[Hero's Banner] OOC: Recruiting, Chargen, and Discussion

[angelfromanotherpin]

So, there's been a bunch of virtual ink spilled on the subject of 'rules-lite' games recently, and it reminded me of one I've MC'd a few times. It always went pretty well, and I'm wondering how it'll do in Pbp format.

The game is Hero's Banner, and it's about young nobility making defining choices. The short version is that your character really wants three things, and they have to pick one of them. Most of the game is exploring the tensions between the wanted things, and coming up with cross-over material between the characters.

The game wants a low-to-no fantasy kind of setting, and I've previously run it in the flavors of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Muad'Dib's Jihad, and an original not-quite-late-14th-century-Russia setting. This time, I'm thinking something Mediterranean, informed by Shanower's Age of Bronze, which is a very naturalistic take on the Trojan War stories. Crazy city-state politics, piratical raiding like warm-weather vikings, prophecies and visions, blood-feuds, and so on.

Looking for 3-5 players. I'll put up an example of character creation so people can see what it looks like and get an idea of whether the system appeals or repels.

note: Please keep any discussion of the relative merits of rules-lite games out of this thread.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Are the rules available online?
EDIT: Think I might have answered my own question
http://tckroleplaying.com/herosbanner/

[Omegonthesane]

Consider my interest piqued.

(Not least because Equality Bears didn't pan out.)

[angelfromanotherpin]

Step 1: Pick a Name
A character needs a personal name and also a family name. I choose Megacles Megacleides. All characters come from a noble family of at least some standing, so the Megacleides are some combination of old, wealthy, or powerful. I think they are a young family recently come to power in Vinamipolis, the city of force.


Step 2: Choose Influences
A character has three Influences, powerful desires. The three each stem from a different source: Hero (inspired by some notable historical figure), Blood (a duty to family), and Conscience (purely personal). An Influence needs a short descriptive paragraph, an Ideal (a very short summary), and a specific Goal.

Hero (Ideal: Great Ajax, Goal: Battle-Glory)
Like many a young nobleman, Megacles wants to be known as a great warrior.

Blood (Ideal: Build a Legacy, Goal: Money)
The Megacleides are a young family, and if they are to survive the vicissitudes of fate, they need to establish their legitimacy. The two traditional routes are to marry into an older family, or to acquire buckets of cash. Megacles has made his choice.

Conscience (Ideal: Validating Pleasure, Goal: Sex up many ladies.)
Megacles has a combination of adequacy issues and a very healthy sex drive. He wants to have a lot of lovers in his lifetime, and he wants them to be genuinely affectionate relationships.


Step 3: Numbers
There are four important numbers on a character sheet. Each Influence has a numerical rating, and these always add up to a total of 100. The fourth number is Passion, which is the difference between the highest and lowest rating values. Passion always starts at 1, and so the starting ratings are 33, 33, and 34. There is not much in it.

Megacles' numbers are Passion 1, Hero 33, Blood 34, Conscience 33.


Step 4: Connections
Connections are things a character gains through the pursuit of their Influences... and can potentially lose through not pursuing them. Each character begins with one connection in each Influence (generally, it's one Connection per full 25 points in an influence). Connections can be people, places, or things; but all starting Connections are people.

Megacles' starting Connections are Andreas, a scribe whom he took as a slave in his first raid, but whom he has become friends with and freed (Hero); Megacles I, his father and current tyrant of Vinamipolis (Blood); and Zosime, the temple courtesan who was his first sexual partner (Conscience).


Step 5: More Relationships
A character must have three more relationships, one blood relation, one close friend/lover, and one enemy. These can be chosen from among your Connections, or new characters. This is a prime opportunity to tie PCs together, by having one character's enemy be another's friend, or one character's enemy be another's blood relation.

Megacles' blood relative is his sister Diantha, his lover is his girl-next-door first crush Phoibe, and his enemy is Kasku, a king in Hatti who lost a son in a raid and has sworn enmity against the Hipplocleides.


...and that's a character. Example of resolution to come.

edit: I just realized all of Megacles' stuff is fairly personal-scale. That's not necessary, grand goals are totally acceptable. Sweeping stuff like 'Conquer Troy,' or 'Spread Democracy,' or 'Make Apollo the Chief God' can be awesome fodder.

[angelfromanotherpin]

So, the basis of the game is the Scene. A Scene is a situation where a PC's Influences are placed in conflict with each other. This process is here boiled down for brevity, hopefully we'll get some more evocative prose in play.

So, Megacles is on a raid. In one direction, he sees a renowned warrior he can challenge, in the other direction he sees his men about to break into a treasure-house. So, he can take on a badass for glory, or get in on the looting before all the best jewelry vanishes into his soldier's orifices. Megacles goes for the glory, choosing his Hero Influence. His player then rolls percentile dice.

