Deliria is a fascinating game and ultimately worth your money, but it isn’t without its problems. It raises several questions. Can a genre be effectively “owned” by a particular line? What’s the role of incremental design in a hobby that’s starving for original content, but fond of a derivative safe harbour? What are the limits of graphic design in an RPG?
I’m tempted to quip that Deliria should be called Phil Brucato’s World of Darkness, since it covers territory that players of Mage and Changeling will find very familiar. This would be unfair, though. because the game makes no pretenses toward being horrific and lacks a firm setting. Deliria doesn’t provide setting support (titles, rivalries) for social play. It doesn’t have splats or a firm cosmology. Instead, the bulk of the game is devoted to telling certain kinds of stories: “faerie tales.” Brucato’s writing is compelling here, even if I don’t think it’s really about faerie/fairy tales. Rather, I think it’s about how to use some of the ideas from faerie tales to enhance the stories a certain segment of the hobby wants to play in.
The pseudo-history of fairy stories in the book isn’t to my liking, since it’s both extremely vague and ignores the political context behind our approach to them. See this post on the Savage Minds anthroblog about the Gilliam Grimm movie, and then compare it to the film itself and you get some idea about the distance between Deliria and actual faerie tales. The game uses broad strokes and appeals to archetypes that owe more to geek culture than universal human sentiment, whereas fairy stories are not really all that universal. Actually, having worked on Dark Ages: Fae, I have to admit that my secret sentiment was that faerie tales are actually pretty culturally specific. They require an interplay of myth and history that didn’t happen in very many places.
In Deliria‘s defense, though, it says it’s about “Faerie Tales for the New Millennium,” which means that it’s trying to inject faerie tale logic into the zeitgeist. But whose chunk of zeitgeist is it for? It seems to me that Brucato (and the “Silver Circle”) were writing for a specific audience that’s far from the engineering students, bored jarheads and high school AV club members that populate the mainstream hobby. This is a game that’s searching for the segment that White Wolf brought in to give it a home again (even as White Wolf’s new World of Darkness has an almost conciliatory tone in trying to reach for that mainstream) after being left out in the cold with the decline of MET LARP and the death of soft/semi/non-horror White Wolf properties like Changeling and Mage 2nd. We’re talking about arts/theatre majors, Renn-faire goers and generally, the types that the first edition of Changeling was almost painfully specific about luring.
Brucato lays out some very loose, utilitarian rules for these stories. Deliria is about people who encounter faerie wonders and the faeries themselves — each side finds the other fascinating. There are three kinds of faeries: powerful divine ones, your basic PC-friendly types and sprites for colour. You’ve got the mundane world, the Mysterium (weirdness in the world) and Deliria (faerieland). Like Changeling, Deliria uses a trait (also called Deliria) that conflates sensitivity to the supernatural world, madness and a certain amount of childlike innocence. Brucato wants you to bounce around these realms and chat with these folks using devices from fairy stories: a heavy dose of pathetic fallacy, NPCs painted in bold, broad strokes and story arcs that belong in a lit course for non-majors. I have to admit that I wanted more showing instead of telling here. Brucato’s unvarnished enthusiasm is fun to read, but I prefer examples of practice. The book certainly isn’t lacking them, but it’s a big book; specific examples could have taken up a bigger ratio of the text.
I’m a bit frustrated that none of this really has an ethos I could hang on to. Brucato talks about faerie ethics. This reminds me of the way he transplanted neopagan business on the historical Rennaissance in Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade and presents many of the same problems. There’s something there that feels alternately self-indulgent and irrelevant to real moral questions. This may be appropriate for faeries, but as a moral rudder for protagonists the ideals of upholding beauty and keeping your word don’t cut it. In fact, I’ll drop a Godwin-bomb here and note that certain Germans used to love their volk-inspiring fairy stories (Brothers Grimm, remember!), classical truth-in-beauty, sacred nature and steadfast loyalty. And that’s why drab-clothed folks with their dissonant jazz, boiled cabbage suppers and blood-rusty hammers and sickles had to wade in and blow their fucking heads off. Even the wondrous demimonde needs a moral heart of iron to protect its free expression, and Deliria fails to deliver it. Without a coherent moral struggle, there isn’t much conflict that follows. This suits the generic nature of the game, but ends up lacking in the antagonists department. Conflict — the living blood of the story — doesn’t get too much attention in Deliria, and this is where I felt the game hit one of its weakest points.
