The Clay That Woke

by Paul Czege

Rulebook for a storytelling role-playing game about minotaurs that live with humans in the ancient ruins of a once-great city being devoured by a primeval jungle.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Gaming

127 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve seen passionate reactions to fiction appearing in RPG texts. I’ve never had strong feelings one way or the other, but I will admit that I usually skip over it. I tried to read the opening narrative in the new_7th Sea_ core rulebook, but when I saw that it when on for, my god, 8 full-sized two-columned pages, I flipped right past them. I knew coming into _The Clay that Woke_ that some significant portion of the text was narrative, and I can’t say I was excited about that. But nor was I dreading it. I greatly enjoyed Paul’s writing in _My Life with Master_, which is the only other text of his that I’ve read, so I was confident that it would at least be an enjoyable read.

But now that I’m 60 or so pages in, I find the fiction to be much more than merely enjoyable. I think this particular use of fiction alongside passages that detail the setting and passages the explain the rules creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The reason I think it is effective is because we read fiction differently than we read how-to instruction, and we read setting material differently than we read either of the other two types of passages. Switching between them – at least in the specific context of _The Clay that Woke_ - has a cool effect on me. I’ll try to explain further.

The first section of text in the book is a bit of fiction, though one without a narrative. It is more of a vignette that situates us generally speaking in the world. We are obviously in a fantasy setting of sorts, with minotaurs, bronze weaponry, and a crumbling city surrounded by jungle. We are given not only physical features but hints at social structures, a sense of cultural decadence, and a storied past that reaches back millennia. I found myself very patient with the hints and suggestions of things in the world, such as a reference to bygone figures like Sulunia Empyreaus and Veturro the gladiator, and to geographical features like the stone faces whose meaning is long gone, the Tower of Heroes, the Vadhmriver, and the tall, leafless trees that stretch out over the jungle that are simply called “watchers.” I was more than patient, I was excited by the glimpses of the world that could not be contained in this one passage. That excitement is due in large part to the fact that it was fiction. Every science fiction or fantasy story makes reference to a world far larger than what you can see in any opening scene. You read actively (or at least, I do) looking for clues and bits and wonder how it will all come into focus later, for you believe that in fact it will all come into focus later. Using fiction puts the reader in the state of accepting that more will be revealed if you are patient and read on.

If the fiction had gone on for long, my patience probably would have shifted to anxiousness, wondering when we would be getting to something good, so it is important that at the bottom of the second page, the author assures you that you will be learning about the game, not just the world. This is the paragraph that ends the first section:

“_The Clay that Woke_ is a roleplaying game. You play nameless minotaurs living and working among the people of the Degringolade and the dangers of the jungle. A gamemaster brings the world to life by creating your employment circumstances and creating and roleplaying all the beings of the Degringolade and jungle. You’ll try to uphold the difficult, stoic minotaur philosophy of silence, and you’ll earn a name” (16).

That single paragraph brings in the elements we just read about: minotaurs, Degringolade (the city), the jungle, the presence of humans, and that minotaurs are in their employ. Doing so assures the reader that the fiction is directly related to the game. Even more importantly, the final paragraph points to things that were _not_ in the fiction: the “stoic minotaur philosophy or silence” and the idea that “you’ll earn a name.” That’s the point that I got excited about what this form of writing could do as the fiction launches us into the rules and the rules launch us into more fiction. And indeed, the next bit of fiction brings up the idea of “breaking silence” and earning a name, as well as showing us what sort of encounters one might have in the jungle. Both forms then hint at things beyond themselves and both promise that all questions will be answered if you only read on. Over time, I found myself reading the rules with the same creative engagement that I was reading the fiction, as everything pointed both forward and back in a kind of crisscrossing of information and ideas.

When reading a rulebook, you expect things to be laid out in logical steps. First I’ll tell you about A, which then prepares to you learn about B. And if you understand C and D, you’re ready to see how E brings it altogether. It’s very linear and in a lot of ways an illusion, as everyone who has tried to write such an instructional text knows. As you try to figure out how to present the material, you realize that you need to introduce the idea of B before you can really explain A, but for B to make any sense, C needs to be on the table, which first requires an explanation of A. That muddle is one of the reasons everyone says that you can learn best by playing, because then everything can be taught almost at once, and it’s why a second read is always more edifying than a first.

