On the Thursday at the end of the 2019 International Medieval Congress in Leeds, a few of us gathered once again to play test the Langobard RPG. To be fair, and as the lack of updates on the blog clearly attests, I have done no work on the game in the last year, and very little since we played at Leeds in 2017. Still, some ideas and approaches had been percolating, and we introduced a few new ideas and approaches. I want to focus here on some updates and approaches, rather than rewriting the events of the story session itself. Suffice it say briefly that the plot involved a dastardly plan to kill the father of one of the characters before he alienated half his property, effectively disinheriting his only son and his wife to be. The plot involved a sabotaged bridge and a wild boar out in the woodlands, and a recent twitter meme has made me sad that the encounter wasn’t for 4d6+26 wild hogs. But the meme also reminded me a month later that I still haven’t posted this blog-post that I wrote on the train home after the conference. Returning to our scheming Lombards, circumstances being what they are the trap backfired and killed the father of the wife to be instead. Hilarity ensued, or at least I was laughing – the players had to drive their character’s into damage management mode as the consequences of their nefarious activities began to loom!
The group this time was much smaller, beginning with three people, all of whom had played two year’s previously – James Hill, Vicky Cooper and Rose Sawyer. We made new characters, beginning with a discussion about the focus of the law-code itself. The main focus of the laws is very much approaching from the perspective of the Lombard free man. This is not to say that other categories are not addressed, far from it, but often it is through that focus, with the unfree and half free being seen in relation to the freeman that enslaves them, and the free woman in relation to the “some man” who holds her mundium [guardianship]. The core group were later joined by Geoffrey Humble and Stephanie Lahey, both of whom took over non-player characters (NPCs) characters that had already been created for plot purposes around the central three player characters (PCs). (A useful tip for people learning to run RPGs is to make starting characters for NPCs linked to the main characters, as late-comers can pick up and play without it slowing the story down too much).
For the initial characters, we took a somewhat new approach to character creation, that I first tried last summer in an impromptu game with my nephews. We handed around an English copy of the law-code (Fischer-Drew, trans) with players instructed to find a clause or two that caught their interest and to use that to form the spark (of joy) from which their character would be built around. The theory was that the clause(s) might reflect something that had already happened to their character, or a feasible event around which the story might rotate and potentially build towards. This, as it turned out, worked fantastically, although in practice all of the clauses – at my request – became potential future directions, rather than having already been implemented. In practice these ideas drove the characters at first, but managed to slip away as the story took over. Which did not really feel to be a problem. I intend to upgrade the character sheet so that the ‘identity’ section containing the core concept information for each character will have a space to include the clauses. Perhaps players will also write out the clause(s), or pertinent parts thereof (especially for a longer clause), on the back of their sheets too, so it remains easy for them to access. As the person running the game, having this on a cheat-sheet will also be useful.
Another thing which proved helpful at this point, was using the ‘capitula list’ or list of titles, from the law-code as a quick reference to find clauses that sounded promising, then checking the fuller details. This was particularly useful for speeding things up, as none of the players had much familiarity with the law-code itself, beyond memories from the session two years ago. As the source material of the Edictus Rothari comprises some 388 clauses, this is obviously too much to have asked three players to have done in tandem for a short evening’s game. For a bigger and more formal game, with a ‘gamified teaching’ element it might well be considered a fair request, but the game itself also needs to be able to bring players in quickly and with no previous experience. For the layout of the rule-book including a copy of the full capitula list in the character creation section seems vital, and including as a part of that cross-references to pages in the rule-book where specific clauses have been given. As many of the titles also include the Langobardic language names for some crimes (morth, for secret killing, the walapaus as a person who disguises themselves in order to commit some crime, and so forth), this may serve a double purpose of introducing players to some specific Lombard legal terminology, as well as the scope of crimes and socio-legal interests underpinning the laws and the game.
In the discussion after the session, I floated an idea that was met with some approval, that the chosen clause(s) sparking the character idea should have a significant pile of Development Points (DP) attached to it, so that the player could later be rewarded with them, if or when they player brought about the associated events. My instinct was to make this a block of 12 DP, so that if a clause had multiple elements, or if multiple clauses had been opted for, they might be easily divided. That is, two clauses or elements would be worth 6 DP each, three would be worth 4 DP each, and so forth. As a normal storytelling session should result in 2-4 DP, this seems also to be a good amount to emphasise the major role that the clause would take in shaping the narrative and character.
This does, however, raise the issue of what happens if the player or games-master establish characters where the events in the clause have already happened before the story begins. Allotting up to 12 DP for effectively just creating a character background seems rather excessive. The best solution seemed to be awarding half the amount here, so 6 DP for a single clause or element, 3 DP each for two, and so forth. As a system, this could obviously be abused, with a wily player jumping to, say, Rothari No. 72, and having a character who begins with their fourth toe having been cut off in the past, and treating it as a simple route to try and get an extra 6 DP!
