Notes from a Materialist Game Session

This is a report on a recent adventure I played in run by Panic Pillow, based on an empire toolkit The 2nd Age we created together. I’m calling it a “materialist session” of the dialectical sort, where social processes drive a lot of what happens in the game. I can’t vouch that Panic Pillow would label it similarly, but I can speak for having this type of thing in mind when designing The 2nd Age.

Panic Pillow ran the game on a HUDless basis, meaning players don’t have access to stats or dice rolls (you can read more about it in Panic Pillow’s write up here). The 2nd Age document is also very light on rules, mainly consisting of some institutional “classes” and qualitative abilities. I’ve not been part of a session with so few explicit mechanics, and was interested to learn from the experience.

Central to The 2nd Age is the idea of character advancement being tied up with the agendas of institutions, and ultimately that of an empire. Social processes operating through the empire, such as expansionism, come to have a direct bearing on the characters. That’s the theory anyway, but I was keen to see how it worked in practice.

Character Motivation

Obviously, this is a bit of a departure from the classic “XP for gold” game loop more conventional to old school games. Before starting, we were messaged secret objectives, linked to the institutions we’d chosen to align with. My character Hudson was on the lookout for metals for an industrial consortium and some blueprints. My fellow adventurer was Caleb, part of the Royal Institute for Furthering Arcane Knowledge, and accordingly incentivised to study magical phenomenon.

Panic Pillow though hinted that we could instead treat the adventure as a more of a conventional loot grab. And if we took objection to the empire’s activities, perhaps we’d end up trying to subvert their goals. It didn’t therefore feel like a railroaded mission, but the implication was that freedom came at a cost.

Caleb and Hudson responded to these motivations very differently. Caleb was the model professional and a credit to their institution, with what I’d call a careerist work ethic. I’m reading about this sort of thing in Napoleon’s army, where advancement was said to be based on noteworthy achievement rather than background. I’d hoped The 2nd Age might foster a similar careerist attitude and it was nice to see Caleb’s player lean into this.

Caleb demonstrated their ambition from the get go, scanning the perimeter of the adventure site for magic with their arcane spectrometer. Later, they would go to extraordinary efforts to study the inner workings of a magical oven - from the inside while it was still on. When the heat made this impossible, he tried introducing cooler air, by building a scaffold to take apart the ceiling.

Hudson took a more relaxed approach, being cynical after years of dangerous work with hot metal. He was tempted to loot a room of golden statues, but was put off by its guards and traps. After grabbing a few metal samples, he was keen to get out before things got too dangerous.

Keeping It Together

With differing secret objectives and attitudes towards them, it was not always possible to keep Caleb and Hudson together during the adventure. Panic Pillow seemed happy managing this, splitting between our exploration of different areas. It worked well for me, and I’m quite comfortable with splitting the party in my own campaigns.

My character felt more motivated to stay with Caleb than I’d anticipated, and ended up helping out with his oven project. This was partly from being wary of Caleb as a “company man”, who might report on him negatively to their superiors. Even if the “carrot” of advancement didn’t motivate Hudson much, the “stick” of repercussions from the empire helped keep the party on a unified track. 

Perhaps because I am reading about it now, I did begin to see Caleb as representing different class interests to Hudson’s own. Eric Hobsbawn talks about the factors that maintained loyalty in the ranks of Napoleon’s army.

The army was a career like any other of the many the bourgeois revolution had opened up to talent; and those who succeeded in it had a vested interest in internal stability like any other bourgeois. (p96, Hobsbawm. E, The Age of Revolution, 1926)

It did feel Caleb represented more the interests of the ruling class within the adventure, whereas Hudson saw himself as more an exploited worker. This was to the point Hudson avoided sharing certain information with Caleb that he wanted kept from the empire.

Factions

The adventure reflected a principle that I think is important for a game dealing with widespread social processes. There were none of what Weird Writer terms “naturalistic factions”, that is factions limited in their relationships to the immediate adventure location and divorced from the context of the outside world.

Of the two factions we encountered, both had a relationship to the empire our characters served. This gave an immediate context to the DM and ourselves as players to orientate these encounters. While reaction rolls were used, the way we presented ourselves and the faction’s attitude to the empire seemed more decisive in determining outcomes.

The 2nd Age concerns an empire’s expansion to reclaim territory from its glorious 1st age. The faction we first met were die hard loyalists to the empire from the 1st age, worshiping its myth with a seemingly religious fervour. Unaware of this, our characters downplayed their connection to the empire, and these fanatics soon lost interest in engaging with us.

For our second encounter, we instead presented ourselves as confident emissaries of the empire. This backfired, as the magical researcher we met loathed the empire and all that it represented. Fortunately, she was not very disposed to violence. Hudson was able to redeem himself slightly be playing up his own grievances with his masters, and lampooning his role as a “dog of the empire”.

Summary

Panic Pillow’s adventure was fun to play, and had a lot of imaginative content I have not talked about at all (his write up gives more a flavour of this). The history of the empire’s 1st age felt ingrained in the adventures site. Sometimes, this was as myth and propaganda. Mutated horrors also hinted at an unspoken darker legacy. This created a sense of continuity between the empire’s past and present expansionism.

The HUDless aspect of the session is difficult to comment on, because there weren’t many situations that would have required dice rolls in a typical game of D&D. I felt comfortable not being aware of any rules. I tend to see my characters as having the capacity of an average person in a situation, and was comfortable with Panic Pillow assessing where these boundaries were.

Experiencing institution-based advancement as a player, it was interesting how this worked in parallel with grabbing loot as a motivator. Loot had a limited pull for exploration, as I wasn’t sure what Hudson would spend it on. I couldn’t see a clear way to improve their capabilities through the purchase of equipment etc, nor could I see the relative significance of money in terms of accommodation costs etc. This is may be something for a future edition of The 2nd Age to expand on.

Panic Pillows adventure has inspired me to run my own “materialist adventure”. It’s going to be part of TavernCon 2023 7.30pm GMT July 1st & 2nd, on the Gaming Tavern Discord server. The pitch is that workers are going missing in a cinnabar mine, with the PCs tasked with ensuring that output rates are not adversely affected. If you’d like to try it out, DM me on OSR Discord.  It will be an lgbt+ friendly game, but you don't have to be a Marxist.