Narration

Gods & Monsters is a game. You roll dice to see if your character in the game is successful at doing adventurous things. Your character has resources. You will use those resources to gain more resources. Just like betting chips in poker, if you use too many resources (such as survival points) your character might die; use too few and your character won’t advance. You’ll use strategy in Gods & Monsters just as you would in Hearts or Yahtzee. You will maneuver your character into situations where their resources are most effective.

One of the cool things about role-playing games is the role-playing. You tell the Adventure Guide, “my character’s going to jump the fence” and then you roll the dice to find out if your character successfully jumped the fence. Or, “I’m going to try to convince the old man to tell us where the xolome went. I’ll offer him a little food first, and I’ll talk softly, and be very comforting.” Then you roll and see if your character is successful, or maybe your role-playing hit all the right buttons and the Adventure Guide just says “yes, you succeed” and then describes what happens.

In Gods & Monsters, much of the role-playing comes from your narration of what your character does. There are three kinds of narration:

Describe what your character is trying to do. The most basic narration is when you tell everyone what your character’s actions are. Whether it’s attacking a demon, sermonizing to a crowd, or offering food to a beggar, it doesn’t really happen unless you tell everyone that it happens. Also, when you describe what your character is doing, you’re really describing what your character is trying to do. Some things will be easy enough that when your character tries them, they are automatically successful. Other things are more difficult, and for those you’ll need to roll dice to see if your character is successful.

When you are describing what your character is trying to do, you can also describe how your character is trying to do it. Instead of saying “I’m going to search for a trap in this room”, you might say “ I’m going to search for a trap behind the tapestry.” This kind of narration can both help and hurt your chance of success. If the trap is, in fact, behind the tapestry, you’ll get a bonus on your die roll. If the trap is obvious once the tapestry is removed, you won’t even have to roll. If the trap is not behind the tapestry, however, you’ll either get a penalty or won’t have any chance of success.

Explain why your character is doing it. In fiction, there’s only one writer, so actions lead inexorably to the “correct” consequences. But in Gods & Monsters the Adventure Guide doesn’t necessarily know what consequences you’re hoping for from your character’s actions. If you’re offering food to a beggar in the hopes that the beggar will tell you whether he saw anything out of the ordinary, for example, you need to tell the Adventure Guide this. Or if you’ve decided that the beggar is really the prince your character has been looking for, you should explain how you or your character came to that conclusion.

Describe the success or failure of your attempt. After your character succeeds or fails, the Adventure Guide will sometimes describe how your character succeeded or failed, and sometimes will simply say that your character succeeded or failed. This gives you the opportunity to describe how your character succeeded or failed. You don’t need to do this; it isn’t in any way necessary. It can, however, sometimes be fun to describe how, for example, the nail snapped after your character hit their thumb with the hammer. Brevity is the soul of this stage of narration: the action has passed, and it is time to move on to the next scene.

Players and Characters

You as a player will play your character in the game. Characters in Gods & Monsters advance through a series of adventures. You will begin the game by assigning abilities, skills, and other capabilities to your character. Throughout your character’s first adventure you will add further capabilities. For the rest of the game your character will use those capabilities to defeat opponents, solve problems, and complete further adventures.

Your character will (if they survive their adventures) advance through a series of experience levels. At each new level, you will have the opportunity to assign new capabilities to your character’s repertoire. Each new level is a new chapter or book in your character’s story.

As you play the game, you will describe to the other players what your character is doing. During a game session, Sandy, playing the sorceror Gralen Noslen, might tell the group that “Gralen casts a spell of dazed enchantment on the Orcs”. Gralen is the one casting the spell. Sandy is probably just rolling dice. Each player will very likely end up playing multiple characters over time, as one character retires, dies, or temporarily goes off in another direction from the rest of the group. But when Sandy says that she’s going off into the kitchen to get a soda, that’s Sandy saying that, not Gralen.

There is also a difference between “player characters” and “non-player characters”. “Player characters” hold a special place in Gods & Monsters. They are the heroes and anti-heroes of the story. The game really does revolve around them. This doesn’t mean that the game is necessarily going to give them any special breaks--sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t. But the game does exist for their players’ amusement. If the players go somewhere else, the game ceases to exist.

Because the game, like a movie camera, focuses on the player characters, it gives them extra chances of survival in the form of survival, verve, mojo, and reaction rolls.

Here are some sample characters. I’ll be referring back to these characters as examples throughout the rules.

When thinking about the character you want to play, you should also be talking with the other players about what they want to play.

What does it mean to play a character?

Your character is the main character in a story. As a Gods & Monsters player, your part of the game is to find that story, to create it. This is not the Adventure Guide’s story; it is yours. The Guide doesn’t have a story, only a situation. It is up to you to create a narrative out of that situation. You need to create your character’s plot thread.

In any story, what matters are the special abilities of the main character. So, look at what your character can do, and think up scenarios for how those abilities might be helpful. Some of those scenarios will not pan out; that’s the life of an author. When one scenario doesn’t bring results, think up slightly different scenarios and think up radically different scenarios.

For example, you might be trying to solve the riddle of what happened in an ancient, deserted manor. You look at your character’s spell list and think, maybe “see whole” would be useful here. Maybe there’s something broken or torn that can be put together. Where would I be able to find such things? How would they have been preserved in all this time, after the building has been emptied? Perhaps some small animal took them away into its lair to nest with. If that’s your scenario, you look for nests. Or, perhaps they fell behind something that couldn’t be moved. Is there such a thing here? Look behind it.

Take the Adventure Guide’s descriptions into account. If it’s an empty house and you keep hearing rats, you might make the scenario “my character finds a lost item in a rat’s nest”. You then keep an eye out for places that rats might build nests.

Maybe your special ability is to beat things up. Who or what, that you could beat up, would help you further your character’s thread and make your character matter? Where would those persons or creatures be? What signs would indicate their presence? Start looking for those signs, and start asking the Guide about them.

Pay attention to the adventure’s backstory. If your character beats things up and the backstory involves goblin ambushes in this area, you might create the scenario “my characters foils a goblin ambush while we’re traveling through this area”. Start paying attention to places where goblins might hold an ambush.

Sometimes your first attempt will fail. You’ll look in the rafters in the first room of a four-room attic and find nothing. If it was a good narrative, don’t give up. Look in the rafters in all four rooms. If it was a flawed narrative, modify it. If you think of a better narrative, use the new one instead of (or in addition to) the old one. But don’t give up too easily. Characters in stories persevere. There are always false starts and slow starts. Characters become main characters because they don’t give up. They ensure that their special abilities matter.

Your goal is to make your character matter in the narrative. If one scenario doesn’t work, try a different one. Later, as your character gains additional abilities, keep two or three scenarios in mind at a time, looking for the things that would trigger those scenarios, occasionally modifying those scenarios according to what you hear from the Guide.

One tool that you have as a player to ensure that your scenarios make sense is that mojo use must always matter. You’ll find out about mojo later, but if you are willing to spend mojo to be successful, the Guide must tell you if your success doesn’t matter, giving you the opportunity to back out of spending the mojo. If you’re barking up the wrong tree, chasing a red herring, or otherwise following the wrong clichéd path, the Guide must tell you this if you successfully bid mojo on a roll to follow that path.