#greyplains

We're zeroing in on "Weregild," which is old English for "man price" or, more contextually, "the value of a person's life."

I think I still want to keep "Greyplains" as the overall project name but that might also be flawed. It might be time to restart before I get too far ahead to ever course-correct.

The cover to the Greyplains: Core Guidebook is a very designed product that is intended to express the themes of the game as quickly as possible. It also a weirdly dense piece (because of its nature as design) despite depicting relatively few key elements. The art is made by the marvelous Mirel Crumb.

This is a full/earlier sketch of what is now on the cover. The same image wraps from the front of the book to the back, crossing the spine (you will see pictures of this later).

You'll notice a couple of things here that are distinct from most other TTRPGs:

1. The background of the book is white and the composition is pencil. There are other books that do this, but it is not the majority at all.

2. There are no people or monsters in this composition.

3. The only elements in the scene are environmental and a single object, a sword, which is centered to the bottom and very small.

I can explain each of these points (and why they are important).

1. It will stand out on a TTRPG bookshelf. It stands out on my bookshelf (please excuse the books on my shelf, it is mostly D&D I promise I play other games).

2. The piece is a first person perspective of a character entering a scene, and that's why you don't see any characters depicted in the cover. I want you, the player reading this book, to feel like you are in the adventure. This matches the intended tone of the gameplay.

3. The scale also communicates the scope of the game's rules as well as the tone (more naturalistic within fantasy). Ultimately, this is a landscape with fantasy elements, and that's what the game is like.

Let's look at how the book manifests in its final, printed form.

This is the intended way that a person is meant to view the piece. They get about half of it from the front, half of it from the back, and the rest on the spine. While, yes, that does in fact literally describe the cover of every book (I get that), the piece plays into this design structure. The intended engagement is that a player is placed at a table with the book in front of them, they open it and use it to make a character and/or play the game. They might flip the book over to read the summary, but they probably won't. They won't really understand the whole piece and its context without seeing the spine, and at that point, the player might own the book. The structure of the book makes you want to investigate it. It has a natural flow that encourages the player to search the environment. By holding the book, you are emulating the experience of playing the game.

The opposite perspective is that somebody sees the game on a shelf at a store. The spine being part of a larger piece is intended to entice the viewer to pick it up and see the rest of the art. The image cannot be conveniently understood by just looking at the spine; you have to actually pick the thing up and look around to get the "whole picture."

The sword on the spine comes from the Greyplains main campaign. The encounter is presented pretty much exactly like this, and the sword is sitting there on a piece of scorched earth just chilling. It is begging for someone to try and pull it out, however this is a terrible idea (obviously). Touching the handle kills the target and sucks their entire life essence and flesh into the sword leaving behind only the person's skeleton, which then sinks into the ground. It's an obvious trap. You can't "I disarm it" on the sword. You can't dispel the effect (unless you come back with much better magic). It just gets to sit there, menacingly. The only way to solve the sword encounter is to accept "you know, I don't understand this situation, and I don't really have to play along." On the onset, it seems like just a dick move (and it is), but by the end of the adventure, the party encounters several other of these swords and can begin to understand what they do, how they work, why they are here, and how they can be sundered. The point is "you don't have to understand everything, now, the more you engage with the game, the more things make sense." And that is also what I'm getting at with the book.

The juxtaposition between the forest landscape and the unnerving crag is also part of the themes of the game. Much of Greyplains is, what I would consider to be, a pretty familiar, "vanilla" TTRPG experience. However there is also a throughline of strangeness that intentionally makes the book, as a whole, feel both familiar and alien to the average TTRPG reader. The cover is designed to feel familiar and alien at the same time to a viewer.

This is a companion piece to my 5e Villain Arc. In my first villain arc, I mentioned that 5e was so bad that it sent me into an angry writing-binge since 2018. That writing project is Greyplains. With the second, and I believe "definitive" edition getting finished (at least in templating, writing it is still an ongoing project), I feel comfortable enough to fully discuss how 5e is a direct anti-inspiration for Greyplains.

Before I talk more about the numbering of Editions, I think I want to take this time to explain what "Greyplains" means.

Greyplains: A Weird Title

First of all, I think "Greyplains" is a pretty good title. I've stuck with it since 7th grade. That would have been like 2006? Fuck.

Dungeons and Dragons is a fairly accurate summary of what you will experience in the game. It’s a good title. It’s hard to argue with success. Below, I’m going to explain what the title, Greyplains means, but I would like to hear your responses, actually. Either in a reblog or a comment, let me know what you would assume Greyplains is about by just hearing the title (before knowing what the explanation is). What kind of mood/feelings/expectations do you get from the title, Greyplains? It’s hard for me to imagine what others think of the title because this has been such a solid part of my being for so long that it is hard to see outside my own perspective. 

Greyplains is composed of two words: Grey and Plains. This is reflective of the magic system in the base setting of the world. Greyplains, as a world building text, is extremely interested in engaging with the assumptions of a "kitchen sink" fantasy world and digging for answers as to why it functions the way it does. Why do the gods care about their subjects? Why do they have domains (fire, wind, earth, art, smithing, etc.)? Why do the undead attack people? Why, if there is magic, do people die? How do monsters work? All these things and more have discrete and somewhat insane answers in the Greyplains setting.

