Running an RPG one-shot in Latin
Jul. 16th, 2023 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cnoocyLast week I got the chance to run a one-shot role-playing game session in Latin, and I thought it would be helpful to others to write it up.
I spent last week at a small Latin-immersion house party in Maine. Some of the other attendees had expressed interest in an RPG session, but I didn't have a lot of prep time before the trip, so I brought my Fudge* book and some sets of Fudge dice, to see if I could come up with something while I was there.
My first thought was to have characters be Romans or to set the game in some other era in which people might be expected to speak Latin. Among the problems with that approach is that it would require a lot of prep from the players and from me, and that as a more amateur classicist, there is no area of history that I could know as well as the players (mostly Latin teachers and professors) would. Then I was thinking about the idea of all of the characters being animals of some sort. On a Thursday morning walk I had the realization that if all of the characters were different animals, then I could do without stats entirely and base actions on how easily a animal of that species could accomplish a given task. That allowed the plot to come together easily, and on Friday morning I sent the following to the players:
In English, that's
On a Friday afternoon, after a morning game of mini-golf, we gathered at the dining room table with pencils, dice, and sheets of looseleaf notebook paper. The six characters were:
They were gathered by Sylvia, the moose queen of the forest, who told them that camp of lumberjacks had appeared in the forest. She needed the band of animals to get the lumberjacks to leave the forest. She explained that she couldn't just gather moose and destroy the camp, because then the humans would come back in force. This was a task that needed trickery and stealth.
Running an RPG, especially a low-rules one, has some things in common with improv. You get suggestions from the players and reply "Yes, and" or "Yes, here's what that looks like" or "Yes, now roll the dice to see how well it works." So when Arruns asked whether there was a river near the camp that he could swim to, I said, "sure" and when Pandolus gave Rosa a ride on his back, I had her roll to see how well she handled her first flight. Especially in a fun and semi-educational context, it's more important to tell a good story together than to set up a contest between the players and the adventure.
The squad arrived at the camp and did some recon. We determined that only feral animals like Ananasa could understand English, but that all animals (of course) spoke Latin. So Ananasa listened to learn that the camp was about to shut down except for one guard. At this point, the group discussed plans. Two basic ideas emerged: Poison the food inside the camp, and build a dam upstream, then break the dam and flood the camp.
Plan A needed poison of some sort. Arruns used his arm pockets to carry poison berries and mushrooms, while Rosa carried them on her back by sticking them on her spikes as well-documented in medieval Latin texts.
Actually planting the poison required someone to distract the guard. After some discussion of exactly how to do that, Pandolus went to sing sweetly in a tall tree and enthrall the guard with his song. That succeeded in getting the guard to come and yell praises at his lovely singing.
Meanwhile Apuleius, Ananasa, and Arruns entered the camp. They were able to sniff out the refrigerator in the mess tent. Ananasa showed off her ability to open refrigerator doors, and placed the berries among blueberries in the fridge. Apuleius came into the mess tent and discovered a mousetrap by the door by stepping on it and breaking it. He also noticed glasses and pitchers stacked on shelves, and Ananasa knocked a pitcher down so Apuleius could take it away to be poisoned.
Back at the river, Pollux was having a difficult time building a dam, because the lumberjacks had gathered all of the fallen wood for their own fires. They got more and more frustrated, smacking their tail loudly against the water and getting more and more musky in their rage, until another beaver showed up to see what was the matter. The explanation went better than the building did, and the other beaver showed Pollux to a grove of saplings and rounded up a few other beavers to help.
As the dam grew, the sound of the river lessened, and the animals back at the camp realized that Pollux was having some success, so they began to leave. Unfortunately, the sound of the falling pitcher had called the guard away from Pandolus's concert, and they had to run to escape. Pandolus attacked the guard's eyes to slow him down, but apparently the guard liked it, because he used the same sounds as he did when praising Pandolus's singing.
The group gathered at the dam, and waited for the next day to break the dam and return the pitcher. Ananasa poisoned the pitcher by kneading berries and mushrooms, but then licked her paws and had to eat some grass to get the poison out of her system.
