One of the key aspects of D&D 4e is its likeness to MMOs. This has been criticized in some parts of the internet and lauded in others: I think it was a really smart move on the part of the designers, myself. Apart from any possible synergy with existing MMO userbases, the move streamlined the design considerably. MMOs being computer-based, 4e feels more … object-oriented now, with keywords and conditions instead of a thousand fiddly exceptional cases. Want to expand the game? Make a new keyword and build your extension around that.

In that vein, I wanted to do a hack of Guild Wars for quite a while now into a tabletop format. 4e is the perfect partner for this, and I thought I’d start with the Ritualist class. Not only because it’s my favorite, but because it offers an opportunity to extend the base model of 4e in a couple of interesting ways.

First let’s classify GW’s classes in terms of power source and role in 4e:

• Warrior = Fighter
• Ranger = Ranger
• Monk: Divine Defender*
• Necromancer: Arcane Controller*
• Mesmer: Arcane Striker
• Elementalist: Elemental Controller*
• Assassin: Martial* Striker
• Ritualist: Shamanic Controller**
• Paragon = Warlord
• Dervish: Divine Striker

* The way GW is formulated around creating ‘builds’, the spellcasting classes, in particular, are open to multiple roles.  The Monk is primarily a Defender with their Healing and Protection spells, but they also have the Smiting attribute, which lends some offensive power.  Necromancers in either Blood or Curses are primarily Strikers, but with Death Magic (the stat necessary for becoming a Minion Master), they are either Controllers or Leaders.  Elementalists split between Striker and Controller (with some Defender mixed in) depending on the element that they specialize in.  Finally, Assassins are the only class with enough of a blend of spells and martial skills to make their power source ambiguous.  Dervishes very much follow the Divine pattern (to the extent of nearly being godless Paladins), but Assassins are split down the middle.

The Ritualist is the only class that I would say qualifies as having a power source outside ones defined in the SRD.  (Note: The SRD includes power sources unused in the Player’s Handbook: Elemental (used above), Ki (most likely for monks), Primal (for druids and possibly barbarians), Psionic (boo!) and Shadow, which I can only assume will lead to some kewl new darkdarkdark class.)  We don’t know what ‘Primal’ is yet, but I’d assume it’s tapping into the forces of nature, which is inappropriate.  Assassins are likely going to be ‘Shadow Strikers’, which actually falls in line with GW to some degree.

A ritualist’s main lines of ability are summoning spirits, item spells (summoning the ashes of ancestors to particular purpose to which they are aligned), and weapon spells (depending on how you look at it, this either replaces the player’s weapon with a spirit-form ‘ideal’ of a weapon, infuses it with spiritual properties or binds a minor spirit to it).  None of these things seem to fit in any of the pre-existing power sources, so I’ve created a new one: Shamanic, or based on tapping the spirit world.

These powers are divided into three lines of effect, each of which is really a role in the 4e sense of the word:

• Channeling: Summoning bursts and strikes of spiritual energy.  Striker.
• Communing: Mainly summoning spirits and items.  Leader.
• Restoration: Healing spells and spirits with passive healing/protection ability.  Defender.

Channeling is the most straight-forward of these three sub-classes - most of the spells do some sort of damage and condition combination.  Communing has most of the spirits and weapon spells, with a couple of items thrown in, and Restoration has a mix of all three types.

Of the three divisions, Communing requires the most thought to mold to 4e, with Restoration a close second.  Summoned spirits come in two basic flavors: active and passive.  Active spirits would, in 4e terms, be like monster minions: they’d have a level (based on caster level), a single basic attack, and 1hp.  Any hit destroys the spirit (unless the Ritualist protects it in some way).  Passive spirits are essentially living zones: So long as the spirit is alive, the zone exists and everyone in the zone is affected positively or negatively.  (Note: In GW, Rangers are the only other class capable of creating spirits, and they’re all passive.)  Only one of each spirit can be active at any one time during an encounter, and spirits, being incorporeal, can be stacked up on a single square.  One fireball, though …  As for range of attacks and size of zones, I’d say that active attacks are at thrown range (the shuriken is the only one in the PHB, so 6/12), and zones are 5.

