Hey Man, well this is Babylon

In my last post, I spilled out an extremely short-form bit of musings on a new game and setting that has been the most current subject of my creative attention. I am currently calling this project “Forevergotten,” and I’d like to now take a few moments to spill out some more ideas. This time, Let’s focus on what the players of this game actually do.

I have always been an ardent believer in at least one tenet which sets down in words something that I believe all game designers should be able to tell anyone about their games: “In this game, you do ___.” With very rare exception, I will not put money down on a game which can’t fill in that blank for me within the first five minutes of perusing its pages. Preferably, I want that information to be found right smack on the back cover, and if not, within the first three pages of the game’s text. I want to know what a game is about, and I want to know what player actions and ideas the mechanics and setting primarily emphasize. As such, I want to be able to define this on my own game before I spend any more time working out more mechanics.

In the previous post, I think I did a good job of establishing at least one major focus of the game’s long-term play goals, but I’ll summarize it here: the players work together to create new in-game memories, which they then use to narratively answer some of the mysteries about the game world’s own past. That’s one of the biggest goals of the game, definitely, and I want most aspects of the game mechanics to push towards that. But I also need to make sure the basic play template allows those mechanics to stand firm.

If the idea of “play template” is alien to you, here are some examples:

• In D&D, you are a group of adventurers going worth together into the unknown, while one player called the DM throws monsters, dungeons and puzzles at you, to respectively be defeated, explored, and resolved.
• In Universalis, a group of players with equal narrative control spend coins to purchase elements into a story which they all work together to tell.
• In Ocean, a group of players with equal narrative control risk dwindling dice pools to tell a survival-horror story of amnesiacs exploring and trying to escape an underwater research station.
• In 3:16 Battle Among the Stars, the players play Space Marines, working against a GM to defeat waves of space monsters in fun and frequently zany narrative action.

For most every game out there, if you think about it, you can come up with one or two sentences defining what the game is all about, and what modes of play it supports and encourages. I now need to do this with Forevergotten. This of course means I must first define what exactly the player roles will be.

My initial idea was along the lines of a more traditional RPG template: a single GM runs the world and opposition, while the players explore and overcome obstacles. Players would have access to two races: The People (humans) and The Many (some kind of group-defined “collective” race). The GM would run everything else, much like they always do in most other games out there. The game would focus on adventures and strifes of the player character team.

But after a particularly engaging session of design musing with a good friend of mine this past weekend, I’ve come to see things form a different, and admittedly more intriguing light. Here are some of the ideas from that session – none really concrete yet, mind you, just some ideas that could come to be as the process moves on.

Stages of Play

The game would focus on three core modes of play: Preparing for the Night, Surviving the Night, and Pushing Back the Night. According to basic setting cosmology, there are roughly nine months (“Memns”) of varying levels of daylight, followed by roughly three Memns of Night. During the Night, Horrible Things happen. This would easily allow the set up of variable pacings of play. For a one-shot or a demo con game, the first two hours could be spent preparing, the third Surviving, and the fourth Pushing Back, all with something of a top-down perspective of play. In a longer series of sessions, whole sessions or more could be dedicated to each phase, allowing the players a more up-close-and-personal perspective into the lives of their characters.

The People, The Many, and The Darkness

Instead of each player playing an individual character and one other guy being the GM, another idea is to more openly distribute the narrative control. A minimum of three players might be required for this. One player would take the role of The Many, and define what exactly The Many are. Are they a bug-like collective hive race? Are they a group of faeries with different interests who squabble but, ultimately, always act as one in the end? Are the a pack of wolves, with each individual Pack representing one “unit” of the Many? Are they even a race at all? Maybe The Many are the noble houses, with each House being one individual entity of The Many. The house has a leader (the brain), and a varying number of additional functionaries and extensions, both personal, physical, and financial.

Another player would play The Darkness, and guide the actions and intentions of all the entities of The Night that must eventually be survived and pushed back. During the Prepare phase, she would focus more on preparation of her own, getting ready for the latter two phases. But she would also insert “dark elements” into the Prepare phase, such as Daylight Raids, crop shortages, corruption, and more.

The People would be played by one or more players, perhaps all of them to a degree. Individual characters, or small groups thereof, with agendas, memories, shared connections, loyalties, and so on. The core focus is always on The People, and how they affect both themselves and the Many and the Darkness through their actions.

Another idea here, then, is to make each “side” a source of primary conflict in each stage. The Many could be the primary source during Prepare, the Darkness during Survive, and the People during Push Back. Each of the other sides would be able to add conflicts during those stages as well, but to a somewhat secondary or even tertiary degree.

This could lead to a modular shift in game flow. Perhaps each session or two is meant to be a complete Prepare-Survive-Push cycle? Players could then shift roles after each full cycle. Perhaps the focus is left open to the play group?

But What About the Focus on Memories?

All of these new ideas leave me a bit less certain about how to invoke the Memories of the Present and use them to create the Truths of the Past. My original intention was to have them unfold through player character actions, and the things in the game that are most memorable would get related to the past through elements of the environment: scrolls, texts, relics, battlefields, ruins, visions, etc. But I’m liking that implementation of the concept less and less now.

That’s all for now. A lot of heady stuff there.

What do you think?