minor update (but yes I'm still here)

I know things have slowed down lately with the game design stuff while I work on some other projects.  But I did knock out one big task today, which was finally giving the Werewolves of London rulebook a proper update instead of just having all the changes scattered among my playtest notes.  And that means that I'm now ready to submit it to this year's Hippodice competition!  And then to some publishers after that's over.  So let's see what happens with that in the near future...

Scales - stepping back

After a few more weeks of beating my head against the Scales rules, trying to find a way to make this game work, I've decided it's time to set it aside.  I might come back to it eventually - at the very least, I would hate to let all those band name puns go to waste.  But I definitely need a break from it for now.

Which means I do get to put my real focus on another project that's been hovering on the periphery for a while.  I'll explain that one in the future post, hopefully with some more things figured out that I can include there.  For now I'll just say that this one is probably going to be around the same weight as Explorers of Legend, give or take a bit.  I'm a little disappointed that this means I pretty much definitely won't have an almost-ready game to bring to PAX Unplugged this year, but that's alright.  It's going to be that much more exciting if/when I do have it more or less complete.

Roll the World is now live on DriveThruRPG

All done and ready for public consumption: 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527945/roll-the-world 

Distraction done (for now)

In the last post I mentioned a new thing I was playing with, a system of random tables to generate a setting for a fantasy campaign.  Rough draft is now complete and available here.  Here's an example of what it can create:

The region where this hypothetical campaign is set is the western half of a continent, with two large islands close enough to be part of the same region.  The climate is hot and dry, with little seasonal variation.  Despite that, much of the region is dense with plants that have evolved to live with minimal water.  A long range of low hills separates it from the rest of the continent.  Two major rivers do flow from the hills down to the coast, and there are two lakes as well - most of the plant life is probably concentrated around there, but there could be patches that spread out well past where one might expect.  Up in the hills, at the sources for the rivers, it's surprisingly cold, and the rivers are even icy in places.

[if I was actually going to run a campaign here then this would be the part where I draw a map, but I don't feel like spending the extra time on that just for this blog post]

Magic is rarer in this setting than in the default for whatever game system we might be playing.   Using magic requires a physical implement - right now I'm thinking stones with runes carved in them sounds like a good default, but different styles of magic might have their own preferences.

"Civilization" has only begun in the past few generations [author note - taken together with everything else we've rolled so far, I'm getting heavy Ur/Sumer vibes, so that would be something to lean on later - but let's see what else the dice give us].  At this point there is one cultural group that has developed to be the major power in the region; if I was putting them on the map they would almost definitely be on the coast, with their capital at the mouth of one of the two big rivers.  There are also three minor powers to place on the map.  Given this setup, most of it will probably still be unclaimed wilderness.

If I was planning a real campaign I would probably do some rolls to define all four of the states that I've placed, but for this example I'm only going to roll up the one major power.  The process for the minor powers would be the same, some things just might be interpreted differently to keep in mind the relative power levels.  Anyway, for our one major player, they have the one large capital city, no other cities of note, and two large wilderness zones within their claimed borders.  It was established when rival tribes along the coast were forced to pool their resources to get through a particularly difficult year, and recognized the possibilities if they continued this way instead of splitting up again.  It is ruled by a parliament in which each member chooses their own successor before retiring.  Let's call it the Council of Masters, and say it's 50 members who each serve for however long they want (with 5-10 years being average) and an expectation that they will return to their original line of work afterward.  At this moment, the Council is not perfect but they are mostly focused on benefiting the whole country.  Or at least benefiting their city and also trying to keep the more distant settlements safe.  However, only a couple decades ago the Council tended to be a lot more selfish, keeping more resources for the city (or for themselves) and slowing development further out.

 

Technological development is about the same in this country as in the rest of the region.  Most neighborhoods in the city have a variety of workers who complement each other; originally this was an organic development, but more recently the Council has been incorporating this into city planning as they strive to maximize worker efficiency.   Manpower and raw materials are plentiful, particularly clay and stone for building.  There is no central institution for knowledge or culture; that's probably been a non-issue for most of the country's brief history so far, but they're now getting to a point where people are starting to feel it. 

 

The culture is fairly homogeneous.  They're not hostile to outsiders, there just aren't many people traveling the continent right now (although traders sailing along the coast would certainly be a thing).  They value hard work and religious observance, and for the most part they're not fond of people trying too hard to be clever.  Their religion is animistic.  Most of the magic that anyone here knows how to do (and there aren't many who know how to do it) involves bargaining with spirits.  Contact with certain spirits is strongly discouraged, based on legends passed down from early tribal history; whether or not those spirits are actually as dangerous as everyone is told remains to be seen.

