10-16-2007, 10:29 PM
Clansmen: The Rebirth
An old classic returns - but has it retained its past glory? WAYNE investigates ...
Resource management. Long-term planning. Resourcefulness. Forethought. Harsh unforgiving environment. Sense of community. Decision-making. Design and Development. Conceptual challenges...
... THESE ARE the words and phrases that first spring to mind when capturing the essence of the Clansmen world. As you can see from the above, this is not a game where things happen immediately or where gratification is instant. It takes - in most cases, literally - months for plans to come together and for things to happen: such is life in Clansmen and you either love it or loathe it. Personally I love it, and have done from day one, many, many years ago when I discovered this game.
The game background
Conceptually, Clansmen: The Rebirth is the same as the original game that folded two years or so ago. It is still a half-hand, half-computer moderated, fantasy, tribal roleplaying game, set in a sword and sorcery world and Mark Palin still GMs (as The Puppet Master) the game in his own inimitable, brusque, non-nonsense style.
In common with most fantasy PBMs the usual player-run races are to be found - Human, Dwarven, Elvish etc - but there are some more exotic races available too, if you need a challenge - Lizard-men and Gnomes to name a couple. Needless to say all Races have a list of advantages, disadvantages and traits, which need to be taken into account when creating a clan.
The game is set in the temperate but war-torn world of Lidan, and all player-lead clans start off on a borderland area 'in the shadow between civilisation and barbarism'.
Getting started
In game turns, your clan is just that, a mass of people treated, for game purposes, as 'a herd of creatures'. What gives a Clan its personality is the individual characters, the people with the 'drive, ambition and intelligence' who organise, plan and otherwise lead the masses. There are 13 different Major Skills an individual can have - ranging from a Leader to a Herder, with Priests and Magi being somewhere in-between - and each individual must have at least one Major Skill, but no more than three. This customisation of skills can have some dazzling or disastrous effects depending on what you chose.
I can give you some advice here from personal experience - the Leader/Trader combination doesn't work well at all: in some cases, characters gain experience by being trained by NPC characters and this means visiting other settlements to be taught. Needless to say, your clan doesn't function effectively with its leader being absent and they also get thoroughly miffed (for in-game effects read Morale Loss) if your leader regularly keeps going away on junkets to nice places 'to develop their trading skill', while leaving the clan to plough, construct and do the general dirty work. Mental note to self: don't do this again.
Whilst speaking of creation and combinations, it's worth noting that players get 100 set-up points to spend on creating their clan as a whole - and believe me it doesn't go far. This covers characters (first one free, then 25 points for each further individual), weapons, beast of burden, clan numbers, armour and the military.
Initially, there are several types of basic troops available to you (Missile, Melee and Cavalry) and each troop type can be Light, Medium, Heavy or Super Heavy. The heavier the troops, the more they cost. Later on in the game, if you have the resources, other troop types can be developed, including Marines, Engineers and various kinds of Artillery.
Overall, planning your start-up so it is viable and actually playable - too many characters/troops and too few clan members is a recipe for disaster - is an essential part of the game. It is worth spending extra time planning, as this will reap benefits in the long run.
Playing the game
Clansmen: The Rebirth is now run on a real-time basis with a week in game-time equating to a week in real life, and this is one of the reasons in-game progress is slow. As I write, turns are due every two weeks.
The order format remains basically the same: you are allowed three 'long' actions - where you can write in detail what you are trying to achieve - and seven 'short' orders, which deal with the more simple and straightforward clan actions.
However, it is here that we see the first of several new, but crucial, changes. The seven short orders were free form, allowing you to write, in one sentence, what you were trying to achieve, but now you have to select them from a list and enter them as per a computer-based order. For example, if I wanted my Trader to concentrate on developing Trading skills, I would have written a one-line sentence describing how I would do it. Now I would simply enter:
Order 4: Webby 3.4 (current trading skill) Train Trader
To role-playing aficionados this may seem a bit soul-less, but it's small changes like these that cut down on Mark's turn-processing time, thus allowing him to keep running the game, which I may add he does purely for the fun of it - financially Clansmen will never turn Mark into the new Paul Getty that's for sure! There are always the first three orders anyhow, which allow for all the role-playing you want.
