Though we're only two sessions into the Metamorphosis Alpha campaign, everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, including me. Prior to this, I don't believe any of the players involved had ever had the chance to play MA before or, if they had, did so for very long. All of them were, of course, familiar with the game in broad terms, including its central premise. While I'm sure there have been many players over the decades who weren't aware that their characters were actually aboard a generation ship gone mad after a chance encounter with a radiation cloud, that's definitely not the case in my campaign. Everyone playing the game already knows the score.
I bring this up, because one of several things about the campaign that I've enjoying as the referee is watching the players pretend, via their characters, that they have no inkling of the Big Picture. The characters began the campaign as inhabitants of the village of Habitat, located on the shores of Lake Refuge within Wolf Forest. So far as the characters know, their ancestors journeyed here from the Barren Hills of Warden after having been cast out of the First Garden by the Builder. This is the world as the characters know it and the players have been operating within that frame.
In reality, though, the characters live on Habitat Level 2 of the starship Warden, one of two levels constructed to look like natural, terrestrial environments – in this case a forest – with an appropriate "climate" maintained by artificial means. Though there are a couple of features to this environment that reveal its true origins, like the Sky Columns (elevators) that can be seen reaching upwards, none of this is known to the characters, who have a fairly simple, even primitive worldview.
Consequently, when we had our first session a couple of weeks ago, I presented the current situation in Habitat in accordance with that worldview. The weather had suddenly gotten inexplicably colder, harming the crops, killing off game animals, and threatening to do the same to the old and infirm among the villagers. The elders did not know the cause and so sent the characters off into the wilds to seek a solution or, barring that, the location of the places where their ancestors first dwelled when they came to Warden. If nothing else, they could retreat there and escape the encroaching cold.
The elders have them all supplies, including a "wrath stick," an ancient Gift, to be wielded by the party's leader (a pure human, since mutants bear the curse of the Builder). To him, they taught the prayers necessary to use it – the Prayer of Loading, the Mantra of Targeting, and the Prayer of Humble Jam-Clearing. Then, they set off to ascertain what was happening and, if possible, to correct it, so that the people of Habitat might once again resume their toil in hopes of securing the Builder's favor, so that they might one enter the promised New Garden.
Again, to be clear, the players understood a lot of things I described to their characters under veiled words. For example, they recognized the "wrath stick" as a firearm, but their characters viewed it as a holy artifact and treated it with appropriate reverence. When the party's leader prepared to fire it for the first time, he recited the necessary prayers beforehand and several of the characters added, "Praise the Builder!" at the end of it, which I appreciated. The prayers do nothing, but the characters believe they do, which is why they recite them whenever the wrath stick is employed.
Actually, on paper (er, screen) that sounds very sustainable. If your gang screws it up, that's on you guys! After all, everyone has known D&D's "secret twists" (that haflings are really hobbits stripped of copyright, that fire breathing dragons aren't real, that in real life, melee has never been resolved via dice roll) for even longer.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, "roleplaying," by definition, is simply the practice of playing a role. Who knew that MA could be revived simply by playing it the way it was intended? It took Jim Ward six months to figure out the polyhedral dice when they were first introduced, and his hallmark (especially as he matured as a game designer) was brevity and efficiency: provide the framework around a simple but intriguing conceit, and let the players and referee cook. His Tower of the Scarlet Wizard is an exemplar.
Leave it to your cadre to slice through the Wardian Knot like it was butter. Kudos.
This is so 70's, I love it. One could preserve the "Big Secret" by making it variable. The answer could be the generation ship warden, or it could be a Logan's Run style underground colony on earth, or perhaps a Mad Max style new world order, maybe the Garden of Eden, etc. The players would just experience the world that you present and later discover the true origin as taken from a list of possibilities.
ReplyDeleteImagine going through life supressing delusions that your world is an artificial construct, only to discover that neither your experienced nor your imagined alternative realities were the truth. We're wandering into PKD territory here.
DeleteSomewhere in the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (I can't for the life of me find it now. I have the book right in front of me.) Dick wrote about how Copernicus revealed to the denizens of earth that they had for generations believed their home was an enclosed, flat-surfaced, domed structure, and their eyes were opened to the idea that the globular ever-expanding universe, and that our home was just an insignificant ball rolling around in the dark.
DeleteIt's a cool concept, a precursor to the Warden, so to speak...but Dick doesn't stop there. He suggests that the Copernican model is itself a counterfeit and we have been deceived for 500 years, all the while believing ourselves to be aware, wise and in on the truth of the way the world is.
I'll cite the page as soon as I can find it, doggone it.
I found it - Folder 28, Item 10 on page 294. The Exegesis of PKD 3-4-74. The reason I couldn't find it is that it a drawing by PKD with some scrawled notes. Replicating the notes here will do no good. The images tie together some of the stuff he writes about VALIS and how the earth is **really** shaped and how it breathes through gills, etc. etc. There he also discusses how the models of the world and his particular understandings of the way the world is (physically) has been a distraction from the truth, and only now, that he has publicly affirmed his erroneous views about the world in VALIS, he can't convince anyone that we believe in a counterfeit universe.
DeleteOk. Now I wish I hadn't. Additionally, I don't think I better try to play a long-campaign MA. If I begin channeling PKD, insanity will be the very least of my worries.
I've only played Metamorphosis Alpha once (I believe) and wasn't aware of it prior to playing. I was aware of Gamma World, which is how the campaign started.
ReplyDeleteBasically, after a dozen sessions and a number of subtle clues we learned our Gamma World campaign was actually taking place aboard the starship Warden.
Another dozen sessions later we find out the Warden is heading directly into a Star with no clear way to avoid our fate. One of the PCs had some knowledge of the ship however and we all managed to reach the Hangar Bay and escape aboard a large Shuttlecraft.
The GM ran out of ideas at that point so I stepped in and took over. Our shuttle is eventually found by Star Law and the PCs become agents with strange powers in the battle against the evil Sathar. Yep, the campaign found its way to Star Frontiers. Lol
I never read Non-Stop (the inspiration for MA) until reading the first chapter this morning. Even though Non-Stop begins with the "primitive" tribes in socio-competition, very early on it is established that the hero, among other primitives, is seeking answers to questions about their "world" -
ReplyDelete"Remember there is much we do not know, and outside our world may be other worlds of which we cannot at present guess."
More than that, the reader is clued in through the primitive's odd language (ponics for the plant-life, obliviously stated by characters but obvious to the reader as a degeneration of "hydroponics"), their discussion of "more advanced" tribes, and the hero's own highly structured, almost modern military structure.
In other words, the inspiration for MA introduces the Warden as conceit early and only partially attempts to conceal its truth.
This is a RADICALLY different than my long-standing conception of MA as an innovative, but long-since "broken" game in need of creative alternate frames around the Warden. Instead author Brian Aldiss demonstrates that he (and therefore, years later, Ward) is really wanting to explore the idea of awakening from counterfeit.
PKD territory indeed.
Remarkable to me that I've never cottoned on to this, as its been their since the beginning.
Talk about a twist!