Since there’s quite a bit of investment in Mythender, I thought I would be upfront about why I said “two months” for the initial set of booklets going out to donors:

• I start a new job as a social game designer on Monday. Yay job! But it means I can’t 100% gauge my evening bandwidth, so I’m assuming roughly 12-16 hours a week to work on stuff. Part of the reason I won’t be posting on Monday or Tuesday, likely.
• I am finishing up some work for Evil Hat Productions on The Paranet Papers. After that’s done and off to peer review, I’m taking a sabbatical from EHP to work on my own books — not jut Mythender, but starting with that.
• Speaking of Evil Hat, there will be revisions on my short story for the upcoming Don’t Rest Your Head fiction anthology, Don’t Read This Book.
• I have Void Vultures to edit, which I’m working on now. It won’t take too much of my time — the form factor & Roby’s writing is pretty solid, but that’s ahead of Mythender because it got funded first. And because we said backers are getting it in December (as well as the rest of the world).
• I have a holiday trip to Seattle for personal matters. Some work will totally happen then, and some won’t.
• I have a trip to Minneapolis for JoshCon in January. I’ll probably run Mythender then, from pre-ready booklets if I bust my ass enough, so that’s my current goal.
• Oh, and I have to learn how to do InDesign competently for Mythender’s layout.

Once Mythender’s written, it goes to a Secret Cabal of people who have played before (and a couple who haven’t) to make sure everything that’s in my head is out, before it goes to donors & the editor.

The bonus content starts once I have that off to donors and my editor. And yes, I’m paying for editing on a free project. That’s how I show my respect to people who are willing to take the time to read my game and how I show respect to those who helped Kelly out. Seriously, mad love y’all.

Here’s a bit about my plans for the form factor & production:

• The game will be in electronic form (PDF), visually-designed for iPad and similar use. That aspect ratio, minimal art for easy loading, good contrast, with some color & iconography to aid in explanation.
• The game will be made easy to print as a series of booklets, using normal 8.5″x11″ paper & normal desktop printer margins. There will be a black & white version of the PDFs for those who don’t want to use color. Folding the pages in the middle and stapling (or however else you’d like to bind it), the sort of thing that some folks can do at home or work, and isn’t too horrible to do at a Kinkos.
• Each booklet will range from 8 pages (taking 2 sheets of paper to print) to 32 pages (taking 8 sheets of paper to print). By “pages” I mean once the booklet’s printed. Four pages fits on a single piece of paper when printed double-sided and folded landscape.
• Ideally, each idea will be contained on either a page or a spread, with larger ideas being broken up. Sometimes this won’t work, but I’m trying this as hard as possible.
• There will be a version of the PDF that is set up for booklet printing without needing special printer/PDF reader options to make that happen.
• I want to have art on each booklet’s cover, to visually distinguishing them at a glance.
• The back of each booklet will be some form of quick reference.
• The middle spread, the one that naturally falls open, will be another reference.
• The planned booklets:
• The core booklet/table of contents/tone setter/basics, 8 pages
• “Creating Your Mythender”, the rules for making a character, 24-32 pages. It’s streamlined from what I have posted before.
• “Moments in your Adventure”, the rules for everything that isn’t a Battle, 24-32 pages
• “Your First Battle”, a tutorial battle for first timers, 24-32 pages
• “Epic, Godending Battles”, the battles rules, 24-32 pages. The tutorial will not refer to this booklet.
• “Mythmaster’s Handbook”, what a Mythmaster (GM) needs to keep in mind in order to make Mythender rock, 16-24 pages.
• “Mythic World #1: Mythic Norden”, the first world of gods to kill in Mythender, 16 pages.
• Loose leaf material: the character sheets, the Mythender Archetypes for character creation, some references, sample characters.
• (Note: these are estimates)

If that sounds like a lot of printing, note that I’m saying a total of 8+32+32+32+32+24+16 booklet pages, or 176 pages (which are small pages, since we’re talking 8.5″x5.5″, before printer margins are taken into account). That’s 44 printed pieces of paper. Anyway, I think that’s all. Writing this may reveal another. Plus, I am intending this to also be easy-to-use electronically, so hopefully that works for y’all.

And other Mythic Worlds will be around the same page count, maybe large, depends on the world.

I should say that most of the text is written, in some form or another, sometimes as outdated rules. So I need to quickly rewrite it for this form factor and shift in tone. (I’ve abandoned the “woe is the mtyhic world and let’s be emo” tone for a “CHOKE THOR AWW YEAH and emo optional” one.)

What, you wanted to know about the actual game? :)

I’ve talked about it quite a bit on my blog, and I’ll keep talking about it. But too much posting about how Mythender works keeps me from writing about how Mythender works in the text. :) Here’s what some folks who have tried it said about it:

It certainly had a lot of cock. And not in a bad way.

- Filamena Young

I GOTCHER DIVINE RIGHT RIGHT HERE GOD BOY

- Cam Banks

Mythender struck me like a thunderbolt. I’ve seen it light wildfires in people’s imaginations. It’s part game, part legend.

- Will Hindmarch

My dice wept tears of blood.

- Logan Bonner

Roll the storm, gain the thunder, unleash the lightning — and End a Myth!

- Chad Underkoffler

Finally, a game that weaponizes my existential angst.

- Nora Last

The finest game of deicide since Candyland.

- Josh Roby

I know what kicks ass. Mythender kicks ass. A Mythender stands on the battlefield atop the broken and bleeding bodies of his enemies, screaming defiance at the gods…and the gods are afraid to answer. That is kick ass.

- Brennan Taylor

I hate this game.

- Thor, wananbe “god” of thunder

Anyway, there you go. Those are my plans. Perhaps they’re ambitious. Perhaps not. I should briefly thank Jeremy Keller for inspiring the form factor, which is a bit amusing. Technoir’s Player’s Book and Transmissions are easy-to-print, and I really dug them hitting the table. Why it’s amusing is that I inspired his Transmissions. All life is circular, baby.

Thank you again.

I’d better get to fucking writing.

-Ryan

Too Long; Didn’t Watch:

• We’re capping the donations at $15K, because woah.
• Holy crap, you’re awesome. wut i dont even
• I’ll talk more about Mythender later, because I have my hands full with managing this project. :)
• Holy crap, you’re awesome.
• I drink passable coffee.
• Apologies to David & Filamena for spacing — it’s been a long couple days.
• Incidentally, in the first 24 hours, 395 people raised $11,325. Again, holy crap, you’re awesome.
• My video comment about the amount is awesomely out of date.
• And for Will Hindmarch‘s Always/Never/Now:

- Ryan

Well, maybe. It depends on you. No maybe about it!

Here’s the deal. The game’s done, and I am not interested in retooling it to use a different die mechanic to make it “marketable.” It rocks the house right now, and over a hundred people have played it throughout the last five years. I love the hell out of this game, and it’s ready to go out and fly and all that paternal jazz.

So I’m going to throw it out there, as a free game for everyone. But only if a charity bundle I’m helping with hits a goal.

Random Kindness Encounter Bundle

Elizabeth Sampat & I have a friend in need, Kelly. Here’s Elizabeth telling you about her. Read this, then keep going for more on Mythender.

Hey guys—

I want to tell you about my friend Kelly. She is a hilarious badass, and a modestly successful food photographer. She’s got a pretty great life at a pretty young age— husband imported from Denmark, two cute cats, and she gets to do what she loves. She is generous to a fault, relentlessly cheerful, and a giant nerd who LOVES D&D and Minecraft.

Last month, she wasn’t feeling so great, so she went to the doctor. Tumors everywhere. That’s not a euphemism.

She had the tumors removed and everything biopsied, and bad news came back. I would have been upset; her husband certainly was. How do you think she reacted?

“Today is a GREAT day! First of all, today is officially 1 week of healing under my belt since surgery, which is 1 week closer to being healed up. Biopsy results on colon, bladder, ovaries and tumors came in…. Colon, bladder & ovaries are CLEAR! Tumors are all benign. Now… To heal up and finish the fight with the last enemy left: Cervical Cancer. I will not accept defeat.”

