GLOGtober '24: Inside You Are Two Wolves (minimum)

 For challenge 3 of glogtober I will do "Esoteric Orders and Creeds'. Since there are as many days left in the month as I have challenges left, I think I'm going to play a bit fast and lose with the prompt. I have an idea I want to make a post about and picked the prompt that best matches it rather then the other way around. 

Recently on the GLOG discord there have been a fair few discussions on experince, and unrelatedly I have been playing in a CAIN campaign recently which has an experince system that I really like. So I'm going to extract the rules I like and want to talk about and write them up as thier own little unmoored subsystem.

Two Wolves Experince

This alternative experince system is suitable for campaigns in which you want player characters to get more powerful by struggling with internal conflicts and abandoning thier old methods for new ones.

Each character starts with a Creed selected from the ones listed below. Each Creed grants you two tendencies, normal and bolded. At the end of a session go down the checklist and get one XP for every question answered 'yes'.

• Did you follow your first tendency?
• Did you follow at least one bolded tendency?
• Did you follow two or more bolded tendencies?

When your experince bar is full (3 segments), you can cash it in to gain an advance. 

If I had a specific framework to attach this system to, there would be a list of things to spend advances on. If attached to a GLOG, each level costs [level]+1 advances, and advances can be spent to gain 'small' abilities like spells or martial techniques. Each Creed would also have a small list of abilities that you can purchase only when you have that Creed, but you still keep them after you switch to a different one.

During downtime you can change your Creed to another one if you feel like your old Creed no longer fits your character. This causes you to lose the Creed's normal tendency, but you keep all your old bolded ones.

Creeds

• Beast
• Get into a fight
• Hold Back
• Doomed
• Deomonstrate you humanity
• Demonstrate your distance from humanity
• Guardian
• Protect your people
• Leave nobody behind
• Moth
• Uncover hidden or uncomfortable truths about the world
• Uncover hidden or uncomfortable truths about yourself
• Temperance
• put people before the mission
• Harm someone intentionally
• Songbird
• Get someone to do your bidding
• Do something selfless
• Demon
• Enrich yourself
• Give something valuable away

This is an example list with a handful of the 'Creeds' stolen directly from CAIN to give the vibe of how these things are structured. For an actual game I would write a list specific to it's paramters.

Discussion

First of all, let me tell you what I left out that CAIN had. In CAIN you also get XP just for surviving a session and getting injured or afflicted during that, which I excluded becouse I want focus on the Creeds specicially. In CAIN they are called Agendas and 'tendencies' are called agenda items. I renamed them only so that this post fit the glogtober challenge on a technicality. Last thing I omitted are five agenda abilities each CAIN Agenda has. I don't think there is much point trying to make system agnostic versions of those.

Now let me talk about why I think this system is worth stealing. You dear reader are probably a roleplayer of the OSR tradition who looks down on how FORGE descended games ask you to assign points for how much story you've did in a session. You may consider yourself an artiste who plays a little freak for the love of the craft not becouse some leafs of paper offered you a carrot to do so, or you prefer to make choices specifically consistantly from the perspective of the character and not a director who's writing said character. As an artiste who plays little freaks myself, I like this experince systems becouse while does ask me to do book-keeping, in return it gives me intresting prompts to take my characters in directions I would not naturally take them.

The character I play in the previously mentioned CAIN campaign as she first appeared. She is an exorcist for the clandestine organization CAIN, who's goal is to kill all the Sins spawned from the trauma of psychically sensitive individuals. She is not human, she is an exorcist, who like any psychically sensitive person is at risk of turning into a Sin herself. Her Blasphemy (type of psychic power) is JAUNT, which includes powers like telepathy, possesion, astral projection and most relevent to her the power to invite other willing targets into her brain, this power is called Passanger. We've played three missions over 6 sessions and not once did she use Passanger for the intended purpose of allowing an ally to act through her, but she's invited each mission's Sin to enter her, except for the one who very clearly does not want to go in there. At the beginning I gave her the Moth agenda becouse I wanted her to be be a psychic goo-drinker, someone who learns too much and suffers for it.

During the first mission I wasn't able to come up anything good for the her second agenda item "Uncover hidden or uncomfortable truths about yourself". On the second mission I switched to Temperance partially becouse I was already playing her as someone who helped people, partially to represent the personality of a different PC bleeding into her own via telepathy. The Sin for the second mission was classified as a Centipede, which are fueled by pure seething hatred. So I decided that when she lets the Centipede into her mind she will have the horrible realization that she has not been able to feel hate for the last two years she's been in CAIN custody, and that is why she has this wierd desire to invite trauma demons into her brain. As a result of this she cut off a tiny piece of the Centipede and bound it to be her familiar and 'prosthetic hatred'. I absolutly loved this development, but it's not something that would have occured to me without the agenda item serving as a prompt.

I think each rule in an RPG needs to justify it's existance against the gold standard of roleplaying, good old fashioned make belief. For a rule to be worth keeping around it needs to allow something that you wouldn't get from free form. The experince systems in many FORGE descended rpgs fail at this, but I like what CAIN does becouse it prompts my character to change in ways I like but would am not have come up with in a vacuum. Since each pair agenda items pull the character in opposite directions hitting both triggers over the course of a single session while both staying in character becomes a fairly well defined challenge, which makes it fun and satisfying to get right. I don't think this system is to everyone's tastes, but I find it really fun.