Minireview: Houses of the Blooded
Ok, now I’ve finally read it. Houses of the Blooded is huge, complex, intimidating, weird and quite fascinating. John Wick wrote a game that he would like to play himself, and the end result features betrayal, social status games in an alien society, bloody duels and romance (which always ends badly). And opera. Which also always ends badly.
It’s a weird game. Quite clearly a labor of love, it’s written in a very strong authorial tone. Unlike Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel, though, the tone here does not annoy me a bit, it just lends flavor.
So, what’s it about? Well, the players are all “Ven”, and “Blooded”. Members of an ancient race of beings originally created as slaves/servants to a now-dead race of sorcerer-kings, they do everything by extremes. All players are nobles, and all control land and are lords over a large population of lesser Ven – land serfs, essentially. Non-Blooded Ven are essentially property, and non-Ven are even less: they are collectively called “orks” and treated as unintelligent animals. The Ven are xenophobes and elitists in the extreme, and laugh at our weak “modern” ideas of equality and moral relativity. Players belong to (or claim association with) various animal-themed factions… one might be Blooded of the Elk, another Blooded of the Bear. This matters, in various ways.
There is sorcery, but it’s illegal. Everyone does it. There are rules, which are strict. Everyone breaks them. The words for “love” and “revenge” are almost identical, and this is extended into the mindset of the Ven – love is seen as a dangerous obsession, a weakness which often leads to bloodshed. Still, almost everyone chases after it. The color of your clothes matters. Nobody wears black, by choice. Some are forced to.
Mechanically, it uses an “Aspects” -based system (modelled after Spirit of the Century) with tons of clever bits tacked on. The winner of a (mechanical) test does not necessarily win the current challenge; he/she gets to decide what happens, and how. This is an important difference. There are no levels and no hit points, none of that crap. Combat is lethal, so you want to avoid it – until you can’t, when someone challenges you to a duel or insults you. Which happens, more often or not.
The Ven don’t die of old age, they retreat into cocoons, and whisper in the dreams of their children.
This is one of the more impressive “indie-style” games I’ve encountered in a while. It has so many neat things that I don’t really know where to start. It’s also a bit intimidating, I do have a small “well, what do I do with it?” problem. There is a very good Narrator section on the book, though, which helps out a lot in this regard. The characters actually age, and must make land-rule decisions in a small resource-management minigame of its own. John has said it’s a sort of an “anti-D&D” game: dungeon crawling is for peasants, this game is about all the bits D&D is not about. Including opera.
The game is very strongly player-loaded, and players are expected to develop a large part of the game world as the game progresses. This will not work for more passive game groups which are used to the GM providing the entertainment, here the players absolutely must chip in. It’s also (optionally) a slightly player-vs-player game – the PCs are expected to plot against each other, at times. This may not be suitable for some play groups, so it can also be left out.
If you’re at all interested in unusual fantasy games, get this game/book and read it. It will give you ideas about gaming, even if you never run it. I’m still not sure if I’m brave enough to give it a try.
I have a few small niggles. The layout is a bit chaotic, with rules scattered all over the (big) book. A more clear “rules section” and “fluff section” might have been better. Also, while the conceit in the book that the Ven were a real, historical race and that the book is based on actual archeological research is fun in a way, it gets a bit old. I would have kept that stuff in the player section, and left them out of the GM-only parts. […]
Five bucks!
Just a quick heads-up: John Wick is selling the PDF of his new game Houses of the Blooded for $5, for a limited time.
That, people, is a good deal – it’s a thick book, and judging by a quick browse-through of my PDF copy it’s pretty awesome. I’m still waiting for my print copy to arrive before reading it, so I can’t say anything more specific quite yet. […]
Houses of the Blooded preorders
Ok, a quick “heads up”: John Wick’s new game, Houses of the Blooded, was opened for IPR print pre-orders on Monday. There are two options: the normal version (which also includes PDF), and a hardcover limited edition. The limited edition has a slightly different cover to the standard one, and also includes a CD with the book PDF, over an hour of music suitable for the game (“Blood Music”), and graphic files plus fonts suitable for creating your own game handouts etc.
The limited edition is also extremely limited. Only 100 copies will be printed, and after I placed my order some 10 minutes or so ago, there were only 25 copies left. Expect them to sell out over the weekend. So, if you want to get your hands on this, place your order fast. Preordering the normal edition will save you $5 vs normal price, but there’s no huge hurry on that one.
John details the two editions in this blog post.
About the game itself: it’s about Love, Ambition, Opera, Obsession and Tragedy (capitals intentional), set among the “Ven”, a race which could be elves, or high-born humans, or C.J. Cherryh’s “atevi”, or anything in that vein. It uses lots of rules cues from Spirit of the Century, and in all ways it sounds extremely cool to me. There is a preview download available on the game’s web page, in case you want to get some more idea of what it’s like.
“The Ven language has only one word for both ‘love’ and ‘revenge’. Just a slight change in pronounciation.”
A game of romance. A game of revenge. A game of invisible wars and sorcerous blood. A game with no victors. Only casualties. […]
John Wick on D&D
I have mixed feelings about the upcoming 4th edition of D&D. I used to play AD&D (1st ed) as the first rpg I ever tried. It was fun, despite the rules being an unholy mess and most of the adventures being pure dungeon stomps with no rhyme or reason. By the time 2nd ed rolled along, I had left D&D for other games (Rolemaster, at that time).By what I understand, TSR pushed up quantity and allowed quality to drop (both massively), ending up in bankruptcy and with Wizards of the Coast buying them out. WotC did a nice hat trick with 3rd edition, rewriting the whole thing with a “d20” ruleset and introducing the Open Gaming License so 3rd parties could use their ruleset to create add-on material. While I’ve never played 3rd ed and don’t intend to (as a ruleset it doesn’t exactly appeal to me), things apparently worked out for WotC and 3rd ed was a success.
…and now we have 4th ed, which is getting conflicted reviews based on what’s known. WotC is apparently chasing after the WoW gamer crowd; makes sense as such, since the rpg industry is miniscule while the MMORPG one is huge (for certain companies, at least). Thing is, I’m not sure they’re copying the right things from WoW. In addition, it’s still not clear if 4e will have a version of the OGL, which has already caused some big 3rd party content producers to jump ship and roll their own (Paizo recently said that they are not getting into 4e, and will instead develop an in-house variant of 3.5 for Pathfinder). Even more fragmentation into an already fragmented market it bad, though I totally understand and support what Paizo is doing – it only makes sense.
All of which leads to John Wick, whose upcoming game Houses of the Blooded looks rocking, to note on his blog:
“I console myself with the knowledge that the new D&D design team is finally giving up the ghost. D&D isn’t a roleplaying game; it’s a very sophisticated board game. This is a bit of a paradox because D&D is the first roleplaying game. Yet, it isn’t a roleplaying game. Like being your own grandfather, this takes some explaining.”
I’m not sure if I 100% agree with him, but he does make some very good observations.
I mean, D&D is now in its 4th incarnation, and it still apparently has no real rules for social conflict (other than some lame “Diplomacy” rolls or suchlike). Rules for hacking monsters? Sure, hundreds of pages of them, I’m sure. But for anything else? Nah, don’t need rules for that, that’s the “roleplaying” thing you can do if you insist on doing “suboptimal builds”. Gah.
Some things WoW should stay in WoW. And some things from the rest of the industry/hobby should finally get introduced to D&D. Will they? Like hell they will. See dragon, kill dragon, collect loot. Huzzah!
