Ragnarok Ruminations Part 2 Nuts and Bolts

Warning to players:  Looking behind the curtain always reveals Oz to be less then he appears.  Read on at your own peril...?  Whatever word I mean to use there.  Use that word instead.

When last we left, it was 38 months ago, and I was starting  a campaign.  If you read the fiction that zooms you up to about 24 months into the campaign.  You'll notice that the PCs are entangling many many people into their story(more often from their plots and not mine).  You go ahead another 14 months and their doing this on an even greater scale, but their doing it with more gods, and introducing and making different pantheons interact with each other more and more.

But as you probably know, the running of ragnarok was a surprise because two players had to move, so I had to rush a few things(I had planned on having another 6 months or so).  One of the things I rushed was who to have involved.  As I talked about in the last blog, I wanted to have the pcs choices and actions effect who was involved, but I didnt want to just automatically drag everyone they've been involved with. into it.  I wanted a bit of fate and a bit of randomness.  After a lot of thought I came up with a system.  I dont think it was  the best system.  Im not sure it was good, but it functioned for what I needed.  I'll get more in depth on its faults in a later post, but for now here it is.


I start with the people I know have to be at ragnarok.  The PCs, the fire titans, the norse gods, and their enemies.

Then I do a roll for anyone who is in the same pantheon with, has had a meaningful interaction with, or has fought in  a combat with or against.

For each of one of the above you added one dice to the pool.
So, If 3 people from my pantheon were already fated to be involved in Ragnarok, and 3 people I had a meaningful interaction with at some point were as well.  I would roll 6 dice on this "roll"

The number to get was 10 on this roll.  If you got a 10 you became destined to have a mandatory part in Ragnarok.  The intertwining of the strands of fate between you and the Aesir destined your finale to be with theirs.  Or not necessarily a finale, but instead a life altering event.  Ragnarok was to be a big chapter in your story in some way.

I added a couple caveats.  If you had a very close relationship to someone involved(parent, sibling, wife, hated enemy) you added two dice for that person instead of 1.
If you were a war god you added 4 dice off the top(cant miss the greatest battle of all time)
And if you were maxed in the magic purview your number to get was 20 instead of 10(being able to manipulate yourself out of that fate).

And So I started rolling.  Starting pantheon by pantheon and then titan realm by titan realm, and then human fatebond by human fatebond.  Anyone who ever interacted with the PCs and was currently alive went into a massive chart that I rolled from.  All the nondead non "essential" Aesir quickly fell in line.  Parents of the PCs came pretty quickly and then their pantheons would get some in because most of the PCs had dealt with most of them.  Having at least 2 PCs from each of the pantheons in play meant most of their pantheon got involved.

The adding 4 dice for war gods hit its stride when I did ares and his children.  They pretty much doomed the entire dodekatheon to joining.  And with an entire pantheon their titan and avatars would also come along.  So eventually Ragnarok also was filled with stars and fertility and darkness.  Many of the titans using this calamity where the gods would be the weakest as the perfect time to strike.  There would be injured, weakened gods everywhere.
Now remember, every time someone new got sucked in to ragnarok.  I had to go through my entire list of people I already rolled and see if they had a relationship to the newly fated and if so, roll an extra dice and add it to their total.

This created a giant constant vortex that ended in addition to the pcs, 126 distinct separate characters involved in ragnarok.  I made them each a note card(I fucking love note cards).  I put their Effective HP(will explain later) their normal attacks, any special attacks, their aura(will explain below) and what happened when/if they died(usually bad stuff).

Aura:  Most gods/titans had an aura of some kind.  It gave people that fought in battle with them a bonus.  It was often either a bonus to purviews or a bonus extra strong blessing of bravery.  Some gods had generic ones, some had very cool specific ones.  Titans sometimes had a WIP rolls to get near them, or made a purview more difficult to use, or drained willpower.  Although sometimes they did helpful things as well with their auras.

Effective Health(effective HP):  When dealing with massive battles(or really even when dealing with small ones), it is a huge pain in the ass to constantly calculate how much legend a creature has, how much it wants to spend on converting.  Should it convert?  Roll with it?  Does it have unbreakable?  How much does it want to spend on it.  Is the creature stunting its actions?  Thats all good for hero and early demigod, but when the PCs start getting more powerful, and the numbers start getting crazy, I invented(although I stole the word from MMO games, and Im sure someone came up with the idea first) my effective HP system. Instead of worrying about all of that.  You decide when creating the creature, how powerful it should be.  Factor in all its defensive abilities, and ball park a HP value that represents that number.
Then you get to write down DV, soaks, and Effective HP, and instead of worrying about legend just subtract from this larger number.  Assuming that the character will be doing whatever possible with its legend to stay alive.  I can explain more about this some day if people want, but I dont wanna spend anymore time on it atm.  Its very mathy.


Back to Ragnarok!

