Frayed Knights; Wait, Wait, Let Me Explain...
The world of Frayed Knights, the indie computer RPG under development at Rampant Games, could perhaps be described as an apologist's rendition of an old-school fantasy RPG campaign.

In the early days of the hobby, very few game masters (or game designers) thought too hard about the rhyme, reason, or ecology of their adventures and worlds. Why are the monsters segregated by difficulty level in this dungeon? What's with the weird, bizarre artifacts in the dungeon that nobody but the players actually try to use? How come these traps aren't set of by the gazillions of giant rats that seem to infest the dungeon? How do the lower levels of the dungeon stay ventilated? What do these monsters eat (besides adventurers and giant rats)? Why are there all these devices that serve no practical purpose to anybody but to vex the occasional treasure-hunting adventurer?

The creativity caught up with itself as players smartened up, and game masters were forced to evolve. After all, if you have an illusory dragon in one room - the hint to the deception being that the exits are all too small to accommodate the dragon's bulk - then you can't get away with sticking a real dragon in a similar room without some really good explanation. If you start using logic and some vague appeals to reason against the players, you need to be pretty consistent with its usage yourself.

So which is it going to be - no dragon, or jumping through hoops to justify its existence?

In many cases, Frayed Knights takes the latter approach. I think the wild contortions of logic and rationalization are part of the fun of the world. It's not necessarily that the world itself is over the top bizarre and comedic, but that the off-beat answers to the questions of "why" have a cumulative effect that keeps getting weirder and weirder. And then we have a group of explorers in this world for whom this is all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff.

And so what you end up with is a group that can get into an argument over whether or not it is wise to rescue an apparent damsel-in-distress... because it is one of the oldest tricks in the book to sucker-punch adventurers in this world. And bizarre relationships between groups of monsters to justify their not killing each other.

But as amusing as the "Why" answers get, it's the "why not?" that tends to drive the silliness. If you postulate a world where there's weirdness X and Y, why not ... weirdness Z?

That's where I got temples dedicated to a god of pimples. And an automaton constructed out of pus.

And, as it turns out, getting the answer to the "why" questions is what drives the entire plot. It's one thing to know that an Ancient Evil™ is on the rise. The natural response for your typical red-blooded adventurer upon discovering this news is to put a stop to the Ancient Evil™ once and for all (at least until the sequel).

But our heroes, the Frayed Knights, are anything but typical. And - quite by accident - they end up asking "Why?" Why is the Ancient Evil™ rising? What does he really want? Is there something more going on here?

And, as usual, the answers get more convoluted as they go.

Labels: Frayed Knights

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:01 AM (Permalink)