Short orders can be utilised by individual characters or by the clan as a whole, and they range from Movement orders to training up individual skills, as shown above.
Some actions require you to spend Clan Support Tax points (CSTs as they are known in-game), and in some ways these are the lifeblood of the game. Taxation, trading and a host of other ways generate CSTs, and the more CSTs you have the more your clan can get done. This is because CSTs are also used as a measure of labour - it takes 60 labour to build a market-place and thus 60 CSTs - which is ok if you have 200 CSTs a turn (very rare indeed) but not if you only have 40, especially as the clan and its livestock has to be fed and maintained out of these CSTs, too! Developing CSTs is an integral - and somewhat secret - part of the game, and finding out how to make more is an interesting challenge.
Choices
One of the most attractive things about Clansmen: The Rebirth is the options available to you, and the different types of clan playing the game reflect it. Some clans study and make technological advances, other wage constant war with NPCs (and in some cases with PCs), others farm and tend the land, some lead a nomadic life-style, whilst others devote their life to their God and spend their entire existence developing their theology. A few clans do a combination of the aforementioned and more!
The only rotten apple in the barrel is if one PC finds out where your clan is located and starts attacking you. This doesn't happen that much, but if it does it can be a resource and personnel draining experience. I have been lucky; I have found a very helpful and friendly player - we already have swapped blueprints and established a trade route between us (trade routes are a good source of CSTs, by the way) - with whom I have entered into a mutual-protection pact. This has already borne fruit as a PC-led group of raiders has thought twice about attacking me when the player saw the size of our combined forces. Another way to avoid PC vs PC combat is to stick to 'your' terrain type - Elves have woodland, Lizard-men have swamps etc - as attacking someone in their terrain type is tantamount to suicide, unless you have overwhelming numbers and vastly-better trained troops.
And changes
Another change in the game is that Clansmen: The Rebirth is run exclusively by email nowadays. I've not always been a fan of email based games, but I must admit it works for this game. The turn results come back in two parts - a Word document (for the written part of the turn) and an Excel spreadsheet (for the clan's development.)
Now, a few years ago I would have dropped this game like a hot potato just because of the very mention of the word spreadsheet, but Mark has obviously designed it with people like me, who are spread-sheet phobic, in mind and it is really easy to complete - if I can do it anyone can do it! It even lets you know when you have made a mistake - impressive stuff.
In fact, the turn-results I have received to date (having played 23 turns in this new version alone) are both well designed and easy to navigate. Each page deals with its own subject (such as construction projects, individual characters progression, research undertaken etc) and all are simple to follow. Each Excel spreadsheet runs to ten or more pages and when added to the two-page (on average) hand-typed part of the turn there is enough information for even the most ardent number cruncher to pore over. That said, the turn-results sheets are not overwhelming and all the required stats are easily found.
Clansmen: The Rebirth: Conclusions
So is this game for you? Well, another player has told me that this game is similar to two games that I have, regrettably, never played: Crack Of Doom and Keys of Bled.
That said, if you are a power-gamer who loves fast clan development, all action turns and instant results then no. If you like to decimate other players, cut a swathe across the continents of Lidan and gain vast amounts of experience for your dominant army, then again no. But if you like planning, cunning, long-term development and forward-thinking realism then yes.
Realism is the key word here. What the current players of this game and I like, and some people will really hate, is Mark's dogged determination to keep the game linked to the real. Large construction projects (ie cathedrals, hospitals) take months and months in real time to build, your clans-folk will get really narked with you if you upset them (and boy will you know it - read on for more details!), not all NPCs will like you while some will not even acknowledge your clan's existence, research can (and will) go horribly wrong, individuals will die painful, ignominious deaths and many of your clan will die en mass, if you don't plan ahead.