Paul’s way around that muddle, it seems to me, is to invoke the way we read fiction, a fantasy novel which shows us parts of the world while referencing names and ideas that will become clear in time as we follow our protagonist around. You get things pointing forward and pointing back, preparing you for new stuff and reaching back to pick up and secure things that were only hinted at before. It is the journey through the text that brings everything together, organically. In fact, the index that stands where a table of contents should be is a perfect emblem of the book. There is an order in heading and subheadings, but the numbers that follow the words dance forward and backward, stretching several pages here, and touching upon a page briefly there. Run your eyes down the index and watch the number reach back and forth, sometimes in large steps, sometimes in small. Everything in the dance has linked arms with everything else, both numerically and conceptually.

It’s very neat, and makes, I think, for a very rewarding read.

The reason fiction is traditionally irritating in RPG texts is that they fail to be intrinsic to the text. They are flavor and contribute nothing but that. What Czege does is make it so that the fiction and the rules and the setting descriptions lean upon one another. In the case of _The Clay that Woke_ that decision seems reasonable because the rules don’t exist as mechanics clothed in the setting of Degringolade and the jungle. The sinew of the mechanics is inseparable from the muscle of the world in which they exist. To play the game, you must understand the world, and to understand the world, you must know not only facts about its people, culture, and physical properties, but you must know the living breathing life of those things as they are communicated through the fiction.

Had this game drawn on genre tropes and fictional worlds already familiar to the reader, then there would be no need to present the information this way. You could say, you know this film? It’s like that.

It’s effective also because the scope of the world in the game is limited. _The Clay that Woke_ involves one (albeit vast) city and one (equally vast) jungle, not a whole planet or system of planets. The game involves minotaurs and humans, not an endless network of species and cultures. The restrictions of the scope of the game played limits the scope of the world at issue so that this particular presentation can accomplish what it wants to accomplish.

Okay, that was much longer than I intended. Forgive me if it is long-winded and wandering. I do not have time to revise my writing much due to lack of free time. If I edited these the way I wanted, I’d post one a month.

****

Time to talk about *silence*.

*Silence is a living philosophy*

The first thing I’d like to observe about silence is that every time it is described in the text, it is worded differently, without any single definition (for lack of a better word) covering everything. On page 18, we are told “Wild and fatherless [the first four minotaurs] didn’t naturally find a life in the society of men – not until they achieved _silence_. Silence is the minotaur philosophy of life conduct: puruse the social good, and pursue justice; do not want; do not use the names of women.” A few pages later, on page 22, we get this: “Over the centuries minotaurs have developed their cultural philosophy of silence: be contemplative, do not want, do not use the names of women, and do not express your emotions, for breaking silence in these ways is an expression of need.” Yet still later, on page 43, we are told, “Over the decades they developed a philosophy of life conduct: pursue justice and the social good; be courageous; act with wisdom; do not want; do not use the names of women.” Finally, each character sheet as the same definition of silence: “Be courageous. Act with wisdom. Work for justice and the social good. Do not use the names of women. Do not want. Do not express your emotions.”

I propose that these differences are not an error in editing, but a purposeful inconsistency. None of the definitions contradict each other, but none of them is complete either. This is because the philosophy of silence is just that, a philosophy, not a strict code or a mantra. It is something felt, something more extensive than a few catchy phrases, something to be lived, not just listed. These variations communicated the living nature of silence.

*A brief look at the problematic nature of gender in the text and game*

The most complete list, and the one that will undoubtedly be the guiding principle in any given game, is the one provided on the character sheets. This is the one the players will constantly be consulting and interpreting. But it is worth noting that every variation includes the two elements “do not want” and “do not use the names of women.” We are told that this last stricture is because “There are no female minotaurs, so nicknames are an effort to create distance from want.” In this game, women can be friends, employers, coworkers, and lovers, but each and every woman, by the very nature of her being a woman, is a potential object of want, which makes them first and foremost objects of sexual desire, no matter what other role they may have in society. That is problematic to say the least.

This de facto categorizing of women as objects of sexual want is further troubled by the repeated use of the word “men” to stand in for human beings within the Degringolade. The original minotaurs “didn’t naturally find life in the society of men” (page 18), “Untamed and troubled they didn’t easily find a life in the society of men” (page 43), and silence has “enabled [minotaurs] to live will among men” (page 43). It is clear from such passages (and many others) that the Degringolade is a solidly patriarchal society, in spite of many Empyrei being women.

The game has very good reasons, I think, for focusing on men, but this treatment of women is disturbing, and I would not be surprised if many women and men are put off enough to not want to bring the game to the table. Why would players troubled by the patriarchy want to play a game in which patriarchal attitudes are so deeply interwoven into the material?

