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This Is Where the Party Is

Graphic, detailed violence is such a standard component of roleplaying games that reviewers often feel the need to remark upon the absence of special combat rules in a game. Madness too has been fruitfully explored, to the point that the careless investigator left drooling and gibbering after an unexpected encounter with some elder horror has become one of the cliches of the hobby. Evil, death, chaos - all of them customary themes for games, and no gamer will be surprised when you tell him about your chaotic evil necromancer whose recurring fits of mania always end in killing sprees.

All the more remarkable, then, is the fact that one of the great themes of transgression almost never makes its appearance in roleplaying games: lust. This is even stranger because, unlike violence, madness, death, chaos and evil, lust is generally quite fun in the real world, even if its potential for destruction is as high as that of the other themes. Perhaps, though, the answer lies right there: although none of our fellow players will believe that we would like to be insane, a bloodthirsty killer or a pale creep digging around in the graveyard at midnight, they just might believe that erotic content we narrate actually mirrors our desires. And thus, it seems, games and gamers have shied away from the rich possibilities that tales of lust and sex have to offer, because we might actually have to reveal ourselves in the process; or they have transformed sexuality into something harmless because juvenile, such as the Guide to Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

And yet, these stories want to be told. Lust, in both its negative and its positive aspects, plays an important role in our lives; it is a theme that can hardly fail to engage us, and many great books and movies have been based upon it. So a game that promises to aid us in telling these stories without degenerating into juvenility or pornography is worthy of our critical attention. Such a game is Paul Czege's Bacchanal.

Caught up in the Bacchanal

Bacchanal is a small game that Paul Czege, author of the indie classic My Life with Master, wrote for the Game Chef competition. It is available both as a free download and as a 12 page booklet; I have reviewed the printed version, but the main difference is the cover art and the addition of several pieces of advice which have also been published on the Game Chef forum. At 4 dollars, the booklet comes cheap enough to be worth your money if you intend to play. The cover art, depicting a half-naked woman embracing a satyr, is quite good, managing to be mildly erotic without succumbing to banality.

The twelve nicely laid-out pages contain a brief introduction, describing the setting; a short section on the materials you will need to play the game and the preparations you must make; a description of the possible scenes the dice can prescribe, which takes up the bulk of the booklet; and finally a few pieces of advice that make much clearer how the game should be played.

The setting is as follows. In 61 A.D., in the Italian harbour of Puteoli, Bacchus has descended from the hills to bring the irresistible madness of wine and gods to town. Everybody is caught up in the ensuing decadence, and Puteoli is transformed into an orgy of drunkenness, violent crime and - above all - sexual lust. With Bacchus come his followers, the satyrs, and his presence has lured several other gods to attend as well: Venus, goddess of love and lust; Pluto, who has come to see the most base crimes of men; and Minerva, enraged by the mindless brutality and of a mind to put a stop to it.

The player characters are in a difficult situation. Each of them has been accused of a crime against the empire, and they need to find their lost companion and flee Puteoli before they are caught and killed by the soldiers that are looking for them. But they are no more immune to the psychic powers that emanate from the gods than anyone else, and they can't help but become involved in the lustful decadence around them. The game, which is meant to played in one evening by two to five people, will follow the characters through the orgies of Puteoli, and ends when all of the character have either escaped or been killed.

An Evening of Debauchery

Bacchanal uses a whole lot of dice. All the important NPCs and NPC-types are represented by a die of a certain size and colour. Thus, Bacchus is represented by a purple d8; his satyrs are represented by between one and three brown d8s, depending on the number of players; there is a single white d6 which represents the companion of all the players, even though these are in fact multiple different characters; and so forth. On top of that you need between 15 and 30 purple d6s, the so-called 'Wine dice'.

Each player has a wine glass which contains a number of dice; at the start of the game, five Wine dice and two non-Wine dice. Play proceeds in rounds, with each player taking a turn to roll his dice, look up the results in the booklet, and describe what happens to his character based on the roll. Interaction between the player characters is at most minimal, and the other players have no influence on the events that you narrate - thus, the game is more about telling a story to an interested audience than most other roleplaying games.

After you roll, you look at the highest die or dice; this determines both the constraints on the scene you have to narrate, and whether or not you have to move dice from your glass to the table or from the table to your glass. So, for instance, if you roll Bacchus as your highest die, you must describe an escalation of decadence at your character's current location, and you must add one Wine die to your glass. If a Satyr is your high die, you also add one Wine to your glass, and you must describe a change of scene and sexual decadence at the new location. If Venus is your high die, you put the Companion in your glass and narrate how a beautiful woman or boy leads you to the person you have been looking for.

The game ends for your character when you either roll a Soldier high, in which case you are apprehended and have a big chance of being killed, or roll the Companion high, in which case you manage to escape Puteoli. Although you have quite some influence on which dice end up in your glass during the game, this nevertheless means that the game can end very suddenly for you, at a moment which seems wildly inappropriate. According to Paul Czege, his playtests showed that this does not in fact detract from the fun of the game; but if, like me, you'd rather not be taken out of the game just after it started, you can adopt the simple house rule that Soldiers and Companions only end a character's story if the player wants them to.

