Archives: Old Posts

Beardcrumbs – Chernobyl In Grey Part 3

One last foray into the Chernobyl game- just to round it off and talk about what we actually did.

 

Characters:

I had four players. Three of them played established characters, one a newbie- largely so that I could explain the setting to everyone through his experience. They each had eastern European names, since the game was set in the Ukraine. Further to that, they had nicknames. This is an element in Sleepwalkers related to one’s true name (which must remain secret).

As the setting stands, a character uses a nickname in the Fringe so that their birth name is secret. This drives people further into the Fringe as a second life develops and they must distance themselves from their normal lives. Part of me wants to change it- traditionally a magical ‘true name’ is not ones birth name but a symbolic one that better reflects their soul. I may have it so that the nickname begins to become the true name over time… but for now, it doesn’t matter. It was actually convenient that Sleepwalkers have nicknames- so do Stalkers.

The characters therefore were:

Synch (a Stray, being a person brought back to life by a bond with a cat)

Thorn (a Shifter, born with abilities to travel the Fringe)

Bird (same again and also a military engineer type)

Writer (the newbie, a Shepherd, gifted to converse with Spirits)

While the NPCs were:

Sunny (a Spirit who has lived in the area a long time and acts as a guide)

Eagle (the leader of the Gatekeepers)

Snake (the leader of the Nobodies)

 

Plot:

What I went with to tie it all together was a mythological/cyclical vibe. I’ve always wanted to tell a Stalker story with a slight American Gods feel- here was a chance.

Slavic myth has a very strong proto-Christian good versus evil cycle of nature theme. Good and Evil are strong terms- as with many older cultures, it’s not quite that simple. The high god Perun, a Thor-like figure, is a thunder god who is patron to mankind and favours things like progress and honour. The low god is Veles, a Loki-like figure who is lord of the dead and favours nature, magic and so on.

In other words, we have a God who represents discipline and a Devil who represents autonomy. Ringing any bells- in Stalker there are two faction, Duty and Freedom.

Well, someone did my work for me. The Gatekeepers, led by Eagle (the symbol of Perun) became a force devoted to making the Fringe safe and controlling it. The Nobodies, led by Snake (the symbol of Veles) became a force devoted to freeing the Fringe and letting nature take its course.

The myth of the storm, this eternal battle, basically involved Veles stealing from Perun and then being chased by Perun. There are thunder bolts and general chaos, then finally Perun defeats Veles- but cannot kill him, for he is the lord of the dead after all. The cycle ends how it began, until next time- in other words, a simple storm is the analogy for the cycle of life and death.

These themes were introduced by one more mythical character, Svarog. This is the Slavic smith/sun god. He was represented by Sunny, a Spirit and a guide. Sunny is an ornery, cranky, grumpy and secretive old git who got the full force of my best Russieque accent. Sunny doesn’t remember who he was before he died, but he sure loves local mythology and the Fringe/Zone itself.

Sunny tells the players all about Veles and Perun as they travel the Fringe. They also find triple headed statues everywhere- representing Veles, Perun and Svarog. This is a tweak on real Slavic myth- a figure called Triglav who is a kind of trinity god. These statues only appeared since the last person went into the Wish granter at the centre of the zone… which was Sunny. He doesn’t remember what happened or what he wished for, but he says it was an ‘ending’ (many Spirits want to die).

Anyway!

The Gatekeepers get them to talk to the Nobodies, which is a trick to slyly attack the Nobodies. The Nobodies get them near to the centre of the zone, but also use them slightly to mount their own attack- a race for the Wish Granter. Snake and Eagle are neither quite what they seem and it becomes apparent that they fit in with the Triglav myth. Are they somehow embodiments of the gods?

The myth of the storm suddenly ties in. The Fringe is wracked by a war between these figures, while all the time the rain gets harder and harder- coming in waves that disfigure the landscape. This is part of the Stalker setting- ‘emissions’ which come from the Chernobyl plant. In this story, they are more like contractions- caused by the Wish Granter.

So, Svarog, as Sunny, brings the characters to the Wish Granter. Incidentally, the character of Writer undergoes some transformations as he adapts to his Sleepwalker abilities… and he also hears about another mythic figure called Dazbog (the daylight god and Shepherd of Wolves). We also now find out that Sunny was one of the workers who died in the Chernobyl incident (a real man called Valery Khodemchuk).

Right!

Eagle, Snake and the party arrive inside the room, where there is the Wish Granter… which appears as a great tree (the axis mundi of Slavic myth).

