Ideas for a visit of Irencillia?

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

Hello,

I have to prepare a visit for 5 characters in Irencillia (domus magnus of house Merinita in the rhine tribunal). The characters want to found a new covenant in the rhine tribunal and need a vote from Irencillia to get the permission (it is the last vote they need, all other covenants of the tribunal have at least one member who is by some means or other convinced to permit the new covenant).

My players will travel to Irencillia with 3 young Magi (Tremere, Guernicus and Ex Miscellanea), a healer (companion) and a fighter (grog). The Ex Miscellanea originates from a magical tradition of hibernia and possesses faerie blood of an old pagan goddess (meanwhile he is a christ, but his faerie inheritance is noticable). The healer was raised by faeries in his childhood (but the location was quite far from Irencillia, too). The other three characters have no reference to faeries.

I have two questions:

  1. How would you play Irencillia? The problem is, that this covenant seems to be different for every individual that arrives. It is part of the faerie nature of Irencillia that the covenant looks exactly the way a character believes it should look. So, do I have to describe five different Irencillias (one for every character)? How would you play this?
  2. Our last gaming session was very discussion- and dialogue-oriented. Compensating this I need an idea for a short, turbulent faeriestyle adventure in Irencillia. The goal should be to get the vote of one of the magi for founding the new covenant. Do you have any ideas for me?

Chiarina.

2

I'd have an NPC ask them what they are expecting to see when they get to Irencillia and then their own preconceptions can form the basis of the description as they will have a group description in their heads when they arrive. Remember that the changes can be blatant or very very subtle...

For example:
Magus #1 - "I'll pick up the glass on the table"
Everyone else - "What glass?"

Eric

3

The real question is how high any of them have pumped Faerie Lore. Someone with a high score would understand the phenomenon enough to help the others navigate through the strange experience.

I recommend writing or printing a bunch of notes giving extremely detailed accounts of what a bunch of different rooms look like. Mix them up and, whenever the group changes locales, distribute either randomly or by how appropriate the description is for a given character.

4

This is something I have no Idea how to handle it.
I would be very interested in a short repot how it worked.
Up to now I never let my Characters visit Irencillia.
If one expect to see a castle, and one other expects a meadow each one will sense what he expects. But how will they see each other?
I assume the one who enters his castle can be seen by the one who is on the meadow all the time. And the one staying on his meadow can be seen and heard by the castle visitor only if there are no walls (fortress walls) in between.
You can use a base Raster and 5 Maps to find out who can sense what , and how much he can see of his fellows. Each character has its own map, but all referring to the same base Raster.
Too much work for me and extreme complicated.

5

The only character with Faerie Lore is the Ex Miscellanea: He has Faerie Lore 1.

At present I think I´ll try to give responsibility for the character perception to the players. The players have to develop an idea, how could Irencillia look before play and then, if their characters reach a generalized location (the wall, the entrance,the kitchen, the main hall...) I´ll ask one player to describe what he sees. Then I´m looking to the others and tell them: "Well, you see something different, you know what I mean!" Next location I´ll ask another player to describe. This way I have some examples, but don´t get bogged down by five location descriptions. Let´s see what the players will do with this.

But perhaps you have a better idea. Then let me know it!

Apart from the difficulties with the individual perception of the place I´m just searching for adventure ideas in Irencillia. What could happen at Irencillia? What could the characters have to do, to get the voice for their covenant foundation from one of the members of Irencillia?

Chiarina.

6

Well, the place is very Faerie.

It could be that the first person to enter an area gets to set the description, and anyone else who moves with them gets to share that particular version. If they leave and come back, someone else's version gets used.

Here's an idea:

  1. get the players to write down on some cards or easy bits of paper what their character thinks Irencillia looks like. Keep it to keywords and short sentences.

  2. whenever a character is first to arrive in an area, describe it according to their preconceptions.

  3. if multiple characters enter an area together, base the description upon a randomly chosen expectation.

The players (and probably smart characters) will work it out very quickly anyway. What you could do to spice things up is to make it so certain things that the characters need can only be acquired in certain 'versions' of the covenant, so the preconception system becomes a puzzle for them on how to 'prompt' certain versions.

Think of it as being a little bit like the Lucasarts adventure game "The Day Of The Tentacle."

7

This isn´t 100% GotF, but it´s an interesting idea! To know if I can use this idea, I first have my players to write down their characters preconceptions. Then I´ll look, if I can derive an adventure idea from their writings.

I´ll report on the growth of this idea.

Thanks for now!

Chiarina.

8

Ask the players before the session to tell you what they think Irencillia will be like. If necessary, prompt them with a bit of information that they may have heard. If you approach each player on their own, you can seed them with different rumours about the covenant, and thus influence their expectations.

I would define a few fixed locations that the characters are likely to visit, defined by function (greeting room, meeting room, prison-bedroom, etc.). These will look different to everyone, but will have the same basic elements. The layout of these locations could be different for each person, but there should be a motif that allows each person to anchor the location as the same. For example, Alice might see a castle room with a luxurious unicorn tapestry. Bob might see a forest glade with a resident unicorn. Carol sees a statue carrying a shield with a unicorn. Dave sees an alchemist's lair with a unicorn horn suspended from the ceiling, etc.

You'll also want to define some elements (probably people) who are the same in all versions of the covenant, although they may be dressed differently to different perceptions. This allows more than one character to interact with the covenant at a time.

Don't forget the other guests, who will also be experiencing different versions.

