Wheel of Time (WoT) is getting a series on Amazon Prime. The first season is in production and I’m hyped up about it. After Lord of the Rings, this is the only other really big fantasy series that I ever got into and it’s something my mom and I shared a love for before she passed. Also, apart from Star Wars, it’s the only fantasy series that I know of that was published by WotC (back in 2001). I’m thinking about how it might translate to an RPG today.
It has been on my mind all week and I’m just thinking out loud here to empty my head. Maybe this goes somewhere, but maybe not? Life is funny in pandemic-times.
This blog post will contain spoilers and I’m pretty much going to assume you know what Wheel of Time is, so reader beware.
Why would anyone want to play A Wheel of Time RPG?
Apart from the obvous answer, I mean. Self-insertion into a fantasy is a lot of fun. There’s a reson why D&D can’t get away from the Forgotten Realms and why Star Wars & Marvel superheroes are recurring favorites as RPG settings.
In fact Wizards published a campaign book for WOT in 2002 the does excatly that. The Prophecies of The Dragon wove between events in the first three books of the series.
For WoT, I like the scale of things. Events can play out over ages, generations, or on a normal time scale with human adventurers at the heart of the action. Eventually all three scales become very important in the novels.
But because those larger time scales are built-in to the concept of WoT, it’s also the perfect excuse to remix and alter elements of the books. This feels a bit like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower in a way, where Roland is reborn to fight the same battles over and over, but his journey is never exactly the same. Sometimes his victories and losses leave him better or worse prepared.
We can make wheel of Time our own.
How the Wheel works.
Some brief notes on the nature of the world of Wheel of Time.
Gods, Magic, and Creation.
There is a Creator and a Dark one. When The Creator made the Wheel of Time, he imprisoned the Dark One outside of it.
The Wheel is driven by the One Power. The One Power is divide into two competing forces, Saidin and Saidar, represented graphically by a disk divided by a sinuous line (the familiar Ying and Yang of Chinese philosophy. (These are often referred to as the mail and female halves of the One Power, which is absolutely one of the things we could change.) Both halve are equal, but competing aspects of the One Power. Each has power over the five elements of air, earth, water, fire, and spirit.
The five elements of power, in both aspects are part of a weave of creation known as The Pattern. Magic is perfomed by making new weaves or changing The Pattern.
The Dark one has his own power, sometimes referred to as the True Power, as it is not dual-natured. More on that another time.
There are at lease four ages in the Wheel of Time.
In the first age, Humans are ignorant of The Dark one and his prison.
In the second age, the Dark One’s prison is discovered and a hole is drilled into it. The Dark One begins to influence the world until the prison is patched, poorly. This age ends in cataclysm.
The third age is the low-ebb of humanity. As they recover from the cataclysm of the second age, the seals on the Dark One’s prison fail and his power resurges into the world, threatens to break the Wheel, destroying Time and unmaking the world. This age ends with a choice. If The Dragon despairs and turns on the world, it all ends. Otherwise, the fourth age begins and the cycle continues.
The fourth age begins with a perfect seal of the Dark One’s prison. By the end of the fourth age, humanity is recovered and the Dark One completely forgotten.
There is more than one world.
There are echoes of the prime world. The patterns of these echoes can be very thin or warped in unusual ways. They can be as simple as alternate histories playing out, or as alien as the worlds of the Aelfin and Eelfin.
There is the World of Dreams, Tele’arna’rhiod. This is the echo closest to our own world and unique in that ordinary people can sometimes go there when they sleep. This is also where those whose lives have become bound by the Wheel go before they are spun out again, reborn to reprise their role in a new age.
Ta’veren
In addition to ‘heroes’ whose lives are bound to the Wheel, The Pattern of creation can sometime center on individuals. these are called Ta’veren. For a time, the lives of others bend around the ta’veren, altering destinies and even the Pattern itself.
The most powerful ta’veren is The Dragon. The Dragon a person whose destiny is to make the choice that will continue the cycle of the Wheel of Time or to allow the Dark One to break it forever.
Decisions
The first questions that comes to my mind is:
What is interesting at each level of scale for the GM? for the player?
What tools can we offer to support those modes of play?
At the top level, we have the repeating progression of Ages, which have themes that help direct what the aims of play to be. The first and fourth ages are the least well defined, but the second and third ages have a lot of inherent conflit that we can use to make adventures.
In the middle level, we have the movements of nations of generations. They generally move toward the goal of the age, but there’s more churn as nations compete for resources and the failings of their rulers are magnified by the might of their armies.
At the ground-level is the traditional adventuring party. They can start small, dealing with local concerns, but eventually, they get caught up navigating the powers of the world that press upon the area s of their concern. Monsters are few and far away for much of the world, if they exist at all in the current age. (They exist when the Dark One’s influence is strong).
So I’m remainded of a few things that already exist, RPG-wise.
The first is Microscope. In it, players take turn inserting events into a timeline. Like WoT, it operates on three scales. At the lowest scale, players can adopt roles and play out pivotal conflicts. Microscope is a great tool for collaborative world-building and includes tools for what players agree to include or avoid its “session 0”. This sounds like a great 1:1 fit for WoT. You can use it to define your version of the Age you want to play in and create hooks for exploring those events further.
The other is Birthright, a D&D setting that also took a long-view on history. IIRC, it had a decent framework for running houses or kingdoms over time too. It may be work a look, but there may be other stuff out there since what can be adapted for use.
Of course, I expect most people are going to be focused on the ground-game. There is D&D, of course. Jordan was a fan and ran D&D for his children for years. Wizard’s 2001 effort was written based on an incomplete series. Simply expanding it seems insufficient, and I wasn’t happy with using the traditional Vancian system of spellcasting. It didn’t feel like how weaving spells did in the books.
Even on the ground level, I want something that handled social and martial challenges equally well. But largely, I’m concerned with a magic system that can handled improvisation of elemental effects, the use of rote “spells”, and a reasonable way to handle burnout if players push themselves for effect, knowing that they could permanently damage their ability to perform magic.
If the players do want to occasionally change scale or play troupe-style–controlling multiple characters over a continent or two–then character creation probably should be relatively simple and quick.
For fast, scalable character-building, I personally tend towards Fate and Cortex. You can sketch out an NPC in seconds and add detail as you need them, scaling up the character’s importance relative to the level detail on their sheet.
To Come (Maybe)
So if I keep moving on this, the next step I want to take it is to broadly define the character classes and what I want them to do. If I can do that, I should be one step closer to deciding what to use to run the game.
Like, should a reborn hero be a class, some flavor, or an optional mechanic? What’s the story we’re trying to tell when we do that and what sort of mechanic (if any) will support it? Maybe the decision of what system to use will become clearer.