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine getting yourself psyched about JUST having cervical cancer? I was having a bad day, but shit damn did that put it into perspective. Like I said, relentlessly positive.

Except she’s having trouble staying positive lately. Despite a super-high monthly insurance premium, she owes three grand on the tumor removal— and will probably owe another four grand after this round of radiation.

Elizabeth & I have put together a charity bundle with a half dozen other indie games, including Vincent Baker’s new Murderous Ghosts, to raise money for Kelly’s medical bills. We’re calling it the Random Kindness Encounter Bundle.

Where this fits with Mythender

If it hits $4000 by January 1st, 2012, I’ll release Mythender for free as an electronic game. Donators will get it at least a month before the rest of the world; you’ll get the pre-editor copy, and the world will have to wait for post-editing. I suspect this to be ready for donators in February — I’m nearly done with getting the text where I want it, and the layout will take a bit.

If it doesn’t, then Mythender’s over. If it can’t help sweeten the deal for a charity bundle, then it wasn’t meant to be. Holy shit, you guys are awesome. We hit $4K in around three hours!

There are different rewards at different donations levels (provided the goal’s hit, of course):

• At $10 (Kind Kobold) – You’ll get Mythender a minimum of a month before the public does.
• At $25 (Generous Goblin) – As above, and you’ll get a thank you in Mythender, under “Names Forever Etched In Time”. If your name as is in your PayPal isn’t what you want, please let Ryan know!
• At $50 (Outstanding Owlbear) – As above, and we’ll turn you into a Mythender! You’ll be immortalized on the Mythender website as “Champions of the Warsong”. Ryan will email you about this, once Mythender is out to the donators.
• At $100 (Terrific Tarrasque) – As above, and you’ll get to come up with one of the Myths — the monsters & gods of a world — in a Mythic World playset. Again, Ryan will email once Mythender is out to the donators.
• At $250 (Magnanimous Myth) – as above, and I’ll make a whole Mythic World playset in your name! Once Mythender’s out to the donators, Ryan’ll email you with some questions and start work on the playsets.

When/if it hits $4000, I’ll post more about what I’m doing with the game. I’m pretty damned excited about it, as I’m incorporating new ideas about how to present complicated rules text. But I will start with this: Mythic Norden, the myths of Scandinavia, is just one “Mythic World playset” I have in mind.

So please, check out the bundle and help Kelly out. Let’s End Kelly’s cancer.

- Ryan

I’ve learned a lot making a 150-dice game with a complex, building currency. I’ve learned that I can make a fun game with that, a game people like to play…if I’m the one bringing the materials, teaching how the game works, and running the game. People will give a design some leeway when playing in a game with him or her that they wouldn’t otherwise, and so I ran a few dozen Really Fun Games of Mythender.

I’ll admit that I’ve been afraid of the flaws in the game, enough to where I didn’t really want to write it — I didn’t want to put effort into it. And these flaws aren’t necessarily with whether the design works (though there are a couple points I haven’t yet solved), but whether the design is accessible. Here’s what’s in my Mythender kit.

That’s a slightly old picture. At last count, I have around:

• 50 white dice
• 30 red dice (though, really, I only need 10 for Mythender. The rest are for Don’t Rest Your Head)
• 100 or so black/blue dice
• 50+ metal coins
• 50+ little gems, 10 large gems
• two massive stone dice

Because that’s how the economy works. And at a game that I’m running, it works pretty well. But not well enough. It’s rough to teach. And, frankly, it’s a hell of a burden to place on someone I’m asking to play the game. So, right now, I’m putting it aside and looking at other ways of doing what I want.

What I Want Out Of My Game

What Mythender currently does well, which I need to keep doing: (1) tactile reinforcement of play, whether you’re increasing in power or being hit; (2) constantly presenting the choice of risking your soul for desperately-needed power. The die game did this well, which is why I kept it. As you continued having actions, your die pool grew bigger and bigger, thus you holding a physical sense of power in your hand.

That power was also your hit points, so to speak, so when you were hit, you lost dice — creating the feeling of actually being hit. Over the last few years, people have loved the shit out of that. It’s tapped into the lizard brain and motivated like I haven’t seen in other fighty games.

And the deck is initially stacked against the Mythenders in a fight, since they aren’t on home turf, so the decision to risk your soul to get a little more power is a very real one, one that I see come up in every game. So whatever new mechanic I make will have to do all that that well.

It’ll also have to be easier to handle and easier to teach. Throwing away the old economy (which I might later blog about) for something more immediate is the first step. And there are different ways to handle a sense of growth other than massively large die pools.

Putting Aside Doesn’t Mean Throwing Away

Granted, a learned a lot from playing with this game for the past few years. Those lessons stay with me. And the ideas in the design are worth keeping around, to mine for other games. So while it might emotionally feel like I’ve wasted years, I have got something to show for that.

The Fear

Thing is, there’s no guarantee whatever I’ll make will do what I like out of the old “millions of dice forevar!” mechanic. Or will be worth my time. Or…well, a number of other little fears that gnaw at me enough to stick to the devil I know. It takes balls to say “okay, do over!” and stick to that, especially when you’ve been public for a number of years.

Fear keeps us in decisions we don’t like, because we are unsure of it being better. But in a creative pursuit, that’s bullshit — it’s not like we’re murdering our old idea babies. We can always go back to them. So why do we fear? Because we’re afraid to fail — even though it’s by failing and learning that we become better at our craft.

And yes, I’ll actually explain the old Mythender mechanic later, for those who are only able to follow along in the abstract. One topic at a time. :)

- Ryan

I live in the software world, so we look at tasks & bugs as having different levels of severity. So you’ll see “high”, “medium”, and “low.” (And one “quick”, because it’s a ten-second change.) This isn’t because some can’t be done and some can — it’s because we live in a world of periodic releases and that’s how we conceptualize. It’s a good way to know “What’s important right now” versus “What’ll be important after completing a week of work.”

The list is up as a Google Spreadsheet, as that’s an easy way for me to organize and display the data.

I gave myself six things I could list as high — so I went with the ones that would affect all the text, both current text and frame my thoughts for the text I need to write. Then I gave myself 15 medium priority slots — these are “if I I can get done is this and high, I’ll feel 90% done.” The rest are low — likely to become higher priority as other elements are complete. Some of the lows fall under “things waiting on other tasks.”

In general, I’ll do the high priority stuff first. However, if I feel the energy for a specific task, then that task gets done at that moment. Still, the priorities help me think and plan. It also helps me explain to myself what’s more immediately important.

Hopefully this gives you some peek into the process, and why revision is not just an overnight thing.

I also recommend for your reading pleasure Robin Law’s post a few weeks ago on “What Happens In Playtest Feedback Does Not Stay In Playtest Feedback”.

- Ryan

Mario Mario

Stranded Craftsman of Rage

History: Stranded / Heart: Craftsman / Fate: Myth of Rage[1]

I won’t bother with answering questions, because we all know Mario. The point of the questions is to get to know your character enough to make him or her.

Weapons

My mastery of plumbing…is my Weapon. (Intrinsic, Level-quaking)

Mysterious Plants…are my Weapon. (Relic, Bowser-slaying)

My brother Luigi…is my Weapon. (Companion, Bowser-slaying)

Heart’s Reminder

A strange, ever-repeating music…happens around me.

Forms

Mortal form: I appear as…a simple man in a blue shirt & red overalls.

Paragon form: I appear as…a man grown twice is size.

Supernatural form: I appear as…a man in a red shirt and white overalls, with an aura of fire around his hands.

Godly form: I appear as…an incarnation of flashing light shaped as the man he once appeared as.

Enjoy. (And yeah, I’m skipping the non-narrative parts, Bonds, etc., because I’m not making him to play. :)

- Ryan

[1] It’s almost like I just leaked an idea here.