Sunny explains that the zone is healing itself; where so much terror and poison is found, the Fringe had to… fight the damage. The whole zone is like a wound; the chaos, the disruption. The Fringe is trying to cleanse the wound, sending the rain storms to wipe out the foreign bodies… humanity. At the centre of it all… new life, the only thing that can defeat death. The cyclical, mythological themes tie in here with the ecological disaster of Chernobyl (I was quite proud of that actually!)

Sunny spills the beans. Here’s his monologue:

Don’t you see? The Wish Granter is alive… and it is a child. It reaches out, sensing the pain and misery of the zone, touching the minds of people that come here. We see visions that beckon us with temptations, but it is only the Fringe trying to understand us. It called me… but I was not consumed.

I didn’t wish to die, not truly. I wished for an ending, and it is giving me one. It read the story of the Triglav- not just from my mind, but from the minds of all the Ukrainians it has touched, from the very earth and rock. The Fringe is imprinted with the hearts and minds of the people.

I saw the Triglav, the ancient battle between eagle and snake, with Svarog standing over it all. But Svarog needs Dazbog to be complete; the Sun, and his son on earth, two sides of the same coin. A Spirit needs a Shepherd to be complete. Yes, my mind created all this chaos when I entered the wish granter… but it was an incomplete wish. Now, I have brought you here to complete it. Me and you, Dazbog [to writer]. Snake and Eagle. Triglav.

Do you recall the end of the story of the storm? The rains come and wash away the damage caused by the struggles and battles of the gods, healing the land, renewing it. We will remake the zone. We will erase all of this harm. Your companions… well, you must realise that you were just a means to an end. Your wishes are… simply not important.

 

Therefore Sunny, Eagle and Snake are not gods, but are simply being guided into following the pattern of the story that the Wish Granter read when trying to grant Sunny’s final wish- for an end to the Zone. The players had a choice now of letting Sunny fulfil the story or intervening.

Should that have happened, Sunny, Eagle, Snake and Writer would have combined with the Wish Granter to form Triglav. The Final Rain (emission/contraction) would have cleansed all human life from the zone- but also repairing all the damage that humans have done.

Instead, Writer exorcised Sunny with his Shepherd powers (this was possible thanks to having his true name, from finding out how he died). The other players left, while Bird went into the wish granter…

And there’s the close.

 

Hope that made sense- I personally loved this story. The way that the mythology, the game and the Sleepwalkers setting gelled really encouraged me- maybe it could be prose’d at a later date.

Coming soon- a big announcement about all the short stories I’ve been churning out on this site!
[sociable]

Beardcrumbs – Chernobyl In Grey Part 2

Morning!

Another little foray into my thought processes, picking up where we left off with:

 

Chernobyl In Grey – Adapting the Zone for Sleepwalkers

 

So we know that the two settings do have a potential merging point- the Stalker scenario can be played out in the Fringe, an otherworldly place which is the setting of Sleepwalkers.

The details required some fine tuning, but I actually found several points of convergence. I suspect most will find the sane when combining settings with a similar vibe- there are always crossovers, even if they are just places where the archetypal story types meet (heroes, villains, forbidden knowledge, ninja pirates).

Listed, they look like this:

 

STALKER	SLEEPWALKERS
The Zone  A lawless nuclear wasteland with strange things happening and   monsters abound.	The Fringe  A lawless spiritual frontier with strangeness and monsters abound.   Basically, the same but fantasy.
The Wish Granter  At the centre of the zone stands Chernobyl NPP, the source of the   disaster. The Wish Granter calls out to Stalkers, promising them their   deepest desires.	The Wish Granter  There is no direct parallel in Sleepwalkers, so it has to be brought   in- details later. Chernobyl is still the location, so that can be moved over   lock stock and barrel, with the plant still being the centre.
Stalkers  People who explore the Zone, shamanic types (in terms of reverence for the natural system) who risk the Zone’s dangers and mood swings in order to find out more about it, get wealthy or reach the Wish Granter.	Sleepwalkers  People who explore the Fringe, also shamanic (in a more direct sense,   travelling to the spirit world). Sleepwalkers are the new Stalkers for this   setting, exploring the Zone’s Fringe counterpart for much the same reasons.
Duty  A group of Stalkers dedicated to policing the Zone, keeping it safe-   and under their firm control.	The Gatekeepers  A group of Sleepwalkers who act like police. The Gatekeepers in the   broader setting are somewhat more like the protectors of the Fringe; I simply   tweaked them to be rather more obsessive and brutal in their methods, more   interested in control.
Freedom  A group of Stalkers dedicated to making the Zone free for all.   Likened to terrorists, they want no faction to have total control of what   they see as a natural wonder (but their motives may be selfish once the Wish   Granter is factored in).	The Nobodies  A group of Sleepwalkers who form small, localised gangs. They act much   like bikers or mid-level criminals, for safety in numbers. They were tweaked   to be the ones wanting the Fringe to be free from control, so that locals   could police it themselves.
Anomalies  Places where the Zone’s physics have become tortured, unnatural   traps.	Landslides  These are parts of the Fringe that differ from the normal world,   where emotions and events have warped the land. The whole Zone is a landslide!   For this setting, this includes anomalies, as they are integral to the   atmosphere of the Fringe. They are explained as the Fringe’s confused reaction   to the pockets of radiation around Chernobyl.
Artefacts  Items with unnatural properties produced by the same effects as   anomalies.	Artefacts  Same again but with emotions and events. No conversion necessary.

