Houses of the Blooded

Houses of the Blooded is a broth cooked up, perhaps, of Zelazny's Amber, Brust's Adrilankha, and perhaps a soupcon of Moorcock. Taking place at some distant time in Earth's past, the players are ven, superhuman precursors of humanity. They are obsessed with honor, revenge, and romance; the stories told in the course of the game are intended to reflect this, with the sort of panache you might expect from, say, Dumas.

Blooded is thus a narrativist RPG; but unlike many others, its focus is more on the playing of distinct roles than on preconceived narrative arcs. Each character belongs to one of six noble ven houses, with its own stylistic characteristics; each also has a public name and a secret name, and all names have meaning in the language of the ven, providing immediate hooks into roleplaying.

The system itself is shaped to one end: to have the players and GM share the burden of story creation and telling in an integrated way, to retain the narrative tension of a traditional RPG, in which characters struggle to achieve their objectives, while also granting players far greater power to shape the narrative than usual.

When a player attempts any action, he rolls D6s, and if he rolls 10 or more, he narrates the outcome; on a 9 or less, the gamemaster does so. (In a contest, the high rolling player narrates, with the GM doing so if both players roll under 10.) Characteristics give you some number of dice, but often an insufficient number; players gain additional ones by invoking "aspects" of their personality, or even one of their names (public or secret). Thus, if your name means "Akin to the Ox," and you are attempting a feat of endurance, or perhaps to retain your patience in the face of insult, your name gives you additional dice. Further, players may use GM-awarded "style points" for addition effect.

But before you roll, you may set aside any number of dice; these are called your "wagers." If you still roll 10 or more, each die allows you to add one subordinate clauses to your narration. Thus, succeeding without any wagers might produce "I leap across the chasm," while succeeding with two might produce "I leap across the chasm, seizing the last vestige of the rope bridge as I do, using it to swing feet first into head of the monster."

Or to put it another way, from a system perspective, Blooded is an elaboration of The Files, Mr. Freitag, an excercise for gamemasters first described by Walt Freitag, one of the seminal figures in the evolution of LARPs. In that game (if you can call it such), two players engage in a dialog (beginning, of course "The files, Mr. Freitag", or "Costikyan," or as it may be). Anything said by one player is true, unless perhaps cast into doubt by a statement of the other ("But if you burned them, why then did your wife meet with Kosygin, whom I know to be working for the Romanians?"). The dialog continues until either an impasse or some resolution is achieved -- or the players lose interest, of course.

Wick is explicit about his intention:

Power in the players hands gives them the ability to tell you what kind of stories they want, what kind of allies they want, what kind of enemies they want. You don’t have to be clever about it. You can give them exactly what they want because they told you what they want.

That is, he views this sharing of the narrative as an explicit good, a way of ensuring that emerging stories are of interest to the players.

As with many narrativist RPGs, the countervailing flaw is that this system requires a gamemaster extremely capable of thinking on his feet and going with the flow; the sort of step-by-step stories you get from most published adventures will never work for Blooded, because the game requires you to abandon control of the narrative arc. It also, by nature, requires players who enjoy playing roles for its own sake; min maxers will presumably be less impressed.

Yet this is an impressive take on a novel way to foster both genuine roleplaying and emergent stories in an RPG.

Houses of the Blooded is fairly costly as RPGs go a mere $5 as a PDF download (though the print volume is fairly costly) -- but Wick has put up a free "preview" PDF that, generously, contains the basis of the system, one short adventure suited for a single play session, and enough material that you can get more than a taste -- you can certainly play from this alone. It's more than worth a look.