It's (I'm) Alive!

Or at least I'm not dead. I am, however, still bedridden and forced to lay absolutely flat on my back or suffer massive spinal headaches, which makes typing rather difficult, since I have to balance my laptop vertically on my stomach. Anyway, I'm still here, and I have a great many ideas that I plan to flesh out once I'm no longer forced to be prone. Here's 6 of them.

1) I've been repeatedly playing through a twine game by I Don't Remember That Move about hunting down Dracula, who killed your dog/father/whatever depending on how you start the game, and the abstract inevitability of the mysteries in the game are really compelling to me. It throws a lot of locales and characters at you, none of which seem to have more than a slight hint of anything to do with your investigation, and leaves you to fumble and scheme your through, drawing your own conclusions, until, at last, you end up face to face with Dracula as you knew you would all along, clutching your little theories and imagined conspiracies to your chest, feeling suddenly like maybe you didn't know as much as you thought you did, and certainly not as much as Dracula does.

I'm not usually a huge fan of the mystery genre, but something about the way the game lets you experience an otherworld of supernatural machination appearing to you almost at random, forcing you to create patterns out of what might well be meaningless events that feel loaded with deadly intent just out of your reach is really appealing to me. Basically, I like Edward Gorey style mysteries a lot, which is to say, mysteries which probably only really exist in the eye of the beholder, but can never be conclusively proved to be so.

With that in mind, I want to start work on a mystery game/module that aims to recreate that experience, using lots of randomly generated information along with a few consistent characters, locales, or themes. A game like that would most likely work best played in continuous iterations (maybe it's possible to run through the mystery in a session, after which it's jumbled up again), so some sort of time loop mechanic might be necessary. Or maybe a generational type deal, the heirs of the PCs struggling to interpret the information their parents left them. Having time progress through the sessions might be cool.
Right now I want to make it a Dracula (or at least Gorey style Gothic) thing, but if I get inspired I might make a random antagonist deal possible.

2) I've been meaning to run another Veins of the Earth game, and because I've been rereading Small Gods and wanting to give both Witchburner and Kidnap the Archpriest, I decided to blend Veins with religious heresy stuff and create a campaign world on the cusp of realizing that the world as they know it is in fact the outermost surface edge of the entire universe, which in fact lies under their feet. The stars and heavens lie. Humanity was long ago banished to the edge of the universe, made separate from all that is. Basically, what if outer space was stone with occasional cave systems instead of negative space with occasional mass, and what if we were on top of it, and what if the Church was pissed about it.

3) A Hollow Knight-y game about being insects in a world where the sentient races and their gods have destroyed each other in an apocalyptic war, leaving the insects and their gods to inherit the earth. Some nice Dark Souls-y Metroidvania-y moody exploration, some domain style gameplay as you expand your colony, and huge god-corpses.

4) I'm gonna make post detailing the system I've been running my OSR games with, and hopefully codify some of the stuff for myself as well. It grew out of the idea that I could use an overloaded encounter die (an encounter die where every result means something, not just "encounter on a roll of 1") as my resolution mechanic, and so far it's been working really nicely. So yeah, Encounter Die as Core Mechanic. Needs a snappier title though.

5) An idea for a campaign setting where the main premise is that the earth just really, really hates to be altered in any way, and as a result, things like agriculture, building, smithing, etc are all only possible through magic. Houses, weapons, clothes are all bound to bloodlines and passed down through the generations. Also, I'm kicking around some ideas about buildings begetting sentience itself? So if you venture out into the wilderness, you lose your mind, eventually become feral. Unless you've got a mask, made by the same Builders who created the homes everyone lives in, sanctified the land everyone farms. Then you can go out, seek your fortune in the wilds. Obviously though, people die out there, masks or no, and when the first beasts show up wearing masks of men, minds sharpened to sentience through the power of the Builders... anyway, it's a start.

6) Some tables for random character creation for a cyberpunk game where the focus is on ordinary people trying to make rent. Kinda like Fates Worse Than Death or Diary of a Spaceport Janitor. Anyway, I wanna make character tables that make believable people, with all the shit that makes people tick represented (yeah okay, this risks just being "depressed horny millennials in the future the game, but the challenge is to make it not just that).


Anyway, if you have any preference as to what you'd like to see coming up, let me know and maybe I'll do that one. Ciao! (As if I'm going anywhere.)

Comments

  1. I really like the ideas for 2 and 5. Sounds like something that would be fun to run over time and flesh out.

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  2. I'd definitely be interested in seeing the encounter die mechanic in 4.

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