Somewhere in Eastern Europe there´s a palace, cursed to forever retain the souls of their vicious dwellers. Somewhere in that palace there´s a visitor, ignorant of his upcoming fate. For one of the cursed has broke free, and has found a place inside his mind... Two souls. One body. Winner gets it all. HOST A competitive roleplaying game for two players. By Jorge F. Ghersa known to some as Gorsh, proudly produced within the supportive threads of feedback Group Omega, as an entry for the Game Chef contest of the year 2007 a.c., using Palace, Memory, and Currency as ingredients. ----------------------------- So what is this game, anyway? If you´re inside the roleplaying games /milieu/, you must have seen this a thousand times. If you´re new, be sure you´ll see it a thousand times more... Anyway, it goes something like this: /What is a roleplaying game? In a roleplaying game ( RPG ) the players assume the role of characters involved in a fictitious story. The Game Master creates the basic background of that story and plays the part of any non-player character ( NPC ) encountered by the PCs ( Player Characters ), and also acts as referee regarding the game rules. The GM starts by describing the situation and telling players what they see and who they meet, the players respond by telling him what their characters do and say, and then the GM describes the results of those actions based on the game rules. The characters work collectively to achieve their goals and so, they make the story progress. In the end, characters will grow and develop further their abilities..."/ Well, that´s how it´s /usually/ done... In HOST, two souls battle for the control of one body, and each of those souls is controlled by one player. HOST is a competitive game: here, you play to win; and yes, winning means the other guy loses. In HOST, there is only one character to play, and you have to earn ( and defend ) your right to play it. HOST requires no Game Master ( nor Referee, Dungeon Master, Gatekeeper, Storyteller,... ), just you & he and he & you, gnawing at each other feet until one of you falls. Uncommon? Not so much. Bloody? Likely. Fun? I sure hope so... --------------------------- What you two will need to play HOST: *This book, either printed or memorized /alla/ Fahrenheit 451. ( If remembering every word is impossible, at least try to remember the rules... ) *An hexagonal grid, either taken away from /certain roleplaying game/ material, or printed from the end of this book. If the former, mark the central hexagon´s borders with a pen or a marker. *A set of Reversi tokens; actually, 42 tokens will suffice. If you know what that means, don´t read further; if you don´t..: Reversi is a boardgame I love, wich uses a set of 64 two-sided tokens, each painted black on one side and white on the other ( see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversi for more ). If you didn´t even bothered to read that, you can print the set of black circles found in the last pages on a white sheet of paper and have an hour of scissor-fun, or gather a lot of equal coins -- though if you do, you may have gotten enough to buy a Reversi set already... --------------------------- What this game is about. Winning. ------------------------- But how is it played? In HOST, players control the souls of either the Possessor or the Host, the two sides battling for the control of the body that holds them. Each of those souls is comprised of seven key memoirs, no more no less, that are considered that soul´s identity; a paper representing each of those memoirs will be placed at all times ( unless, of course, that memoir fades away... but more to this later ) in a tile of the hex-grid, and will be backed up by tokens representing its "power", "toughness" or whatever you want to call it. Through the game, things in the board will change over and over, and eventually one player will either be rendered out of memoirs, or will choose to concede the game to avoid further humiliation and also to get some extra edge next time. But it IS a roleplaying game. Such control of the body is decided upon the board, and specifically, it is obtained by possession of the center tile, but the center tile control in turn defines who gets to play the Character. Through the playing of this character this soul, the "I", will attempt to empower his own side of the struggle and diminish the other, "Other" side, by trying to maintain his normal life and putting the Character in situations that prove him ( himself, for the moment ) that his fantasies and dreams are merely that: dreams and fantasies. The Other soul will try to pull his memoirs, disregarded as fantasies by the Character, to the center of the picture through manipulation of the scenario, and will push the character into Challenges that involve his real memoirs, in an attempt to prove them less "real" than usual and therefore, less powerful. All those actions made through the narration will, in return, affect the board. And so a new circle begins... [ The what? Things change fast in this game. And as things change, so the roles are passed back and forth between both players. So we need to settle down on a few terms to make the rest of the book crystal clear. The basic, first difference between the players is who is the Host, and who is the Possessor. The host is the soul