The Land God Gave to Cain - Q2: What's usable in your games or writing projects?

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As I mentioned when I introduced this book, The Land God Gave to Cain has been noodling around in my head for quite some time, without being really sure why. I've been trying to explore this as I re-read it. Did you pick up on anything particularly usable? A setting, character, or plot element? What about themes - does anything particularly stand out as needing a mechanic? Are there any existing systems you would use if you wanted to convert this into a scenario?

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    As I mentioned in the other thread, The One Ring looks like a perfect match for the journeys and adventures in the wilderness. The way it handles travel and fatigue makes for a great backdrop to the adventures and encounters that take place along the way.

    Similarly, the gold-driven madness of the prospectors is exactly on-message for The One Ring.

    The other gameable part of the book is that it's a humanitarian adventure: it's a search and rescue operation, complicated by preserving honour and and the memory of the dead. It makes a refreshing change from standard RPG fare of murderhobos killing things that are threats. I'd like to see more of that sort of thing in RPGs, and this book shows that it can still be a thrilling adventure.

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    Not really a question I can answer very well. I did like the way that the terrain was unpredictable and implacable - I suspect that those who live there see that at least in some seasons it has a stark beauty, but that didn't really emerge here, only its fearsome side. I tend to like context as a kind of pseudo-character, and here the land definitely fulfilled that role.

    I also thought that the setting of the railway construction team was fascinating - it must have been an extraordinary project to work on. Maybe a historical analogy would be a ziggurat or pyramid, or the Egyptian road out to the Red Sea from the Nile valley, built to access gold mines but a fearsome and frequently fatal task, where pharaohs listed among their accomplishments constructing wells so that workers could survive.

    A futuristic one could be a space elevator or similar Big Engineering project. It's a long time since I read it, but from memory the first of James Blish's Cities in Flight series had a mining operation on Jupiter handled by remote control... which in a twist of plot irony turns out to be entirely unnecessary as regards the mining products, and useful only insofar as it confirmed a particular scientific theory.

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    @RichardAbbott said:

    I also thought that the setting of the railway construction team was fascinating - it must have been an extraordinary project to work on.

    I agree: fascinating. How would someone turn it into a gameable situation, though? A lot of it is routine, and I'm not sure how you'd translate the day-to-day business of civil engineering into interesting game sessions. I'd love to hear people's ideas!

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    For my part, I do love a 'travelling' scenario and have done several. I actually don't really like how The One Ring treats travel, taking something I otherwise think is full of good roleplaying adventure potential and distilling it down to a few rolls for what amounts to minor penalties or attrition, so I wouldn't go that route. My preferred method for handling travel is to treat it as a series of encouters that reveal the changes in scenery and culture as things progress.

    There's a strong 'increasing isolation' theme in the book as Ferguson travels from England to Goose Bay, then to Sept Isles (the actual name of the settlement) and eventually up-track into Labrador, so to me this suggests a lot of potential for a horror scenario, so I immediately think of a Call of Cthulhu type game. I don't think one needs to go mythos, here, though the setting certainly lends itself to that. I think that inspiration can rather be drawn from more historical horror stories drawn from arctic expeditions, the Donner party, and other stories I've read of early North American exploration, like the The Moor's Account which covers a traversing of the southern USA. All these historical accounts share the desperation that comes from deprivation and isolation, so I'd be inclined to look at a system like Nemesis, with it's madness meter, and try to play up certain themes - survival (hypothermia, starvation), suspicion of fellow travellers (remember that feeling from Michelle Paver's Dark Matter?), and something more existential - cannibalism, and the fear that you (the player character) might be the monster.

    So, I suppose maybe Fate suggests itself, here. A Cthulhu variant for sure - maybe Trail of Cthulhu if you wanted to play up the mystery - would have the basic chops, even if you wouldn't use the mythos.