The next night the camp inhabitants didn't post a guard as they slept, but the camp had been surrounded by chain-link fence. Rosa climbed through the fence, and she and Pandolus got the gate open. Apuleius returned the pitcher to the mess tent, but he and Ananasa were flummoxed by the task of returning a pitcher to a shelf instead of knocking it down. So they left it on the floor in the hopes that some human would find it on the floor and drink out of it.
Once they returned to the dam, Pollux warned the local animals with some tail slaps, then Apuleius knocked the dam down with some good kicks. The camp flooded and the lumberjacks fled, gathering up their things as best as they could. The next day the signs on the camp fence had a big line across them, which the color-seeing animals reported was red. The animals had succeeded and received honors and treats from queen Sylvia.
Two days later, one of the lumberjacks drank from the poisoned pitcher back in town and got sick for several days.
This was a lot of fun and a lot of work. Coming up with ideas as I ran the game took a lot of quick thinking. It was also a little tricky with a group of so many players, and I worry that I neglected some of the characters. But the players had a good time and laughed a lot, and some were playing an RPG for the first time. Some of the players noticed that role-playing forces you to go ahead and speak rather than worrying about the grammatical rules of the language. I hadn't realized that it had been a desire of mine to run an RPG in Latin for a few years, and it was neat to discover that I had fulfilled a long-term goal.
* Fudge (https://www.fudgerpg.com/) is a rules-light RPG system (or possibly metasystem) that doesn't specify any statistics. Its most distinguishing feature may be its dice, which are sets of four cubes with two + sides, two - sides and two blank sides. Adding them gives a steep bell curve from -4 to +4. You can approximate this pretty well with 4d6-14 on standard dice, which gives a similar bell curve from -10 to +10.
I spent last week at a small Latin-immersion house party in Maine. Some of the other attendees had expressed interest in an RPG session, but I didn't have a lot of prep time before the trip, so I brought my Fudge* book and some sets of Fudge dice, to see if I could come up with something while I was there.
My first thought was to have characters be Romans or to set the game in some other era in which people might be expected to speak Latin. Among the problems with that approach is that it would require a lot of prep from the players and from me, and that as a more amateur classicist, there is no area of history that I could know as well as the players (mostly Latin teachers and professors) would. Then I was thinking about the idea of all of the characters being animals of some sort. On a Thursday morning walk I had the realization that if all of the characters were different animals, then I could do without stats entirely and base actions on how easily a animal of that species could accomplish a given task. That allowed the plot to come together easily, and on Friday morning I sent the following to the players:
Castra lignicidarum in silva vestra apparuit. Regina vestra vos lignicidas fugare vult. Sed quod possunt facere manus tua animalium parvorum?
Lege animal, minor magnitudine quam lupo, quod potest ambulare (vel volare) in silva Cenomannica. Hoc persona tua erit. Vel ferum vel ferale licet esse. Nomen personae tuae finge.
In English, that's
A lumber camp has appeared in your woods. Your queen wants you to set the lumberjacks to flight. But what can a band of small animals do?
Choose an animal smaller than a wolf that can walk (or fly) in the Maine woods. This will be your character. It can be wild or feral. Make up a name for your character.
On a Friday afternoon, after a morning game of mini-golf, we gathered at the dining room table with pencils, dice, and sheets of looseleaf notebook paper. The six characters were:
- Ananasa, a feral housecat (feles)
- Apuleius, a donkey (asinus)
- Arruns, a river otter (lutra)
- Pandolus, a crow (corvus)
- Pollux, a beaver (castor)
- Rosa, a hedgehog (erinacea)
They were gathered by Sylvia, the moose queen of the forest, who told them that camp of lumberjacks had appeared in the forest. She needed the band of animals to get the lumberjacks to leave the forest. She explained that she couldn't just gather moose and destroy the camp, because then the humans would come back in force. This was a task that needed trickery and stealth.
Running an RPG, especially a low-rules one, has some things in common with improv. You get suggestions from the players and reply "Yes, and" or "Yes, here's what that looks like" or "Yes, now roll the dice to see how well it works." So when Arruns asked whether there was a river near the camp that he could swim to, I said, "sure" and when Pandolus gave Rosa a ride on his back, I had her roll to see how well she handled her first flight. Especially in a fun and semi-educational context, it's more important to tell a good story together than to set up a contest between the players and the adventure.
