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TTRPG Tuesday - Fevered Ramblings about The Company

Well, I’ve got a lot of Kamen Rider energy brewing in my head but it’s not ready to coalesce into playwriting just yet (ANY TIME THO BRAIN), so how about I do a little checkin on The DOLLY Extraction for a TTRPG Tuesday? How about it? How? I dunno, truly.

So much as I wanted to deliver a finished product all on my lonesome, the cold hard truth of this is that I’m trying to write for an RPG that I’ve helped edit but haven’t ever actually played myself or even seen played.  I can picture and plot out ideal player/gm experiences and come up with some interesting mechanics, but I may have run into a wall, one that is partially just - you know, pandemic doom fatigue jesus christ I’m so tired and I’ve drawn out all my rituals and habits for so fucking long and for WHAT - and partially a ceiling on how far ideas and guesswork can take me without playtesting, a schedule of deadlines, and client directives/feedback.  That was a big part of me losing steam during my work on the misbegotten John Silence RPG.  I knew even less about what I was doing there, of course, and my God was it ever bad news that I’d really only read DnD and DnD-adjacent RPGs back then, but I think a big part of it was that all the voluminous interesting ideas in my brain floundered in a limbo of indecision because I couldn’t feel or find my place in the collaboration.  I didn’t know where my work stood in relation to the broader project, and I received no guidance, so to be frank, I mostly checked out and then rush-squeezed out some (but not all) of what I’d promised once a deadline and a look at the other writers’ work suddenly materialized.

But this doesn’t need to be a grievant post-mortem - that’s only useful in terms of identifying what to avoid and work against for the present and the future.  I think I should just doodle out the encounter wheel thing that determines which Shepherdess is encountered, maybe spend a Mechanic Monday plotting it out, spend some time in Paint or Word sketching out the map of the decks, and then reach out to Logan for a calibrating session.  Yeah.  That might be useful, and enjoyable.

And oh MAN it’s not applicable/useful for this scenario but I just got a KILLER idea for a mechanic where the players start a mission with fairly normal parameters and objectives but something unexpected happens (an Event, or it has a random chance of happening each turn), and their myconid spores / memetic worms / hypnosis is disabled and then the GM gives them their actual briefing, from before they got mind-controlled.  And that mind control has the potential to kick back in, at which point the GM should continue to answer questions and treat the scenario as though they never gave them the second briefing.

Potentially it’s an escort quest? And the “prisoner” or “VIP” is the one who’s mindcontrolling them, editing their perceptions and memories? (Shades of Jessica Jones’ Purple Man here, something to watch out for) 

If the mind controller can control their memories, maybe they have a bag that perpetually has “several” healing kits, and a bunch of enemies that they seem to dispatch easily, but they also keep accumulating Itch tokens - tracking their real, unhealed physical damage, which they don’t become aware of until the mind control is broken - because none of the healing kits are real, but several of the enemies are.

Maybe whatever neutralizes the mind control doesn’t neutralize it for all of them, so they individually may drop out of the mind control, at which point the GM takes that player (or those players) into another room (real or Zoom) for a sidebar.  And part of the information gained in the sidebar is the knowledge that if they act overtly against the mind controller, the other party members will be turned against them.

Wow so I wandered way off-topic, but not off-genre.  What a weird TTRP Tuesday.  Tune in next week for - something else!

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