Let’s turn my lunch hour into story hour, shall we?[1]

I did a playtest of Mythender at GenCon 2008 with Fred, Rob, and company. Two very useful bits of feedback came from that, one shining and one brutal:

• Fred proved the idea behind the game was solid. He relished ending Cthulhu by using his character’s ability to incite love in the hears of others. He loved Cthulhu to death. Think How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Now make it about deicide. Yeah, that was hot.
• Rob broke the every loving shit out of my mechanic. (Link to my talking about it in detail over two years ago.) And that’s what we’re going to look at today.

I mention Fred’s bit not only to say “look at my game, isn’t it the coolest idea evar?”[1] but to also say that if I didn’t have that counter-weight to Rob’s contribution, I would probably have been a bit crushed as a neophyte designer. Which would have been a shame, since Rob was doing that out of love.

The old Mythender system had you come up with four traits[3] about how you go around killing gods. You rated them from 2 to 4, or something like that. So you might have:

• My hatred of the past [2]
• Bloodtooth, the sword I forged from the first giant I slaughtered [3]
• My spectral warhorse, made from the souls of all warhorses slain in battle. [3]
• The song of Thunder, whose melody deafens gods [4]

(I’m intentionally using the new form of Weapons naming over the old trait ones, in case those who played earlier versions are wondering.)

The die mechanic remains the same as it’s always been: you roll X number of Storm dice and however many Thunder dice you have; successes (2-4) on Storm dice give you more Thunder dice, and successes on Thunder dice give you Lightning tokens that you use to inflict vicious wounds. The X originally came from the stat ranking.

My ingenious idea was “dude, I want to make people interested in using their worst stats alongside their best.” So every time you used a stat, you checked next to it. Once you checked them all, you erased those checkmarks and I gave you some currency you used to do more awesome shit mechanically (get extra dice, increase gains, etc.)

Because I presented the idea with that sort of wording to my home playtest group, they played along. They didn’t try to break that intent, to see what would happen.

Along Came Rob…

If Rob was a cruder man, I would say he fucked that intent in its goat-ass. But Rob’s a gentleman, so, uh, he gave it a stern talking to about its harlotry? (Yeah, I got nothin’)

Rob always used his higest trait. And he creamed the fuck out of my system by doing so. He didn’t care about the build-up reward. He wanted the most dice he could have at a given moment, regardless of future gains.

And he was doing better than the other players at gaining stuff to end Cthulhu.

(He also broke another rule he said sucked, where he couldn’t give his gains away. As in, he said “No, that rule’s lame” and handed players some of the mountain of dice he gained right in front of me. I was too shocked to protest. Later, I took that feedback to heart, but not in the way he did it. I owe us all talk about addition-based[4] design as a means of extending rulesets for special options, rather than cluttering a base set with all sorts of things you could do.)

I went home, glad there was a cool story told with my game but also shaken. I spent months avoiding working on Mythender, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit the game didn’t work.

Then I finally sucked it up and redesigned traits…which became Weapons. And I’m far, far happier with the result.

The lesson here that I learned from Rob, and that Jeremy learned from me:

Your genre-reinforcing mechanics don’t mean shit if they aren’t fun for the players.

Word is bond.

- Ryan

[1] A bit of bloggy advice: I’ve started taking to writing my blog posts the night before, and then just quickly reviewing them the next day before manually posting.

[2] Which is the game designer version of whipping out your johnson like it was a fucking winning lottery ticket. Or something.

[3] And I have a blog post brewing in my mind about how toxic that word is in RPGs today, in that it is a detriment to the design process. Also, four is too many, another blog post perhaps.

[4] Is that the term for the opposite of exception-based design?

I anticipate that next week I’ll have the full character creation stuff up, and I’ll be doing a request for comments on that. It won’t be an edited text (though it will have been revised several times), and it’s laid out in Word[1], but it’ll be a proof of concept.

The Warrior & Crusader Hearts (Click to Enlarge)

What’s a Heart?

Creating a Mythender starts with two choices: choosing a Heart and choosing a History. A Heart is the sort of Mythender you are, and a History is the mortal you were. “Heart” refers to what all Mythenders have, a Mythic Heart that pumps the lifeblood of Norden, Mythic Power, into them. The Heart is a horrible bastard of a thing, granting both near-invincibility but also damnation.

Both choices come with three questions and impact further decisions on character creation. There are six of each (and sharp folks can figure out how to make their own, I’m sure).

Here’s a wacky idea

Given that I’m publishing this through Evil Hat, and all books in Evil Hat have the brick & mortar PDF guarantee, I can assume that the book will be printable by most of the people buying it. So why not have the character creation chapter streamlined and *gasp* both instruction and worksheet?

What I thought I was making when I sat down the other day to start this were handouts. Then I realized I was writing and laying out a chapter. I’ve watched 30 people make characters with the current rules, enough to see that some people need more advice and guidance than others. So advice & guidance are going to be at the end of the chapter, in order to achieve two things: (1) get out of the way of people who don’t need it; (2) give space for the group to help each other rather than reliance on the immediate text.

Finally, and I might be talked out of this, but it’s been in my head for over a year: when Mythender’s done, I’ll release the character creation chapter for free. Free + printable + designed to be filled out and flow with the process = more people able to make characters for a game. And what’s not to like about that?

Again, this is all rough, but I figured folks would like an update.

Thanks!

- Ryan

P.S. Little things about what you see here won’t survive the next round. I’ve already got better ideas (thanks to talking with friends looking at the post) on how and what to present. But the overall I think is solid.

[1] And this is just self-layout to fit on letter-sized paper landscape. It’ll have a professionally-done layout for real real. :D

So you should know how to write the character creation chapter, right? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You’d think so, but suddenly you’re overwhelmed by all the times people have had problems, and as you’re writing a procedure you’ve outlined, you’re constantly doing dumb crap like writing sidebars of advice and getting distracted and feeling like you’re making little progress. And then you feel really dumb, because you can explain these ideas really, really well…vocally.

See, I’m an orator[1]. Podcasting is natural to me. Being mouthy at Barcon is natural to me. And a friend recently helped me understand why: in those moments, I have a specific audience. When I’m writing, I’m, to borrow a phrase from the redoubtable Chuck Wendig, painting with shotguns. And that’s fucking my process all manner of up.

I have come up with an experiment to help me, and people like me, get through this roadblock. It’s about writing a letter that will teach them how to do something. This trick is mainly for procedural texts, but the crafty among you (which I’m going to charitably assume is all of you) will stumble across other uses of this trick, I’m sure.

Writing a Letter to Two Friends

In this exercise, you’re going to pick a single piece of your game you’re struggling with, and two people whose intellect you respect and who come from different backgrounds. And you’re going to write one letter addressed to both of them. This is not just some hypothetical exercise. You are going to write a letter to two people and email it to them.

Pick friends who are:

• People whose intellect you respect. That way you aren’t second-guessing your audience and what they know or can easily figure out. You have time in the future to fill in “I’m going to second-guess you” text, if you absolutely have to.[2]
• People who come from different backgrounds. This will mean their assumptions will be a bit mismatched, so you’ll have to over-explain yourself just a little. And a little goes a long way, because — and here’s the rub — if you only write it to one person, you’re going to assume what they’re assuming. That’s like playing a game of Telephone with your draft. Avoid that.
• People who will take the time to give you feedback. Unless you’re the sort of self-deprecating sadsack that assumes your book won’t be read, the point of writing a book or game is to communicate ideas with people. So test if your communication is any good.
• People who know how to give feedback & critiques. Not everyone knows how to do this. I recall in high school showing people my poetry[3], and most people would say “that’s cool” or whatever. You know the people in your life who will give you good feedback and know how either to not be a cockbite about it or how to be the right cockbite about it.

If you can’t find people with all four, pick three out of four of those ideals. Whatever it takes.

Living this Exercise: Mythender

Let’s take that “hypothetical” from earlier. I’m struggling with Mythender’s character creation, because there are parts that are difficult. And I’ve designed a lot of small influencing bits around them to make them easier. Now the trick is to codifying that into text. Which is fuck-all hard for me, for some reason I don’t understand. Probably the fact that there’s all this built-up expectation and I’m the only one who knows all the pieces, so I can’t rely on other people to help me riff-write.

