I was going to have a thing to try and make that last vague post a little bit more coherent and specific, but I want to actually do that well, so it may take some time (not, scott of the cold place time hopefully, just, more time than I have been able to offer with deadlines from other bits of life). So in the meantime I'd like to point towards a couple of really important points that kicked off my obsession with odd bits of codification.

Firstly - Legend of the five rings. A game about cups of tea, insulting people through compliments and conflicting duties. This game is AMAZING when it comes to embedding information. You visit a guy at his house, and disarm. Fair enough. But which side do you put your sword on? And which way does the hilt face? To put in on the side of your sword arm is trusting, to put it with the hilt facing him is cocky. And then you got the arts of insulting people through gifts, and compliments. Which is kind of brilliant. In the art of the duel it gave rules for competitive quickfire art criticism. (That said, when I first played I had the good fortune of having a GM who was very much into the mythology, so every conversation was about religious, mythological figures to explain why an action should be taken. Which, actually, is something else the game is really good about trying to encourage you to do. As the main book points out, the Crane clan courtier doesn't say 'lets kill some lions'. He says something about Shinsei, the wonders of working in harmony, and how unfortunate it is that the sons of akodo sometimes need reminding of this).



"Both eyes blinking means trouble higher up. The eyes are the local authority."


Secondly - Fire Walk With Me. Or well, any David Lynch piece. But the briefing scene in this is AMAZING for an odd way to pass information. I have no real idea how you would make it work in games, but sometimes, you just have to admire a thing of beauty as just that.

 If you haven't seen this scene you have to watch it sometime. Its beautiful, and weird and silly in equal measure.


"Gordon said you were good. Tailored dress is our code for drugs. Did you notice what was pinned to it?"

"A Blue Rose?"

"Good... but I can't tell you about that"



One which came after I was obsessed but is still really good to look towards is of course Burn Notice. Particularly any part involving spy to spy networking (for that matter you can take pretty much any piece of media involving overly smartassey people talking to each other). Apparently friend requests aren't good enough, so you end up with dates and newspaper clippings and flowers. (Actually, flowers are a wonderful thing to look at. Also for information and messages, though our tendency these days is a bit rose-tinted in interpretation. Though some seem a bit more comprehensive. If painful to look at).


And... this book here here which I was introduced last year is amazing when it comes to thinking about things in terms of visuals. And well, even if you aren't wanting to do things with secrets and stuff you should probably look at this.

I challenge you to a conspiratorial card game

Intrigue games! How wonderful are intrigue games? Everyone nods and winks and everyone has a completely different take on what is going on and we’re all wrong. Even the one of us running it.

The thing is a good intrigue game needs a good way to do cloak and dagger communication. And sometimes high-tech is no good (due to say, not being a technologically advanced setting. Or having masochistic players that don't like to make things easy. Not that I’m admitting anything).

So here’s a corner of an idea to think about - use games. We all (I) have seen the awesome (awful) scene in Fortress 2 where a mafioso is masterfully (ham-handedly) given a break out plan by christopher lambert (christopher lambert). Or that bit in that James Bond film where they talk about the meaning of a tarot card. Or a dozen other examples, some of which seem like more natural fits than others.

But how would this work?

Well, if I’m going to be honest, I’m not entirely sure. That first post and how nothing is worthwhile in and of itself? Yeah. But I guess you start by looking at the games in very simple terms. Take from the chess example in fortress 2 the idea of contact as a way of saying what IS the message. What else does chess have? Hierarchy, opposition, and a clear goal. In feudal systems? It has class system, strategic reference. These are the things. And well, this is for evocation. Your game doesn’t need a full game of correspondence chess, or even a set piece. Which can cut a lot of that ham-fisted fortress 2 scene out in favour of telling the sufficiently intelligent player that a piece is being left exposed as you give the dialogue about repercussions, or unfortunate accidents or or or.

But lets boil it down further. Remember the good bit of assassin’s creed 3? That other zero-sum piece taking game [Fanorona] ? Remember how it boiled down to two moves - towards and away? Thats a perfect system for talking in binary. You want to encourage something, you take with a towards action. To discourage is the opposite. That you can go into as much and explore freely.