Let me give you some examples here. On my first turn I tried a tactic I had successfully used in another tribal game in order to get my crafts-people to produce more trade goods and thus produce more CSTs. My leader said he was implementing new changes in the production of trade goods, by introducing assembly lines, bringing in shift patterns, arranging job-sharing and encouraging people to work on all parts of the assembly line, so they would become 'multi-skilled'. The result - more CSTs? No way...
My leader was informed that the clans people hated this idea and were very close to revolting; the work force went on strike, at least 50% of my clan threatened to leave, as did some of my individuals, morale plummeted through the floor and, furthermore, if I continued with this idea there would definitely be an attempted coup! The anger generated by my clan literally seethed off the page with a passion! Needless to say I aborted this implementation immediately.
As further examples, my friendly neighbour nearly lost his mage (he was down to his last hit-point!) when some research went horribly wrong and he blew himself up and it took him a few months - in real time - to recover. Another player went to construct a barn and a careless spark mean it burned down losing all the materials he saved to build it. My mage almost did every action in one turn, and collapsed with exhaustion at the end of it - it took him some time to recover!
This is not to say that everything that happens in the game is bad, or the game is doom-laden. I just want to point out, that as in real life and unlike a lot of other similar games, bad things do happen. On the plus side, learning from my lesson above, my priest floated the idea of putting a religious hierarchy in place, to make our religion more structured and organised. Initially it was met with a great deal of reluctance by the clergy, but a few turns of explaining the benefits, detailing the structure - thanks goes to the COE website, which has links to the definitive hierarchical church structure that I copied - and discussing this proposal, my priest finally got the go-ahead and we are now implementing it - which will take months in real life.
In the long run, though, it will be worth it. My clan will get bonuses in morale and organisation, and I understand there are certain 'hidden' bonuses too, which I believe is Mark's idea of rewarding what he considers to be good game-play. In addition, there is a great deal of satisfaction to be had when the fruits of your labours actually become a solid entity.
To be frank, Mark's GMing style is an acquired taste. Personally, I like it very much, because it is waffle-free, straight to the point and not overly embellished. Mark is excellent at putting over the way your clan feels en mass, and is just as accomplished at putting over the emotions of each individual character. Joy, anger, fear and satisfaction - they all spring off the page at various stages in a direct and powerful fashion.
Criticisms? Well there are a few, which I have to get off my chest. Winter-time in-game lasts for about four weeks and it finds the world frozen physically, as well as in terms of travel, farming and fishing. Travelling is thus impossible, CSTs go way down and your clan can't hunt or gather food or fodder at all - stockpiling is an absolute necessity. I understand this is a deliberate strategy implemented by Mark to stop clans developing too fast, and I have no problems with that logic, but in my opinion it severely limits the number of things you can do at that time of year.
I also find the ten-order per turn format limiting. With just seven short actions to perform the training of your characters, your troops, construct things, buy blueprints and research things, every action is valuable. I have found myself sacrificing some aspects of my clan's development for others, which has resulted in my clan being woefully lacking in certain areas. These seven short actions become even more valuable when you have to state each turn that your engineer/mage/cleric is researching a project. I would welcome a 13-order turn with the three detailed actions staying as they are, and ten orders being allocated for clan development etc.
When all is said and done, the positives in Clansmen: The Rebirth certainly outweigh the negatives by far. In fact, it's one of my favourite games. Why? Because, in a nutshell Clansmen: The Rebirth is...
Addictive. Absorbing. Thought-provoking. Stimulating. Entertaining. Enjoyable. A Treasure - and most of all Fun!
Clansmen at a glance
A mixed-moderated fantasy tribal game run as a PBeM by Mark Palin. Turn Fees are £3.50 per turn until turn 20 and £5.00 per turn thereafter.
GM Mark Palin is contactable via: kilina_gahak@yahoo.co.uk
The Clansmen discussion group/mailing list is Clansmen@yahoogroups.com
An old classic returns - but has it retained its past glory? WAYNE investigates ...