So I’m writing the character creation chapter. I’m picking two friends or this exercise: Josh Roby and my friend Lily.

• Why Josh? If you have to ask that, you are in a cave. Man designed Smallville, the greatest game that should have been on MTV Geeks Top 10 RPGs of 2010 list. He’s a frequent cohort of mine (and working together on a new project we’re calling Vicious Crucible, and we can critique each other.
• Why Lily? She has a different background — she’s a Mage: the Ascension LARP Storyteller, runs and plays games like Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and Rogue Trader. She’s starting to play the “dirty hippie games” like Don’t Rest Your Head (and recently talked about it on Hell Yeah, Gamemasters!) And, oh, this is important: she’s excited about Mythender. So, hey, awesome.

Now, you might be wondering why these two and not other people. Read on, friends. Read on.

Oh, and so you know, I’m on day fucking three of writing this letter, partly because it’s difficult, partly because I have like a thousand other things I have to do, and no one is paying me right now to write Mythender. (Sorry Josh & Lily, you’re not getting this until the new year.)

Dos and Don’ts

You will write in your natural voice, as you would speak. It doesn’t matter if the end product will have a different voice. That’s for a future draft. Get this letter done by writing as you’d talk. Trying to make it in another voice is one path of fucking up. A short example from the letter I’m working on:

Overview of Making a Mythender

This should take, like half a hour, 40 minutes.

Don’t get hung up on uneven descriptions. If you have a list of stuff, and one item takes three sentences to describe, one takes just one, and a third is “this should be obvious” that’s okay. Obsessing at this point is toxic to the process. This is not your final text. Another example:

A Mythender is:

…A walking slayer of gods. He is walking destruction He leaves in his wake the broken bodies and spirits of Norden’s nightmares.

…A force of nature. He is a living blizzard of chaos and doom.

…An incarnation of independence. No one owns or is master over a Mythender. The only equals a Mythender knows is another of his kind, and even then no Mythender is more powerful than another. They go where they choose, they do what they will for reasons all their own.

…A cursed soul. Mythenders are damned by Fate to become they thing they hate most: a monster, a myth. Either this or death await, and there is no third option, no matter how much one might hope.

…A lonely mortal, still capable of feeling. Mythender seem inhuman from the outside, but they still feel as mortals do. And if they ever lose that ability to feel, they will fall and become a myth. Mythenders have feeling. They have empathy. They have everything to lose.

My writer instinct tells me that “force of nature” looks wrong. But that’s to fix later. And “lonely mortal” is probably too long. Whatever. I’ll fix later, when I know what actually needs fixing.

If you have a laundry list of configurations, like Feats in D&D, list just a few. And list them when that decision will be made, even if you later intend to put that in another chapter for reference. I don’t have an example of this yet, as I’m still working on my letter.

Don’t get hung up on imperfect language. If you don’t have a good term for a concept, fuck up aggressively and call it out. Example:

First Choices: Am & Was

To start making a Mythender, you start with two choices. On the character sheet that needs to be totally reworked, you’d see “I am a ________” and “I was a _______” You can choose these in either order. [I don't have a good name for this, so I'm calling them Am and Was for now.]

It turns out that two hours after writing this, I actually came up with terms I liked. I had old terms, “Archetype” and “Identity,” which sucked. Meaningless terms just to have terms. In writing this last time, it was natural to call one History and the other Heart — for reasons I won’t get into. Still, the lesson holds. I was able to move on by just writing a shitty name and flagging it.

If you have decisions that require more mastery than you can reasonably devote space to in the email (and if it takes more the 500 words to frontload an idea, it’s too much for this exercise), give a short, imperfect version and call that out. In Mythender, your Weapons have some mechanic fiddly bits. But instead of going into that, I wrote:

Second: Coming up with your three Weapons

Weapons are the things you use in battle to completely annihilate the forces of Norden. You aren’t just killing, you’re utterly destroying and unmaking. Because of the power behind these Weapons, they’re all things of meaning and import to your Mythender. They can be skills, raw emotions, special artifacts or relic, or allies and companions.

Weapons come in three types: Intrinsic, Relic and Companion. Intrinsic Weapons are skills, talents, emotions, beliefs — anything that’s a strength of him from within. Relics are items of power that have personal meaning to your Mythender — not just any sword, but your father’s sword, or the sword of the one who killed your village, or the sword from your first Ending. Companions are those who travel with you, be they mortal, animal, or even mythic.

When writing out your Weapon, write it out as if you were filling in the phrase “_____________ is my Weapon.” You’ll see that the character sheet as “…is my Weapon” on each Weapon slot. Often they’re start with “My…” or “The…” and that’s okay.

Restrict yourself to only one level of headings. Some of you, if you’re like me, are practically felicitating whoever invented to concept of sub-headers. Don’t do that here. One level of header — maybe a second, but that second is only for individual choices in a step, not advice or whatever. I don’t have a good example that doesn’t just involve pasting the entire email, which is 2300 words so far, and I’m expecting it to hit around 6000-7000.

What You Do When You’re Done Writing

First of all, sit on the letter for at least one day. 24 hours, not just overnight. Close it, don’t just leave it open to tinker with. Ignoring this step means you hate freedom and puppies.

Then open it up and read it aloud. Aloud. Where your mouth is doing the noise-making thing that you’re good at (assuming, again, that you’re a strong orator like me). If you can, read it to someone — but not one of the two people you wrote it to. Use that to catch problems in your email — any time you have a drop in confidence while you’re speaking, flag that bit of the text and come back to it once you’re done with this part of the exercise.

After that, you’re going to edit.[4] You’re going to go through your text and find where you flubbed.

When you’re done, you’re emailing this to your two friends. I recommend it as two different emails rather than one, that way if they reply to you, they aren’t also replying to the other person, thus possibly annoying them or contaminating them as an experiment vector with more data than you intended to send.

Ask them to record themselves reading and trying your text. Ask for specific feedback.

Then rewrite the letter, incorporating the feedback, for two more people & repeat.

Congrats. You have a “zeroth draft” that likely works. Now you can go through the work of turning that into the text you want in your book. Fuckton easier to rewrite that text than one in a vacuum, yeah?

- Ryan

[1] This is not uncommon in our hobby. I think some of brilliant folks are better orators than writers. Listen to John Wick explain Houses of the Blooded. Then read it. It’s not that John’s a shitty writer (though I know some will argue that he is — take that argument to RPG.net please!), but that he’s such a goddamned great orator that his writing looks lessened in comparison.

[2] Or you could, you know, assume your readers have a higher base intelligence than that. Something I often remark when I’m editing: “Assume your reader is smart enough to get this.” (Or when I’m feisty and with the right author, “Do you seriously think I’m a fucking moron?”)

[3] Yeah, I was that fuck. But I won some award and got a standing ovation in my senior year of high school, so hey, it worked for me. And, honestly, the reason you’re reading this now is because of my high school creative writing teacher fostering me as a writer. I owe you a debt I can never repay, Ms. Starr-Joyal.

[4] As a point of note, it’s a pet peeve of mine that we call doing your own editing “editing.” It’s really “rewriting.” But that’s because too many cockbites thing self-editing is good enough to have a story or book considered edited. And that makes baby pandas cry.

OgreCave GNU – NeonCon ’10 (Ryan Macklin/Mythender)

Allan Sugarbaker and I talk about Mythender, which I ran for him and some other fine folks at NeonCon. We talk for around fifteen minutes about the game and my plans for it.

This Just In From NeonCon: Ryan Macklin and Josh Roby’s Vicious Crucible

Josh Roby & I are working on a new game, Vicious Crucible. We had Sean Nittner try it out, and talked about it on his show for around 25 minutes.

Narrative Control – Episode 55 – Player Trust

Another Nittner-Macklin combo, Sean & I talk about player trust in games. His show notes are extensive, so you’ll know if you want to listen by reading them. :) This episode is 33 minutes long.

All told, that’s barely more than an hour of me mouthing off. Some of you take longer to drive to work. So, hey, enjoy.