I suspect that the reason why we see repeated motifs from the old World of Darkness as well as some noticeable omissions when it comes to showing the reader how to create stories is because Deliria is an incremental design. You like that? It was a cool neologism I came up with just now!
An incremental design occurs when a play group modifies an existing game (or group of games, combining elements from each of them) over time to the point where it has blossomed into an original creation. Incremental design used to be the standard, with results that were alternately risible (Palladium Fantasy and any number of D&D clones) and praiseworthy (D&D itself; Runequest). This can be a conscious process as well, where we hack a gamer to distill it down to what we like — which ends up being a different game altogether.
Deliria feels like it was incrementally designed based on reacting to Changeling and Mage until at some point, Phil Brucato and co. decided that it could stand on its own and deserved a distinct treatment. This may have come from play experience or it may have come from Brucato’s design experience. I know for a fact that when you’re working on a line you didn’t create, a part of you constantly says “I would have done that differently,” and makes a mental note. It’s a smart thing to do and is what separates fanboys with a contract from real writers.
But the danger of incremental design is that you might forget that you’re designing an entire game from the ground up. An incremental design takes you deep into specialized territory to the point where you might forget how to tell people to roll dice and construct stories with villians. Sometimes you can get away with skipping this, but Deliria marches to a sufficiently different drummer that it can’t. The game needs more advice on the basic craft of play and Guiding (the Guide is the game’s GM).
Part Two
Now I’ll talk a bit about the game’s gorgeous (if slightly problematic) design, organization and system.
The game isn’t just a leap forward in art and layout. It’s an order of magnitude better than anything else out there, including industry leaders like Dungeons and Dragons and the World of Darkness. Only the sheer amount of ornamentation is a problem (and in spots, a very real one — not just a matter of taste, as I’ll detail later). The best looking RPG in existence would be with us if a game combined the stark grace of Nobilis with the colour production values and artistic talent of Deliria. It’s almost embarrassing that other companies are so stingy, but then again, other companies have much more intense production schedules.
The book is a work of art — so much so that it sometimes undermines itself. Deliria uses a system of icons and coloured text and sections to help readers find what they need, but it’s less effective than it could be. The icons aren’t, well, iconic enough. They are complex, pretty bits of art in their own right, which makes them harder to remember than simpler symbols. The coloured pages by section are more successful and really help you navigate to the right ballpark.
You need these tools, because the game’s organization leaves a lot to be desired. There’s no central glossary of games terms. Character creation takes place after the task resolution system, which forces you to flip back and forth to find out what your Grace and Aspect and so forth are on a character sheet. Explanations are either exhaustive or overly simplistic. The game needs a couple of detailed two page summaries for characters and systems for reference, to orient new readers and (most importantly) to point to when you’re trying to help players make characters and figure the game out. Deliria is one of those games where the Guide will usually be the only one with a copy, so flipping has to be kept to a minimum. Deliria does try to ameliorate this a bit by providing regualar pointers (red text) to other pages relevant to whatever you’re looking at. All in all, the game feels a lot like a website: as if a series of hypertext documents were strung together sequentially.
The smartest thing Laughing Pan could to would be to release an abbreviated player’s guide that includes all the rules you need and a few new bits of character flash. There are plenty of games like this (Nobilis comes to mind), so this isn’t a particularly strong criticism. At this point I think I need to remind you all that you should buy this book.