Resource management. Long-term planning. Resourcefulness. Forethought. Harsh unforgiving environment. Sense of community. Decision-making. Design and Development. Conceptual challenges...
... THESE ARE the words and phrases that first spring to mind when capturing the essence of the Clansmen world. As you can see from the above, this is not a game where things happen immediately or where gratification is instant. It takes - in most cases, literally - months for plans to come together and for things to happen: such is life in Clansmen and you either love it or loathe it. Personally I love it, and have done from day one, many, many years ago when I discovered this game.
The game background
Conceptually, Clansmen: The Rebirth is the same as the original game that folded two years or so ago. It is still a half-hand, half-computer moderated, fantasy, tribal roleplaying game, set in a sword and sorcery world and Mark Palin still GMs (as The Puppet Master) the game in his own inimitable, brusque, non-nonsense style.
In common with most fantasy PBMs the usual player-run races are to be found - Human, Dwarven, Elvish etc - but there are some more exotic races available too, if you need a challenge - Lizard-men and Gnomes to name a couple. Needless to say all Races have a list of advantages, disadvantages and traits, which need to be taken into account when creating a clan.
The game is set in the temperate but war-torn world of Lidan, and all player-lead clans start off on a borderland area 'in the shadow between civilisation and barbarism'.
Getting started
In game turns, your clan is just that, a mass of people treated, for game purposes, as 'a herd of creatures'. What gives a Clan its personality is the individual characters, the people with the 'drive, ambition and intelligence' who organise, plan and otherwise lead the masses. There are 13 different Major Skills an individual can have - ranging from a Leader to a Herder, with Priests and Magi being somewhere in-between - and each individual must have at least one Major Skill, but no more than three. This customisation of skills can have some dazzling or disastrous effects depending on what you chose.
I can give you some advice here from personal experience - the Leader/Trader combination doesn't work well at all: in some cases, characters gain experience by being trained by NPC characters and this means visiting other settlements to be taught. Needless to say, your clan doesn't function effectively with its leader being absent and they also get thoroughly miffed (for in-game effects read Morale Loss) if your leader regularly keeps going away on junkets to nice places 'to develop their trading skill', while leaving the clan to plough, construct and do the general dirty work. Mental note to self: don't do this again.
Whilst speaking of creation and combinations, it's worth noting that players get 100 set-up points to spend on creating their clan as a whole - and believe me it doesn't go far. This covers characters (first one free, then 25 points for each further individual), weapons, beast of burden, clan numbers, armour and the military.
Initially, there are several types of basic troops available to you (Missile, Melee and Cavalry) and each troop type can be Light, Medium, Heavy or Super Heavy. The heavier the troops, the more they cost. Later on in the game, if you have the resources, other troop types can be developed, including Marines, Engineers and various kinds of Artillery.
Overall, planning your start-up so it is viable and actually playable - too many characters/troops and too few clan members is a recipe for disaster - is an essential part of the game. It is worth spending extra time planning, as this will reap benefits in the long run.
Playing the game
Clansmen: The Rebirth is now run on a real-time basis with a week in game-time equating to a week in real life, and this is one of the reasons in-game progress is slow. As I write, turns are due every two weeks.
The order format remains basically the same: you are allowed three 'long' actions - where you can write in detail what you are trying to achieve - and seven 'short' orders, which deal with the more simple and straightforward clan actions.
However, it is here that we see the first of several new, but crucial, changes. The seven short orders were free form, allowing you to write, in one sentence, what you were trying to achieve, but now you have to select them from a list and enter them as per a computer-based order. For example, if I wanted my Trader to concentrate on developing Trading skills, I would have written a one-line sentence describing how I would do it. Now I would simply enter:
Order 4: Webby 3.4 (current trading skill) Train Trader
To role-playing aficionados this may seem a bit soul-less, but it's small changes like these that cut down on Mark's turn-processing time, thus allowing him to keep running the game, which I may add he does purely for the fun of it - financially Clansmen will never turn Mark into the new Paul Getty that's for sure! There are always the first three orders anyhow, which allow for all the role-playing you want.
