Skip to main content

TTRPG Tuesday: More Nattering about The Company

It’s TTRPG Tuesday again, and I’m still on my The Company kick, still thinking about The DOLLIE Extraction.  I think something I got hung up on was how much bigger the scope of this environment was than the default scenario, but I think that the genre kind of demands (and this happens to make my job easier) a more sparsely-populated setting.  I was kind of picturing a packed Cruise Ship with clones in every corridor and berth, but part of that corporate horror genre (which again I hate) is the creepy factor.  The constant fear that you’ll encounter something, and with each moment that passes without silence, the terror only grows.  Commando raids and fighting off hordes of enemies is more the domain of zombie movies, which I hate ever more.  No, I think I can keep my caste system, my named and numbered copies and Frames, but that there should be fewer active threats; awake, that is.  I think that the ship should be teeming with experiments dormant or in stasis, packed with the potential for violence, which makes it all the more shocking when the silence is punctured by the unexpected encounter of an active clone, each of which must be dealt with lest the entire ship awaken and rise against the players.  I also think it makes sense for the mission to correspond with some kind of coup or incident that has caused a lockdown or at least a breakdown in surveillance and coordination.

Instead of a full flowchart of interconnected actions for all the Shepherdesses and their ilk, I can lay out a roughly divided floor plan of the ship, with certain rules for the rolls that will cause incidents to happen.  Maybe a nested fortune teller style table that will use multiple rolls to determine who shows up, where, and what happens.  I like Logan’s time-based regular roll that can cause monsters to appear randomly, that’s probably the layer of abstraction that’s called for here.

So, what are some more twists that can make this stand out from Eurydice project? How about sonic grenades (tuned to the frequency that paralyzes non-Shepherdess clones) and restraints as discoverable loot, since there’s a coup and all? How about a specific central location that the hacking can be done from, with a time limit / push your luck before Shepherdesses arrive? How about a hacking-based minigame, to inject a little bit of boardgame love into this RPG? How about the big twist being that at one point an IED used by one faction against the other causes a premature detonation of one or more of the party’s planted charges, so that the ship starts to be destroyed with them still on it? Hm.  That last might be a little too action-adventurey again.  A better climax is probably a brutal fight and flight from a Shepherdess with the appearance of clones of the PCs.  Or slow flooding?

Maybe what would be best for the next step is to take the list of elements, set it aside, and then try my Experience First approach.  Describe the campaign as I want it to go, then reverse-engineer that dream.  We’ll give it a shot; next time, on TTRPG Tuesday!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for Alice, left for Cat) and thro
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Beliefs as Roles

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the application was rather more literal, which was a fascinat
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Minimum Viable Product for WWDW?

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!
Post a Comment
Read more