Genesys is not a complete game as written. It is a book of tools, suggestions and examples (in the same vein as White Box) which can be used by a creative referee to build a personalized game. With or without input from the players, a referee will need to make several key decisions about how their Genesys will work mechanically. Integrating the rules and setting seems the preferred way to do this, so it helps if one either has a setting in mind and builds their Genesys to support that vision, or perhaps builds the setting and rules together at the same time. The Genesys core book indicates Fantasy Flight Games will be publishing specific setting books which will presumably do this work of modification as needed for each official Genesys published setting.
There is significant freedom that goes with a referee constructing their own “Genesys” game, but developing the game requires creativity (and effort and time). The Narrative Dice System (NDS) Genesys uses tends to “flavor” any game created around that core mechanic as cinematic, heroic and larger than life. It also promotes a narrative style of play with players and referee sharing responsibility for generating the story elements. As long as the referee is comfortable with the flavor of the core system and sharing narrative control, Genesys can serve as the basis for virtually any game milieu imagined.
The Genesys I have played has been based on the Aventuria setting of The Dark Eye RPG by Ulisses Spiele. A lot of the adaptation of the system to the published setting, and filling in of blank areas in the Genesys rules as written is happening at the table as we play. This puts a lot of emphasis on improvisation and on-the-fly rulings which are then discussed afterwards. I recall playing White Box using this approach many decades ago.
An alternative approach, and one I am pursuing with regard to a Thieves’ World build for Genesys is to have a lot of the modifications and additional material I think will be needed thought out and written down beforehand. The upfront labor in taking this approach can be comparable to “world building” itself. I guess as a referee, one either enjoys this type of task or one doesn’t.
Among my thoughts on Genesys, one of the first things I notice is the fragmentary nature of the examples given regarding magic as a sub-system using the NDS. Genesys offers three types of magic user skill which they label “arcane”, “divine” and “primal”. The magic schools or skills determine what kinds of spell effects the PC can draw upon for casting. Casting a spell is a descriptive action wherein the player describes the desired effect and the referee assigns the dice pool, which seems consistent with a narrative system.
For Thieves’ World I will want to create new Genesys schools, one for Lythande’s “star magic”, one specifically for the Purple Mage's water magic, and one for the S’Danzo fortune tellers, etc. The spell examples given in the Genesys book are enough to demonstrate how magic might work using the NDS, but requires additional work for Thieves’ World (or Aventuria, Greyhawk, etc.). Thoughts for S’Danzo magic (peculiar to females of the S’Danzo people) include new spells such as “Eye of Fortune” – monetary gain will be shared with the caster, “Evil Eye” – a curse which adds difficulty to tasks, “Blessed Eye” – a blessing which aids in accomplishing a task, “Forward Looking Eye” and “Backward Looking Eye” – which can see forward and backward into time, “Enchanting Eye” – which acts as a love potion, “Charming Eye” – instantly persuaded, “Spirit’s Eye” – see and commune with ghosts, and “Eye of Holding” – paralyzing effect.
The Purple Mage uses an altogether different type of magic. In sword & sorcery stories such as The Purple Mage by Phillip Jose Farmer (Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn) the magic is often described as temple magic, both black and white, and connected to worship of certain ancient deities. Such is the case with the Purple Mage who lives on an island fortress/dungeon near Sanctuary and practices water magic derived from a water goddess. Among the spells described in use by this mage are illusions and animal control spells and he draws upon water for the source of his magic power. Genesys has neither illusions nor animal control magic examples, so I will need to create those "spells" or rituals for use in the Thieves' World setting.
Genesys combat has potential for the cinematic using the NDS success with threats, failure with advantages, triumph and despair results, but can also be time consuming as player and referee work to sort out what the dice pool results mean in narrative terms. Initiative as written seems counter intuitive to sword & sorcery pacing and involves deciding among the players who acts in which order. This involves too much meta-gaming for me and I will be replacing the initiative system with a simple "high success roll goes first" mechanic. The rules as written favor ranged attack over melee and I will be reversing that in an effort to promote sword-play over standing off and firing missiles as a preferred tactic.
Genesys includes a number of generic backgrounds, careers, skills and talents as examples of what can be done with the system, but intuitively matching a setting with unique versions of the backgrounds, motivations, careers, skills and talents seems the way to go. Gear and adversaries are only briefly touched on in the Genesys core rulebook and obviously need to be tailored to the setting as well. Thieves’ World is a human world setting much like our own earth with a medieval technology level. Gear will resemble what was historically available during that period and adversaries will mostly be human. It is also a fantastic setting with supernatural “monsters” that will need to be designed, but the creatures will have the advantage of being new and monstrously unknown except for the few specifically taken directly from the source literature, which include giant crabs, purple spiders, and the “Flying Knives”. What else might exist on Thieves’ World? Why not design your version of the setting and find out!
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