 

Clearly it didn’t take much to get Sleepwalkers to conform to Stalker. I was particularly pleased with the inclusion of the Gatekeepers and Nobodies as parallels to Duty and Freedom- they play important roles in the themes of the story and plugged perfectly into what I chose to drive the story and make it pop from science fiction to contemporary fantasy.

More on that next time!
[sociable]

Beardcrumbs – Chernobyl in Grey

Hiya! Here’s a little experiment.

I’ve read that a good tip for writers is to do a little writing each day (obviously).

Not going to happen.

However- the tip (from the dummie’s guide) added that this can be achieved by writing short 300 word statements that examine one’s own writing. This could be a recap, or analysis of an old piece, or just revising some work in progress as a way to take a fresh look at it. It’s all practise.

So, that’s what I’m going to do- to keep my writing sharp and keep my blog updated, I will write short diary-like entries about past, present and future projects. I’m tentatively calling it ‘Beardcrumbs’.

Not every day. Don’t be absurd.

 

Anyway, to this end, I’m going to start by looking at a Sleepwalkers RPG game I ran:

Chernobyl In Grey – Adapting the Zone for Sleepwalkers

 

A month or so back, I ran a playtest of the Sleepwalkers RPG setting. I’m not going to go too much into the mechanics and how they need loads of work. I am however going to discuss the setting I chose, specifically translating the story of Stalker to the setting of Sleepwalkers.

This may sound odd. I’d wanted to run Stalker as an RPG for ages, but here was a chance to run Sleepwalkers. So I squished ‘em together. Astonishingly, it worked, so I’m going to try to explain how.

When I say Stalker, I refer to the PC game. However, I also borrowed heavily from the film of the same name and the book (Roadside Picnic) for help with the atmosphere and the less visual aspects of the zone.

So, for this first little dalliance, let’s compare the settings in overview:

Sleepwalkers

Lots of info about this on my site already. A second world exists; a grey purgatorial place that mirrors this world in shape and dimensions, but is heavily influenced by thought and emotion. This world is called the Fringe and is inhabited by Spirits (ghosts of the dead), but also by Sleepwalkers, who are living people able to travel to the Fringe despite being alive- fulfilling a shamanic role of dream exploration and both in and out of body travel. Their name comes from the fact that the Fringe is close to death and so the best way to get there is in sleep. The setting is modern day; in fact, the Fringe is in peril, because there are just too many Spirits and Sleepwalkers and they are too well organised and equipped- the Fringe has gone from being a purgatory to a frontier.

Stalker

The Zone of Alienation in Chernobyl is a huge area of the Ukraine which is largely forbidden to the public due to fallout from the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster. Stalker takes that situation and combines it with the setting of the movie Stalker- a strange, devastated wasteland where people are affected by fluctuations in physics and in the very wellness of the world. At the centre of this place is the Wish Granter- an artefact that can make a man’s dreams come true. In Stalker, this becomes the Chernobyl NPP. At some point a second disaster has occurred of unknown origin- so now the Zone has become a wild place, both radioactive and effected by the anomalies of the movie, and mutants and hoodlums and all the rest. Very bleak, very atmospheric, very Ukrainian.

 

So how does Stalker fit into Sleepwalkers?

Like this, to cut a long story short. In the ‘Real’ (the normal waking world), the Zone is just as it is in reality (hardly pleasant but nothing mystical in the overt sense of the word). In the Fringe, the mirror of the real world has been skewed by the tragedy of the disaster- and so the Fringe bears the characteristics of the Zone as it is in the game.

Simples!

Next time, I’ll introduce the characters we used (real names baleeted guys) and go into how the two settings gelled together in detail.

Peace.

[sociable]