The Pieces of Gestalt

Imagine a world in which personifications of concepts — Archetypes such as Winter, Death, and Determination — existed, having sprung to life in 1989.  Now imagine that, in this world, a fairly large number of these personifications, these living symbols, chose to put on colorful costumes and become superheroes and supervillains.  That’s the high concept of Scott Bennie’s campaign setting Gestalt: the Hero Within, which I was able to review thanks to Ed Healy of Atomic Array.

In some ways, this is not such a stretch for a superhero game.  As Bennie writes in his introduction to the first chapter, “[a]ll fiction deals in archetypes, [and] comic books apply these symbols more consciously than other fictional forms.”  The statement might be open for debate, but clearly comic books deal with archetypes.  Bennie intends for Gestalt to go one step further, though:  the characters are not making use of those archetypes; instead, the characters are the archetypes.  The Gestalt (Bennie’s name for such a living symbol) of Winter might have cold and ice powers, but he’s not just a guy with cold and ice powers — he’s a living representation of Winter.  The Gestalt of Murder isn’t just a common serial killer, or even an uncommon one — he’s Murder personified.

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Virtue: A Homebrew Alignment Variant

There’s an RPG blog carnival going on, and the topic is homebrew.  It’s certainly a broad topic.  To some extent, every campaign is homebrew.  Even if you try to run completely by the book, avoiding house rules, there are still rules interpretations to be made.  The interpretations of your table are not going to be the same as the interpretations made by another GM.  Roleplaying is an inherently creative activity, and even in a game sticking entirely to published sources — the official rulebooks and official modules and official everything else — differences of interpretation and of player character action and personality are going to lead to differences in play.

This is, I think, the biggest strength of roleplaying.  You can play Monopoly or Risk by the book, and it will be the same experience every time.  You can run through Keep on the Shadowfell as published, and it will be subtly different every time, because every GM will need to interpret and improvise, and they’ll do so in different ways.

We all homebrew.

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