- Ryan

So, I thought I would share with you the intro text to Mythender. Thank you to the couple dozen people who helped me workshop this, and my editor, Amanda Valentine, for being totally awesome. (I’m sure it’ll continue getting tweaked in further revisions, but not much more so.) Hopefully this gives you a taste of the thing I’ve devoted myself to for some time now. I’m still working on the text, and have a number of people slated to playtest the game from the text alone (in addition to the 70 people that have playtested it at home and cons via me running it).

Maybe tomorrow or later this week I’ll post about my philosophy of game text openers. But for now, I hope you enjoy.

Mythender – Epic Metal Opera

Far north, there is a place of legend, a land of gods and monsters. It is the home of cruelty and oppression, a domain of ice and peril. It takes its strength from the worship its gods demand of mortals, from the terror its monsters inspire in them. With the full force of Eternal Winter, it crushes any who oppose its gods and monsters. To free all people from this fate, these gods must die. This is Mythic Norden, and you are the living weapon that will strike true into the heart of Winter.

Mythender is a game about the handful of mortals who steal power from this land and wage a war against it. This is an epic metal opera, filled with raging battle anthems and reflective power ballads. There will be passion and blood, consequence and tears.

As a Mythender, you are a titan among men—the might of myth, bound within mortal flesh. Your rage boils rivers, sunders mountains, and brings the heavens crashing down upon the earth. The land quakes with each step you take. You rip out the still-beating hearts from the gods and destroy the mythic world. You are the walking incarnation of wrath, of death, of change.

Grand battles will scar the land. Screams will echo like thunder across the world. Rivers will run red with the blood of the fallen. Trolls, giants, witches, warriors long dead, valkyrie, and even Odin and his kin will all taste your blade and your hate. Only the gods themselves are peers to you, and you fill them with an alien sensation: fear.

Even that is not the limit of your power. With each god that you End, you deal another mighty blow against the land of myth itself. You carve away pieces of it and make room for mortals to live without fear of the night and cold. As you choke the life from a god, you rip the power away from Norden to reshape this newly mortal world with your own desires. You can End anything you wish—hunger, despair, illness, peace, love, death—striking it from the world and mortal memory.

Your power rivals that of the gods. But while many would aspire to apotheosis, for you it’s a fate worse than death. The moment you let it go to your head, the moment you give in to hubris, you become those you fight.

Your power—ripped bloody from the beating heart of Myth itself—will make you into the very thing you must destroy. A god. A champion of Norden. A myth.

That is your Fate, Mythender.

The only way to fight against this corruption is to bond with Norden’s people, the innocent victims of this terrifying world. You must struggle to gain their sympathy. But this will be your greatest challenge. You may be able to snap Thor’s neck, but no one will sit at your dinner table. They can no more relate to you than they can to a storm or the sea. As they fear the gods they rarely see, they fear you more. This is the curse of the power you steal from Norden. It is easier to rip away Fenris’ jaw than to put a smile on a child’s face.

But if that is the price of such power, so be it. You will not go quietly into that good night, Fate be damned! You will make Norden pay a dear price before it claims you. And when you fall, you know your comrades will continue ceaselessly with this quest. You trust that, when the time comes, they will End you. For you are the harbingers of destruction, the cleansing fire, the Spring that melts away Winter’s frost. You are a Mythender.

- Ryan

Consider this post a “Dear self, here’s a reminder how to not fuck up.” Perhaps it will also be of use to some of y’all.

A good character creation text should consider a number of things (in no special order):

1. Inspire the players with thoughts of characters
2. Instruct players on how to make a character
3. Be usable as a reference while in the middle of the process
4. Help the GM/facilitator with his role in character creation

So, that said, and this is freakin’ key: I don’t have to get all of these right in the first draft. That’s been one source of paralysis lately, though now that I’ve realized that I’ve been able to move on.

Let’s specifically talk about the first bit, though, the “inspire” point. That is freakin’ key, more so the more specific your setting or your system is…like, say, a game where you’re a walking, talking force of nature that is still trying to remain human. If you don’t frontload with some ways of inspiring character, people may either have a hard time locking on to an idea or end up being inspired by something external to the game, thus making a character concept that doesn’t really work with your conceit. (A few dozen playtests of Mythender end up strongly corroborating this idea for me.)

Text I had last year said:

Question 1: What is your Heroic Concept?

Heroic Concepts take the form of:

[Adjective] [Noun]…[Prepositional Phrase]

These quickly generate ideas that, with the other four questions, kick-start ideas for the character. Examples:

• Determined Baroness…with a dying people
• Battle-scarred Knight…in need of a cause
• Scorned Scion…with a need to prove himself
• Wrathful Sea Captain…under pressure from his love

Pro tip: “Prepositional Phrase” is a good time to introduce a twist to the character concept, like “Villainous Prince…with a broken heart.” Alternatively, if you have a killer concept that doesn’t fit in that format, go with your concept and forget the format.

The flaw: wasn’t inspirational enough. Yes, it helped form an idea into something usable at the table, but did shit for coming up with that idea. So, I’ve thrown out this rubric for a new scheme. Character creation starts by picking two things: an Archetype and an Identity. Each thing is a general idea with some focusing questions, and only from there do we get into further character stuff. Here’s a (rather unedited) taste:

Archetypes

Mythenders have many different ways of achieving theirs goals, but each prefers a particular way of dealing with Mythic Norden. We call these Archetypes. Here are the six most seen in Mythenders:

Warrior

These Mythenders go by many names: swordsman, knight, master of arms, duelist, barbarian, even the common “warrior.” No matter the name, these men and women share certain traits—they all share a willingness (though not always the desire) to battle. They all prize skill over mere steel. Of all Mythender, it is the warrior that truly understands that they are the weapon, no what is in their hands.

• Why did you become a warrior?
• What skill do you value the most?

Crusader

Some crusaders champion a god. Others a king, a love, an ideal. But as much as crusaders struggle against one another, they have one thing in common: they do not wield sword or axe. They wield belief. Their passions are as sharp as any blade, strike as true as any arrow. No Mythender is more willing to accept his fate of falling than the crusader. If death or the loss of his soul is the price to pay for his ideal, so be it.

• What happened to turn you into a crusader?
• What do you believe in so strongly?

[Four more Archetypes are listed]

Identities

Fate takes mortals from all walks of life and turns them into Mythenders. There is no single background, single Identity, that they share. Still, some are more common than others.

Child

Of those chosen by fate, one could argue that the children who become Mythenders are the most tragic. With their innocence sundered, they make for fierce fighters—untempered by age or wisdom. But it takes more than a simple tragedy to turn a boy or girl into such a being. Seeing…no, enduring…the true cruelty of man, of armies, of nature, of Mythic Norden, that is how a child Mythender is made.

• What cruelties have you endured?
• What fuels your limitless rage?

Lost

Everyone loses something they care dearly about. Some lose much, much more than others. Some are unable to move on. And a very few are shown by fate how they can get back what they’ve lost. Those who’ve lost and become Mythenders have lost something so dear, so personal. They’ve lost in a way that’s broken them, that has them killing gods and risking their very souls to recover. The reason they do this to themselves goes beyond lost, though. They have grief and they have guilt, two forces as powerful as Norden itself.

• What did you lose?
• Why didn’t you prevent this loss?
• How has losing this changed you?

[Four more Identities are listed]

The bit of testing with this has told me that this is how I should be doing character creation, at least for this game: a number of choices that constrain (to focus characters to what a Mythender is, as it’s not just any fantasy hero), to inspire (as reading one of these count help spark a character idea), and to guide (with the questions that each section has to further character creation, Evil Hat-style). Of course, this is just one piece–albeit an important piece–of character creation, but it’s the one that’s taken me two years to finally understand.

Anyway, that’s it for now. We’ll see if I’m onto something or if I’m totally off my ass.

- Ryan

Footnote: In a bit of parallel thought, some people talk about character concept vs. creation on a Story-Games post.

Specifically, I’m going tell you about the two Fates the all Mythenders know await them: The Mortal Fate to die, and the Mythic Fate to become corrupted and twisted into mythic godhood.