As far as a story goes, I can't come up with something specific, but you might want to consider the following elements:

  • Do your best to split the party. Not often recommended, but it in this case it would make your life a bit easier
  • Consider a chase or flight scene. Allows you to muck with the player's heads as they experience different geographies. Alice knows there is a corridor between the room where they met Richenda's caricature and the one with the unicorn tapestry, but Bob knows that there is a mile of goblin-haunted forest between the bridge-troll and the unicorn's glade...
  • The suggestion that some versions might have features that are unique (and important to the story) is a good one. Irencillia's weirdness results from a shattered regio, and not all the different versions need to be purely perceptual

Mark

9

Allright. Here is my session report about my groups visit of Irencillia:

There are five players in this group. First I wrote an email to them. I asked them about the notion their characters have about Irencillia. I got quite different stuff, some ideas were nearly complete, some I had to flesh out. Then I developed a generic idea of the place: Here is the entrance, a corridor, a patio, a dining room, a kitchen, the guestrooms, the council hall, the library, the prison and the sancti (the latter were signed with a sanctum marker and were forbidden to enter). Then I personalized the rooms: For one character the dining room was a meadow with picnic blankets, for the next one it was a tavern, for the third is was a prosaic canteen. The corridors were common passages with stone walls for one character, shiny bridges between specific trees for the second and arched vaults made of plants for the third. I customized the grogs, too. For the first character it seemed that here are satyrs and centaurs living, the second saw dwarves, the third saw men with glasses in grey lab coats. The magi and their faerie caricatures I used as constant: they looked the same for every character.

Then the game started. When the characters entered new rooms, I gave the players a snippet with their individual description of the location. As a playing aid I lighted a candle and revealed soon, that I´ll talk about the reality of the character, whose player had the candle. So the players had to hand the candle round if someone else wanted to talk about his point of view. If the candle stood befor player A, I described Irencillia as it was in the reality of his character. Player B was able to listen to the conversation, but had difficulties to understand what the conversation was about. Anyhow: After a while the players were able to guess, what their troupe members were seeing. This assumptions about the reality of their friends were a special charm of this afternoon. Here is an example:

Agnes used "second sight" and detected an invisible staircase, that led from the tree she stood on to a neighbouring tree. Unfortunately in front of the staircase there stood a gnome with a beater before a very big gong. Apparently the gnome had to beat the gong, if someone wanted to trespass the invisible staircase. Agnes started a conversation with the gnome to get more information about his office. Then Crepusculo got along, saw Agnes before a closed door talking with a laboratory assistant. He wondered why the two were talking about a gong all the time. By this means we quickly had a glorious mess and a lot of fun.

Here are the main events: The troupe needed a member of Irencillia, that would vote for the founding of their new covenant at the next meeting of the rhine tribunal. Soon the characters found out, that every member of Irencillia would only vote for their covenant, if faerie queen Rosmert would allow that. Unfortunately Rosmert doesn´t speak with visitors. She is the faery caricature of Handri and Handri is very withdrawn from the outer world. Thus the first task was to meet Rosmert. The troupe had a knight that had not a clue of magic. The poor fellow was more and more fed up with all these alternate realities and invisible barriers. He possesses a ghostly warden in the shape of a jinn that he got to know in the holy land and took with him. The confused knight retired to his guestroom and invoked his jinn. As an answer he got the order to took the jinn to the patio, so that the jinn could sanctify this godless place in the name of allah. The knight - long ceased to be a fundamentalist - did as requested. But the operation wasn´t appealing to the faeries, because they feared, such an influence of divine might could destabilize the faerie aura of the place. Quickly the knight and his jinn were captured and thrown into the prison. The other characters followed their frined and wanted to rescue him. Then the spotlight of Crepusculo came: In his reality Irencillia was one big faerie laboratory with a lot of laboratory equipment and assistants in lab coats. In his eyes the prison of Irencillia consisted of single cells. This cells contained tubes, that led to a big glass cube. This tubes extracted the vitality of the prisoners and channeled it into the cube. In this glass cube there was a lab assistant, that sat before a writing table and inscribed the sucked off vitality of the prisoners in form of a story into a book. Above the book a big prism hung in the air and projected the written story into the air of the room beyond the glass pane. Because faeries are stories coagulated to a material existence, the projection slowly created the form of a big faerie dragon. In Crepusculos idea of Irencillia, this was Irencillias big project: Suck the vitality off their prisoners to create a big faerie dragon. Of course the troupe was not happy that one of their friends would become faerie fodder, but before serious aggressions took place, Varinia entered the room, examined the new prisoner and discovered his valuable personality (the knight is compassionate). Because the knight was finished with his mental stability, Crepusculo lent itself to enter the cell instead of the knight. Varinia accepted and discovered just another valuable personality (Crepusculo is optimistic). The excited maga knew that such strong personalities would help to promote the creation of the faerie dragon and was ready for a deal. She would bring the troupe to the faerie queen Rosmert and if Rosmert would allow that the magi of Irencillia vote for the creation of the new covenant, then two of the player magi would agree to spend two days in the cells to spend their vitality for the experiments of Irencillia. The negotiation with Rosmert brought another condition for the troupe. The magi got a book from Irencillia, that they had to copy two times and transfer to two persons (the book is a quasi-religious scripture that propagates the faerie-religion of Iacob, leader of the elder guild, the receivers are another Merinitamagus and a progressive and reforming abbot - shadows of future stories). The characters complied and left the covenant. One of them suffered in his captivity and it will take some days till he regains his optimism he lost in the cells of Irencillia.

All in all the afternoon took a lot of preparation work, but we had a very exciting game session.

This was difficult for me to express. Please excuse my english.

Chiarina.

10

Hi Chiarina,

It sounds like you had a really good session! I'm glad all your work paid off in a memorable game for your players.

Mark