Demagogues in the Vincity (Igor Horst's houserules for "Dogs in the Vineyard")

#21

After getting in the Star Wars mood, I decided to look up the Town Creation rules for “Jedi in the Vineyard” and compare them to two other Town Creation rules.

“Dogs” Town Creation Demagogues’ Town Creation Salar’s “Jedi in the Vineyard” Town Creation
Pride Golden Age Fear
Injustice Oppression Prejudice
Sin Violence Anger
Demonic Attacks Paramilitaries Form Injustice
False Doctrine Ideological Heresy Hatred
Corrupt Worship Civilian Recruitment Violence
False Priesthood Demagoguery Suffering
Sorcercy Demagoguery The Dark Side
Hate and Murder Revolution Dark Dominion

All seem to have the same basic template - a small problem slowly escalates due to violence, until eventually it becomes a massive destabilizing event that the players must deal with. Salar has the injustice and violence happen far latter than the other two Town Creation events, and the Dark Side only steps in at the last possible moment (while the ‘bad guys’ come in much earlier in the other two Town Creation rules). This means Salar’s rules focuses on a “slow burn” and highlighting the root causes, while the other two Town Creation rules focus more on the decline itself.

“Demagogues” has a ‘golden age’ era where things are going well that the other two Town Creation rules lack (though this is because “Demagogues” Town Creation also bakes into it the idea of a cyclical Town, where a Revolution eventually loops back around to Golden Age - the other two Town Creation have no cyclial system, and it assumes that the Town is absolutely perfect until it gets destabilized by Pride/Fear).

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#22

Just got some time to compile my original notes for the Star Wars playtest, for your viewing.

Note that the campaign notes assumed the continued existence of the Rebel Alliance following the end of Initiation - so when the Rebel Alliance blew itself up, this kinda led to me doing a lot of improv and making stuff up on the fly, using my original notes as a framework for coming up with an “alternate history” scenario of sorts.

For example, the “Hand of Kae” stuff was erased outright, and replaced with a subplot about “The Railroad” (a pro-Sith organization) schimsing into two factions - one faction trying to reboot the galaxy by embracing the dark side and a second faction trying to stop the reboot by embracing the light side.

Still, the major driving conflict between the Militarists and Loyalists remained…mostly intact, though without the assistance of the Rebel Alliance, the Militarists had the advantage (before, the civil war was tilted in favor of the Loyalists).

#23

Due to COVID-19, we needed to play games online. However, DitV is a very dice-heavy game, which may make it unsuitable for online play (IMHO). So I began trying to port “Demagogues in the Vicinity” to “Lasers and Feelings” rules. The result is Violence and Persuasion. I tested it with a 3-session Star Wars campaign where players were bounty hunters in a balkanized galaxy trying to restore order on a mining colony (and later, a research-oriented space station), and it worked well.

Most of the stuff in “Demagogues in the Vicinity” has been ported over to “Violence and Persuasion” (including the Town Creation rules), but there’s no Raising and Seeing, Fallout doesn’t exist (though you can still sacrifice your character to cancel a severe consequence), and the Escalation System is simplified greatly (you simply state how many dice you want to roll, with more dice representing a more aggressive stance). I also did some work divorcing “Violence and Persuasion” from 2000’s Dogs by stressing that the setting must be fictional, and that players are free to modify the setting in-play (by ‘playing’ the Curveball Card) whenever necessary to introduce moral dilemmas and cause people to rethink their approaches.

I have a preference for rules-lite systems (probably due to my first exposure to RPGs being PARANOIA), so I might be using Violence and Persuasion from now on. Emphasis on “might” - if COVID-19 ends and in-person games resume, maybe the “Raise and See” mini-game of Demagogues would come back into vogue.

For that reason (and many more, including the idea that I don’t really want to create a second thread for a game that is really based on a game that already has a thread), I’m keeping updates about Violence and Persuasion in this “house rules” thread. If V&P does grow and need to be split out into its own thread, I’ll go ahead and do it.

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