Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday. It’s a lovely cool Summer evening, and I have a couple things been kicking around my head lately. We’ll see how much of it I get out of the old noggin before my laptop battery dies, how’s that sound?
First up, I’m still thinking about the Bulb system; what axes should define the first set of nine I want to make, and what questions/fields should be defined in every Bulb. On Twitter, I mused about an x-axis of Fantasy to Sci Fi and a y-axis of Grim to Hopeful, but the truth is that I don’t usually want to write much Grim stuff, so do I really want to write three settings that fall under that umbrella? Probably not to start! So maybe a better first grid is x-axis Magic, y-axis Tech, yielding:
Some other axes to consider are: abstract <> tangible; past <> future; simple <> complex; lonely <> populous; faithful to history <> deviating from history; small in scale <> large in scale.
I do know that a Bulb that I want to start with is Moss, the idea that kicked off this whole thing, as I was thinking about mech worlds I wanted to build for a Spectres of Brocken playtest, and I kept coming back to something less metal-and-tech and more stone-and-science, as fantasy-based mecha stories can be as interesting (or even more so) than tech-based ones. Looking at my proposed Tech v Magic grid above, I don’t even know that it’s strictly speaking No Tech, so much as it is High Magic, and perhaps Low Tech a la Ghibli, where Tech can exist but be nascent as Magic peaks and wanes (Mononoke) or where Tech is long lost and inseparable from Magic (Nausica, Castle in the Sky). If I wanted to do two Mecha worlds, I could also do a Bulb to flesh out the world in the untitled Mecha prose piece I’ve been noodling on the last couple of days. I also want to do some kind of academy, my answer to H*gwarts and Strixhaven and the wonderfully mysterious locations in the Abhorsen books. There’s a reason we’re attracted to Magic Schools, and I want to take a crack at making one; one as far as possible from the ones in The Poppy War and The Magicians.
What are the questions that every Bulb should answer? I think that the list starts wide spatially and narrows down before expanding again temporally. The general feel and principles of the world > the landscape > the locations > the occupants > current events > history/lore. It may come as no surprise, but my brainstorming of axes, as well as thinking about how Tone/Genre of a Bulb could be defined with a series of Never>Rarely>Sometimes>Usually>Always sliders, have all run together. I think though I’ll table the standard list of fields for each Bulb til another day; it deserves its own post.
Last thing before my poor laptop gives up the ghost: I kind of want to do posts about what RPG systems would be like for some mediaI like (and one I’m writing)? Like what would a The Owl House RPG look like? Or Paranatural (seriously, if you like webcomics give it a read)? Or the audio dramedy series I swear I’ll finish someday, Tartans Hockey Live? They’d all be tough challenges, though the only one I could ever actually publish would be the Tartans one (though if I was really proud of either the TOH or Paranatural one I’d privately send them to Dana Terrace / Zack Morrison respectively, just as a thank you for making such wonderful series). MAN OH MAN, listen to me, has anyone ever put more horses farther ahead of more carts than yours truly? My laptop is yawning, that’s enough for tonight. Til next time!
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