In our last game, they fought a particularly difficult being, a dead Valkyrie who was being compelled by another to poison the spring with her eternally-flowing blood. That ended up being the hardest fight I’ve even run, where they really thought that the three of them were going to fail.

They forgot, for a moment, that they were playing Mythenders. Failure can happen, but only if they consider the price of success too dear — the price of progressing their Fate.

Mike’s character almost paid that price. He kept tapping into his mythic nature and progressing his Mythic Fate, as seen on his sheet. Along with that, he was hit hard in one round that caused him to lose all his Thunder dice, thus requiring him to choose between staying out of the rest of the fight, or coming back in by checking off one of the Mortal Fate boxes.

He did, and at the end of the labor they were victorious. But Rashid al-Jabbar was in danger both of dying and of becoming a Myth — both fates that await every Mythender loomed over him.

Here’s where we get to why Mythender’s are so powerful — when they lose all of their Thunder dice, they are merely taken out of the fight. They aren’t dead. Of course, they cannot partake in the spoils after their fellow Mythenders are victorious, or do anything to help keep their fellows from failing, but that’s the price of being out. Being safe. Being alive.

Or, you could put your own life on the line, your Mortal Fate to Die, and come back into the fight with more dice. You don’t cheat death and leave the fight; you embrace the wound that would kill lesser men and continue fighting.  The most important thing is that we do not know if you’ll die until the end of the labor. We do not know if that mortal wound will be the one that kills you, not until you have had a chance to be victorious one more time.

Similarly, each Mythender can tap into their own mythic nature and draw power to conquer their adversaries. Each time they do, they push themselves closer and closer to revealing what they’re destined to become, their Mantle of Power. And each time, they risk being pushed closer to their Mythic Fate, to become the very thing they’re ending, to be ended by their friends. But that is such a small price to pay for incredible power in the moment — and like the Mortal Fate, it is something that a Mythender only succumbs to at the end of a fight.

Mike’s character had to deal with both, and Fate is cruel. He tossed a single die, hoping it was low. When you check your fate, that’s what you do — look at the lowest number checked, and hope you roll lower than that. There is no appeal to the die with Mythic Fate, and a very costly appeal with Mortal Fate.

The die rolled 3. The only kindness a Mythender facing down both Fates has when rolling is that he needn’t declare which Fate he’s rolling for until after the die is cast — in the end, facing utter annihilation or corruption, a Mythender still has some pull over Fate. Mike chose for that to be the die for his Mythic Fate, thus avoiding that for a time.

The die was rolled again, for his Mortal Fate. It landed 6. Rashid al-Jabbar was to sentenced to die.

Mike would refuse that. He spent his last remaining Stolen Power — the very power a Mythender can use to achieve their Impossible Drive, the very power that Rashid al-Jabbar would need to create a world where all worshipped Allah — to reroll his Mortal Fate die. It landed 2. Rashid al-Jabbar cheated Fate, at a dear price.

And now Rashid, after choking the unlife from this poisonous Valkyrie, knows that his chances of creating the world he wills is that much more unlikely. And now Rashid, after spending the last of his stolen power, knows what it means to have the Fates hovering over him, ready to feast.

He will have to spend a long time being mortal, to come back from the precipice, to undo the progression of his Mythic Fate. Rashid, who no longer appears remotely mortal, having activated his Monstrous Mantle of Power, must spend time among them to calm his mythic side.

That will be a trial. But as hard as that is, he must also face one more issue: there is no power in Heaven or on Earth that can undo the progression of his Mortal Fate. He chose to come back into the fight. He chose to progress his Mortal Fate. He cannot unchoose what he has chosen.

Today was not the end of the story of Rashid al-Jabbar, but I guarantee you, he is forever changed by this day. If he is wise, he will put down the scimitar, find a woman, raise a family, and let his Mortal Fate claim him in old age.

But he is a Mythender. So few ever take up this simple wisdom.

Ryan had to stop me from giving him money. And money is tight and he hasn’t even written the game yet!!!

In Mythender you play the equivalent of a 30th level D&D character killing myths and gods before you are ended or fall to a fate worse than death… become a god yourself to be hunted by your fellow Mythenders.

Imagine stabbing Odin in his good eye and telling him how much of a little punk he his.

I played a pirate who was drowned by her own crew after she was sacrificed to the god of the ocean in hope they would reach shore.

Some games have beliefs or goals. In Mythender you have impossible drives. Yup, impossible. I swore to rid the earth of all oceans. Yup.

My weapons? I can literally take the water from you.

I’ve enslaved my former crew who now drag my ship around by land since I refuse to sail again.

And as I grow in myth I become less mortal. My tell tale was that there is an anchor embedded inside me connected to a chain dragging across the land infinitely back to the exact location where I drowned in the middle of the ocean.

My favorite part was when I wanted to become more mortal. I told a farmer who just lost his family that he was my father now and to tell me the bedtime stories he used to tell his children… the ones that just drowned due to the serpent. Wow. WTF!

When the GM says no to you… about anything… they write it down and give it a number. You can then attack it till the no becomes a yes.

Ryan… write the game. Now… do it now!

John,

I would say “Dude, I’m working as fast as I can, but I don’t have time right this moment to finish the draft.” I would say that, but that’s effectively a “no,” and then I would assign some dice to that “no.” Then you would end that. So, I’m just going to cut to the chase and accept that I’m writing this draft even though I have half a dozen other things going on. :)

It’s my hope that I’ll have an initial rough draft by GenCon.

Yeah, I just publicly cited a date. Watch me totally blow past it.

As a little treat, let me post up John’s character:

Name: The Uncreated
Heroic Concept: Drowned pirate with enslaved undead crew
Origin: Mortal Europe (unspecified beyond that)
How You Became a Mythender: I drowned after my pirate crew sacrificed me
Character Reference: The girl from The Ring
Impossible Drive: Rid the earth of all oceans

Weapons

• I can take the water from you [Intrinsic, Mythic 1]
• The scum that drowned me [Companion]
• I’ve drowned…what the hell are you going to do? [Intrinsic]
• My old cannon is my pistol [Relic]

Mantle of Power

• Atmospheric Effect: It’s hard to breath around me
• Paragon Mantle: Single chain drags behind me to infinity
• Supernatural Mantle: Chains springing from me to all the oceans
• Monstrous Mantle: Replace the oceans with my blood

Why the adventure matters to you: The Midgard Serpent has bested me in battle multiple times
(We didn’t do any of the other Relationships, since it’s a con game)

Final Mortal Fate: 6
Final Mythic Fate: n/a

Gifts Gained

• Sureness [+upgrade to reduce cost]
• Grievous Harm

Impositions Gained

• The ocean is barren [5]

I should post up the other three from this game soon, and maybe write it up. I’m too infrequent of a blogger.

- Ryan

I say “for lack of a better term” because it turns out that there are two things I could mean by that (either of which this foe could be at this point), and they’re vastly different in my mind.  The first is a “fallen Mythender” — a mythic being of some sort that was once a Mythender and now fully fallen to the Mythic World.  That’s the first idea.  But should “succumbing to corruption” br the only way you might run across a Mythender as a foe?  After all, based on what I’ve set up, at that point they aren’t even a Mythender anymore, just a myth.

That leads to the second idea — of a “renegade Mythender,” a hero who hasn’t changed or been corrupted, but has shifted his focus away from ending Myth to ending his own kind.  In explaining this idea to Lenny, who has listened to me at length talk about Mythender, I said (paraphrased):

It’s Clint Eastwood’s character from Unforgiven.  A Mythender puts down his Mantle to have a normal family and raise children.  One day, he goes off to trade when a new generation of Mythenders comes in and causes the chaos that Mythenders do, ending the status quo.  In the ensuing carnage, his boy is killed.  He comes back to his home — everything he put his Mantle down for destroyed.  So he takes it up again, this time to end those who would thoughtlessly leave heartbreak in their wake.

We talked about this idea at length (as this is just one form a renegade Mythender could take), and it occured to me how often I go back to Westerns rather than Fantasy to explain Mythender.  I have half-jokingly called this game the “Ryan Macklin takes Ken Hite’s axioms of the Western and applies them to epic, semi-historical fantasy” the RPG.