But perhaps the game provides avenues to upset the patriarchy by finding a way to redefine masculinity and recreate the society we are given at the start of the game. We are told that the watchers, the giant leafless, bloomless trees that stretch out over the jungle canopy, “will fully frondesce and bloom again when the city below enters a new age of greatness” (page 16), and we are told that we’ll “play until it’s clear whether the watchers will frondesce and bloom again for society’s entrance into a new age of greatness” (page 22). Perhaps part of this new age of greatness will not include women being first and foremost objects of male desire. Obviously the fate of the society is bound up with the minotaurs we play, and the minotaurs are bound up in masculinity, so perhaps the solution to the one is naturally a solution to the other?

Having not played the game, I don’t know if that is where the game goes naturally. I don’t see anything in the mechanics that makes that likely to occur, since the course of the game is bound to the desires of the players, but that seems like something that _could_ happen if the players pushed for it. I’m just not sure the game cares whether you push for it or not.

Let’s move on to why the minotaurs are all male in the first place.

*Why only male minotaurs?*

It’s clear Paul wants to say something - or explore something - about masculinity through _The Clay that Woke_. A brief look at the philosophy of silence reveals elements of what it means to “be a man” in various cultures throughout history. Being courageous, being wise, keeping tight reins on desire, not expressing emotions—these can all be seen as foundational tenets of western manhood.

But before we delve into what the game is saying about masculinity, I want to take a moment to look at how making all minotaurs male gives the games narrative energy.

The tension at the center of the fiction created by _The Clay that Woke_ is the uneasy position that the minotaurs occupy in the human society of the Degringolade. Minotaurs are creatures that span the two realms of the game, with one foot in the jungle and the other in the city. They are both wild animals and civilized people, and silence is supposed to be the means by which the minotaurs can live peacefully and somewhat harmoniously among human beings.

The whole reason minotaurs need to fit in with human society in the first place is the fact that they are all male. If the race of minotaurs hopes to survive the current generation, they need to mate with human women, and the same goes for every generation that follows. Only human men mating with human women will produce future women for future mating, so minotaurs cannot drastically upset human civilization without compromising their own future. That is a brilliant position from which to make dramatic fiction. It’s a classic case of not being able to live with them and not being able to live without them. No matter how frustrated minotaurs might get with human men and women, they cannot say fuck it and run off to the jungle permanently.

But individuals don’t always think of the whole, so there needs to be some mechanism in place to protect the herd by shaping the individuals’ behavior. That’s where silence comes in. Silence creates a code of personal conduct that ensures that each individual minotaur can coexist with humans in their city without jeopardizing their own well-being or the well-being of the herd.

If the larger social tension is created by minotaurs needing to exist within human society, then the localized tension within each minotaur character is created by the need to achieve silence by suppressing half of their own nature. If we look at the six elements of silence as they are written on the character sheets, half of them are aspirational goals (be courageous, act with wisdom, work for justice and the social good) while the other half are restrictions on their behavior (do not use the names of women, do not want, do not express your emotions). Actually, the goal of not wanting goes beyond controlling behavior and seeks to limit natural impulses. Achieving this incredible state of self-control would be hard enough in an ideal setting, but doing so while being second-class citizens makes it all but impossible, which the text alludes to: “Human society employs them for menial and dangerous and brutal work. So, not surprisingly, they often fail to live up to the ideals of their philosophy.” The larger tensions aggravates and ratchets up the individual tension, which again makes for excellent drama.

*Silence as a part of play*

The beautiful part of the game is that the game mechanics surrounding silence create tensions in play that mirror the situation I describe above. How do you force players to play their minotaurs as the game demands? How do you make them feel the pressure to achieve silence? Those silence tokens do so much work! I love that the GM is instructed to take away silence tokens when a minotaur PC breaks silence. The player doesn’t pay a token to break silence; the GM takes it away if they do. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one, both thematically and psychologically. Starting with three silence tokens means that you get to break silence three times before the GM takes control of your character and sends them to the jungle, possibly with a trail of broken human bodies in their wake. The player needs to choose carefully when their character will break silence and when they’ll adhere to it, which invites the GM to have her own characters apply pressure to see what the characters are willing to break silence over and what they are not.

It’s a brilliant setup because the players don’t need to read a book full of fiction to understand the difficult position the minotaur occupies because the silence tokens and rules that govern their behavior let them feel it directly. It’s a powerful statement when a game’s mechanics can do that work instead of requiring long explanations and discussions about players’ buy-in. Once the GM knows what kind of world needs to be presented to the players, the players just need to respond to the GM and the pressures of the mechanics. Oh! And then there is the list of how their character broke silence that they have to maintain on their character sheet—oooh, I love that. It does so many things at once. It is a reminder of the critical moments that have happened before; it is a way of making sure the player knows why their silence token was seized by the GM as the philosophy of silence meets the real world; and it is a list of the minotaurs shameful moments, like writing on the chalkboard 50 times, and like the list the minotaur repeats to himself when he is torturing himself at night with a list of his errors.

