multiple entries into a single district, your scale is probably too large. If you find yourself with a lot of empty districts, your scale is probably too small.)

THE URBANCRAWL LAYERS

Over the top of this foundation – the gazetteer and the map – you’re going to layer in your urbancrawls.

Unlike a dungeoncrawl, the goal of an urbancrawl doesn’t default to treasure hunting. It defaults to finding something interesting. If the PCs are fairly ignorant of what the city has to offer (or are simply looking for new opportunities), then this idea of “finding something interesting” can remain fairly generic. But as the PCs learn more about the city, the action will inevitably become contextualized: Instead of saying, “Let’s see what’s going on in the Longbotttom neighborhood.” they’ll start saying things like, “We need to find out if there’s a blood den near Powderhorn Park.” or “Maybe we can figure out what the Halfling Mafia has been up to.”

Each urbancrawl layer basically boils down to one way in which the content of the city can be contextualized. In a given city, for example, you might have separate urbancrawl levels for:

• Vampire blood dens.
• Patrons who can give them jobs.
• The activities of a criminal gang.
• Potential targets for lucrative heists.
• Purely random encounters that provide “color”.

Each of these urbancrawls would (ideally) have interesting material keyed in every district of the city. So if the PCs go poking around the Longbottom neighborhood they might find the local vampire den. Or get contacted by agents of Lord Melbourne. Or run into mafiosos hassling local businesses. Or discover that a local merchant family currently holds the Neferelli Diamond. Or get their pockets picked by goblin urchins.

(Having five full layers like this would probably represent a really dense urbancrawl. It would require a lot of prep, but it would also deliver hundreds of hours of play. My guess, though, is that you probably only need 2 or 3 layers to get a really dynamic urbancrawl started.)

THE THIRD DIMENSION

This basic structure of urbancrawl layers is probably sufficient for running a simple urbancrawl. But I’m going to propose that you can add significant depth to your city by extending its urbancrawl layers into a third dimension.

You’re going to take one of your existing urbancrawls and you’re going to add layers to it. These deeper layers won’t necessarily be complete (in the sense that they’ll fill every district in the city with content), so it may be more convenient to think of them as “hidden nodes”.

The idea is that these hidden nodes can’t be directly or immediately accessed by anybody ‘crawling the city. Instead, they can generally only be accessed in one of two ways:

First, districts in the “lower levels” of the urbancrawl may contain clues that will point directly at these hidden nodes. For example, PCs raiding a vampire blood den may discover correspondence from Count Ormu implicating him as a vampire lord.

Second, these hidden nodes can be “exposed” to people ‘crawling the city if certain conditions are met. These conditions would generally take the form of “clearing” lower level nodes. For example, if various adventuring parties take out three of the blood dens in the city, Count Ormu’s network may be sufficiently disrupted to expose his involvement.

This second condition is particularly important for open tables because it solves the “I didn’t get the clues from the first half of this mystery” problem: If you’ve got the clues pointing at Count Ormu, great. If you don’t, but the blood den networks have been sufficiently disrupted by other groups, then Count Ormu becomes available to you through general ‘crawling.

In conceptualizing these hidden nodes, it may be useful to reflect once again on Kenneth Hite’s Conspyramid from Night’s Black Agents, which provided the most immediate inspiration for this added dimension:

You don’t necessarily need to engage in the same rigid hierarchy or chains of communication (the geographic component of the urbancrawl will cover a lot of the same bases), but it also can’t hurt, right?

Of course, the third dimension of some urbancrawls will be more conceptual rather than organizational: Different targets for heists, for example, may not be directly connected, but you can still add additional levels to a heist-based urbancrawl layer (representing the attention of more powerful clients or security arrangements which have been exposed or simply a pacing mechanic for heists over time).

Go to Part 11: The Investigation Action