So next I had to decide what places I wanted Ragnarok to take place in.  We needed asgarde, bifrost and the plain Vigrid(I feel like it had a different name but thats what google is telling me atm).  I wanted to give the PCs places where they could save bits of the world if they wanted(could) so things also had to take place at Vanaheim(for will) and Yggdrissl(for kettilla).  Then several of their sanctums would be at risk because of fated battles(thor and jormongondr probably fight in iceland) or because they pissed people off(a water titan had been waiting to betray vivian for a bit, and a son of Poseidon had been waiting to get back at Marcus for years).  Eventually I ended up with 24 locations where battles would take place of some kind.

There were three levels of "importance" to the battles.  With 12 places at the first level and 6 places at levels 2 and 3.

1. Non important stuff.  The Pcs could save their sanctum, or their children or their cult, but nothing major.  Basically things the PCs care about, but on a grand scale dont matter much.  Except Asgarde is also in this list cause it gets attacked first automatically.

2. Semi-Important.  Big things happening that if they arent stopped can have catastrophic effects in other parts of the world.  Also Bifrost cause it gets attacked 2nd and it crashing leads to Vigrid.    Fate titan realm is one of these places.

3. The big ones.  These six are the 5 places on the field(which is enormous) that each god prophesied to die fights his enemy(plus olympous cause there was a side plot where tons of shit was going on leading up to that including fate realm).

Each of the 1s lead into a 2, and each 2 led into a 3.  Then all the 3s lead eventually to Vigrid.  With fate and pyscopomp super activated, space almost didnt have a meaning, and whenever a battle finished at a location, the denizens were moved to the next location that was on the list until the battle at Vigrid ended.

Each Location also has an Effective HP(just a general number for the bad things there to do to completely destroy the place if no pcs or npcs are stopping them.  IE, if the bad guys are just left alone to run batshit and destroy).  An aura(fated buff for being there, often a way to get legend back), a bad thing that happens if the location is destroyed(when asgarde finally fell no one could use loyalty channels anymore), and an order in which the npcs arrived there.  It started with two, one trying to destroy and one trying to defend it and from there could stay even or spiral in either direction.  First level places had 2-4 characters.  2nd level had 5-8, and 3rd had many/all the rest.  It was based on story lines tied to those each location, and the npcs that fit best there, mixed with a little randomness.

All over the room I spread out 4 tables(2 big 2 small) and started with the asgarde card in the middle, and all the pcs at asgarde as the jotun attack after sailing over in the boat.  Then I put down the Mimirs well location.  Some stuff happens and the two groups get split up.  The prophets plus goze go to the well, everyone heads to defend ragnarok.
(We had several people playing 2 characters, the deal was once they split up their characters, which was mandatory as soon as possible, they couldnt have them at the same location again til Vigrid.)

At each location the first two npcs "happened" and the battles began.  PCs got to take 4 "actions" per segment.  Actions were big things that didnt necessarily have time constraints on them, but had to fit into a 4 hour window.  So, they could fight giants for 4 actions, this would consist of 4 hours of them taking out a section of the massive army.  But only involved them rolling 4 times and taking that to a scale of 4 hours.
Or they could summon a tornado, that would be one action worth even though it took less time.  Or they could pop all their fighting powers, and attack one of the bigger enemies 4 times.  I wouldnt count the popping their powers as actions, cause they werent "meaningful actions" but I would have them take the time to do them, so they probably got beat up during it.

After the PCs at each location took their actions I would have the npcs at each location take their actions(often I did this while they were deciding what they were doing or rollling and would write the effects down to tell them when they were done), two people would draw randomly from the deck of level 1 locations.  Those locations would hit a table, and the first 2 npcs in those locations would arrive there.  Then each of the current locations(at this point just asgarde and mimirs well) would have their next npc added(he would arrive on scene) and the pcs would have to decide which area they wanted to be in for the next segment.  They would talk about it, pyscopomps would port people around, and wherever they landed they were stuck for the entirety of the next segment.  They'd get all the new applied auras of the place and npcs of whatever area they landed in, and they'd start a new.

When we got to the level 2 location they started coming 1 area at a time, and finally the level 3s also came one location at a time.  But they were always random, and chosen by the players.  Some locations lasted for many segments(asgarde) some were dealt with in 1 or 2(geoffs sanctum).  It was very exciting.  After each segment which location was next was even a surprise to me, and the pcs kept having different reactions, and weighing which was more important to save or where they'd be most effective.  The groups split and reformed in all possible different ways, and they rotated what titans they fought, and what gods they fought with.  It was the epitome of awesome.
And I would tell you more, but anne has sworn me to secrecy on the specifics until she writes the fiction.
But when she does that we do have a recording of the game that we could upload(but jesus its 40 hours long, even after an edit why the hell would you wanna listen to that.

I think thats everything I wanted to talk about regarding the nuts and bolts.
Next time: Things I think succeeded and possibly things I wanted to put in this post but forgot.