Item spells are pretty straight-forward.  They provide some effect for a maximum duration, so long as the item is held by the Ritualist.  Holding the item requires two hands, and the character can’t make basic attacks or use implement-based powers while holding the item.  They can still summon spirits and use non-offensive powers, but without any bonus conferred by their implement.

Weapon spells, again, last as long as the weapon so affected is in the target’s hand, and isn’t dropped, broken or switched out.  Only one weapon spell can be active on one character at any one time.

As for class features, that’s a bit trickier.  It’d be my guess to divide them among the three build options:

• Vengeful Ritualist (Channeling): At-will lightning damage type attack, Ritualist weapon talent.
• Spawning Ritualist (Communing): Increase hp of spirit minions to 1/4 caster level; at-will item spell.
• Ghostforge Ritualist: At-will weapon spell; can cast two weapon spells on a single target.

I’d need to read the other class features much more closely before I’d settle on these.

The hard part is going to be leveling the GW skills into powers.  Since each skill in GW scales along with level, it’s really an arbitrary decision as to what is more powerful, and which should be at-will, utility, etc.  Obviously, elite skills would be higher level, but you’d also need to factor in the relative power of conditions and other effects in D&D versus GW.  Knockdown is a big deal in GW where seconds and reflexes count for a lot, but not so much for D&D.

Given that the skills are ArenaNet (and NCSoft’s) IP, I’ll only provide the skill name and a line of text related to changes to the power to suit D&D’s system.  I should have the list together in a day or two.

I found this set of polar panoramas on Flickr, and it just screams out for use in a game. A Little-Prince-inspired comes to mind immediately, with each tiny world having properties of its own. It also puts me in mind of the cover of SimCity Societies (sucked!) and Katamari Damacy.

Edit: And I just found a Flickr pool dedicated to polar panoramas.

So in my last post, I mentioned an idea for a game based on the Decathalon. Just in case you’re not a fan of field and track or the Olympics or live under a stone with a laptop, the decathalon is a series of ten field events played over two days. Each competitor in the decathalon takes place in all ten events, and earns points towards the total with each event. The competitor with the largest point total at the end wins.

The events are:

Day 1: 100 metres, long jump, shotput, high jump, 400 metres.

Day 2: 110 metre hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, 1500 metres.

So to get our heads wrapped around this game mechanically, let’s cluster the events by type.

Footraces: 100m, 400m, 1500m.

Running Throw/Jump: Long jump, high jump, 110m hurdles, pole vault, javelin.

Standing Throw: Shotput, discus.

The running throw events are the hardest to quantify as a whole, so lets take care of the other two categories first. Also, as a matter of course, I’m going to use card mechanics (specifically, a standard deck of cards) to get started with prototyping. A finished game would likely have original cards. I’ll explain why a bit more in each event cluster.

Footraces: The basic mechanic here is pretty simple, because it’s a race - get to 100, 400 or 1500 points first to win. With cards, this means playing cards from a hand. Here we come across our first design problem. If we shuffle a single set of cards, someone may be left with a crappy hand through no fault of their own. Olympic games are all about skill, not luck (though of course luck creeps in at the edges), so we should minimize it. So each player will get their own deck of cards, and with the cards playing a central role in all of the mechanics, that seems like a good idea.

Each player gets their own set of cards (one suit with values from A > King (13 cards)) and shuffles them, then deals themselves a hand of five, re-drawing after each turn. So where did the fun go? If this is a race game, you simply play the highest card you have in your hand each turn until someone gets to 100. It’s just a turn-taking exercise and it’s all about luck again. So we need to create some sort of conflict between the players.

Let’s say that the person who plays the highest value card in any turn in fact winds up with a value of 1 less than the lowest card played. If two or more players tie, then the highest value stands. So now you want to play not your best card, but the best card that you think you can get away with. If you’re paying attention, you’ll know what cards have been played. This mechanic has the effect of keeping people clustered together through the whole race, making it tense, but also adding an element of strategy.

