Mirrorlands

4pm: Mirrorlands

I really want to see this one come to life. I only played this brief, two hour demo, but it still haunts my brain, and I want more of it.

This was an alpha playtest of a game based heavily on The Dark Crystal. Two realms sort of bled into each other, and the PCs were dreamers who could influence things in a way that citizens could not. I'm not sure if "mirrorshattered" referred to the PCs or to the realms. A Shard was like a dungeon or story the group wanted to pursue. It could be a castle, a puzzle, a whole city, and so on.

But one had to be careful of fracture sickness, which came from long term exposure to the fracturizing process and mirror dust. If you're not careful, you will disappear.

Everyone had a Nature, which my notes gloss as "Specials", and which seemed to be the equivalent of species. IIRC, none of the PCs were human, though I have no idea this long after whether that was our choice or baked into the setting.

The system was an interesting cross between Powered by the Apocalypse and Fate. Everyone had an apex skill, their Mastery, and a Weakness skill.

• GM: Marissa Kelly
• Richard Flynn: Florian, a Drak. Basically a Drak Dr Frankenstein, like the Scientist Skeksis from The Dark Crystal. Florian did experiments, and the Crystal Guard was more infected than others. Florian had also experimented on himself and gotten exiled. He was bitter about that. He was called -- or called himself -- The Crimson Duke. A Crimson monocle was attached to his face. He was disdainful of other Drak for not being able to pay the price for what they want.
  • Weakness: Move
  • Mastery: Improvise
• Me: Desht, a Drak, she, her. Her brother was Prince Valish. She needed to make sure that she was powerful enough to kill him. I have the character sheet with the full pyramid, which involves rolling 2D6, modified as follows:
  • +2: Master: Wreck (Mastery)
  • +1: Learned: Strike, Provoke
  • 0: Trained: Move, Sway. Probe
  • -1: Untrained: Endure, Improvise, Scavenge, Obscure (Weakness)
• Vincent Eaton: Nucknuk, a Winden, he / him. Nucknuk lives in moment, as is the way of his kind. If you ask for something he has, he gives it to you. He knows that if he needs it, you'll give it back or he'll find another. He doesn't hold grudge, but unlike most of his kind, he is a whiner -- he complains in the moment. He used to be a merchant, but was not allowed to be one very long, because of his generous nature. He would get things from other Winden to give to others who wanted them.
  • Who did he anger by being in debt? Probably a Drak. We agreed that this would be Prince Valisht, who was furious at Nucknuk and had been trying to collect for a while.
  • What did he make? Whatever he needed. He was always practical, leaving behind a trail of impractical tools.
  • Weakness: Endure
  • Mastery: Improvise
• ???: Fulley, a Flyrna teacher passing on information. Fulley had a temper problem, which was frowned upon in Flyrna society. I think Fulley had a staff. My notes say, "Yes. Splinter of life tree to them -- I refuse to cut things, just defend." So, a staff does make sense.
  • How did Fulley come to be teaching? If I understand my notes, no one would satisfy Fulley's curiosity, and so Fulley had to do it. And, other Natures would ask questions, so the Flyrna probably sort of fell into it.
  • Fulley was young and wanted experience. How does one experience what truth is? I think Fulley tried to analyze the truth behind the concepts of the mirrorlands and the mirrorshattered, but I'm not entirely sure.
  • Master: Pride
  • Weakness: Strike
• Morgan Ellis: Rethia, an Eyrdet (I think). There was a brand on his forehead which he covered with a scarf. He was a little paranoid, as his kind turned into arcologies when they died.
  • Why didn't Rethia travel with others of his kind? He avoided them, especially that cluster of voiceless ones in the west.
  • Rethia: They used to be my people, d__n it!
  • They had been killed, then. By whom? Unknown. Rethia had not been there. My notes say something about "bone + song" and joy, as well as anger, but I can no longer figure out what that all meant.
  • Master: Probe
  • Weakness: Pride
• Vivian: Zen, they / them. My notes give no indication of Nature. A strange artist and dreamer, a devout believer. Zen makes and leaves art. The art is extremely physical and stays where it is.
  • Master: Obscure
  • Weakness: Provoke
  • My notes say, "Desire must be given a voice -) only in church + meself". I have no idea what that means.

