Post Mortem - Remissio Peccatorum [Dogs in the Vineyard]
Jul 11, 2014 16:19:03 GMT -8
Post by guitarspider on Jul 11, 2014 16:19:03 GMT -8
For the time being you can find the video here.
I had a ton of fun running this game and I think it was really successful in several other respects.
I re-skinned Dogs in the Vineyard, which turns out to be extremely easy. The setting was Occitania (medieval southern France) because that area had great heretics for a DitV game: the Cathars. The Cistercians, a reform order, and their involvement in Occitania against the Cathars was a great starting point for the characters. Pitting monks against non-violent heretics also resulted in a game almost entirely without violence, which was one of my goals for this game.
Character creation was slightly different from the original, I added some setting-specific questions, which were supposed to give the players a framework from which to build. That seems to have worked perfectly. Including the initiation conflicts character creation took about 90 minutes, and we weren't hurrying at all.
Before I ramble on, I have to say that the three players were fantastic. Also, watching players start to find and cite bible verses to make a point, no matter how obscure, is one of the great joys of GMing a DitV game.
There were two key experiences that I wanted the players to have: 1) having to actually figure out what the heretics were about and getting conflicting and seemingly incoherent evidence 2) Realizing that for the simple people, one priest was as good as the next person preaching to them, as long as the person seemed to talk sense, which leads back into 1), because the common folk didn't necessarily have a deep enough understanding of theology to realize there was much of a difference between Catholics and Cathars. If the body is evil and constantly tempting us, why shouldn't it be made by Satan and then, obviously, procreating is terrible idea, your soul is never going to escape your evil body that way. Seems legit!
The first worked out particularly well as far as I can tell, as players were bit for bit uncovering Cathar ideas like no meat (no killing so no killing cows either!), no procreation, asceticism and female preachers, without having to understand any of the reasoning behind it. That is close to the experience actual monks had, who, even when they talked to self-professed Cathars, often couldn't quite get to the bottom of why exactly these people didn't want to procreate. In that way Catharism is ideally suited as a heresy, because very few people will have an idea of what it was about. I imagine this would be completely awesome in a campaign of 3-5 sessions, where the players can start to understand Catharism more and more deeply each session and allow the players as well as the characters to feel like they're really starting to get these weird people.
There was a slight red herring problem in that the players seemed to home in on the two itinerant priests instead of the heretics in the local community. In hindsight I should have brought the main heretic figure into play earlier, if just to have the players go "oh, her" later on, instead of having to deal with an NPC that they hadn't heard of. No biggie though.
Given that several people couldn't play and how much fun this was I'll probably do something like this again next Jackercon.
I had a ton of fun running this game and I think it was really successful in several other respects.
I re-skinned Dogs in the Vineyard, which turns out to be extremely easy. The setting was Occitania (medieval southern France) because that area had great heretics for a DitV game: the Cathars. The Cistercians, a reform order, and their involvement in Occitania against the Cathars was a great starting point for the characters. Pitting monks against non-violent heretics also resulted in a game almost entirely without violence, which was one of my goals for this game.
Character creation was slightly different from the original, I added some setting-specific questions, which were supposed to give the players a framework from which to build. That seems to have worked perfectly. Including the initiation conflicts character creation took about 90 minutes, and we weren't hurrying at all.
Before I ramble on, I have to say that the three players were fantastic. Also, watching players start to find and cite bible verses to make a point, no matter how obscure, is one of the great joys of GMing a DitV game.
There were two key experiences that I wanted the players to have: 1) having to actually figure out what the heretics were about and getting conflicting and seemingly incoherent evidence 2) Realizing that for the simple people, one priest was as good as the next person preaching to them, as long as the person seemed to talk sense, which leads back into 1), because the common folk didn't necessarily have a deep enough understanding of theology to realize there was much of a difference between Catholics and Cathars. If the body is evil and constantly tempting us, why shouldn't it be made by Satan and then, obviously, procreating is terrible idea, your soul is never going to escape your evil body that way. Seems legit!
The first worked out particularly well as far as I can tell, as players were bit for bit uncovering Cathar ideas like no meat (no killing so no killing cows either!), no procreation, asceticism and female preachers, without having to understand any of the reasoning behind it. That is close to the experience actual monks had, who, even when they talked to self-professed Cathars, often couldn't quite get to the bottom of why exactly these people didn't want to procreate. In that way Catharism is ideally suited as a heresy, because very few people will have an idea of what it was about. I imagine this would be completely awesome in a campaign of 3-5 sessions, where the players can start to understand Catharism more and more deeply each session and allow the players as well as the characters to feel like they're really starting to get these weird people.
There was a slight red herring problem in that the players seemed to home in on the two itinerant priests instead of the heretics in the local community. In hindsight I should have brought the main heretic figure into play earlier, if just to have the players go "oh, her" later on, instead of having to deal with an NPC that they hadn't heard of. No biggie though.
Given that several people couldn't play and how much fun this was I'll probably do something like this again next Jackercon.
