The Great Game

Okay! Let’s do this!

Odyssey was the second game run under the Profound Decisions banner. It drew heavily for inspiration earlier game of the same name run (if I am remembering right) by Boogieman Games. It was a game set in a fantasy version of the Classical world involving five Mediterranean nations competing for the favour of the gods. It was a story rich closed world, with stripped down rules, arena fighting, and highly aspirational costume standards. It has its own TV Tropes page.

I wasn’t involved in the design of Odyssey (I was focusing on running plot for Maelstrom at the time it was being developed), but I crewed the game for I think three years, or five events. My role mostly involved creating “tech” – magic items and spells – liaising between the story team, quest team, and referees.

When it came out I was pretty enthusiastic about the game but I have to admit my excitement waned over time. In all honesty it was not really a game for me. I prefer a game which places more emphasis on player-character interactions than Odyssey entirely supported. It also didn’t help that at the same time I was contributing to Odyssey I was splitting my time between wrapping Maelstrom up with zero budget, and helping to develop Empire.

The game had – still has – a strong and committed fan base that really enjoyed it. This is okay; not every game is (or should be) for everyone. For the most part I keep my opinions and criticism to myself, because why be the kind of dick who pisses on peoples’ shoes for the fun of it?

Matt and I talked about Odyssey a lot when we were working on Empire, and looked at what we thought worked and what didn’t with it at least as much as we looked at Maelstrom. Given I’m writing about live roleplaying at the moment, I thought I’d try talking about the lessons I took away from my time working on Odyssey in the most constructive way possible.

There then are five lessons I took away from Odyssey.

Costume Helps Build a World

Oddyssey had five nations – Egypt, Rome, Carthage, Persia, and Greece. Each had a strong, organiser defined look and feel. The mailshot for the game included a (to me) high production value costume guide as a major component along with the rulebook. The game was not afrai to be aspirational. If you wanted to play a Roman champion, the game wanted you to wear lorica and use a massive oblong shield. If you wanted to play a Greek, you wanted a tunic and sandals, and spears, and oval shields. Persia had crescent-moon shields for goodness sakes.

And players rose to the occasion. They looked gorgeous in their kit. People commissioned Classical-era weapons, armour, and shields for this new game that had never run once. You could tell at a glance which nation 78% of the players belonged to. While it presented a bit of a bar to participation, it’s hard to be sure how much of a bar it provided. My impression is that people were attracted to the game because of the kit standards, rather than being put off. I think it helped that if you wanted to play something other than a warrior, most nations has some straightforward costume options (a toga at the end of the day, for example, is a sheet and some brooches; a t-tunic is straightforward to make out of a sheet and is adequate for most nations, and so on).

Empire has aspirational costume as a direct result of the success of Odyssey. We tell players what they should look like if they want to play a nation, and for the most part players buy into this. It helps create the feel of a specific world, rather than a generic festival in a field.

There’s one caveat related to costume which was partially inspired by one of the Odyssey nations but mostly built on things we were already taking from Maelstrom – any group with a straightforward costume brief, especially if its the kind of thing a live roleplayer is likely to have in their kit cupboard – will be more popular than a nation that doesn’t. We occasionally talk about the Malathia/Carthage scenario, but it’s also very appropriate to both Wintermark and Navarr (which if I remember correctly were the two largest nations in early Empire).

The brief still matters – but the Boss often talked in the second half of Maelstrom how the game might have been much better if the easy-kilt-wearing nation had not also been the pirate nation and made up entirely of humans. Likewise, we talked a lot about the way Carthage was a reasonably easy costume brief and also the eeeeeevil nation, and how that might have skewed its player numbers.

Context Creates Worth



Maelstrom was a game of discovery. Magic was new – brand new. The player characters were pioneers in-game discovering and naming their own spells. This contributed strongly to the way the magical spells and magic items were somewhat generic – they were intended I think to be fleshed out with details by players. This was empowering – to a point – but it also meant that a core element of the game lacked flavour (for want of a better world).

By contrast, every magic item and spell in Odyssey was part of a larger story. The names of lesser mysteries referenced mythology of the five nations. The magic items – limited in number – were based on mythological or historical items and locations. The greater mysteries were written to tie in to the event’s ruling zodiac sign – I spent a lot of time pre each event on wikipedia following links, or reading up on obscure stuff Harry had found for me about crab biology (for example).

Magical elements came with bits of flavour that tied them into the game world, and that immediately gave them more weight. It’s much harder in my experince to roleplay about how cool a +1 sword is, compared to how cool the Sword of Coriolanus. The Sword of Coriolanus comes with its own backstory, and constantly tries to get the bearer to spill the blood of their allies; you can roleplay around that. That sword is a thing in the world, and a roleplaying prop far beyon its ability to improve to-hit rolls by 5% (or whatever). Between Odyssey, Ars Magica, and Dragon Warriors, I knew going into Empire that I wanted the magic and magic items to be specific rather than genric – that even the +1 swords the players were making would have some element of flavour and depth to them.

A tangential element related to this came from a discussion we had early on with a Maelstrom player (Richard Hawkins), about the problems presented by Maelstrom’s generic magic. He explained the challenges of doing a ritual in a closed world with no more actual guidance than “it uses crystal mana and lasts five minutes.” He identified that magicians needed hooks to hang their two-to-ten-minutes of roleplaying on. This lead directly to the magical traditions we created to provide players with the tools they needed to actual roleplay magicians.