My sheet had 3 stress boxes, but also 3 stress tracks, known as Resiliencies. For the Drak, these were Physical 3, Emotional 2, Intellectual 4. The Drak, also known as "Old Kings", had the following listed on their sheet:

• Knowledge & passion, flamboyance & pettiness, wastefulness & hedonism
• Untrustworthy, prone to betray each other in self-interest
• Trying to take advantage of crystallization for power
• Will wage war and conquer others to preserve their empires

There was a chart about rolling that I see I tried to recreate:

Baseline Difficult Risky Perilous
No roll. Can this lead to new fiction? Is there leading fiction? 
Is there unavoidable cost?
10+ n/a n/a Reduced cost.
7-9 GM intros new threat. Existing threat comes to bear, 6- falls whatever. Pay full cost.
6- miss. n/a n/a Full cost and then some.

To create the Shard, the group started by describing a shared dream that drew them all together. Some of them may have dreamed with some of the others before.

Florian, what did dream reveal about where you all need to be? (I think the answer may have come from someone else) Inside one of the Crystal Volcanoes.

Fulley, when? Sooner rather than later, i.e., asap.

Rethia, what did it reveal about what you have to do? Stop Prince Valish from completing his plan.

Desht, why? Because he will drain all the power and all the life out of the land -- out of both lands.

Zen: He is your brother.

Desht: He said I am no longer his sister so he is no longer my brother.

GM: That's good Drak logic.

Nucknuk, how? The dream revealed we are going to have to make our greatest weaknesses our greatest strengths.

And given we had only 2 hours, we now cut ahead. Clearly, if this had been a campaign, we'd have started one of the last sessions.

There was a shard with a big crystal palace built into the volcano. That was where Prince Valish lived. Nearby was a town or small village with a bunch of Winden. In that town could be found a tavern and a park, and my notes also mention a planter with exotic flowers.

What was the group's plan? It seemed to start with a visit to the tavern.

I think Nucknuk said something about getting a gate open, perhaps the gate to the palace.

Nucknuk: And I know a guy. I know an old man who gets his drinks for free.

And Nucknuk tried to do likewise, something the GM categorized as "just Difficult". I believe the player rolled a 5. This meant that the person behind the bar was not impressed by Nucknuk's attempt to drink for free.

I thought to myself that, clearly, one way or another we were a group, so I described Desht, a tall figure concealing her face with a hood, stalking into the bar, proud and disdainful, but also dropping coins into the bartender's hand, indicating with the smallest of nods that it was intended to pay for whatever Nucknuk had just bought. Not that Desht had any affection for Nucknuk. Affection was a weakness, obviously. (I suspect Desht's "affection" was on the order of what one might feel for a cute-but-annoying pet.)

If I recall correctly, Desht noticed an artist sketching the group and moved to deal with that potential threat, while the others worked on their plan to gain admittance to the castle. Florian hired a girl and boy to make some kind of choir.

Zen tried to Sneak, getting a 9, which was at least a partial success, and my notes say that Zen and Rethia did something with plants, possibly collecting some as part of the Sneak In plan. Certainly, Fulley had some idea of sneaking in via tunnels.

Nucknuk intended to enter openly, using "my reputation as a merchant".

Florian: It is said that Prince Valish, for sport, has traps and cages in which he captures and imprisons creatures, most of which are the size of swamp things, and he has them fight for his amusement, and his foes have more than once felt their teeth.

Someone: More than once?

Florian (clarifying): Once each.

Fulley was, I think, investigating mirror dust near some of the plants.

Someone, possibly Florian: Why are we looking at the flowers?

I believe at this point, a limping Drak, walked briskly past them. It was clear that he knew secrets of some sort.

Rethia: Maybe we should ask him? (I think about where something was or about people's movements?)

Zen: Maybe you should ask him.

Rethia: Well I'm going to get one regardless.

I'm not sure what Rethia was referring to, but certainly, the Drak seemed to take too much interest in them.

