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The Horizon 1 Site

HORIZON IS OVER!

The webpage remains up as a permanent archive of game material, mainly for the benefit of nostalgic players - although if you'd like to run a Horizon-inspired game for your friends, that's wonderful too. Horizon will be succeeded by Legacyin Trinity term of 2006.

If you like you can look at the (sketchy, incomplete) GM notes as well.

Turnsheet Guidelines

Turnsheeting in Horizon exists for two purposes:

  • For you to tell us on an in-character level what you want your character to get up to between sessions.

  • For you to tell us on an out-of-character level whether you're enjoying the game, and whether there's anything we can do to help you enjoy the game more.

    The IC Part

    In-character, there is two months between each session. This is enough time for you to enact four wonderful plans in order to achieve your goals. The in-character part of the turnsheet should ideally be split into four sections: Actions, Housekeeping, Opinions, and Expenditure. Four corners of nature's harmonious turnsheeting cube.

    Actions

    You get four actions in a turn. An action is an attempt to achieve something non-trivial. For example:
    • Assassinating someone is an action.
    • Breaking into someone's house is an action.
    • Kidnapping and interrogating someone is an action.
    • Going on an expedition is an action.
    • Working on an invention is an action.
    • Brewing alchemical things is an action.
    You should detail how your character intends to go achieving the goal you set for yourself in each action. You should give us as much detail as needed to let us know what you intend to do and how you intend to go about it. If you're sparse on the details, we'll be obliged to guess how you go about things, and our guesses might not be the way you were thinking of. At the same time, bear in mind that we have around 100 actions to process each turn: don't go into minute detail. Furthermore, in general we will expect your character has a decent idea of how to do the things your character is skilled at: if you turnsheet something which seems OOC sensible to you but would seem IC eccentric to your character, we'll check with you before assuming you go ahead with it.

    It's legitimate (and often sensible) to put in multiple turnsheet actions towards achieving an especially difficult goal. Many actions could conceivably be broken down into multiple steps: as a rule of thumb, if the steps are relatively simple, straightforward things, there's little advantage to putting individual actions into them. For example, if I turnsheeted:

    1: Bake a cake with a file in it.
    2: Get a disguise.
    3: Put on the disguise and visit Ugly Bill in the Doghouse, handing over the cake.
    4: Hide Ugly Bill when he escapes.
    I'd be wasting my actions, when I could just write:
    Action 1: Bake a cake with a file in it, disguise myself, visit Ugly Bill in the Doghouse, give him the cake, give him sanctuary when he escapes.
    On the other hand, if the steps in question are complicated things (and are, in fact, major goals in their own right), it's more sensible to turnsheet them individually. For example, if I wrote:
    1: Buy loads of guns and establish secret caches in the hills around the city. Recruit the disgruntled steamworkers who've been fired from Mr Edward's cheese factory for the revolutionary cause. Blow up Colonel Zero at the annual parade with the explosives I made last turn. Lead my Richterist goons in a revolution to establish a socialist utopia.
    I won't get as good results as if I wrote:
    1: Buy loads of guns and establish secret caches in the hills around the city.

    2: Recruit the disgruntled steamworkers who've been fired from Mr Edward's cheese factory for the revolutionary cause.

    3: Blow up Colonel Zero at the annual parade with the explosives I made last turn.

    4: Lead my Richterist goons in a revolution to establish a socialist utopia.

    And chances are the GMs would note that I've tried to cram 4 different actions into 1 and rule that I only get as far as hiding the guns in the hills.

    It is, of course, entirely acceptable to put contingency plans into your turnsheet. (For example: "Here's action 1a and 1b. If Frank gets back to me with the idol, I'll go for action 1a; if Frank fails or betrays me, I'll go for action 1b instead.")

    Housekeeping

    The housekeeping section of your turnsheet is for those things which are too minor to merit a full turnsheet action, but which you'll still want the GMs to be aware of. Acceptable housekeeping actions include, but are not limited to:
    • Paying rent and/or protection money.
    • Giving money to PCs and NPCs.
    • Scoring whatever horrible drugs you ruin your body with.
    • Putting advertisements in the small ads.
    • Writing news articles and submitting them to newspapers.
    • Doing your job.
    • Attending an event or meeting you've been invited to (so long as you don't intend to do anything more complex than turn up and talk to people).
    • Talking to NPCs. (Discussions with other player characters should really be handled over e-mail).
    • Tidying your room.
    • Angsting.
    The rule of thumb is that if it's part of your character's regular day-to-day routine, it's a housekeeping thing.

    Opinions

    If your character is trying to express a particular opinion to people during this turn, point it out here. It might be helpful.

    In particular, if you hold rank in an organisation your opinions can come to mould that organisation's policies. The higher your rank, the more closely you'll be listened to - for example, the opinions of Rank 4 mobsters or government insiders will carry more weight than the opinions of Rank 1 goons or government paper-pushers.