The longer races could just multiply the distance given on each card (the Ace, for example, could be 1m for the 100, 4m for the 400 and 15m for the 1500). But the strategy and the mechanics of the non-sprint races (in the physical sense) are different from the sprints. In the 1500m race there’s pacing, blocking and other strategic choices that need to be addressed, since the racers can change lanes. I’m not sure if there’s an immediate solution to that.

The largest category involves some sort of run, followed by one (or more) explosive events: throwing a javelin and such. We can model the two parts of the event separately: the run, and the throw.

The run is different from the races, since each competitor is running on his or her own, so the same sort of strategic card play won’t work here. What they do have in common (except for the hurdles, which I’ll get to in a bit) is a foul line. What this can give us is a ‘push your luck’ scenario with the cards. Players shuffle a deck of cards, then draw blind. As they approach some arbitrary point total (say, 75), they must try to draw close to, but not over, the line.  The closer the player gets to the line without going over, the more points they can add to the second part of the event, the throw or jump.

As for the throws, let’s consider some other mechanics to make the game more variable.  I’ve been pondering this for a while, and what I’ve come up with is this: pencils.

Each player takes turns rolling three pencils down a ‘field’ designed to look like the various events (a high jump or the javelin range), with distances or heights marked on it.  The player rolls all three pencils down the track.  Each pencil is marked at the middle point with a red band - that’s where the roll is scored.  To make it more of a game of skill (instead of just slamming the pencils down the pitch as hard as possible, we’ll include a limitation; we’ll have a ‘foul zone’ at the end of the track.  The player gets the score of the furthest pencil down the track, excepting any fouls.

The player then takes the throw score and adds a number of additional feet, yards or inches based on how close they were in the run.

The hurdles are a different matter - I’m not sure how to do those yet, but a sort of combination of press-your-luck and baccarat would work, with each hand of baccarat representing one hurdle.

Finally, for the throws we’ll use the field bits for sure.  I’m not sure how to add in the power of the throw.  The same press-your-luck system might work, but I think something a bit different is in order.  Maybe a ‘coin drop’ - dropping or throwing a clear coin onto a bullseye, with the center of the coin being marked.  The closer the center of the coin is to the center of the bullseye, the more feet or yards get added to the pencil-roll portion.  Standardizing this would be difficult, however.  How high do you have to drop the coin from, and how do you get all of the players to drop from the same height?

So now I’m going to start mocking up the various fields and tracks, and we’ll see what turns up in playtest.

Here, for my own benefit mainly, is a complete core dump of all the game ideas that I have either on the front burner, back burner, or in the percolator:

Front Burner:

• DEAD: Down to re-turning out cards.  Hard work galore.
• Acts of Creation/Eidolon: My non-winning Game Chef entry. I need to integrate my playtest feedback, re-write the game for clarity, re-do the art for the cards (since I never heard back from the artist who provided the excellent art for the contest), and make a pretty PDF.  Also, find a new name.  I don’t like either one of these.

Back Burner:

• Oort: See below!
• Decathalon: See above!
• Bluebeard: Brainstorming a way to integrate all of the mini-games.
• Makuria, via my challenge from Jonathan Walton.

Percolating:

• A Brady Bunch hack for PTA.
• On the Air: Roleplaying game in the Golden Age of Radio.  Plays with the border between player skill and character skill.  Contributing during the live radio plays earns currency for the off-mic portions, and earning on-mic credit (to handwave your bits) by piling on the drama off-mic with scandals and the like.
• A game based on Mayan script.
• Some sort of Industrial Revolution game based in part on the Tech model.
• Get It On: Roleplaying in the Golden Age of Porn.
• An AGE Model podcast?
• A game based on coming-of-age movies like Superbad and American Pie.
• A Disney princess board game for my daughter.

By the way, this post on the ultra-new Elsewhere blog debuts the use of graphic banners for the various games that I’m working on. Isn’t this one pretty? It’s for Oort.

