When I played classic fantasy RPGs in
my youth, my heart could never get into a game that I felt reduced my
newly-created Player Character to a work-for-hire lug. I’d spend hours
on my character’s life and back story, prepping him or her for heroic
greatness only to find out from the Game Master that our promised
“adventure” was a temp job from some dude in a tavern.
In
my opinion, “revenue” is not one of the three R’s of heroic motivation.
When adventure games are only about the coins and kills, something
special gets lost.
In World vs. Hero,
I wrote “Hero creation precedes adventure design for a reason – to
enable the World Player to devise conflicts that will draw heroes into
the action more meaningfully through personal struggles.” Think about
any movie you’ve seen or book you’ve read that featured a truly heroic
character. That character wasn’t simply killing bad guys and taking
valuables; there was always another dimension to the hero’s mission that
was intimately tied to who he or she was. Great storytelling puts much
more at stake for heroes – so much more that a person unworthy of the
title “hero” would never be able to endure the trials of that adventure.
For a successful treatment of a heroic character, follow the three R’s of heroic motivation: redemption, revenge, and revelation.
In one of our first playtesting sessions of World vs. Hero, we had all three. It all started with this nameless world:
When
the Gods of Old had finished creating the First World and the People,
they cast the discarded shards of their work into a pocket of the
cosmos, giving the remnants no second thought. The shards manifested
their own will and formed into a new world that imitated the original by
taking the shapes of the dreams and nightmares of the People. In a
single cycle of dreams, the shards became at once a wondrous and
perilous place of Dominions of the Light and Nightmare Territories. The
balance between the two lasted for as long as the People of the First
World had hope. However, something has happened to the People; their
dreams are darker, their hope more fleeting. The inhabitants of the
brightest Dominions feel the darkness rising and know that the Nightmare
Territories grow stronger. Now, the world of the shards needs heroes
who will be bold and daring, heroes who will reject their existence as
the echoes of others and assert their right to live, heroes who will
fight against the nightmares until hope returns…
It was a simple concept – heroes facing living nightmares.
That
was quickly followed by a few hero types and races, and the Hero Player created three heroes for what we hoped would be a trilogy of
game stories.
When I, the World
Player, had to create the Adventure Premise, I examined the Hero
Profiles carefully and wrote an Adventure Premise that ensured that each
hero had a powerful motivation to put his or her life on the line.
Here’s the premise:
The
boldness of Smoke Eater Lungo Drevv, Bogeyman Lord, rose to new heights
when his Bogeyman Machinists parked an extraordinary contraption on the
edge of the Jasmine River near the border of Green Hills Dominion. The
river, home to water fairies that protect Green Hills, could not be
crossed by anyone from the Nightmare Territories without the permission
of the fairies, but it seemed that Smoke Eater had a plan. Hiring
mercenary Dream Slavers to power his machine, he and a secret ally are
poised to invade Green Hills Dominion, though no one of that dominion –
not even the Castellan of Green Hills himself – believes such a feat is
possible. Should Smoke Eater and his nightmare legions magically find
some way to cross that river, the citizens of Green Hills would be
massacred or enslaved, and the Nightmares will have gained their
greatest advantage against the Light.
So, there’s a premise with a fair bit of intrigue to it, but it’s actually more intriguing than you know. Remember, the heroes were created first, so I took my inspiration from their lives. Now, here’s where that premise really came from:
Mudar Zaleel
Human Dream Slaver, Five Tribes Dominion
Mudar
has walked the line between the good dreams and the nightmares for most
of his adult life. Selling his services as a Dream Slaver, he has
worked for both the Dominions and the Territories, never once
questioning his self-serving business ethics. Lately, Mudar himself has
begun to experience nightmares in his sleep, a rare occurrence among
people of the Dominions, and he is suffering. So terrible have these
secret nightmares become that Mudar has tested ways to keep himself
awake or induce deeper sleep beyond dreaming through the use of poisons.
With the cause of his nightmares still unknown, Mudar wonders if his
mercenary ways have cursed him with guilt-induced bad dreams, or if his
Dream Slaver powers are connecting him with something dark within the
land itself.
When we first meet
Mudar, he has just come from working for Lungo, though the Hero Player
had not originally planned that but accepted it as such. Troubled by his
recent issues and Lungo's plans, Mudar begins to walk the road of
redemption by helping to stop the Bogeyman Lord's plot against the water
fairies and Green Hills. A mature motivation with great developmental
potential.
REVENGE
Donnelly Grig
Everkid wanderer
As
a boy in the Nightmare Territory of Smoke Eater Lungo Drevv, Donnelly
was sold to a forge house by his drunkard father, there to toil in the
weapon-making metal works of Lungo’s cruel Bogeyman Machinists. All day
and night, Donnelly wished to be saved in any way from the endless hours
of hard labor in sweltering temperatures. That wish came true on his
13th birthday when the mysterious Everkid transformation came upon him,
and Donnelly was able to teleport himself out of the factory and into a
new life. With his transformation into a pointy-eared,
eternally-thirteen fey being, Donnelly longs to strike back at the
nightmares just as much as he longs to be a part of a real family.
Obviously,
Donnelly will get his chance to strike back at the nightmares by
targeting the one he hates most, Lungo Drevv. Easy motivation.
REVELATION
Lady Ciara Doran
Human Castellan-in-Training, Green Hills Dominion
Even
at a very young age, Ciara showed a strong desire for seeking answers
and an impressive aptitude for solving problems. Her father, the
Castellan of Green Hills, made sure that Ciara’s skills were nurtured to
their fullest by his staff, especially after the death of her mother.
Ciara became respected in social circles around the Castellan’s court,
but her tomboy nature and intellectual drive left her uninspired by
mundane pursuits. Becoming proficient with the Puzzle Staves, Ciara
feels ready to earn her future standing as the next Castellan of Green
Hills by adventuring into the disputed areas between the Dominions and
Territories to solve the mystery of the rising power of nightmares.
So,
what was the revelation that motivated Ciara? It was one the Hero
Player never saw coming - Lungo's secret ally was Ciara's mother, who
wasn't dead after all! This threw everything Ciara ever believed about
her parents and her life into doubt, and it turned her into our main
protagonist.
Though we only ever
got through two games of the anticipated trilogy, the stories that we
told were truly enthralling. Mudar was gradually becoming a really cool
edgy hero; Donnelly killed Lungo at the cost of his own life (we were
going to replace him with a past Ally); and Ciara faced her mother more
than once, but as yet had not discovered what she was up to. All of the
excitement and emotional investment was only possible because the
characters had motives befitting of the word "HERO."
- JF