that was born inside the body, the real man. The possessor is the one who entered the Host body in an attempt to escape its curse at the palace. This two names won´t ever change during each session, altough they could swap as you play the game more times. Both Host and Possessor battle for the control of the Character. The Character names the body that the Host starts the game ruling. But as that can change in time, let´s settle on this: the Character names the fictional body, always, regardless of who is in charge of it at any given time. Then, you have the I and the Other. This is just a fancy way of refering to the one who is in charge of the Character and the one who is not, in the present situation. Play begins with the Host as I and the Possessor as Other, but again, that can change. And finally, to complicate things further, we have Attacker and Defender. This relate to how memoirs are lost or empowered, wich will be explained later, but simply put, any time one player makes a Challenge move against the other in the board, the first will be called Attacker and the later will be called Defender. Because one attacks and the other defends, you know. ] ------------------------ How to begin play First, you two will create the Souls. Each of you must write a small description of that soul´s Self, beginning with the words: "I AM" ( Host ) and "I WAS" ( Possessor ). It should contain important things, elements the Soul would use to present him/herself ( wich is, indeed, presenting his or her Self ). The Possessor player can write, optionally, the reason why he has been cursed, the way the palace holded him, or any other way to explain his eery situation. The Host player has a special thing to come up with: a "daily rutine" of the Character. It can begin as he leaves the palace and returns home ( effectively making it become not daily nor a rutine, but it´s ok ); or it can simply be a "one common day in the life of" type of text. Write it down, try to keep it simple and concise. This will be helpful, to both players, to make up the situations during narration. But the Possessor has another task too: You´ll need to describe the palace a little later, so write down anything that helps you and your fellow player to picture it. Where does it stands? How is the weather there? How does it look like? How does it /feels/ like? Who runs it now and how it uses it? ( visitor tours, hotel, embassy... ) And the more important: How the curse "works" ( cursed item, cursed water, cursed mirror... ) and how it got /you/ trapped in the first place? Once you´re both done with it, mark the most important seven things that defines this Self of yours from the first text - if there was too many, pick seven and loose the rest; if there wasn´t enough, rewrite or simply add on the spot. Write each of those descriptors in a strip of paper, or even better, in the hexagonal shapes we give to you at the end of the book to print and cut off. Possessors remember: you can use the explanation of the curse as one of this papers. Once written, they have become memoirs: take good care of them, because they´re all what your soul /is/. [ Why writing the text, then? The purpose of writing the full description is to enforce coherence of the Self. The game is about Selves, not simple assorted sets of memoirs; that´s what makes it all the more interesting when they start crumbling apart. However, If you or your opponent consider you can make a cohesive self just by naming the seven elements, go ahead. ] Then, you will place those papers on the grid. The Host player starts, but is obligated to put a memoir of his on the center grid: as it represents his initial control of the Character. Be wary of wich you put there, as it represents the most important thing in this man´s definition of himself... Reinforce this bit of memoir with a token on top of it, with the white side facing up. Then the Possessor does the same, but can put his memoir in any tile he wants; again, reinforce it with a token on top of it, but this time with the black side up. And so both players continue this procedure until each have set all seven memoirs and reinforced them with a token with the proper color up. But beware! Try to keep your memoirs all connected to the others ( i.e. at least with one adjacent memoir of your own color ). The reasons to do so relate to the way the board is "read" for roleplaying purposes: memoirs connected to each other can be read as interconnected, parts of the same person or vision or dream; memoirs isolated are on their own -- and this gives them mechanical disadvantages too. Now, the Host has another six tokens to reinforce their memoirs, piling them up over their previously laid token in any distribution he wants; as always, white color ( "his" color, during the game ) facing up. After he´s set, the Possessor does the same with six of his own. This is repeated yet again for each in that order, so in the end both players have layed the initial seven tokens and twelve more ( six and six again ) in any distribution they want. [ Yes, you can put them all in one tile, for example, in the center tile. But this is hardly a good strategy, for reasons you´ll understand later. Plus, it´s boring ...] Now you´re both ready to go. But you know little of how this is played, yet... -----------------------------