Oort is an idea that popped into my head while playing the very excellent indie computer game Dyson, which is a procedurally-generated RTS where you colonize an asteroid field with a swarm of self-replicating robots. The different asteroids that you colonize give the robots created there different properties. The differences aren’t really all that noticable in the game, but that’s not really the point. It’s very engaging and don’t install it if you have any actual work to get done.

This got my mind turning over, wondering if you could construct a sort of strategy/roleplaying game based on the idea. As an added touch, the game would play with table-chatter by limiting player-to-player communication to the short list of nouns and verbs in the game. Why not?

Here’s what I have so far:

• The game begins with each player having control of a swarm of self-replicating robots who’ve been sent to the far reaches of the Solar System (specifically, the Oort Cloud, hence the name) to return these resources to Earth. Things get strange for the von Neumann machines when they find an ‘Artifact’ in the Cloud that gives the machines a glimmer of sentience.
• The game starts with a limited number of nouns and verbs in the vocabulary. The players then construct commands for their swarm by stringing together these words (bytes). The swarm has eight spots for commands: four for interacting with the environment, two for modifying itself, two for interacting with other swarms (the other characters). You also have eight slots of ‘memory’ to move commands in an out of active memory.
• After harvesting a certain amount of resources (and gaining points for doing so), the characters advance in certain ways: they can add to the vocabulary by introducing new nouns (new structures, etc) and creating new verbs by stringing together the basic verbs and nouns. For example, ‘go asteroid make warren’ could be turned into a new verb, ‘colonize’. These complex commands would belong to one player, but others could use them for a higher cost.
• As the game progresses, then, the players can accomplish more in every turn - this simulates the growing, replicating and spreading. Also, the players may choose to specialize, adding unique verbs into their vocabulary.

At some point (I’m imagining a deck of cards with different Trans-Neptunian bodies on them), you turn up the Artifact, and things start to change. Each of the characters starts to develop ‘culture’. In the beginning, all of the players are working collectively to return resources to Earth. From contact with the Artifact on, the different characters begin competing with one another, attempting to achieve dominance over the others in one way or another (perhaps decided by the special functions that they’ve chosen), so the game goes from co-op to competitive.

As the turns continue, more of the swarm’s commands must include keywords that the Artifact introduces.  This cranks up the differences between the swarms and the competitiveness - it gets progressively harder to get things done, and the machines are progressively focused on achieving a very small number of goals.

The other aspect of the game that I enjoy is toying with the communication at the table - requiring that players communicate with one another with only the vocabulary in play.  Impossible to enforce, I know, but it strikes me as interesting anyways.

Here’s the new site - it’ll be all kinds of slick once I’m done. That is if I can actually code the CSS that I’ll need to do it. Woo!

On a side note: The temple here, while Egyptian, is located in what was Makuria.

For some reason, categories have come unhitched, and there are bugs showing up. I’ve reinstalled to no effect, so it must have to do with my ever-so-clever blog template that I’ve been messing with lately. Instead of re-doing it, I’m rebooting instead - I have some ideas for improving the site anyways. So there’ll be some dust floating around - I expect few will notice it, since most of my readers come from planetSG.

Viva coding!

Here’s a link to Mike Doyle’s Art Play. I haven’t personally played any of the board games that are listed on the site (though Caylus and Supernova are on my list to get), but the raw range of the art on display here is awesome. Mike has a great design sense, and it’s interesting to me to see both the process he goes through, and the difference between the amount of art and design involved in a board game and an RPG. RPG art is basically just window dressing. Board game art has to communicate in order to be effective.

On a recent episode of The Dice Tower boardgame podcast, the #1 response in a poll on what sort of sports-themed board game the listeners would want to see published was ‘the decathalon’.

During Game Chef, I was in a critique group (Go Hydra!) with a gentleman named SirElfinJedi, who created a game called ‘Masks of the Nautica’, which uses a mechanic based on a compass rose: the GM pics a direction (northeast, for example) and the player chooses a range of compass points based on the relative strength of their skills.  If they pic the right one, they succeed.

I’ve wanted to make a pirate game based around the Brethren Court introduced in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which was itself loosely based on the actual Brethren of the Coast, a loose coalition of pirates in the Caribbean.

