Skip to main content

TTRPG Tuesday: Revisiting Cold Iron Company

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday.  This could be a short one as I’m pretty well exhausted - not so much due to physical exertion as Massive Ramen Lunch and Subsequent Interrupted Nap.  But I submitted myself for a thing today that, if I got it, would mean a chance to develop one of my designs under the guidance of someone more experienced.  There’s so much incomplete work in my portfolio but oddly the one I ended up choosing for my pitch was the system I laid out in the post about Cold Iron Company.  Looking back on it, I’m surprised that I extruded that burst of creativity almost a year ago, and also, that there was so much to it.  I forgot how much I built it out beyond the Statuses table (which remains my favourite part).
In terms of what I would want to work on, I think the following:
Better delineate between the system (currently unnamed, all the crunch, the statuses and the character composition, plus a way to grind reputation with different factions) from the setting (Cold Iron Company, the alternate WWII historical context, factions and their motivations, the specifics of the trainings, and the conflicts that inform the plot), and treat the latter as just one module for the former
Nail down enough examples for every mechanic that I can paint a fairly detailed picture of what world and character generation, combat, and out-of-combat roleplaying look like
From the first point, figure out what the core features of the system are and where it’s intended to be flexible
Figure out what’ll be easy and what’ll be difficult, then devise a project plan and timeline
Learn how to stick to it? And actually publish?
So yeah.  That’s what I’d want to work on.  The thing I submitted for prioritizes marginalized folks, and I definitely don’t think I should be considered on that front, but we’ll see - it’d be nice to be paired up with someone to tackle a specific goal like this.  Anyway, time to review the rest of the notes from last year and see what percolates again.  Til next time!

Comments

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 ...

TTRPG Tuesday: Campaigning

  Hey it's TTRPG Tuesday, let's see if I get something written before sleep overtakes me. I'm still on that Channelers kick, but today I want to talk about a possible campaign path: The Magpie Offensive.  I see this as a military campaign where the PCs are conscripted, volunteers, or mercenaries for an army that is marching to quell Spirit threats and unite the region under a protectorate. There should be free RP sections as interludes between missions, and missions should be chosen by the party.  The army ensures loyalty with intangible rewards as well as artifact items. NOTE: This whole thing is being designed with the Rascal article on militarization in ttrpgs in mind. What is the thrust of the campaign? It's fundamentally one of conquest.  How do I encourage characters to question their presence and their complicity? How much interpersonal violence is an acceptable price to pay for environmental justice? How can party composition affect all this from jump? H...

Mechanic Monday: Winding Down an Engine Builder

  Welcome back to Mechanic Monday! Been a minute hasn't it? Remember when I did one of these a week for a year? 2020 was such a productive time! Totally worth the complete decay of my sense of self! Today I’m going to go about things a little backwards.  Normally I start with the mechanical kernel, mock up how it would look in a hypothetical game, and then do a little theorycrafting around it.  This time, I uh already have a v1.0 prototype.  So let's start there. Gradually Shorter Engines In Paper Moth Dynasty, you play a young Monarch, with nine Role cards flipped to either their Sun or Moon side.  In the first round you will place 7 of the 9 available cards in your Court tableau, then Exile a card and play the next round with one fewer card to draw and one fewer to play, then do the same again before the third and final round.  You will therefore place 7 cards in the first round, 6 in the second, and 5 in the third round. So engine builders (and th...