Once you find your way, you’ll get to know the game’s Compact System. Compact seems to have learned its lessons from live roleplaying and displays a keen understanding of the relationship between live and tabletop games. Compact gives you the option of three levels of complexity. The most complex end of it is less involved than games like The World of Darkness or TriStat. It’s less complicated than the new MET and a bit more complicated than the old one. In essence, it’s a variation of Stat+Skill+die, but in this case the complexity level lets you choose between a broad or narrow stat (a Grace) and skill (Vocation). Use the broad versions for simple games; the more detailed Aspects for a more traditional tabletop experience. Players draw from cards (or use dice that simulate a draw) and either add or subtract from their dice totals. Suit draws can variously generate no modifier, automatic success or failure and critical success or failure. Your total is compared to a competing draw or a target number.
It’s simple, it looks like the math works (the CD-ROM that comes with the game features probability charts) and can be used in many venues; cool variations (I was thinking of a Asshole style variant where the GM deals the whole deck, players can see their cards and bid accordingly. You get to pick more from the discard pile only after running out) suggest themselves.
Subsystems for conflict cover physical, mental and social combat. Similar to ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
chadu‘s PDQ, you can injure an enemy’s pride and sanity as well as their body. In the Advanced style, higher Graces give you multiple actions, so there will be definite thresholds of comptency where skilled characters can run rings around you.
Finally: the magic system. This uses a framework that will be familar to Mage players. Your magical style is your Accord. You may have multiple Accords (though you select one as your primary). These ecapsulate a belief about magic and the world as well as a spellcasting style. Like Mage, you need tools to enact your will. The system doesn’t force you to buy into specific realms of power (like Mage‘s Spheres); these are just categories you use to figure out what a spell does. You simply decide what you want to do, try to hit the target number and see how it worked out.
The game describes a handful of Accords by belief, not be any in-game social organization. My main critique is that Brucato has the same basic bias he had writing Mage, in that you can pretty much tell that he’s a pagan neophile who thinks pagan neophilia is the coolest way to go. Accordingly, the pagan style’s flaw is that it’s too intensely personal — an instance of “praising with faint damnation.” Then again, perhaps my personal bias creeps in here: Brucato’s run on Mage featured lots of instances of the stand-ins for my favourite belief system being folks who deny sensuality, repress their true feelings and kung fu people to death over minor doctrinal differences. Good people don’t let people but into Starhawk’s critique of Buddhism, folks.
Still, the quick descriptions of Accords and the system as a whole is probably one of the most succinct yet useful treatments of multicultural magic yet and worth your attention, especially if you’d like to port culturally driven magic over to another game. It’s wortn noting that even though faeries and humans both use the same magic system, faeries get to bend the rules at the Guide’s fiat, usually by performing ritual magic quickly.
Finally, the game has rules for “static” powers (which are compatible with magic): Shapeshifting, mental powers and the like. You can use these and your Wyrds (flaws) to create pretty much any normal or supernatural character you can think of.
Let me sum it up: Deliria is a beautiful game using a solid rules engine. It has many flaws and elements I would consider controversial, but it should not prevent you from picking it up. One keyword that comes close to summing up the game’s needs is Guidance; it needs to be better organized, it needs to push the protagonists toward real moral stakes and it needs to provide more concrete examples of how the fae world interacts with mundane lives. These deficits are one of two things that prevent the game from being the “standard text” of modern fantasy gaming. The other flaw is in the areas where Brucato fails to discuss and answer antithetical appraoches: the political faerie tale, the world beyond the self-styled American demimonde (if the commericialization of things like Burning Man even elt us still apply “demimonde” to the thing) and faiths, beliefs and magic that would apply a competing totalizing model. But these issues are easily remedied by a mature group of gamers who are self-willed enough to differ in opinion and use the text as a way to uncover fun antitheses to its viewpoint, as well as cleave to points where they agree. Buy it.