The squad arrived at the camp and did some recon. We determined that only feral animals like Ananasa could understand English, but that all animals (of course) spoke Latin. So Ananasa listened to learn that the camp was about to shut down except for one guard. At this point, the group discussed plans. Two basic ideas emerged: Poison the food inside the camp, and build a dam upstream, then break the dam and flood the camp.
Plan A needed poison of some sort. Arruns used his arm pockets to carry poison berries and mushrooms, while Rosa carried them on her back by sticking them on her spikes as well-documented in medieval Latin texts.
Actually planting the poison required someone to distract the guard. After some discussion of exactly how to do that, Pandolus went to sing sweetly in a tall tree and enthrall the guard with his song. That succeeded in getting the guard to come and yell praises at his lovely singing.
Meanwhile Apuleius, Ananasa, and Arruns entered the camp. They were able to sniff out the refrigerator in the mess tent. Ananasa showed off her ability to open refrigerator doors, and placed the berries among blueberries in the fridge. Apuleius came into the mess tent and discovered a mousetrap by the door by stepping on it and breaking it. He also noticed glasses and pitchers stacked on shelves, and Ananasa knocked a pitcher down so Apuleius could take it away to be poisoned.
Back at the river, Pollux was having a difficult time building a dam, because the lumberjacks had gathered all of the fallen wood for their own fires. They got more and more frustrated, smacking their tail loudly against the water and getting more and more musky in their rage, until another beaver showed up to see what was the matter. The explanation went better than the building did, and the other beaver showed Pollux to a grove of saplings and rounded up a few other beavers to help.
As the dam grew, the sound of the river lessened, and the animals back at the camp realized that Pollux was having some success, so they began to leave. Unfortunately, the sound of the falling pitcher had called the guard away from Pandolus's concert, and they had to run to escape. Pandolus attacked the guard's eyes to slow him down, but apparently the guard liked it, because he used the same sounds as he did when praising Pandolus's singing.
The group gathered at the dam, and waited for the next day to break the dam and return the pitcher. Ananasa poisoned the pitcher by kneading berries and mushrooms, but then licked her paws and had to eat some grass to get the poison out of her system.
The next night the camp inhabitants didn't post a guard as they slept, but the camp had been surrounded by chain-link fence. Rosa climbed through the fence, and she and Pandolus got the gate open. Apuleius returned the pitcher to the mess tent, but he and Ananasa were flummoxed by the task of returning a pitcher to a shelf instead of knocking it down. So they left it on the floor in the hopes that some human would find it on the floor and drink out of it.
Once they returned to the dam, Pollux warned the local animals with some tail slaps, then Apuleius knocked the dam down with some good kicks. The camp flooded and the lumberjacks fled, gathering up their things as best as they could. The next day the signs on the camp fence had a big line across them, which the color-seeing animals reported was red. The animals had succeeded and received honors and treats from queen Sylvia.
Two days later, one of the lumberjacks drank from the poisoned pitcher back in town and got sick for several days.
This was a lot of fun and a lot of work. Coming up with ideas as I ran the game took a lot of quick thinking. It was also a little tricky with a group of so many players, and I worry that I neglected some of the characters. But the players had a good time and laughed a lot, and some were playing an RPG for the first time. Some of the players noticed that role-playing forces you to go ahead and speak rather than worrying about the grammatical rules of the language. I hadn't realized that it had been a desire of mine to run an RPG in Latin for a few years, and it was neat to discover that I had fulfilled a long-term goal.
- Character
- Persona, -ae
- Dice
- Aleae, -arum
- Gamemaster/GM
- Ludimagistra, -ae / Ludimagister, -tri
- Roll
- Jacio, ere
- Roll the dice (as an imperative)
- Aleas jace
- RPG
- Ludus, -i Personarum (Agendarum)
* Fudge (https://www.fudgerpg.com/) is a rules-light RPG system (or possibly metasystem) that doesn't specify any statistics. Its most distinguishing feature may be its dice, which are sets of four cubes with two + sides, two - sides and two blank sides. Adding them gives a steep bell curve from -4 to +4. You can approximate this pretty well with 4d6-14 on standard dice, which gives a similar bell curve from -10 to +10.
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