It may have started as a salvage/cop-out but I enjoyed doing last week’s TTRPG Tuesday. I need to set aside some designated writing time, and some of that should be game build time - and perhaps I can ease from one to the other with some of the aforementioned scenario building. An idea I particularly liked from back when I studied improv was to always maximize specificity. My best friend still quotes “Cough Medicine is good. Robitussin is better. Waltussin is best”, and for better or for worse it has put in me a dread of generalities and vagueness. We all want to connect with our audiences, we all want that universal or timeless experience. But I think that you have to be timely to be timeless, and you can’t be universal if you’re not you.
Lol so anyway, I’m trying to think of the little details that can make those Company scenarios more tangible and strange. Weathervane could be in a desert, and not just any desert but the Sonoran or the Gobi. The Sorcerer’s Laboratory could be in an inaccessible cave complex, claustrophobic and filled with umbraphilic life, or on four floors at the top of a skyline-defining record-holding Shard, or connected to the sewer system for easy, illicit disposal. DOLLIE could be on a luxury liner that lazily follows Spring, or in the stolen husk of a poisoned township. Are any of these a period-specific one-shot? Lots of chewy goodness here.
Well, now that I’ve flanneled on, how about an utterly unrelated Mechanic?
Kingdom Crafting from Different Sources
In GREEM, your Kingdom is a tableau in front of you comprised of cards from a number of different sources. The initial Geography is determined by a player-unique deck of cards that you array during setup; Events come from the Fate and Fortune decks, which you draw from at the end of your turn and play onto a card or card pile in your Kingdom; Merchant cards are drafted from the hands of Caravan cards that pass from one player to the next; Noble cards are purchased from a common market in the center of the play area; Artifacts can be unearthed from the discard piles of previous ages; cards provide extra benefits when played to a Spoils pile but can be forcibly taken by other players in combat; resource cards can be freely bartered; Legend cards can be claimed at any time once their conditions have been met.
So this idea popped into my head while reading a Dan Thurot review, of Monumental. Dan’s critiques of games are high level enough that they spark a lot of thoughts, as instead of copy-pasting from the rulebook, he usually discusses mechanics from a more abstract impact-based point of view. It’s certainly had an influence on my Experience First theory of writing. The raw idea that came from reading his civ-building thoughts was that, were I to make a civ-builder, instead of a pure draft or a pure market, cards acquisition should be diverse, and the types and purposes of cards should thematically match the means by which they are acquired.
So that’s it. I don’t know how high on my list Building A Civ Builder is, nor do I want to devalue the work of the civ-building games out there. This is just an expression of my Heidi Chronicles based belief that in creative works, both form and function deserve consideration, and should be designed in harmony.
That’s this week’s ramble! Catch you next week, thanks for reading, Ima go knead some dough now.
Lol so anyway, I’m trying to think of the little details that can make those Company scenarios more tangible and strange. Weathervane could be in a desert, and not just any desert but the Sonoran or the Gobi. The Sorcerer’s Laboratory could be in an inaccessible cave complex, claustrophobic and filled with umbraphilic life, or on four floors at the top of a skyline-defining record-holding Shard, or connected to the sewer system for easy, illicit disposal. DOLLIE could be on a luxury liner that lazily follows Spring, or in the stolen husk of a poisoned township. Are any of these a period-specific one-shot? Lots of chewy goodness here.
Well, now that I’ve flanneled on, how about an utterly unrelated Mechanic?
Kingdom Crafting from Different Sources
In GREEM, your Kingdom is a tableau in front of you comprised of cards from a number of different sources. The initial Geography is determined by a player-unique deck of cards that you array during setup; Events come from the Fate and Fortune decks, which you draw from at the end of your turn and play onto a card or card pile in your Kingdom; Merchant cards are drafted from the hands of Caravan cards that pass from one player to the next; Noble cards are purchased from a common market in the center of the play area; Artifacts can be unearthed from the discard piles of previous ages; cards provide extra benefits when played to a Spoils pile but can be forcibly taken by other players in combat; resource cards can be freely bartered; Legend cards can be claimed at any time once their conditions have been met.
So this idea popped into my head while reading a Dan Thurot review, of Monumental. Dan’s critiques of games are high level enough that they spark a lot of thoughts, as instead of copy-pasting from the rulebook, he usually discusses mechanics from a more abstract impact-based point of view. It’s certainly had an influence on my Experience First theory of writing. The raw idea that came from reading his civ-building thoughts was that, were I to make a civ-builder, instead of a pure draft or a pure market, cards acquisition should be diverse, and the types and purposes of cards should thematically match the means by which they are acquired.
So that’s it. I don’t know how high on my list Building A Civ Builder is, nor do I want to devalue the work of the civ-building games out there. This is just an expression of my Heidi Chronicles based belief that in creative works, both form and function deserve consideration, and should be designed in harmony.
That’s this week’s ramble! Catch you next week, thanks for reading, Ima go knead some dough now.
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