The basic idea is that all elements of reality are composed of some percent-composition of magic. This material magic is called "souls," and different things (people, places, objects, creatures, etc.) have different amounts of Souls. Souls are 4th dimensional matter, basically dark matter, that is tethered to mundane matter like a square is a part of a cube or, more accurately to this case, like a cube is a side of a tesseract. The Soul, thus, can benefit from the organization of matter from which it is tethered to, and more complex combinations of Souls can be formed as more of the possessor’s mundane matter becomes ensouled. Magical elements are made (where magic items come from), magical cells, being organic machines, can be formed (monsters), and creatures can increase the percent composition of their body that is Ensouled by going on adventures (heroes and Player Characters).

Gods exist outside of the Prime Material Plane, and they are beings completely formed by magic, principally as the coincidental result of planar tectonics. This collection of magic and souls creates a functional personality. The issue with being a god is that everything you do consumes the resource which makes you alive (souls and magic). Thus, the only way to grow is to find ways to get more souls from other sources. That is the reason why gods have domains. To the gods, all the elements of reality are capital investments. Humans are an ideal subject due to their natural ability to accumulate ensoulment compared to their short lifespan. Thus, a human will on average yield a lot of souls over their life, and thus gods seek devotion from humans. In order to get this devotion, they will intervene in strategic ways to maximize their returns on investment. They will subtly influence things, they will give guidance, they will give inspiration. Occasionally, if absolutely necessary, the gods will intervene in moments of crisis, but this is rare and extremely expensive. More likely, the gods would prefer to sell off their investment and refinance their portfolio into new domains to adjust to the shifting order of the world. Why defend Constantinople when you can liquidate your shares in Byzantium and instead invest into either The Ottoman Empire or the Tzar of Russia? That kind of thing.

To get these souls, the gods rely on middle-men, called the Bealdres (singular Bealdor, who you might recognize as the old english version to the norse Baldr, as in the brother to Thor. Also from some game called Baldur's Gate?). The Bealdres of the Prime Material Plane are the Riftere, essentially the folk character Death from Death (the Grim Reaper). The direct allusion to reaping in a field of wheat is the operative source of the name Greyplains. Souls are like the berries of wheat, and the straw are the human bodies which contain them. Death is the only outcome when life is a traded commodity, and the gods reap the fields of reality. Despite this darkness, there is light in the lived experience of being alive, thus the world is fundamentally "grey." Thus, Greyplains.

Greyplains is interested in the relationships between feudalism and capitalism. The lived experience of people in Greyplains is feudal, however the entities which exist outside the scope of reality are engaging in capitalism. This progression of increasing denaturalization of the human experience through commodification is one of the central themes of the world building and in the text of the Greyplains rules themselves. While playing the game, you are heavily encouraged to look at your character as a pile of mechanics that exists to solve problems, because the joke is that you, the player, are in a position of playing "god" with the Characters. You are encouraged to dehumanize your own PC in order to reach the outcome of farming EXP, and you are supposed to feel the inherent conflict of learning more about this "living" person over the course of the adventure. Greyplains instructs you to treat people as tools, and it also exists to make that experience extremely painful. Greyplains is designed, from the ground up, to be a pain simulator. This is what Greyplains has in common with Wisher, Thurgist, Fatalist. WTF is just more upfront about the kind of experience that you're going to have. Greyplains uses math and hard-to-decipher probabilities to arrive at that position. The true goal of playing Greyplains is for the Player to hate themselves for what they've done to their Character; for you are the darkness and they are the light in a field of wheat. They gather the berries and turn it into bread, and you digest their lives and turn it into your own experience. Upon learning the truth of the Greyplains magic system, you are forced to confront yourself. I guess I came up with an alternative (and in my opinion, more interesting) to Roko's basalisk in 2007, three years before LessWrong had a terminal thought abortion and cursed us with the stupidest fucking billionaires of all time.

The game achieves this result by generating an intense verisimilitude with its mechanics. Greyplains encourages the GM to stop players in their tracks and force them to answer important questions about what they are doing, how they want to go about it, where they are getting the resources to spend on it, etc. Because GM powers are democratized to the table (in the sense of what exists in the world), Players also get a lot more influence on what the world is like (as a direct response to their Character’s abilities).  This ability to forge reality using their character adds to the verisimilitude and it makes reality directly attached to that character. Thus, when the character dies (because characters are very vulnerable to death in Greyplains), reality itself feels vestigial. I find it somewhat hard to explain, but it is very impactful. It almost feels apocalyptic when a relevant PC dies because so much of the reality around the adventure was tethered to them. And now that they are gone, reality remains but the Character does not get to live in it. It’s really tragic, and as the game designer it is really funny. This situation exists at the same time as the Level 0 mechanics, which I have explained in another post, essentially forbids players from “creating a backstory” at the beginning of the game. The only things we know about a PC are what they do and who they are based on the needs to solve problems during a session. But the emotional result of PC death is so much more intense in Greyplains than any other TTRPG I’ve played or ran. 

I'm working on my seminar explaining "Value-Negative TTRPG gaming." One of my points is to build situations with unclear morals. I talk about conceiving of the base problem as a series of escalating trolley problems, and I'm pretty happy with the result.