Keeping the narrative pressure on
I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...
With over 700 commits to the code repository, the changes made in Kerkerkruip 9 are far too numerous to mention here. But the highlights are:
- Original theme music for the main menu, composed and produced by Wade Clarke.
- An entirely reworked reaction system allows you to dodge, block,
parry and roll away from incoming attacks. Successful reactions increase
your offensive or defensive flow, adding a new layer of tactical depth
to combat.
- An entirely reworked religion system allows you to sacrifice
absorbed powers to the gods. Worshipping gods grants lasting benefits,
including divine interventions on your behalf; but losing absorbed
powers makes you weaker in the short term. Religion thus becomes an
important aspect of the player's overall strategy.
- Grenades can now be thrown into adjacent rooms, opening up new
tactical options. However, your enemies may sometimes manage to throw
them back to you!
- A powerful new grenade is the Morphean grenade, which puts people to
sleep. If you become its victim, you'll find yourself drawn into one of
several dream sequences: weird and dangerous adventures that have an
effect on the real world.
- The hiding system has been streamlined, boosted and made far more transparent. Stealth has now become a viable option.
- The player now starts out with one of several starting kits, necessitating different approaches to the dungeon.
- New content includes the angel of compassion, a radiant being that
loses its lustre as people die around it; Israfel, a terrible angel that
can split into two smaller beings for increased combat effectiveness
before reuniting to heal; and the Arena of the Gods, where you can
defend your god's honour against other divine champions.
- A new Menu implementation which is both screen reader friendly and hyperlink enabled.
We are now also offering stand-alone installers for specific operating systems. While it's still possible to download the game file and run it in your favourite Glulx interpreter, there are also installers for Windows and Debian/Ubuntu. We will be supporting OS X in the near future.Finally, we have a new website at http://kerkerkruip.org. That's where you should go for downloads, more information about the game and how to contribute, and a link to the wiki.
Kerkerkruip is presented to you by the Kerkerkruip team: Victor Gijsbers, Mike Ciul, Dannii Willis, Erik Temple and Remko van der Pluijm. We hope you enjoy the new version. If you've got any comments, or if you'd like to contribute to this free software project, please go the website for details and contact us!