The two halves of the silence philosophy are naturally at odds with one another, because to pursue justice and the social good assumes a desire in the minotaur for justice. There’s the excellent bit of fiction in the text of when the narrating minotaur confronts Feru, the maker of the poison that affects the young wives of Saemung Empyreus, in his shop. He is working for justice and the social good, but he is also acting out of his own desire to be a protector and to stop this asshole. As he runs out of the store it is clear that he broke silence by confront Feru even as he acts to uphold silence.

So silence and the minotaurs’ status as second-class citizens work to create an ever-unsettled situation that the minotaurs are forced to navigate. Silence is an unsteady platform upon which the minotaurs are forced to do a balancing act, only the fulcrum and platform have no point of equilibrium at which the minotaur can rest; instead they are constantly shifting their weight to steady themselves, which they can never do. It is a Sisyphean task, but it makes for self-propelling drama, which is great for an RPG.

For more thoughts, see this post on G+: https://plus.google.com/1027219169271...

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just received The Clay That Woke in the mail, and I absolutely love it. Paul Czege builds a magical, disturbing, and evocative world, with original game mechanics that are more part of that world than of our own.

The Clay That Woke is a role-playing game set in the Delgringolade, a massive, ancient city slowly being reclaimed by the jungle. The players are minotaurs, all male, menial workers in a world dominated by human beings, sworn to stoicism and silence, but also sworn to make the world better, and sometimes driven to blindly run into the jungle to replenish some deep well of strength within. The jungle is full of strange, dangerous creatures, but the humans in the city have strange urges and motivations as well. Ghosts are driven to recreate heroic scenes from their lives. One woman wants to free her husband from prison so she can kill him because that is the only way she will be free to remarry. Weird seeds and insects may expand the senses, but they may also exact a price. Allowing yourself to be swallowed by a giant dragonfly may allow you to control it like a vehicle, but if you stay inside too long, your skin may turn translucent from its digestive juices.

The game was certainly influenced by dying earth writers like Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun) and Jack Vance (Tales of the Dying Earth), but it also calls to mind Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Joseph Conrad. The black-and-white illustrations help evoke a world where plants, animals, humans, spirits, and the dead mingle and sometimes recombine in strange ways.

The mechanics of the game are based on randomly selecting tokens from a bowl known as "the krater of lots." My one quibble with the work is that it's hard to distinguish the icons that represent different tokens in the text. Referring to them by name would have made the book easier to use.

If you're interested in RPGs with diceless mechanics, or in strange worlds, I highly recommend this game.

As of this writing, there is a half-price sale on printed books and tokens, so now's the time to buy. The tokens are a nice addition to the game and make it much easier to play.

[Hamish Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rules explained in an engaging narrative, interspersed with evocative fiction to convey the vibe of the weird, magical bronze-age world.

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Czege has produced an excellently innovative storygame with a rich, immersive world suggestive of the best Appendix N and Conan stories.

The game has a clever and simple resolution mechanic, though the details get a little rocky around the edges ("if player X has NO tokens of Y type, but there is a token of Z type in play, then ...", etc).

The archetypes are well thought out and well-written, and each feels psychologically distinct--an impressive feat given that the different archetypes are near-identical from a mechanical standpoint.

The in-game universe is breathtaking and unique, and would serve well as a setting for any sort of role-playing game. I would certainly buy supplements of the in-game universe even if I never ran The Clay That Woke.

The "content layout" of indie RPGs is always a sticking point with me, but Mr. Czege has done a wonderful job of blending in-universe fiction with rules and mechanics in seamless and effective manner. If you plan on writing an RPG rulebook, you owe it to yourself to read The Clay That Woke, as it masterfully jumps from rule to fiction to editorial.

The art, the cover and the "form layout" are all gorgeous and thoughtful, and display a true attention to craft and detail that is often lacking in kickstarter projects (including my own, at times).

My only serious quibbles are that the rules get a little spongy and distracted (re: groups of minotaurs going into the jungle) and some of the text is noticeably copied from previous sections in the gamebook, which breaks immersion.

A fantastic read and a clever ruleset with plenty of excellent material on prepping for sessions. Well worth purchasing in print.

[Russ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll come back around and re-rate this book when we've had a chance to play. Four stars for now for innovation and readability. Haven't gone to five because I personally would have liked it to read more like a traditional RPG rulebook.