• If the roll is ≤ the Influence's rating, the result is a success and the MC has narration rights, which means that while anyone is welcome to make suggestions, the MC gets to describe the details of how Megacles does well in the challenge. "Megacles breaks that dude's arm, takes his spear, and walks away in slow motion."

(Note that there are certain restrictions on any narration rights, chiefly that the overall Goal cannot be resolved. So, Megacles can do well and even win, but he cannot personally kill a hundred dudes with his pinky or otherwise cement his place in history as a great warrior; that's for the endgame.)

• If the roll is > the Influence's rating and the player accepts it, the result is a failure and the MC has narration rights of the failure.

• If the roll is > the Influence's rating and the player challenges it, there is a re-roll at a bonus (default +30). Whether the re-roll succeeds or fails, the player has narration rights, and the character's Passion will increase by a variable amount (which in turn will result in the character's Influence ratings changing).

• On any re-roll, there is also a chance that the PC will have a Breakdown, where the player can choose success or failure regardless of the nominal roll, but the character must be overcome with emotion.

That's not complete, but I think it gets the gist across.

[Korgan0]

Do influence ratings change at all, and if so, how?

[angelfromanotherpin]

They change every time you take a re-roll on a failed roll.

As part of that procedure, you roll 2d10 between 1 and 3 times (depending on how large a bonus you took on the re-roll), each time taking the higher value and adding them together. So for a three-time increase: (3,1) (7, 9), (1, 2) = 3+10+2 = 14.

That amount is then added to the character's Passion. Since Passion is the difference between the character's highest and lowest ratings, the ratings are adjusted to reflect this new difference but also keep the total at 100. So, if the above was a character's first Passion increase, his Passion would go from 1 to 15, and his new Influence ratings would become 41/33/26.

After each change, the numbers are reassigned freely to the different Influences (though big changes come with some consequences), as best fits the player's understanding of the character. So, even if Megacles chose to pursue his Hero Influence and succeeded, his player could end up reducing his Hero Influence because Megacles thought the fight was gross or unsatisfying or otherwise unappealing.

A character goes into endgame when their Passion reaches 100 and they assign 100 to the Influence which is their final choice. Most of the mechanical end of the game is just managing the rate of Passion increase so your character goes into endgame roughly when the other players' do.

[OgreBattle]

I'm in.

So the setting is Bronze age mediterranean and the PC's are nobility. Neat.

[angelfromanotherpin]

That's one.

I'll put up a bit more setting info later today. It's supposed to be kind of thin so that details can be filled out as needed in chargen and play, but I think there's room behind 'kind of thin' and 'one sentence pitch.'

[angelfromanotherpin]

Setting Notes

Politics
The world is divided into Kingdoms, which range in strength from mighty (Mycenae) to basically powerless (Ithaka). Although called Kingdoms, they don't really operate under the kind of hereditary monarchy we associate with the name. Whenever a ruler dies, all the prominent families scuffle for a shot at the big chair. A ruler's authority is also highly variable, some are absolute monarchs, others labor under severe limits established by custom or legal precedent. At any given time, a few places are experimenting with some weird form of government like Democracy or Gerontocracy or something.

Practically all kingdoms are based on a walled city, a defensible trade hub. There is very little of the traditional notion of treasure, most wealth is in the form of fine cloth, rich dyes, jars of oil and wine, and mined salt. Items of gold and jewelry are heirlooms of noble houses.

The various kingdoms are formed into loose alliances with culturally-similar kingdoms. These exist mostly to threaten a unified response to attempts at conquest by outsiders. Each alliance is organized under a High King, who has vague diplomatic authority to negotiate with the other High Kings and to serve as a court of last resort to resolve disputes between kingdoms. The most important High Kings are in Mycenae (Greece), Thebes (Egypt), and Hatti (Hittite Turkey).


Warfare
Fighting is basically constant, and divided into two forms: raiding, and conquest. Raiding is mass armed robbery, and thought of as something like college hijinks. The people who get robbed or stabbed are unhappy, but actual fatalities tend to be very few, and smoothed over with some sort of settlement later. Conquest is a more serious matter because it involves real estate, and is most often two kingdoms who share a border quarreling over exactly where that border is; people raise actual armies and may call in allies, death is common and not apologized for. The much rarer attempts to actually conquer a walled city are the most serious business and treated as existential threats.

Good fighting gear is hella expensive. Even some kings go into battle making do with leather for the largest pieces of their armor, and common soldiers are most often basically naked. Primary armament is spear and shield. Swords are back-up weapons for those who can afford them. Ranged weapons are rare, because very few people have the training to use a bow-of-war or a sling. Nobility fight from chariots when practical, and the relationship between a warrior and his charioteer is idealized. There is a strong culture of single combat, duels are frequent and prestigious.