What do these three things have in common?  Mini-games, baby.  More specifically, a cluster of mini-games sharing the same mechanical core.

Let’s start with the decathalon, which gives us the physical games to model on.  The events of the decathalon are:

Day 1: 100 metres, long jump, shotput, high jump, 400 metres.

Day 2: 110 metre hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, 1500 metres.

The next step comes from clustering them together by type:

Footraces: 100m, 400m, 1500m.

Running + Throw/Jump: Long jump, high jump, pole vault, javelin.

Throw: Shotput, discus.

Now we can start to think of a way to model these games.  I’ll do that in the next post.

For the pirate game, I’ve already picked out a few minigames: mumbley-peg, the knife trick, shut-the-box, liar’s dice and the compass rose mechanic I mentioned above.  Each of these would perform a different task: mumbley-peg for duels, the knife trick for social challenges, liar’s dice for narrative control, shut-the-box for naval combat, and the compass rose for … a lot of other things.

Why do this?  And why do it in what is (ostensibly) an RPG?
It has to do with my idea of distributed play: that the form of a game influences the way that players interact with it.  Yes, I could just make one unified mechanic that would handle all of these things, but I’m interested in how player skill, and the difference in player skill, would play out in the choices of the players.  Someone who’s good at the mumbley-peg portion might use that to his or her advantage by bringing that mechanic into play more often.

What a collection of mini-games does, apart from adding a large dose of theme (always a good thing), is give players different paths to success.  Mixing that together with differences on the character sheet gives a wider variety of play for the game, and helps to support the unique, off-beat feel that I want to give the characters in Bluebeard.

I’ve been challenged at Story Games by Jonathan Walton to a design challenge:

 Kuma: Write me a game set in a country that you’ve never heard of. Like, go find a world map and find some nation-state whose name is totally unfamiliar to you. Then read about that place and write me a game set there.

To which I responded:

As the winner of more than one geography bee in my day, there’s no nation-state I haven’t heard of (modern ones, at least). So instead, I did a random walk through Wikipedia until I hit an entry that referred to some nation outside of the US/Europe, etc that I hadn’t heard of before. The result: Makuria! Here’s the Wikipedia article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makuria

I’m already imagining something to do with the ‘Six Cataracts’.

The Kingdom of Makuria was a pretty neat place.  It was Christian (as was most of Ethiopia at the time), and was bordered to the north by the rather large (and I’m sure threatening) Umayyad Caliphate, an Islamic empire that stretched from Persia all the way along the north of Africa and into Spain.  At the time, it was the largest empire in the world, and ranks as the sixth largest in all of history.

But that’s not what the game’s about, it’s about Makuria, a kingdom of a different religion, a neighbor to the largest empire of the day, sitting in what is today northern Sudan, a less-than-hospitable piece of land.  This sort of screams ‘it’s about being the underdog!’, but where is the game in that?

On the upside, the ‘Six Cataracts’ refers to six massive waterfalls that the Nile takes in this region.  Symbolically, this is awesome.  Perhaps the mechanics of the game could incorporate an Agon-like track for conflict that is six spaces long - or the game could progress between these six different states with different conditionals placed on play for what Cataract is currently in play.

In other words: I’m working on it.

I’ve had the AGE Model on the brain quite a bit over the last few weeks, particularly as I engaged in Game Chef this year. As I’ve been working it around in my skull, quite a few Big Model-genic discussions have come up on Story Games: here and here, specifically.

I’ve come across another possible addition to the strength of the AGE Model: The Three Fulcra (Fulcrums, for the plebs).

Each of the AGE Model’s three axes (Art > Em, the Consensus Axis; Em > Game, the Clarity Axis; and Game > Art, the Constraint Axis) has across from it the third principle: For example, the Art > Em (Consensus) axis has across from it the Game Principle. What I’ve begun to wonder is this: Does the third principle act as a sort of fulcrum for the forces present on the axis? Does the Game principle act as a mediary between the Em and Art principles?