For those playing at home, Ken’s axioms of the Western are (and I’m going to misquote here, because my copy of Dubious Shards is at home):

Only the gun can keep civilization safe from the barbarians.
Those who take up the gun become barbarians.

And that explains why when I watch over-the-top semi-historical fantasy movies (300, Beowulf), I get a sense that that’s how a Mythender game should look like in the minds of the players, but also how I feel about how “look” isn’t the same as “theme.”  The themes of those movies and of what Mythender has become are pretty damned far off — which I consider this a feature, not a bug.

But to make sure I fully flesh out this feature when writing the text and to communicate it as best as I can, I need to add some more Westerns into my current media diet.  For that, I’m going back to Ken’s “Westerns 101″ list (posted last October), which I recommend to everyone interested in Westerns.  I’ve seen some of these, not all, but I’m going to re-watch those I have seen anyway just to refresh my memory.

Once Mythender is done and out for a bit, I might write an alternate setting for it: The Mythic West.  One that more directly expresses the original paradox of The Gun.  But, that is for later — now is the time for working on the original game itself and not setting hacks.  (But yes, when I do, it might be The Magnificent Seven meets 300.  And yeah, I’m sure that Ken would read that as utterly heretical.  I seem to get that response out of him, from time to time.)

- Ryan

(Click to embiggen)

I recall something that Daniel Solis once said when I talked about Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple last year or so on Master Plan:

“Woah.  This shit just got real.”

That’s how I feel now.  Man alive, I’m going to print this out and post it up, so that everytime I think “man, what should I do?” I can look at it and go “right, Mythender writing.”

Thank you for the inspiration, George.  And for the badassitude.  I will totally run a game involving skeletons & kraken for you should we get a chance to game together.

- Ryan

To focus on the setting: Apparently it’s the Middle Ages, and the Catholic Church is sending it’s agents out to whack pagan gods? How much does “the public” know? And most importantly, what do the Mythenders get for killing myths and legends? What’s the reward?

Yes, it is the Middle Ages – 800 to 1200 is the rough time period of Mythender – but it has nothing to do with the Catholic Church unless a particular character wants it to. The people who journey to the land stronghold of the mythic world, known as Mythic Norden, come from all walks of life – peasants looking for their father’s approval, princes looking to make a kingdom of their own, priests looking to bring the word of God, pagans looking to free their lands from the tyranny of myth. The thing they have in common is that the see something wrong with the mortal world as well, and have such a burning, intense desire to change it that they can tap into the very world of myth as well.

Mythender is very much a “how much of a monster will you become to end the monsters you loathe and change the world” sort of game.

As far as what the “public” knows, the entire game takes place in Mythic Norden. People know that trolls terrorize the land and that gods demand tribute. People live in fear and despair. But they also know about Mythenders and instantly recognize one on sight. Mythenders have too much raw power flowing through them to hide among the masses, or to disguise themselves as common travelers. So, everything is essentially known in the setting – it’s high fantasy in the real world rather than religious conspiracy action.

The reward for killing myths is the power to remake the mortal world. We touch on that quite a bit in the thread, but to sum it up for people reading here: if your burning desire is to make your homeland ever-fertile, or to bring your brothers back from the dead, or even change what it means to be human (such as by removing lust or treachery from the human heart), by killing grand gods and monsters are you given the opportunity to drain the very lifeblood from the mythic world and use that to force your own will on all mortality.

The goal is epic play, and I feel that the only way to truly handle epic play is to have player-defined rewards. People who walk around with the respect and nearly the power of mythic beings do not merely accept quests from anyone, not even a king or pope.

How does combat look? How do you avoid becoming a Legend yourself? How do you keep the game leaping from awesome to epic to over the edge? Does it start out small and human-scale and then balloon from there, or do you jump in right away to fighting the legends?

Combat, or what Mythender calls a “Labor,” is a comic & anime-influenced system that focuses on a single moment in the fight (or argument, or whatever people feel like having a labor over) and assumes that Mythenders (and, frankly, their foes) are always going to succeed in the small scale – if you swing your sword, it hits, you never flub. To fumble I think would hurt selling the experience as “epic.” It would probably be better to post up an example exchange to explain what I mean, but the goal is that it’s essentially a race to beat the other side in the large scale – you can hit the dragon ten times with your sword, or your army, or your inability to feel fear (which are all weapons in Mythender), but the only one that “matters” is the critical hit that send the beast reeling back.

That said, all those small-scale successes build up to being able to buy that large-scale success, and if you can get enough of those before the other side does, you’ll win the Labor. Thus, the model is to “out-succeed” the other side.

Luckily, Mythenders have each other, and can help out by handing each other various currency & use teamwork tactics to beat their foes to the ground.

To keep it from leaping over the edge, well, it does start off pretty hardcore. In one game, weaponized stigmata was able to hurt a sorcerous storm. But, the way the dice work as a pacing system and the way that small & large-scale success is narrated is, I think, a big part of what keeps it from diving off the edge into something that isn’t fun for people. Essentially, you either buy with the currency generated a large-scale success and get to declare how it happens, or you just have a small-scale success and the GM describes the impact.

It doesn’t start out small or human-scale. In my opinion, that’s what other games are for (and I say that honestly – I love D&D 4/e, and don’t want to simply retread that ground). Mythender is focused on epic, god-killing play. But, that isn’t to say that all you do is fight legends. (If you did, you’d probably become a Myth within the first couple sessions.) The scenes you have between labors allow you to recharge your various abilities & regain your mortality, by exploring the situation you’re in with the mortals of the land, discovering other elements of this adventure, and dealing with your dual-nature as a mortal and as someone touched by the mythic world.

And this is to me key to an “epic” game. Only part of that is “dude, I got to stab Odin in his good eye!” To sell the entire experience, you need to show that Mythenders are respected (beloved and feared) and are harbingers of change outside of fighting gods.

What does character creation look like? Is it like Spirit of the Century, where you tie the characters together via past battles? Is it like The Whispering Vault, where you start somewhere, get your marching orders, and go out to do battle?

Neither. It’s in some ways a bit more classic – characters can, to an extent, be made in a vacuum (though it’s usually better to not, in my opinion, for any game). There are three phases overall to it, with the first answering three questions about your character overall, to get a baseline – a high-level concept, a character reference, and an ultimate goal. If everyone’s on board with what they’ve come up with, then you come up with your various Heroic Traits (though we’re looking to rename those here at Mythender HQ, after seeing how received they were at Dreamation and how I’ve explained them), what actions or emotions refresh those traits, and the elements of your mythic nature – your power and how you begin to change from a mortal to a mythic being.

Once you have all that, then the last piece is to come up with why you’re traveling with each of these other characters. You talk with each other to come up with these, be it with camaraderie (“I am traveling with Frederick because he saved my life.”), competitive (“I am traveling with Hakim because I need to convert him.”), or treacherous (“I am traveling with Jean because I think she’s insane and will be the first of us to turn, and I will be the one to end her.”) You could have matching reasons, or you could have completely unrelated reasons for traveling with each other. (“Jean is traveling with me because she has a crush on me.” – Yeah, how’s that for tasty, tasty mismatched action?)

This ends up building the backstory, and it’s assumed in Mythender that the group has been travelling along enough to have built up this sense of unity, but it isn’t just narrative uselessness. When you make one of these the focus of a scene, you can refresh one of your Traits – so it pays to come up with stuff that you together can use and want to reincorporate in your game.

I suppose it would be analogous to doing characters in Spirit of the Century, if you stopped after you made your novel, did up your skills & stunts, and then did the Guest Starring phases only after that.

At that point, then we get into adventure creation. But that’s another post, as this one is wicked long. :)

Thank you for the questions, Carl!  Hopefully, I’ve answered them to your satisfaction.  Let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to follow up on, though I should warn you that some things might be a bit fuzzy, and I’m only now starting to write the full draft.

