End of the Second Day

So What’s It All About?

We don’t necessarily want to make a generic fantasy game. We sorta got one of those already, don’t we?

Well what’s the alternative? Probably the alternative is; it’s about something. Pendragon is about Chivalry and the Arthurian Romances and your character is defined by the chivalric virtues and vices. They are actually your stats.

The Star Wars RPG isn’t about the Force, but it is about Good vs Evil! Among other things. And the Force Die gives that theme some teeth with Dark Side and Light Side points.

Well, “fighting monsters” isn’t really a theme like that. It’s more of a “what are we doing?” not a “why are we doing it?” So it’d be nice if we knew “WHY are you fighting monsters?”

We started by imagining it might be literally Law vs Chaos. And the final product might have something to do with that. These are classic ideas in fantasy roleplaying, prominently featured in Elric of Melniboné, but after talking about it, it seemed unlikely that one huge, overarching theme would work for us, given everything we want to do.

Vasloria is our Medieval Europe analog and we figure it’ll probably feature some very old school kind of play. Probably not literally dungeon crawling, it’s still Heroic Fantasy, but you might fight an army of Hobgoblins who worship Tiamat and are trying to conquer the area. That seems like something adventures in Vasloria might try and do.

But heroes in Capital, The City of the Great Game are way more worried about politics and factions and alliances. They still fight a lot of monsters! But the why is a little different. The tone is different.

Furthermore, our Space Fantasy multiverse, The Timescape is an entirely different set of assumptions. It’s way more Guardians of the Galaxy (or, maybe The Starjammers) which is to say Space Opera?

So if you imagine the Force from Star Wars, and imagine making a Force mechanic with Dark Side points and Light Side points, you can see how you could run LOTS of different adventures in the Star Wars universe, and that mechanic would have different meaning in different games.

Does your game feature Jedi PCs? Well then the force is a resource they use and manipulate. It’s just a tool for them. Whereas Hal Nightlancer (Matt’s PC in Mark Hulmes’ Star Wars campaign) has never met a Jedi, there aren’t any around here, and there might not even be any left alive. It’s much more Andor than A New Hope.

In that context, the Force is still real! It’s a real thing with a mechanic that affects the game, but none of the heroes are in control of it the way Jedi are. And that creates a very different tone. Same mechanic, but since the PCs can’t access it like Jedi can, it becomes more of this background force that affects everyone. It ebbs and flows, and we can use it, but only in a very limited manner.

Another way of looking at the Force in an Andor-style game is; Matt Colville can decide to use a Light Side point to add a Blue Die to his pool, but Hal Nightlancer has no idea this is happening and probably doesn’t even realize his success was in some way related to the Force. The Force is subtle when there’s no Jedi around.

So we can imagine different campaigns feature heroes fighting for different reasons. Is there some generalized mechanic, like Law vs Chaos, that’s just contextualized differently in Vasloria vs Capital vs The Timescape? Maybe! We talked about that.

But maybe it’s not the campaign you’re in that determines “why are we fighting?” It’s the villain.

At the start of the game, the players (and, often, the GM!) don’t really know who the villain is yet. You don’t need an Ajax the Invincible to start playing in a tavern and maybe get into a fight.

But as you play, there’s this generalized mechanic you track. Could be Fate or Fortune/Misfortune, could be Law vs Chaos, and these results (if, indeed, they are results. Like a Law symbol and a Chaos symbol on the dice) just power/affect some generic abilities. Barbarians like getting Chaos results, Paladins like getting Law results?

You can imagine that. But then at some point you discover “Wait! These guys are wearing the symbol of House von Glauer! OH NO!” It’s a big reveal, who the villain is. And from that point forward, these symbols start to mean something specific. Specific to von Glauer and his minions. Only von Glauer’s agents can use the Chaos symbol to power The Red Tax ability that drains your vitality or whatever.

Wow. Now that starts to feel like something. The game is about something, and we have this broad, generalized mechanic you can use in any game, at any level, but we also provide adventures with Villains who run Organizations (very MCDM!) and they get to use this mechanic uniquely.

If we do a good job? Then GMs will go “Ok, I get it” and be able to come up with their own. I.e. we don’t need to tell you what your game’s about. YOU can decide that, invent a villain that represents it, and give their org some dope ability that the generalized mechanic “grabs on to.”

Will this actually be in our game? Is this how anything in our game works? We have no idea. But this is how we find out how our game works. So far, two days of talks, it certainly feels like we’re on the right track.

We’re talking about the right things. How will this manifest in the end? No one knows….