The seductive part of this idea is that the first example that I’ve given, with the Art > Em Consensus axis on one side, and the Game principle on the other), it seems trivial to come up with examples of the rules of a game mediating between players’ personal choice and the experience of the game. That’s what rules often do in RPGs.

The other two axes aren’t as clear-cut.

The Clarity axis (Em > Game) represents the complexity embodied in the experience of the game, with Art as the mediating principle. So how does player expression mediate between the structure of the game and the experience that the game provides? The first example that comes to mind is the ‘hacking impulse’, the creation of game content on a local level (a game group, or a mod for a computer game) that alters the structure to provide an experience that the player(s) prefer.

This works either way, with the players hacking together rules to support some aspect of a given milieu - for example, making rules for a Star Trek game to support the command structure aboard the Enterprise. Similarly, players may create non-mechanical supports to bolster their experience of the game - for example, explicitly agreeing to keep in-character.

The last axis (Game > Art, the Constraint Axis), mediated by Emulation.  This is the hardest of the three Fulcra to put my finger on.  The axis itself is a measure of the extent to which players are free to make choices, or to express themselves through the play of the game.  Towards the Game end, players are limited in the amount of choices they have.  This has the positive effect, from a designand play perspective, of creating predictability and repeatability - players can devise strategies and expect them to work from one play of the game to the next; similarly, they can alter their strategies with some assurance that they know the outcome.

Games further toward the Art apex are eschewing predictability for player freedom - opening the players’ range of choices to the extent that they can create new game situations that the rules of the game may not account for explicitly. A couple of examples of Art over Game would be tabletop RPG play where conflicts are resolved through dialog between characters, with no mechanical backing; and ’sandbox’ games like SimCity where the basic rules of behavior are mapped out, but players are free to develop cities in any shape or form that they see fit.

So how does Emulation, the creation of a certain type of experience, mediate this?  The answer lies in the social aspect of emulation - the idea that emulation is a purely social property of games.  Does a mechanical outcome ‘feel right’ to the group, or to the player?  Does resolving a long-standing conflict completely outside the framework of the rules ’seem fair’?  Is it in the ’spirit of the game’?   These are nebulous quantities, but they’re almost always present to some extent in games.  Playing within the spirit of a game can be just as important as playing by the rules - and while it may be ineffable to a degree, the sense of playing fairly or coming to a satisfying conclusion for all of the players is important: games are social constructs, and if that social cohesion, the ‘magic circle’ is broken, then the game falls apart.  Finding, and staying within, that social norm (whatever that is defined as by the group), mediates between the use of rules and players’ desire to express themselves.

The results for Game Chef will be announced tomorrow - assuming that the judges don’t have to push it back again. I’m quite happy with how Acts of Creation turned out - as a strategy game, it really clicks for me. The roleplaying aspect is a bit more understated, but that seems to be a design hurdle that I need to jump over. DEAD has the same issue: The game flows very well now that I’ve refined the shit out of it. The real question now is how to re-integrate the roleplaying aspects into the game.

Why?

Well, first of all I have a sort of Holy Grail that I’m shooting for, here. I really believe that the gap between the play of board and card games, particularly many of the eurogames, is not all that big, and that the integration of roleplaying into these games is not much more difficult than the integration of the mechanical variety of boardgames to RPGs.

Ancillary to that is the fact that I’m relatively bored with indie systems these days. While there are exciting things being done all the time thematically, and in terms of genre-bending, the mechanical richness of the indie set is lacking. A lot of the mechanics lately seem to boil down to fancy footwork to cover the fact that you’re really rolling another die. While this helps in terms of creating a narrative, these systems lack any real strategic or tactical depth.

I’m trying to mine boardgames and their components for new and mechanically interesting while still bringing the story home. I’ve gotten a lot more done with the first part, and I’m working hard on the second part.