- Ryan

Howcome they get charged +3, +2, +1 and not +1, +2, +3? The latter would seem to incent the player to hold off for longer when charging. Is that not desirable in this case?

That is, in fact, a fantastic question.

The reason I went the way I did (and, incidently, you’re free to charge in any order) is because I think this presents more choices than the 1-2-3 method.  With that method, you have to check the +1 box of one of your traits on the first turn, so that’s prescribed.  On your next turn, you have the following choices:

• Discharge your +1 box to roll four Storm dice rather than three.
• Charge your +2 box and roll three Storm dice this turn.
• Charge another trait’s +1 box.
• The game-breaking move called “Grandstanding,” which doesn’t affect your charging at all (and can potentially kill you if its too early in the game, should you not have enough dice and roll poorly).

In many ways, there’s really only one option: Charge your +2 box on the same trait.  After all, you can either roll 4 dice right now, 3 next turn, and then 5…or you can check and roll 6 on the following turn.  You get the most bang for your buck that way.  Of course, from there it might have an interesting choice between “Do I check the +3, or do I cash out now?”  Something certainly answered by tempo.

In the current setup, with the diminishing returns, the choice is initially more interesting:  on the second turn, you could:

• Discharge that +3 for 6 Storm dice.
• Charge your +2 box, so you can roll 8 next turn.
• Charge another +3 trait, so you can have two 6-dice turns in a row.
• And, of course, Grandstanding.

Much, much more interesting to start, and with enough little options the game will sing.  But, in thinking about your question, I did have to wonder about the value of the +1 box.  Sure, it’s tempting to go from the +3 box to the +2 box so you have one turn with a lot of dice, but checking the +1 is silly — you might as well charge your other trait or something like that.  So, I revised the +1 box rule — if you charge the +1 box, when you discharge it you also get a sweet, sweet point of Mythic Power.  So, really, it’s: [+3], [+2], [+1/1MP], chargeable in whatever order you desire.

So, thank you Marhault for questioning me on this.  I hope this new idea will pan out.

- Ryan

When I came up with the “stat subsystem” for Mythender, I was reacting the the concept of a “dump stat.”  I liked the idea of quantification & relative competence (and still do), and wanted to avoid a situation akin to Charisma in classic D&D — a place to put your worst stat and ignore it.

So, when I drafted up the stats for Mythender, I wrote down seven words — I can’t recall all of them, but “Guile,” “Fortitude,” “Nimbleness,” and “Prowress” where four of them.  The idea was that you would pick four of these seven essential hoeric qualities, and you would rank them something like 2, 3, 3 & 4 — the number of dice you would roll when you use that stat.  The core system is “dice pool, individual success” style, so rolling more dice is always good.

Now, with nebulous terms like “guile,” any half-creative player could come up with a way that anything they do is “with guile.”  This was intentional in the design.  Mythender is, in some ways, my answer to high-level D&D 3/e — demigods walking the earth should be nigh-limitlessly badass.  But, this means the dump stat problem exists, because anyone creative enough could avoid using the lowest stat (as opposed to games that are more rigid in their quantification, and can present problems to characters that require the use of said stat).

My “brilliant” solution: require the use of every stat for a bennie.  You would check off when you used a stat, and when you used them all you got Mythic Power — the powerful supercharge currency in the game that fuels special, rule-breaking abilities.  (Which is to say, yes, they’re the feat fuel of the game.)  I thought this was elegant and inspired and awesome.  I was eager to show it off.

I explained this idea to my game group, and they found it intriguing.  So, in our first few playtests of Mythender, back when the stats were set terms, it seemed to work (if a little flat).  I later switched to a “you come up with your own stat” method that I loved with I first discovered Unknown Armies (and seen in many indie games), to make it more interesting to the players.  And we played this way for months.

Did you know that sometimes your playtesters can be too nice to you?  Sometimes they’ll play along with your pet idea because they’re trying to test it out mechanically rather than play as they might truly do?  Yeah, sometimes your playtesters may accidentally lead you astray, if you let them and give them reason to.

There was this issue with human nature: given two options, you’ll want to pick the better one.  So, do you roll your best stat or your worst with facing down a dragon?  I was trying to encourage using everything to be awesome and breadth, but critical situations caused players to question the “I’ll get a bennie later if I totally hose myself now, but I might die if I don’t do well enough now” mechanic that I apparently devised.  Rob Donoghue brought this to head at GenCon, when he completely ignored the bennie element and completely destroyed the system in doing so.

I have to thank him so very, very much for that.  That was the kick in the ass that I needed, to see what someone would really do with the mechanic and how it didn’t work.

So, I came up with others ideas within the same vein, because I had spent so long with this “you have stats and they have numbers” idea that I couldn’t really see a way out.  Then recently, and I can’t remember how I got such inspired, I found a way to divorce stat & number, which keeping numbers which were important to the “so, how many dice do I roll right now?” element of the design.

This meant going back to the drawing board and trying something new, which I was scared of because Mythender was something people were looking forward to, and at the time I couldn’t mentally handle another huge delay.  I mean, yes, if the game’s no good it needs to go back to formula before publication, and intellectually I understood this, but emotionally I was frustrated as all hell and avoided the drawing board after Rob’s revelation for months.

“Sometimes, you just have to suck it up and press on,” I had to remind myself.  I seem to be in need of reminding myself of that a lot.

The concept I have is that all Mythender have a single, base rating, their Storm stat.  It defaults to 3, but there are reasons and times when it’ll go up or down.  (Why “Storm” is something you’ll have to wait for — the central mechanic of the game is a complicated dice exchange.)

A Mythender has (currently) four stats, in the “you describe it yourself with some guidance from the text” style.  Instead of separate numbers, each stat has three boxes: +3, +2 & +1.

To start off an encounter, each box is clear.  On a roll, a Mythender (and I should preface with: this is also how it works for Myths, so the system is finally more unified and non-crap for the GM) either “charges” or “discharges” (for lack of a better term) a trait.  If they charge, they put a slash through one of the boxes on that trait and just roll their base Storm dice along with their Thunder dice.  If they discharge, they put a cross slash through the charged boxes on a trait and roll Storm + charged box bonuses, again along with their Thunder dice.  Once a box is discharged, it’s used for the encounter.

Let’s show this visually.  Say you have the trait “Ancestral lance.”

Ancestral Lance [+3] [+2] [+1]

On your first turn, you charge Ancestral Lance, talking about how you bring it to bear on the valkyres charging.  And you roll your base 3 Storm dice.

Ancestral Lance [+3] [+2] [+1]

Now, on your second turn, you could choose to discharge it for a +3 bonus to Storm, totalling 6.  Or you could charge the +2 box, so you can get +5 next turn.  We’ll say that you’re not feeling the pressure at the moment, so you’ll charge.  (Yes, you could also use another stat, but let’s not overcomplicate this for the explanation.)  That means rolling another 3 Storm dice only.

Ancestral Lance [+3] [+2] [+1]

It’s your turn turn, you just got hit hard.  Your Thunder pool is almost depleted (seriously, there are maybe 40 people out there who have any idea what I’m talking about at this point — I should talk about Storm, Thunder & Lightning later).  It’s time to discharge your Ancestral Lance.  That’s +5 on top of your 3, for 8 Storm.

Ancestral Lance [+3]  [+2] [+1]

And those boxes are done and unusable for the rest of the encounter.  Since I haven’t yet had a battle that’s taken longer than 8 turns (and I’ve had a lot of battles), having two open traits should be no problem.

Now, I want a sense of breadth in Mythender, but also fiery focus.  So the solution I came up with (that is yet untested) is that you get to use two traits for free in an encounter, but if you want to open up your third or fourth, it’ll cost Mythic Power.  Playtesting will see if that works.

Luckily, my playtesters and I have learned how to better playtests — when to play around with my half-baked ideas and when to punch them in the moneymaker.

- Ryan

Edit: To answer Fred Hicks’ Twitter comment on “Can I charge the [+2] on my Ancestral Lance without having charged my [+3] yet? I want the answer to be yes.”  Yes, Fred, you totally can. An intentional part of the design.