Engel, Pt 1.

I'm going to skip, for now, the comparison of World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online; firstly, because Sam changed his vote, and secondly because I haven't played LotRo in over a month, since my trial ran out. I may be playing it again soon, and if I do I may write the comparison again, but it's no longer fresh enough in my mind to do the subject justice. I will say, though, that my first impression was that I would have at least a slight preference for Lord of the Rings online were it just me playing; but since all of my friends are on WoW, it was the obvious choice instead. For now.

That said, I'm going to take Bekka's request, and tell you about my Engel roleplaying campaign. I'll warn: This may take more than one post to get through.

Some of you started to play an Engel play-by-post game with me a while back, but we didn't get very far in it (as with most play by post games that I've been in). So I'll recap the broad details. Engel is a pen-and-paper RPG, like Vampire: The Masquerade or Dungeons and Dragons. It was originally published in Germany and was then translated into English by White Wolf, the same people who do the World of Darkness line. Essentially, Engel is a post-apocalyptic game involving the battle between Angels and Demons. The Angels (or Engel) and demons (or Dreamseed) in the game are actual physical creatures (as opposed to being strictly beings of spirit). The human population is largely controlled by the religion that has grown up around the Engel, which calls itself the Angelitic Church. Because only fragments of the Christian Bible have survived into the post-apocalyptic world, the Church has the trappings of the Catholic church (only taken to a totalitarian extreme), without the benefit of its doctrine. It is heavily implied that at least certain aspects of the church are corrupt, if not the entire thing. For example: the church has an office referred to by the commoners as the Grimriders, who will show up in a given village once every few years to collect the "Tithe", which is essentially a tenth of the children of the village, who will be set to work in the church. The Grimriders are also the only ones allowed to possess firearms -- for most anyone else, owning or being too interested in the technology of the past is considered heresy. In extreme cases, laypersons learning to read is considered heresy.

In the rulebook for the game, it is largely assumed that the players will play the part of the Engel, and to go about the European countryside righting wrongs, battling demons, and so forth. If the church is corrupt, the Engel (or at least the assumed Player Character Engel) are genuinely concerned with helping people and doing God's will.

Well, reading the book, which contains one of the most detailed, atmospheric, and otherwise well-drawn game settings I've seen, I found myself thinking that if I were to ever run the game, I wouldn't focus on the Engel but on the humans of the setting. Really, what is it like to live in a religion where God's favor is a living, breathing reality? The Engel exist: what affect does that have on someone?

Then I came across a short paragraph in the rulebook that mentioned that the Angelitic Church has an Inquisition running to make certain that the population stays orthodox and to weed out the heretics that spring up. I grew excited: the player characters would have to be Inquisitors! Faced with the incontrovertible proof of God's existence and his approval of their religion, but also in the middle of the corruption gnawing at the church's innards. It was here that the interesting choices were to be made.

...Of course, I only had that one short paragraph to go on: the Inquisition isn't mentioned anywhere else in the book. (Come to find out, there is information on it in one of the German books now, but White Wolf has stopped translating the series, so I'm out of luck on that end. my college german is all but gone by now.) So, for the play by post game we almost kind of started, I read up a bit on the general practices of the real Inquisition, as well as stealing liberally from the World of Darkness' version of the Inquisition.

Then our game didn't last very long. I put the idea for the campaign onto the back-burner, because I was convinced that there could be some good stories here, some compelling choices, some interesting characters and ideas to explore. It sat back there for a good year or so: I had other games to play, and the groups I played with never seemed to vote for Engel for our campaigns (though I would always mention it as a possibility).

So, last year I was running a Planescape game for our regular group, and there was a string of evenings when only Bekka and I were able to make it. The thing about Bekka is, she always makes it to RPG sessions. I think she's missed maybe one scheduled session in the entire time that I've known her. So Bekka and I decided that, for nights when the rest of the group couldn't make it to the session, or for random times when we were just hanging out, we should have an alternative RPG to the main one I was running. So I listed off some ideas I had for a one-on-one campaign. Bekka told me hey all sounded good, and that I should just pick whichever one I most wanted to run. I, of course, had been wanting to play Engel for over a year.

Now, (this part won't make much sense to you if you don't play RPGs) the original German version of the game involved using something like a Tarot deck to resolve uncertain outcomes. Interpreting the cards was supposed to aid in creating the narrative somehow. When White Wolf brought the game to America, however, they must have decided that the whole Tarot thing was a bit too far out to get a wide audience; so they converted the rules over to the d20 system, which is the system of rules that Dungeons and Dragons uses. Why they didn't convert it to the World of Darkness system (which would have been a much better fit, in my opinion), I have no idea: except that the d20 system is the most popular system around, thanks to D&D being the most popular RPG ever. But the d20 system is pretty much my least favorite system ever. I find it clunky, slow, and over complicated. I'm not going to say I haven't ever had fun with it, because I have (especially when Shane is GMing), but it is always a chore to run or to play, and certainly I don't have the rules memorized like Easterling or Lauren or Will. Also, the D20 system is all about making your character more and more bad-ass -- it's the whole concept of "leveling up". But in Engel the setting just didn't seem to be about that at all (especially if I was going to make it be about the Inquisition instead of the angels.

So there was never really a chance that I was going to play with the D20 rules. When we were trying the play by post game, I converted the World of Darkness rules. But by the time Bekka and I decided to play, I'd discovered the perfect match in an independently published RPG called Dogs in the Vineyard. DitV is a game where the player characters are young men and women charged with keeping peace and maintaining the authority of a sort of frontier religion (largely copied from early Mormon history). The rules include an ingenious escalating conflict resolution system, which I won't bore you by describing at the moment: suffice to say that the system is largely concerned with themes of judgment, and constantly asks the players what they feel is worth arguing for, fighting for, or even dying for. It was, in other words, a perfect match for my envisioned game of Engel: The Inquisition.

I mention this (rather long) prehistory of the game because I think it brings the game into a good context. If I'm going to tell you about the plot of the campaign, you have to understand the pieces that go into it: the setting, the fact that I had a year to let the ideas percolate, the fact that the Dogs in the Vineyard system was practically tailor-made for the game, the fact that I was playing it with my most dedicated player. Another factor that played into it was that I didn't know how long we'd keep the campaign going -- who knew how many sessions we would actually get? So that led me to not hold back my ideas for later; after a short introductory town to get the feel of things, we launched right into the big concepts I'd been excited about.

So, for the next post I'll actually get into what the campaign was like, the characters, the towns, and what's happened.