One of the PCs: Why are you so interested in us?

Drak: I'm not interested in you in the slightest.

My notes say something about a difficult roll, a result of 6, and a sniper. Red crystal formed around someone's jaws, a thing that could only be done to dreamers. Zen tried to trip the Drak with Move, getting an 8, aka at least a partial success.

And the long and short of it was that while this brought them some time, they would have to hide in Nucknuk's cart.

Florian: That sounds very undignified. That's fine.

Nucknuk arrived and announced himself.

Nucknuk: Would you please inform the lord of the house that Nucknuk has returned to pay his debt?

While there was some roll involving the skill Probe and an 8 on the die, I just remember that this gambit worked. The gate was opened for the cart and the Winden. Florian grabbed some things from the cart and got a total of 13 on the roll to Improvise.

I think that Nucknuk was supposed to wait for the majordomo. I'm also fairly sure that he and whoever was trying to announce him or fob him off on someone else couldn't get the oxen pulling Nucknuk's cart up the stairway.

Nucknuk (I forget the context of this: Everybody's gotta eat!

Fulley did something with mirror dust involving using Move, an Untrained skill for Fulley, in a manner both Risky and Perilous -- and getting a 10 on the dice! The GM said that this gave Fulley the opportunity to enhance 1 of the beasts if Fulley chose. Fulley could do one thing with the results, but, I think, was also supergroggy.

As Nucknuk made an excellent distraction inside the castle for the others, back in the tavern, Desht provoked the sketch artist, who was indeed trying to alert Prince Valish via his sketches. Desht drew her sword, and possibly revealed herself. Certainly, she confronted the artist. Possibly, her brother came through the sketch, or possibly his voice did. Regardless, we had to stop for feedback at this point.

Roses and Thorns

Rich: The setting is distinctive and can pull in generic stuff that doesn't feel generic. That said, the plot didn't line up with the setting. It was very traditional: break into castle, kill some guards. There was no web of connections.

I liked the group creation of the quest and thought it compared favorably to a gm infodump.

Vince liked the Natures and the themes. He also liked how the PCs were both like and different from the typical person of their Natures. he liked the ease of conflict resolution, saying that the shifting spotlight felt natural. I'm not sure what the rest of my notes from his feedback mean:

vs Custom Things -- Unique to Natures
Strings / Web of Relationships

I can't tell if those described roses of thorns.

I think someone said they liked the codification of difficulty. Vince felt that this helped resolve the "vagueness of soft vs hard moves".

I'm not sure what "vs -- not much of skills list person can see useful". I think that was a thorn, but I'm not sure what it means.

Morgan liked the idea of the shared dream. I'm not sure whether he liked the who/what/where aspect, as I think he said that it was better if the PCs dreamed together, shared images. This kind of bonding together could come about because of the dreams.

He found the skill range a little odd, in comparison to, say, Apocalypse World itself. In Mirrorlands, we each have 4 skills at -1, and the system seems a lot more weighted to negative results and failures. Perhaps this was intentional, but it was still weird.

GM: It's the same probability mathematically, but good to hear.

Also, Morgan noted, we were all dreamers, but there was no skill for that.

GM: "Dreamers" just means PCs.

Apparently, this means that, socially and technically, PCs can affect shard in ways which most people can't.

Zen's player liked the setting and the different Natures. Logically, some PC types would be troublemakers, but the Natures were flexible enough that the players didn't _have_ to do it that way.

The player wasn't as enamored of the skill system, appreciating the elegance of it but thinking that it needed to be in a different game.

Zen's Player: The only thing it did was to help me think of the _kind_ of things I'd like to be doing -- but in play, it was no help at all. My take on Improvise and others' was very different.

I liked the Strength / Weakness skills, and I liked the part of the dream/prophecy that said we had to make our greatest weaknesses our greatest strengths, as this covered a whole lot of ground.

GM: I'm glad some of you enjoyed the dream thing and trying to figure out prophecy creation.

Vince: It's a really interesting way to do the bonds.

The GM's thorn was that this was very hard to run as con game.

As I said, I want more of this game.