Player-on-player Action is Solid Gold

Odyssey was a game that encouraged player-versus-player conflict. Each of the five nations was competing with the others for territory, and territory directly influenced the power of the nation and the people in it. One element that supported this was that the magic – and the medical skills – of one nation overwhelmingly couldn’t be used on members of another nation (the “blood” element).

One consequence of this, I think, is that the nations had nothing to offer each other. It felt like the game itself gave players significantly fewer reasons to interact with each other, leading to greater isolation. This was good for a game rooted in the rivalry between the five nations, but bad from the point of view of encouraging players to interact with each other.

A core design principle of Empire is that the game had to encourage as much player-with-player interaction (as opposed to player-with-nonplayer interaction) as possible. The economy in particular was built to give players reasons to talk to each other, even if just to engage in trade.

Straightforward Rules Pay Dividends

Compared to Maelstrom, among others, Odyssey had incredibly straightforward rules. Characters had a small number of skills, based on their nation and archetype, but there were no hidden rules or calls that people were unaware of. Mysteries and magic items could provide significant boosts to indiviuals but they were rare and largely gave people more abilities rather than new abilities.

Characters had one or two hits, and every blow did damage. There were a handful of calls, but fighting was basically dependant on actual fighting skill much more than “soft” bonuses from skills and magic. The rules were easy to remember, but flexible enough to allow for cool situations or bits of “tech”.

Seeing the rules in action helped reinforce our decision to keep Empire simple (albeit not as simple as Odyssey). Straightforward rules take up less mental space, I think, and leave more room for actual roleplaying.

One element I liked that didn’t make it into Empire was that Odyssey characters did not advance. The original game had a fascinating advancement system where players aged between events gaining and losing skills and health until they died. Odyssey by contrast had no advancement but allowed players to change their archetypal class whenever they wanted to.

Advancement is probably an article all its own, but in an ongoing fest live roleplaying game designed to run over a long pereiod it can create significant problems. Anyone who played Maelstrom must surely be aware of the problem that established characters massively overshadowed new characters in all areas, for example. I occasionally wish we’d adopted the Odyssey approach for Empire – instead we took the middle role and while we allowed advancement we kept it reasonably slow.

Another thing I’m pleased we did take from Odyssey was that there are no “hidden skills” in the game. Any character can start with any skill, and the skill list itself represents all the skills in the game. An established character can still overshadow a new character a little, but I think it’s a lot harder and less significant an overshadow than it was at Maelstrom.

Any characters you can’t talk to are probably being wasted

This is a very specific lesson. Odyssey had powerful gods who met with mortals and spoke to them in god audiences. I’m not uncritical of how this element worked in play, but it served as a powerful contrast to Maelstrom where the gods were unknowable and communicated by (effectively) shoving little notes under the doors of their angels. I still shudder when I remember that initially the gods of ‘Strom could only communicate with their angels in two-word notes with maybe a picture attacked. I’ve broken out in a cold sweat just typing this sentence.

While I prefer the idea of god-of-philosophy to the god-of-shoes model, Odyssey won hands down in terms of its ability to get player character buy-in the the non-player-character agenda. A god you can actually interact with is able to answer your questions and explain why it wants you to do things. It can immediately correct your misinterpretations – the value of which I had learnt to my cost very early on at Maelstrom. One of the first Maelstrom missions I sent out from a god when I joined Maelstrom crew was intended to encourage the new Kamakuran daimyo to “condemn the undead”. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of communication, the eidolon who took the mission interpreted the mission as “condemn the undead Kamakuran daimyo” which resulted in a significant number of characters dying.

Never again.

This demonstration of the value of talking to non-player characters lead directly to the development of the eternals at Empire (and the god audiences were a pretty obvious inspiration for the eternal audiences). While the eternals aren’t gods – they’re more analogous to faeries or demons – we knew that two-way face-to-face communication was what was needed. Heck, at one point we discussed not including letters in the game at all and having a piece of in-game tech that allowed player characters to talk to foreign dignitaries in real time as well (we’d seen the limitations of letters to non-player characters at Maelstrom already). We didn’t in the end – it was simply prohibitive to make it happen for reasons too numerous to go into here– but I wonder sometimes how it might have influenced Imperial diplomacy if ambassadors had been able to talk directly to their opposite numbers rather than rely on the slow back-and-forth of letters.

In Conclusion

It’s a bit obvious to suggest every live roleplaying game iterates on the games that have gone before. Odyssey was partially built as a reaction to Maelstrom, and Empire drew on ideas eveloped in both games (among others) to create something new.

The ritual system of Empire in particular owes a lot to lessons learned while writing for Odyssey – which I used to test out some prototype ideas. (There’s also a funny story about how writing 60,000 words of greater mystery flavour text for the second game over the course of a weekend nearly pushed me off the deep end, which helped a lot to drive home the importance of sustainable commitments with regard to making words happen. Such fun.)

It wasn’t a game for me, for various reasons, but I’m grateful to it for giving me an opportunity to test out some of the ideas I later built on when working on Empire.