This is the entire system, clear and succinct. The final section in the book gives some good pieces of advice, as well as much-needed clarification about the kind of game Bacchanal is intended to be. I quote:

In Bacchanal, you are thrust by the dice to the fore of the stage to fabricate and describe scenes of erotic transgression. If this doesn't induce anxiety, and the game isn't with your lover alone, then you aren't doing it right.

The Depths of Lust

How does Bacchanal fare in actual play? There are two major questions, in my opinion. The first is whether Bacchanal actually enables its players to tell erotic stories to each other, something I assume they don't do regularly, without feeling too uncomfortable. The second is whether these stories actually do have a tendency to be interesting and thematic, rather than just chains of cheap verbal pornography.

In order to answer this question, I invited two of my friends in, one male, one female. We know each other pretty well, but there are no internal sexual relationships. In addition, I supplied six wine glasses - three for the dice, three for wine - and two bottles of good wine, as well as some tasty cheeses and grapes. For background music I created a compilation of erotically themed songs by Inkubus Sukkubus. There is something very satisfying about playing Bacchanal while someone is singing "God of lust and god of nature" in the background.

With the decadence thus firmly in place, we looked over the rules, which are very easy to understand, then created characters, which truly is a breeze. Soon we were on our way with the first scenes.

Two good points of the game design became immediately apparent. First, you will often have a result that tells you to increase the decadence at the current location, which ensures that there is a natural progression of decadence throughout the game. Because of this, you can get used to the idea of telling a tale of lust and debauchery in a few relatively safe first scenes, then gradually increase your vulnerability. What begins with drunkenness and soft caressing can thus easily degenerate into murder, incest and rape.

Second, the fact that you take turns narrating ensures that you constantly get feedback on the amount of explicitness and decadence that your fellow players are comfortable with. If the others are telling much more subdued scenes than you are doing, chances are that you'll tone down a bit; conversely, if everyone keeps following the others to ever higher scales of decadence, you might finally come up with things that you'd never have told without this encouragement and validation.

Because of these points and the evocative setting of the game, I believe that the first question can be answered affirmatively. Bacchanal helps the players to tell erotic stories to each other, exploring sexual transgression, in an environment of trust. The remaining question is whether the relatively rules-light game can also ensure that the tales are interesting and thematic, instead of just transgressive - which would get old very soon.

To this, the answer too is mostly affirmative. Let me first explain the 'mostly'. It is rather easy to lose yourself in scenes that use transgression for its own sake rather than for telling an interesting, thematic story about lust, and there is nothing in the rules that stops this from happening. However, it is surprisingly easy to tell a rich symbolic story, and even to turn somewhat meaningless previous scenes into symbolic events through later narration.

The reason for this is rather subtle: the game itself, small as it is, has such a strong symbolic and metaphorical content that almost any event in the game can be reinterpreted as a meaningful thematic move. Look, for instance, at the player characters: their life is in danger, they really only want to flee Puteoli, but they cannot help but be caught up in the bacchanal. If that isn't a powerful metaphor for the relation between the rational and the lustful in man, nothing is. Whatever you do, this metaphor will always sit there in the background, ready to give meaning to your fantasies.

The gods, too, are rich with symbolic meaning. Bacchus is madness and lust in all its forms; the satyrs symbolise sexuality, especially male sexuality; Venus female sexuality; Pluto cruelty and violence; Minerva the shock and outrage of the rational mind. You will generally shape your narration to reflect the dice in your glass, and thus these themes will infect your narration almost unnoticed, ready to give overarching meaning.

And so, three first time players who were not, as far as I could see, particularly striving to tell a thematic tale at the start of the game, ended up with: one tale about a man discovering female sexuality and being destroyed because of it (I was very much reminded of the movie Eyes wide shut); one heart-rending tale of a young girl abused then condemned by a male-dominated society; and one man succumbing to his own lust before he decided that the only way to deal with it was to forcefully excise it from his own body - three tales that had much more thematic depth than I generally expect from a game that lasted perhaps four hours.

So, although the possibility exists that you'll end up telling nothing but a bunch of increasingly shocking scenes, based on my experience I'll say that chances are that the system will help you to explore themes of lust, sexuality and violence in a more meaningful way.

Irresistible madness?

What, in the end, is my conclusion about Bacchanal? It is certainly not for everyone, and you should think carefully before asking people to come and play it with you. Be sure that they are mature, and that all players know and trust each other.

But if you can find such a group; if you believe that there are interesting tales to tell about lust and sexuality; and if the rich symbolic content of the ancient Roman religion appeals to you, Bacchanal is definitely worth a try. You will probably tell some very interesting stories, as well as surprise yourselves and each other by the power of your imagination and the courage and sensitivity you show in telling each other about sexual transgression in a fashion that commands respect rather than repulsion.

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