The more your players are into games and game theory the more this can develop, but in all likelihood you probably don’t want to go too far into it with that one guy at the table, so keep it nice and broad, boil it down to some simple rules and basic innate properties of the game you are playing. Some games will lend themselves more readily than others. For instance, a personal favourite - Cards.

Cards are wonderful for codification. Take your ordinary deck of playing cards, remove the jokers. 52 Cards, divided into 4 suits. Thats a procession of a standard year. They have a hierarchical structure, you can divide them into factions readily and  have equivalent positions. In various countries the suits were associated with different classes (this dates back a while, so it might be best not to think in hearts,diamonds etc and start going a little old school - wands/staves, pentacles/coins , swords and that sort of thing).  In French and italian in broke down simply -> Wands as peasants, coins as merchants, cups as clergy and swords as nobles. In Germany coins and swords get reversed. Which makes a kind of sense, though I’m not well-read enough to sufficiently articulate why.

The best bit about codification in cards? It was already a done thing. There was a german card game called hofamterspiel dealing with the inter-relationships of feudal germany (http://www.wopc.co.uk/austria/hofamterspiel.html) , and an italian one which was about virtues , arts and sciences (http://www.wopc.co.uk/italy/mantegna.html) . There was even a man who used cards as memory aids for his systems of law and logic (this is of course, because listening to a man talk for hours…. you’re going to remember him finishing and starting. Then you get a card evoking things with visual art, giving it a primacy… synaptic links. Codification isn’t just about conspiracy. Though try letting your wizard explain that hr isn’t playing solitaire, and is actually trying to remember the right level of fireball that he won’t kill the barbarian…)

When we look at tarot, things get even more fun. You see papess cards invoking a joke at the expense of the catholic church (and in one case there’s even the suggestion that the papess was actually meant to supplant the authority of the pope) . You get concepts as cards in the arcana , from the hermit (who can be time, or the sage. Or both) to the hanged man, to death itself. So you have simultaneously this wonderful hierarchical system , and also these cards dealing with ideas beyond the standard structure of hierarchy, which could also have inverted meanings. Another fun strange one - the use of aspect ratios. If you look towards any deck of playing cards you will see a golden rectangle . Now, real history basically boils down to it looks quite nice. But lets take it to a point where the standardising of deck manufacture isn't really a factor. A deck with that would mean that you or your designer were mathematical types. And well, math and geometry and secret societies and magic have a nice happy huggy history...

Here is where I jump off the diving board into pure fantasy of the worst hollywood history kind. What about using them as a clandestine calling card? You have a hierarchy up to trumps, a system for communicating instruction in the arcana, the surviving cards of the visconti sforza decks are all made from expensive material, according to handmade, incredibly detailed patterns according to woodcuttings. That sounds to me like a challenge to forgery. They were banned in a fair bit of europe from time to time, but played nonetheless in simple trick taking games (fun hiding in plain sight) . And this is without looking at using fortune telling set ups for conspiracy purposes.

I’m not sure, any ideas on the use of cards or other games for information?

At tables there are several types of player, the realists, the simulators, the emotional dramatists, the number crunching types. These are all good, but every now and then they become that guy.

I am usually that guy. I obsess over small bits of fluff, think of amazingly convoluted plans with huge and obvious holes in them to go wrong, remember the bits of the rules which inconvenience the party, stop remembering my skills and start trying to understand the maps in front of me and sometimes create my own dice tests for doing stupid things that occur to me.

I would pretend that this is because I’m an awesome roleplayer, only in real life I’m a bit of an impulsive mess as well, strangely enough.

This blog is going to be dedicated to the end points I come to when I obsess and ruminate, and is more about creating jumping off points. Nothing I post here is going to be a good idea in and of itself. But, hopefully, it might provide the scaffolding for anyone creative and patient enough to come up with something wonderful and beautiful one day. And, hopefully, talk about it.