Short orders can be utilised by individual characters or by the clan as a whole, and they range from Movement orders to training up individual skills, as shown above.
Some actions require you to spend Clan Support Tax points (CSTs as they are known in-game), and in some ways these are the lifeblood of the game. Taxation, trading and a host of other ways generate CSTs, and the more CSTs you have the more your clan can get done. This is because CSTs are also used as a measure of labour - it takes 60 labour to build a market-place and thus 60 CSTs - which is ok if you have 200 CSTs a turn (very rare indeed) but not if you only have 40, especially as the clan and its livestock has to be fed and maintained out of these CSTs, too! Developing CSTs is an integral - and somewhat secret - part of the game, and finding out how to make more is an interesting challenge.
Choices
One of the most attractive things about Clansmen: The Rebirth is the options available to you, and the different types of clan playing the game reflect it. Some clans study and make technological advances, other wage constant war with NPCs (and in some cases with PCs), others farm and tend the land, some lead a nomadic life-style, whilst others devote their life to their God and spend their entire existence developing their theology. A few clans do a combination of the aforementioned and more!
The only rotten apple in the barrel is if one PC finds out where your clan is located and starts attacking you. This doesn't happen that much, but if it does it can be a resource and personnel draining experience. I have been lucky; I have found a very helpful and friendly player - we already have swapped blueprints and established a trade route between us (trade routes are a good source of CSTs, by the way) - with whom I have entered into a mutual-protection pact. This has already borne fruit as a PC-led group of raiders has thought twice about attacking me when the player saw the size of our combined forces. Another way to avoid PC vs PC combat is to stick to 'your' terrain type - Elves have woodland, Lizard-men have swamps etc - as attacking someone in their terrain type is tantamount to suicide, unless you have overwhelming numbers and vastly-better trained troops.
And changes
Another change in the game is that Clansmen: The Rebirth is run exclusively by email nowadays. I've not always been a fan of email based games, but I must admit it works for this game. The turn results come back in two parts - a Word document (for the written part of the turn) and an Excel spreadsheet (for the clan's development.)
Now, a few years ago I would have dropped this game like a hot potato just because of the very mention of the word spreadsheet, but Mark has obviously designed it with people like me, who are spread-sheet phobic, in mind and it is really easy to complete - if I can do it anyone can do it! It even lets you know when you have made a mistake - impressive stuff.
In fact, the turn-results I have received to date (having played 23 turns in this new version alone) are both well designed and easy to navigate. Each page deals with its own subject (such as construction projects, individual characters progression, research undertaken etc) and all are simple to follow. Each Excel spreadsheet runs to ten or more pages and when added to the two-page (on average) hand-typed part of the turn there is enough information for even the most ardent number cruncher to pore over. That said, the turn-results sheets are not overwhelming and all the required stats are easily found.
Clansmen: The Rebirth: Conclusions
So is this game for you? Well, another player has told me that this game is similar to two games that I have, regrettably, never played: Crack Of Doom and Keys of Bled.
That said, if you are a power-gamer who loves fast clan development, all action turns and instant results then no. If you like to decimate other players, cut a swathe across the continents of Lidan and gain vast amounts of experience for your dominant army, then again no. But if you like planning, cunning, long-term development and forward-thinking realism then yes.
Realism is the key word here. What the current players of this game and I like, and some people will really hate, is Mark's dogged determination to keep the game linked to the real. Large construction projects (ie cathedrals, hospitals) take months and months in real time to build, your clans-folk will get really narked with you if you upset them (and boy will you know it - read on for more details!), not all NPCs will like you while some will not even acknowledge your clan's existence, research can (and will) go horribly wrong, individuals will die painful, ignominious deaths and many of your clan will die en mass, if you don't plan ahead.