Ships are a way to get from one place to another. Ship-to-ship combat on any but the smallest scale is a chaotic nightmare of boarding and ramming, where armor will drown you as often as save you, and the whole thing is a matter of last resort. On the other hand, one-on-one ship duels are a common element in a naval raid, either the raiders overcoming a harbor patrol, or enraged victims pursuing the thieves to reclaim their property.


Religion
The gods are everywhere in a way that is really alien to people raised in a secular society. Prayer, ritual, and sacrifice accompany almost every regular activity. A merchant opens his stall every day with an offering to Hermes, a wife stokes the fire for breakfast with a prayer to Hestia, children pray to Apollo before bed to keep bad dreams away. I don't know if people actually pray to Asklepios for health every time they poop, but I wouldn't be surprised. There are a very large number of gods and goddesses, the Olympians are just the best known.

The role of the priest is to advise the lay worshipers as to how to most effectively please/not anger the gods. The majority of priests are nobles doing the equivalent of interning – they aren't in it as a career, just to learn a few things and network. Basically anyone who plans to go into politics has spent a couple of years working as a priest of Zeus, for example. Career priests do exist, though they often take up this role later in life as a form of retirement.


Miracles
Priests generally aren't miracle workers. The gods do what the gods want, and don't often take requests; when they do, they're as likely to favor some smelly goatherd as a high priest.

The flavor of the setting is that godly acts are all mistakable for coincidence. When a convenient storm sinks a war fleet, that was the gods. When an eagle drops a tortoise on the head of an orator, that was the gods. When a man has a curiously non-metaphorical dream about whose wife he should steal, that was the gods.

The most reliable sources of miracles are the various Oracles scattered around, who cryptically prophecy the future with some regularity. Most everyone of importance has at least one prophecy associated with them, even if it's a general one about their family fortunes that they inherited.

[Korgan0]

As a huge fan of Aeschylus' Orestiad, I'm down.

[angelfromanotherpin]

That's two. Omegon, did we lose you?

[Grek]

This sounds bitching. Count me in.

[angelfromanotherpin]

And three; we're a go. If anyone else wants in, recruiting is still open until I edit 'Recruiting' out of the thread title.

Okay guys, start posting your characters. In the FtF mode of play there's a lot of group discussion and bouncing ideas off each other, so I think what I want is for you each to put up a rough draft, then we'll have a round where everyone can comment and suggest, then you'll submit final versions. Then, we'll begin!

If you have any questions, let me know.

Oh, your characters should be somewhere between 14 and 24 years old to start with. 21 is the customary age of majority, but 14 is sort of a mini-majority, when you can get married and prosecuted as an adult and such, but your guardian still has power of attorney. Older than 24 is probably no longer 'young' nobility.

[Grek]

Name: Ahmose Theronos
Age: 20
An ex-Theban of noble birth. Originally from Thebes, but traveled to <place we're at now> to search for his sister, who was captured during a raid.
Influences:
Hero 33 (Ideal: Imhotep, Goal: Become a famous Priest-Physician)
Blood 34 (Ideal: Reunite the Family, Goal: Free Sister from Slavery)
Conscience 33 (Ideal: Piety, Goal: Convert the Greek to the worship of Amun-Ra)
Passion 1
Connections:
Hero ???, a local Doctor of some renown.
Blood Amisi, his sister. Servant in the house of ???, a Greek noble.
Conscience High Priest Ptah, the current big honcho of Amun-Ra's priests.
Other Relationships:
Relative His sister, Amisi. See above.
Friend ???, his merchant partner. A Greek, but still a close friend.
Enemy ???, a horrid woman who insists they are destined to be wed.

[Omegonthesane]

Yeah, wasn't willing to shell a tenner for a system I may well never use again, so dropping out.

[Korgan0]

So, I'm thinking a dilettante traveller second son of a formerly great Myceanean client state, who, with the death of his elder brother and father in battle, had his place as heir usurped by a stereotypically fat, evil, lordling. Now he's torn between his desire to learn, travel the world, and aid the common people on the one hand and his duty to his father to be the son he's always wanted to be and lead his city-state back to glory.

[OgreBattle]

Is this all that's needed to play?

http://tckroleplaying.com/herosbanner/d ... sample.pdf

Found a PDF

[angelfromanotherpin]

Well, no. That pdf is hilariously incomplete. It looks like a promotional sample or something. But if not having the rulebook is all that's keeping anyone out, do not fucking worry about it. The rules are simple, and there is basically no way to game the system – it would be like trying to game Munchausen.

Korgan0, sounds good, can you write it up more formally like Grek did?