    Expenditure

    Here's where you should keep track of how much money you are giving to people, and how much money you're receiving. Check the money rules for more details.

    The OOC Part

    If you have any complaints, suggestions, words of praise or other OOC issues you'd like to raise with the GMs, feel free to put them in your turnsheet, e-mail the GMs, or talk to us at RPGSoc events. Please bear in mind that while we'll listen to all your comments, there's a limit to how much we can change the game to enhance your enjoyment without damaging other people's enjoyment.

    Giving Us Your Turnsheet

    The preferred format for turnsheet submissions is via e-mail to the GM team. Please refrain from attaching your turnsheet in the form of a text or word document - copy-and-paste it directly into the body of the mail, please.

    The GM team can be reached at:

    team_of_traitors at yahoogroups dot com
    or
    rpgsocgm at maillist dot ox dot ac dot uk

    The deadline for turnsheets is 11:59pm Friday. The GMs will usually meet to discuss turnsheets on Sunday; while we will attempt to process all turnsheets we receive by then, we'll regard turnsheets received after the deadline as being optional.

    Getting the Results

    We'll give you the results of your turnsheet actions to you at the beginning of each session of Horizon. Please turn up promptly to sessions - we intend to time in at 8:30pm after an hour turnsheeting players, and we would prefer not to inconvenience timely players by making them wait while we turnsheet late ones. If you expect to be late to a session, let us know in advance - if any of our GMs have time, they'll happily give you turnsheet results via e-mail to save you and us time at the start of the session. If you miss a session, we will endeavour to get your turnsheet results to you (by e-mail or in person) as soon as possible afterwards.

    Some guidance on how to approach being turnsheeted:

    • Don't be afraid to ask questions or request clarifications. We want to make sure that you understand what we tell you in turnsheeting - or at the very least, that you're only confused about the things that you are IC meant to be confused about.

    • Turnsheeting, for the GM team, is about giving the players information. We will try to tell you everything your character would IC know about the situations which arise during turnsheeting. We will not decide for you how your character interprets this information - most of the time, at least. For example, if you are investigating a crime we will tell you what evidence you uncover; we will not say "you think X did it" unless the evidence very obviously points to X.

    • In a related point, 99% of the time we will not tell you how your character thinks or feels. There may be exceptions to this; it is possible for characters' emotions to be influenced through supernatural forces, or through an imbalance of your Affinities; if we do say "your character has found themself being especially bad-tempered lately", it will be for reasons such as this. If you think that it would be IC unusual for your character to be bad tempered, you may assume that your character notices this uncharacteristic behaviour as well.

    • Similarly, we will try to make as few assumptions as we can about how your character reacts to a situation, although the nature of turn-based games means that we will have to do so to an extent. For example, if during the course of a turnsheet action your character learns that his or her Dependants are in danger, we will assume that your character will drop what they are doing and go rescue their Dependants - if your character didn't care about them enough to save them, they wouldn't qualify as Dependants after all.

    Eternity

    After the last full session of Horizon - which will occur on the Tuesday of 7th week, Hilary term 2006 - we will invite players to submit eternity turnsheets for their characters. These are summaries of what you want your character to do for their rest of their life, after the end of the campaign - there is no need to divide this turnsheet up into actions, but at the same time we're not looking for novel-length epics.

    It's worth making clear from the very start of the game how we're going to be handling eternity turnsheets, since this may affect people's decisions during the rest of the game. In particular:

    • Eternities are for closure, not for saying "aha! and then I win at everything when nobody is looking without any preparation". If you've been working towards something all game - like taking over the city, or becoming leader of a gang - and you achieve it by game end, by all means tell us what you do with your grand prize. If, at the end of the game, the leader of your gang dies, and you've spent several turnsheet actions getting yourself in an advantageous position should that occur, then an eternity turnsheet describing how your character takes over is appropriate. If, at the end of the game, you think you'd like your character to take over the city or win control of a gang, but you've not put in any groundwork in during the game, saying "I take over the city/gang in eternity" is just a bit silly.

    • That said, if you've got a Big Plan you've been working towards all game, we'd appreciate it if you'd try to actually deploy the Big Plan during the game, rather than springing it on people in eternity - it's just plain more interesting that way. If you don't get a chance during the game or if your timing goes wrong we'll take your groundwork into account during eternity, but please do try and make sure your plan comes to fruition during the game itself.

    • Aside from that, eternities are by and large reactive things. How do you respond to the events of the last session? How do you react to [X] becoming the leader of [Y]? Any lifelong campaigns of bloody revenge you fancy devoting yourself to?

    • To repeat ourselves: saying "aha, and after the curtain falls I do this Big Wonderful Thing which I didn't do any preparation for during the actual game" is just a bit crap. Please don't do it.
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