Even this munchkiny, min-max situation is hardly terrible, though. For a start even so simple a clause includes a number of plot hooks and character identity elements. Rothari No. 72 addresses the specific situation of a free person, so we have an insight into the social class of the character, and must ask ourselves further if he, or the one holding her mundium, is landed or un-landed, has any official duties, locally or as a representative of the king, and so forth. Likewise, the question of who cut of the toe, must be addressed, leading to the establishment of a network of characters, whether other player characters (PCs) – highly recommended for adding extra layers of interactions and getting the story underway – or non-player characters (NPCs). Furthermore, the games-master might also split even such a simple clause into two elements, giving the player the 3 DP for having lost the toe and setting up the grounds for the case, but making it so that the pursuit of composition itself must happen in game. If all goes according to the Edictus Rothari, the freeman or woman would be rewarded a composition of (up to or exactly?) three solidi for the wound, while the player got their remaining DP reward. Moreover, the reward here would be at the full value of 6 DP for one of two elements, not the half-value for making it part of their background.
By having the characters be formed discursively and communally, as we had done before, it was once again possible to weave interconnections between the characters. Last time I had begun with a plot already sketched out, derived from the law clauses I had used as hooks to build the plot. This time as an impromptu game I had nothing prepared beyond stray thoughts, and the starting point arose from the clauses and characters themselves. Both approaches worked, but the story certainly felt more organic this time, and I was still able to weave in additional clause-based threads as suited the situation. In all, it felt to me a great success, and the feedback from the players and friendly observers seemed to echo that.
Some note on game mechanics, character creation and naming conventions
For character creation we reset the number of starting skill points to one (1) skill at level two (master), which give four six-sided dice to any attempt, and five (5) skills at level one (disciple), having two six-sided dice for any attempt. In practice this distribution worked rather well, as the level zero skill still had one six-sided die to be rolled, and difficulty modifiers for relatively easy situations likewise gained an additional six-sided die. This number of points worked well for the named skills on the character sheet, $$ in total. However, I had forgotten that in the session two years previously we had taken many of the class-specific skills off the sheet, with the assumption that these would be added in as appropriate. this was to remove clutter, and to help players uncertain at what a typical Lombard of a given class and sex might be expected to have. A future revision might need to make this more apparent, or see if a half-way mark can be found. As it was our free Lombards began with no named weapons skills, and nearly ran afoul of the first antagonist whose path they crossed (a wild boar)!
Throughout the course of the game, we lowered the minimum amount that needed to be rolled for a basic success when using a skill from ‘6’ to ‘5’, and briefly even tried ‘4’, before returning once more to ‘5’. Coupled with the moving any dice showing a ‘1’ to one side as a ‘flaw’, and the critical successes obtained from dice showing ‘6’s, the rules engine seemed to work well.
This arbitration engine also transferred directly to the Motivations (driving emotions) section of the character sheet, with the same three levels of influence each being present. The number of points available was reduced to three (3), with players able to have either one strong and one weak motivation from the five, or simply to have three weak. This seemed to give a good emotional range for the characters, and allowed overwhelming emotional moments to be balanced with the cynical rationality of players.
The damage system still needs to be refined, a point which I have been hinting at and working towards, in idle thoughts, at least, for some time now. We didn’t address this directly in the story, but a general sense that a qualitative, narrative-led system of wounds (dampni) was required beyond the counting of lesser blows (plaga) given in the rules certainly made itself felt. Ideas on this are beginning to coalesce, so I hope that I shall be able to return to this project with a little more energy before IMC 2020 is upon us! As a further update to this, last week I was poking around in Rothari No. 77 as a case-study for my main work, which addresses the person who strikes another’s enslaved or half-free worker so that the wound [vulnus] or bruise [livor] is apparent, and am feeling more and more that this could work well with the qualitative trait-based damage system I’ve been musing over. I really want to restart work on this project before the year is out, so cross your fingers!
A final point that also got discussed was: by what name should the gathering of players be referred to? and should a special name be chosen for the storyteller? I raised the possibility that the storyteller should be called the iudex [judge], but felt that as the story itself might also have such a legal official it could get confusing. Obviously, this could work in a game where the storyteller has a player character presence in the story (similar to how some games use clerics in Dungeons & Dragons), but it seemed that there were a lot more types of story that might be told for that to be viable. As such we are still settling on storyteller and games-master, as ‘host’ which I have used from old habits in previous posts doesn’t feel quite right.
For the name of the group itself I floated two possibilities. Firstly, the gairethinx, that is the legal assembly of all free Lombard men. This obviously does not work well, despite the legal connotations, as characters may be half-free, unfree, women, non-Lombarads (eventually!) and so forth. The other option that received a bit more favour, and which we are provisionally settling for is the Fara – the extended family unit of the Lombards from the migration period. Against this term is the fact that it had all but dropped out of use as a major social construct even by the time the Edictus Rothari was issued (643 CE) and when the game is set. On the other hand, the idea of the players being a close-knit group travelling together is a touching and compelling image that appealed greatly to us.
Langobard 