Grek, looks great; can you talk a little bit about the Theronos family? Also, can you be a bit more specific about your religious goals? As in, do you want Amun-Ra to replace Apollo as sun god, or Zeus as chief god, or all of Olympus?

[Grek]

Alright.

The Theronos family is a proud and weathy lineage dating back to the Old Kingdom, with a somewhat dubious claim of descent from one or more of the ancient Pharaohs. Such was the style back then, and they're never going to admit they made it up. His particular branch of the family is half-Greek, their mother having originally been an Athenian. Current members include:

• Grandparents: Paternal: Chuma & Kiya, Maternal: Philomenes & Ianthe
• Parents: Iah & Celandine
• Ahmose: (20) and his sisters, Amisi (21) and Kebi (14).
• Kebi's family: Husband Baruti and son Jahi.

While they have both wealth and history, what they currently lack is respect. Having his older sister kidnapped in a raid was really embarrassing for the family, because she was supposed to be marrying this noble fellow, Baruti, in the spring and that didn't happen. They had to hush it up and marry his other sister off instead. Ahmose wanting to find his sister and return to Thebes with her is as much about restoring the family honor as it is about familial affection for his elder sister.

Religiously, the long-term goal is to get the High Priest of Zeus to be replaced with the High Priest of Amun, for all the statues of the Olympians to have Egyptian-style beards and headdresses and for the rituals to please the Gods to look like Egyptian rituals. He personally thinks they should stick with Amun-Ra as the proper name for his God, but he's willing to settle for Ammon Zeus or some other hellenization as long as all of the important things (like where the sacrifices go and what the statues look like) are done correctly. Getting Mut and Khonsu into the pantheon as well would be just icing on top.

[OgreBattle]

What do I need to fill out for character creation?
Fill in the same parameters as Grek?

Can I be Persian or Scythian?

[angelfromanotherpin]

What do I need to fill out for character creation?
Fill in the same parameters as Grek?

Basically. My second post is the example of character generation and it's fairly complete.

Can I be Persian or Scythian?

Depends how historically accurate you're willing to be. As far as the Persians go, they aren't really a thing at this point. This is so far before 300 that Spartans are, I shit you not, best known for being pretty. Now, I don't really care if you want to be anachronistic and have a Persian culture show up on the east coast early, I'm just saying.

Scythians also aren't really a thing, historically, at this point. Like, I think the Greeks call the region Scythia, but there isn't anything like a unified culture there yet. Again, if you don't care about accuracy, I don't mind.

I think I'd prefer Persian to Scythian, just because they'd be Mediterranean-adjacent and not Black Sea-adjacent, and thus more accessible to everyone else.

[Chamomile]

I'm considering joining with some kind of conquistador who plans on going all Alexander on the setting.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm considering joining with some kind of conquistador who plans on going all Alexander on the setting.

Why not be that conqueror?

[Chamomile]

When I said "joining with a conquistador" I meant "with a conquistador as my character" so yeah, that's the plan.

EDIT: And here he is.

Andronikos Kritikos

Influences

Hero 33 (Ideal: Socrates/Plato, Goal: Moral Rule)
Andronikos believes in the ideal of the philosopher-king as laid out by Socrates/Plato (Plato attributed enough of his own thoughts to Socrates that it's hard to tell which). He uses this ideal to rationalize the justice behind his rabid desire to conquer all the things.

Blood 33 (Ideal: High Living, Goal: Conspicuous Consumption)
The Kritikos family has a long and storied tradition of making ostentatious displays of their power and wealth.

Conscience 34 (Ideal: Empire, Goal: Conquest)
The Kritikos family has traditionally been pretty okay with sitting in their palace surrounded by scantly clad servants and sipping fine wines. Andronikos' burning desire for conquest is entirely the result of his own ambition.

Passion 1

Connections

Hero Ideal: The philosopher who taught him (some expy for Aristotle, essentially)

Blood Ideal: The younger brother. I dunno if the father lives (he may be the first obstacle to global domination), but the younger brother is not a threat but can still represent the ideal of spending ostentatious amounts of money on feasts and wine and women and other things that are not more phalanxes.

Conscience Ideal: I'm not really sure about this one. If I just keep copying Alexander then this would be the mother, but I do want to put some distance between the two. The other alternatives I see are the friend who wants to see Alexander succeed and also ride his coattails, and a lover who is...Well, basically the same. Really, regardless of who exactly it is, the motivation of "I care about you and want you to achieve your goals, especially if they mean I will have a personal relationship with a global hegemon" seems fitting.

Relationships

Relative: The younger brother from Blood obviously, could possibly be the friend from Grek's toon
Friend/Lover: Whoever is the Conscience ideal, they fit
Enemy: This space is for rent and will hopefully be plugged by one of the other character's relations, otherwise perhaps the father is in the way and therefore qualifies