Let me give you some examples here. On my first turn I tried a tactic I had successfully used in another tribal game in order to get my crafts-people to produce more trade goods and thus produce more CSTs. My leader said he was implementing new changes in the production of trade goods, by introducing assembly lines, bringing in shift patterns, arranging job-sharing and encouraging people to work on all parts of the assembly line, so they would become 'multi-skilled'. The result - more CSTs? No way...
My leader was informed that the clans people hated this idea and were very close to revolting; the work force went on strike, at least 50% of my clan threatened to leave, as did some of my individuals, morale plummeted through the floor and, furthermore, if I continued with this idea there would definitely be an attempted coup! The anger generated by my clan literally seethed off the page with a passion! Needless to say I aborted this implementation immediately.
As further examples, my friendly neighbour nearly lost his mage (he was down to his last hit-point!) when some research went horribly wrong and he blew himself up and it took him a few months - in real time - to recover. Another player went to construct a barn and a careless spark mean it burned down losing all the materials he saved to build it. My mage almost did every action in one turn, and collapsed with exhaustion at the end of it - it took him some time to recover!
This is not to say that everything that happens in the game is bad, or the game is doom-laden. I just want to point out, that as in real life and unlike a lot of other similar games, bad things do happen. On the plus side, learning from my lesson above, my priest floated the idea of putting a religious hierarchy in place, to make our religion more structured and organised. Initially it was met with a great deal of reluctance by the clergy, but a few turns of explaining the benefits, detailing the structure - thanks goes to the COE website, which has links to the definitive hierarchical church structure that I copied - and discussing this proposal, my priest finally got the go-ahead and we are now implementing it - which will take months in real life.
In the long run, though, it will be worth it. My clan will get bonuses in morale and organisation, and I understand there are certain 'hidden' bonuses too, which I believe is Mark's idea of rewarding what he considers to be good game-play. In addition, there is a great deal of satisfaction to be had when the fruits of your labours actually become a solid entity.
To be frank, Mark's GMing style is an acquired taste. Personally, I like it very much, because it is waffle-free, straight to the point and not overly embellished. Mark is excellent at putting over the way your clan feels en mass, and is just as accomplished at putting over the emotions of each individual character. Joy, anger, fear and satisfaction - they all spring off the page at various stages in a direct and powerful fashion.
Criticisms? Well there are a few, which I have to get off my chest. Winter-time in-game lasts for about four weeks and it finds the world frozen physically, as well as in terms of travel, farming and fishing. Travelling is thus impossible, CSTs go way down and your clan can't hunt or gather food or fodder at all - stockpiling is an absolute necessity. I understand this is a deliberate strategy implemented by Mark to stop clans developing too fast, and I have no problems with that logic, but in my opinion it severely limits the number of things you can do at that time of year.
I also find the ten-order per turn format limiting. With just seven short actions to perform the training of your characters, your troops, construct things, buy blueprints and research things, every action is valuable. I have found myself sacrificing some aspects of my clan's development for others, which has resulted in my clan being woefully lacking in certain areas. These seven short actions become even more valuable when you have to state each turn that your engineer/mage/cleric is researching a project. I would welcome a 13-order turn with the three detailed actions staying as they are, and ten orders being allocated for clan development etc.
When all is said and done, the positives in Clansmen: The Rebirth certainly outweigh the negatives by far. In fact, it's one of my favourite games. Why? Because, in a nutshell Clansmen: The Rebirth is...
Addictive. Absorbing. Thought-provoking. Stimulating. Entertaining. Enjoyable. A Treasure - and most of all Fun!
Clansmen at a glance
A mixed-moderated fantasy tribal game run as a PBeM by Mark Palin. Turn Fees are £3.50 per turn until turn 20 and £5.00 per turn thereafter.
GM Mark Palin is contactable via: kilina_gahak@yahoo.co.uk
The Clansmen discussion group/mailing list is Clansmen@yahoogroups.com
Wayne
2004-12-06
2004-12-06