    I love the whole Wendigo/cannibalism theme, so that's what I'd add to the scenario. A diverse cast, including more natives - probably people who understood the wilderness well, but didn't really care to explain it to the white people (i.e. a lot like Laroche, really), maybe a city guy gone native that characters can relate more easily to (this could be a Darcy or a Paule). Some radio operators who deliver cryptic messages from up-line. The backdrop of the railways under construction, which does a great job of visually defining progress into the unknown when you go from a busy port and the head of the railway, to the end of track, to the end of grading, to the end of forest clearing, to the surveyor's camp way up the line. All these places have an increasingly remote feel, and fewer people. and increasingly more back-woodsy (and therefore unrelatable) people. So that's a nice model for rising tension, I think. Pair that with some untrustworthy travelling companions and I think you've got a class 'A' horror scenario. All you really need is something to draw the characters further onward - something so compelling they can't really go back. Is that the lure of gold? The desire to find a lost relative? Probably varies per character.

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    I could definitely do a historical or SF game in a land like this! In my current biweekly Out of the Ruins game, the PCs are on a planet in approximately Mars' orbit which is very glaciated, though not an "ice planet". Out of the tropics its much like the book.

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    @Apocryphal the gold theme was a curious one... I guessed early on that this was the secret of Lion Lake, but in the end nothing much was made of it. Sure, there were the huge nuggets just lying around when our intrepid explorers got there, but then surprisingly little. Just a kind of throwaway line in the epilogue "The Ferguson Concession... failed to find the source of the gold". I guess it was another strand that was never really developed.
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    @RichardAbbott said:
    @Apocryphal the gold theme was a curious one... I guessed early on that this was the secret of Lion Lake, but in the end nothing much was made of it. Sure, there were the huge nuggets just lying around when our intrepid explorers got there, but then surprisingly little. Just a kind of throwaway line in the epilogue "The Ferguson Concession... failed to find the source of the gold". I guess it was another strand that was never really developed.

    Same here as to guessing there was gold at Lion Lake, but nobody in this novel is going to get rich. I knew that too! :D

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    I liked the sense of landscape, the landscape itself as adversity. There's lessons there in my One Ring game, and the landscape here is savage enough it reminds me of an ill-fated trip into the cold desert landscape of Angmar my characters undertook, where they hit the classic Tolkien thing of throwing away valuable armour and weapons to lighten their load so they could continue to travel.

    But the thing I really want to steal is a version of the radio hams for an interstellar science fiction game, including the unreliability of signals, which still sometimes oddly reach further.

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    @dr_mitch said:
    But the thing I really want to steal is a version of the radio hams for an interstellar science fiction game, including the unreliability of signals, which still sometimes oddly reach further.

    That sounds cool... presumably in some futuristic setting you could have signals amplified by odd electromagnetics in a nebula, or on a bigger scale gravitational lensing.

    Your comment reminded me of a James Blish story I read years ago (internet searching reveals it's called The Quincunx of Time) with an ansible-style communicator which, as the story unfolds, turns out to involve potential future paradoxes. I must read it again sometime to see if I still enjoy it :smile:

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    I love the Ham Radio idea, and didn't think of that when reading the boo, but it seems like a great premise. Imagine a setting where the PCs are never in the room together but communicate remotely. Perhaps an adaptation of the letter-writing game by Brad Murray.

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    @Apocryphal said:
    I love the Ham Radio idea, and didn't think of that when reading the boo, but it seems like a great premise. Imagine a setting where the PCs are never in the room together but communicate remotely. Perhaps an adaptation of the letter-writing game by Brad Murray.

    Presumably then the PCs might well communicate with each other and avoid the GM altogether... is this a good thing or a bad one? How many others here have played Diplomacy with the crucial role of covert negotiations (and acrimonious repercussions...)

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    @Apocryphal said:
    I love the Ham Radio idea, and didn't think of that when reading the boo, but it seems like a great premise. Imagine a setting where the PCs are never in the room together but communicate remotely. Perhaps an adaptation of the letter-writing game by Brad Murray.

    Callisto? I was in Ray Otus' Barsum Callisto game and loved it!

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