 

There are three factions of note in this country:

• The burgeoning class of professional warriors, looking for ways to keep a comfortable income flowing when there is no war at the moment
• Several pirate gangs disrupting coastal trade and fighting with each other as well - one of them is clearly in the lead and working to put down the rest
• Descendants of one of the old tribes who argue that they are underrepresented on the Council

At present, the Council of Masters does not look too kindly on either the warriors or the pirates, but does not consider either faction to be a serious problem just yet.  They are sympathetic to the one tribal group, and several Council members have been actively working with them on identifying suitable candidates.  However, some members of that tribal group have also worked their way into both the warrior class and the leading pirate gang, looking to use either (or both) as leverage if they feel it's needed.  And the warriors and pirates seem suspiciously okay with each other...

 

---------

Okay, yeah, I could definitely run a campaign of something or other in this setting.  I should also point out that not everything presented here is in the order that I rolled it; some information got moved around based on where it fit better in the narrative.  But all of it does come from the random tables, with me just adding a few details here and there to turn the prompts into something coherent.

 

So that's that for now.   I'm giving it some time for people to review the draft and maybe suggest more content, and then eventually I'll pretty it up and post it on DriveThru and/or Itch.  I'm in no rush for that though.

A small update for Scales, and a... [rolls dice] small update on something else

Doing a lot of pondering about Scales since the last playtest, and I think I've figured out the core change I need to make.  Instead of my original (admittedly bland) system of adding points to stats and then comparing with a target, I'm moving to a set collection mechanic.  I don't have the details worked out yet, but what I have in mind so far is that each skill from the first draft of the game is now essentially a suit in a deck of cards, and players need to first collect sets to build their individual skills, then contribute cards from completed sets to the band skills.  I'll need to add meaningful ways for players to interact with each other, and I think I want there to also be an engine building aspect.  And of course there's still the whole "what about dragons?" thing from my last post which I haven't figured out yet, but I hope you'll agree that it makes sense to get a better feel for my core mechanics first before I determine how different aspects of the theme can interact with that.  So that's all still in progress.  But it is at least still actually in progress.

And in other news, I recently started listening to a worldbuilding podcast called Mythtakes Happen, and that inspired me to start writing up my own worldbuilding tool.  My goal is for a glorious, lifepathy set of random tables to give all your dice a workout and end up with a fairly well sketched out game setting.  Definitely more involved than my Lazy Culture Generator, almost definitely less involved than the old Central Casting character lifepath books that are another major inspiration for this project.  I know that other games already exist that include something like this, but none of them have it at the level that I want, so I might as well make my own attempt.  I'm still outlining it right now and listing what tables I need to create for this in order to cover physical geography, how magic works in the system, significant history, and current nations and cultures.  Filling in more specific ideas as I have them, which is very scattershot right now, just enough to help me organize, remember what I want in each section, and maybe spur ideas for what else to add.  I will say that I've already had some fun just with the bit for generating factions within a nation - what I have right now is that for each faction you roll for what group they come from (e.g. ruling class, trade guild, religious sect, etc), what their main goal is, and their relationships with each other faction, and just rolling those things for three factions, with no other context established, already gave me some serious fodder for a campaign set in that otherwise undefined country.  So I think I'm going in the right direction with this.

And yeah, I guess I should specify that what I'm working on right now is only for fantasy settings, and is system agnostic.  Maybe if this goes well I'll write similar ones in the future for other settings, but that'll be for another time.

Scales: I thought you said this game was about dragons?

Had a Scales playtest today, with more complete rules than last time but still feeling very first draft.  Got lots of good feedback on different ways to go with the mechanics, but this one hit me the hardest - if the game pitch says that it's about dragons learning to play instruments, then why don't they do anything draconic in the game?  You'd think I would have seen that one coming after my early tests with Werewolves where players complained that they weren't doing anything wolfy.  And this comment is 100% correct.  If the game is going to be about dragons, then there should be something in it (besides just artwork) so it feels like you are playing as dragons and not just generic characters.  Magic, or breath weapons, or flying, or... something.

So what is that going to look like?  No idea yet.  Playtest just finished a few minutes ago, I need time to digest everything.  Hopefully my next post here will be to announce that I've figured it out (and maybe sooner than another month?).

Werewolves of London: what's all this then?

In my last WoL-related post I mentioned changing how police work.  Today I finally got to test out the new system, and it was almost a hit.  It started off slow, but by the end of the game the police were blocking off a good portion of the board.  Test players said they liked how this forced us into more conflict, and how it helped with balance (Mayfair isn't nearly as valuable if you can't actually cash out your investments).  The remaining flaw was that the bribe rules were just a slight tweak off of what I had before, when the threat of mutual annihilation meant that everyone had a reason to contribute to paying off the police.  With that threat gone, today's players felt like there was no reason for them to spend their own hard-earned money for something that might only benefit their opponents.  So what I'll probably do instead is to have a flat rate that you can pay on your turn to clear the investigation off of a territory of your choice (but you still can't invest money into that territory on that same turn, since the police don't clear off until afterward).

Ooh, and maybe to keep some sense of the "prisoner's dilemma" tension, even if it isn't quite the same anymore, multiple players bribing the police in the same turn will still only clear one territory, chosen randomly between them (or determined by whoever is willing to throw in more money on top of the base price). 

Alright, I guess that's at least one more test I'll need to run before it's ready for pitching...