Campaign Toybox
The Story: Alice was neither the first nor the last to see the truth: through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole, once you alter your vision just slightly you can see the hidden world. It couldn’t be any other way: the things most given to life are those with which we live and die. Not any heroes in a book or movie, but our representatives on a board. As we live through them, they came to live through us. At night, in the game cupboard, everything comes to life…
It’s not a nice world in there, though. Not with so many warriors and kings. But death only lasts until the morning, and ultimately, there is only one prize and that’s popularity. What a game wants is to be played the most. Sure, the kings and queens of the chessboard have history on their side. The gleaming silver terrier of Monopoly trades on his nostalgia with the younger meeples. The space marines like to act tough because they cost the most money. But these days, there’s a new order in town. The powerful, staid Germans. The accommodating, flirty cross-over hits. Those collectible card games that are breeding like rabbits. And of course the slutty party games with no brains who get taken out for anybody.
It’s like high school, but everyone’s armed and the rules are even more arcane. Because everybody has rules – it’s not a game if it doesn’t have rules…
Style and Structure: Familiarity is fun. Your sourcebook here is your very own gaming cupboard, shelf or boxes. Those are your NPCs. Your favourite games are running the show, they are the prom-queens and the football stars. Genres become cliques. It’s just like high school, only the weekend isn’t date night, it’s game night, and being taken out is even more important – because it really is life or death.
If a game isn’t played for long enough, it turns to stone and can’t come alive any more. And the power structures aren’t as ephemeral as high school. Powerful games become entrenched and desperate to hold onto their power. They play dice (ahem) with the lives of weaker ones, manipulating events so that their favoured positions cannot be compromised. When that doesn’t work, there is violence. Games cannot die (they can only Go Back To Start) but they can be pushed to the back of the cupboard, beaten and creased. So it is a political game for popularity, but with plenty of opportunities for smackdowns.
And there’s magic, too. There has to be magic. Art Magic is the least powerful, unable to change the essence of a game’s rules but it can change the entire mood of a game. Luck Magic only works in the short term but at the right moment can lose fortunes or make miracles happen. Most powerful of all is Rule Magic, which has the power to stretch and manipulate and find loops hole in the very rules that bind a game’s life.
PCs and NPCs: Your NPCs are the games you own. Sit down with your PCs and let them assign personalities to your games. The ones they lose in or dislike they’ll love to make the villains. For PCs, however, you should avoid pre-existing games. That way players can be creative and flesh out their games’ rules and nature without anyone calling them on how “realistic” their stats might be. What’s more, being new kids on the block provides its own story arc. It allows the PCs to naturally be introduced to all the factions and power groups, deciding when and where to ally themselves and of course, be blood in the water for those factions to fight over. This is known as the “World of Darkness” model, and they use it a lot because it works well.
Plots and Villains: In a political game, your plots are your villains, and here they come with a built in prize to win. The question then is how is it measured? Consider having either a game stat or an in-world physical measurement of popularity. Games can actually effect the mindset of their owner by some ritualistic practice or device that may be vague or may be very precise and measurable. The point is, the more sway you gain from such things, the more likely you are to be pulled out of the cupboard. Of course, the ways to gain this sway is controlled by the strongest games – and they get stronger every time they get played, while their enemies get weaker. Not just politically but literally, because being played makes you stronger and more able to use your rules on other games, and not being played slowly turns you to stone.
It may even work like a kind of religion. The difference is it’s not entirely monolithic – at least not yet. The Great Gamers Outside the Cupboard are strange and unpredictable, their tastes changing as often as the weather. Each week they can only gather to try and see who will be chosen. He who controls the popularity controls the universe – but you can never control it for good. Or so they say. And that’s where your plots come from: every game wants to be the only game played, to win the popularity competition for ever. At least the status quo is more fair. So in between trying to loosen the grip of the current top dogs, you can go on quests to stop Pokemon from finding the key that will turn all the other games to stone.
Sources: We’ve already mentioned Alice, but do read Looking Glass again because the life of the chess pieces is great inspiration for how rules might affect a playing piece. For the fun of everything coming to life, Night At the Museum is a surprisingly good film, as is The Indian In the Cupboard. Not surprisingly, this is a staple of children’s stories, although it’s usually toys not games that do so (because the incarnation of a cardboard box into a persona is perhaps a bit esoteric) but even with toys you’ll find a rich vein to tap, and it goes back to such classics as the Brave Tin Soldier and The Nutcracker Suite. Games that come alive in a different way appear in Jumanji and Zathura (and Stay Alive for video games), and Hollywood keeps threatening to make films out of Monopoly and other Hasbro giants. Kids’ stories in general are full of incarnated objects with a personality that reflects their nature, and like almost everything in kid’s stories, bringing these things into a more nuanced, adult world creates fantastic outcomes. If you simply don’t own enough board games or need help defining your traits and factions, check out the Geek Lists as www.boardgamegeek.com (it’s also a great site).
RPGs: We’ve already mentioned the World of Darkness for political games with factions, but Changeling: The Lost in particular is a good source. Not only does it have lots of incarnate objects, it also features faerie pacts which make a great model for the kind of rules a game might have to obey to stay true to its nature. For political games with manipulation and factions, there’s some excellent choices, from Amber to Smallville. Smallville also works if your game cupboard leans more toward high school than Dune, as indeed does Buffy or Teenagers from Outer Space. Nothing does “toys come to life” as well as Puppetland which is available free online and also has great rules about what a puppet can and can’t do, which would fit perfectly with trying to characterize a board game. Games where you can define such genre rules on the fly will also be useful, like the clever Universalis or Mortal Coil. Speaking of indie games, the wonderful Army Ants is set in the world of your backyard, using the same idea of turning the familiar into the awesome.