One of the things I’ve talked about on here is the idea of Distributed Play - the idea that toys (or in our present discussion, game components) carry with them inherent mechanical options that aren’t suggested by others. For instance, if you play a game with a small set of cards marked 1-6, you could theoretically replace a six-sided die with the cards. However, the physical aspect of the cards allows for options that dice don’t have: they can be sorted, stacked, turned (’tapped’), flipped and marked - all things that dice don’t do as easily or as well. These properties give a stack of six cards a different set of gameplay possibilities than a a similar number of dice.

The importance of this can’t be overstated - points and aspects and attributes are fine and well. But when their net effect is to simply add +1 to a number, the mechanical flora of games starts to pale.

My design is going apace - at this late stage, I’m thinking that I just have to start freakin’ writing and let the chips fall where they may (so to speak).

Part of the trick with the game is that the resources at hand for the players are extremely limited.  Everyone gets one hand of 13 cards per age, and all of the mechanics associated with the play of one age must fit with, or emerge from, the simple play of those cards.  I’ve been tempted more than once to go over to dice, and I think if I get enough validation to redesign I’m going to use Tarot cards instead, or perhaps just give them as an option.

As it is, just the raw writing of the game is going to take some time at this point, so I have to get started.  Examples are going to be key.

I’m also considering changing the name of the game to Acts of Creation.

Oh, and for a chuckle I went over the list of games that have influenced my design.  Here’s the list:

Polaris, Carcassonne, Eye of Judgement, Primeval and Black & White.

There are more, I’m sure.

I’m doing my best to throw myself headlong at GC this year - if you were hoping to participate, it’s a shade late, but still possible.  Here’s where to go to get started.   Unfortunately, I threw myself headlong at a game idea that was fundamentally flawed, considering that I basically missed two of the pieces of art that were in one of the sets I chose, and spent a good day and a half designing around that flawed concept.

After recovering the shattered pieces of my sanity, I’ve thrown myself back into the fray and banged out this:

Here’s the quick pitch:

The game uses (primarily) Dale Horstman’s art sets.  There are four players in the game, and it is set up much like Polaris in its rigor.

At the beginning of time, there were four Elemental Lords.  Seraph (Air) - the mermaid art, Ouros (Fire) - the serpent art, and Chthon (Earth) - the king figure.  Each of these Lords was in constant contention with their Nemesis, and this constant flux kept the universe in constant harmony, and prevented the World from being born.  But one of the Lords, now known as Leviathan (Water) - a black square, made a pact with his Nemesis in order to make the Cosmos in his own image.  Leviathan was consumed by the process and the Cosmos became unbalanced, resulting in the creation of the World.

The game plays out over the Four Ages of the World.  In each one, the Elemental Lords are trying to defeat the Leviathan and return the Cosmos to a balanced state.  Of course, in doing this, they destroy the world.  The Leviathan is seen by the people of the world as their protector - the world itself is mostly ocean, dotted with islands.

Mechanically, the game is set up like this:

There is a central board, with four stations around a central ring.  Each station belongs to one of the Elemental Lords, which are represented by the art in the set (plus the black image).  Each player chooses (or is given) one of the Elemental Lords to play.  Then each player is dealt a Nemesis (the other art piece for each character - the mermaid, the beast-man and the serpent-lady), including Leviathan.

Finally, the players are all dealt a hand of playing cards to use as currency during the game - each suit belonging to one of the Lords - but the cards are dealt by rank (everyone is dealt an Ace, etc), and you may get a suit belonging to anyone.  You get the Jack, Queen and King of your own suit - these cards are different in that they represent divine intervention on the part of the Lord - a sort of ubertrump card.

There are other components - one based on Elizabeth Shoemaker’s art (the hand photographs) - which are powers that you can execute once per Age of the world: lock, bind, sacrifice and void (again, a black square).

Play will be centered around the center circle, on which will be drawn a relationship map of the World - cities, religions, societies - that are created, manipulated and destroyed during the Age of the World in play.  This would borrow, to some extent, from REIGN’s ORE system of agency creation.

…

I can see the game table.  I can see people playing the game, and I can see the flow of play - what I’m missing, what I really need, is the theme of the game - what the driving force of the game is.  Is it about the status quo v. change?  Is it about the inside-out ethics (if the other Lords win, after all, the World is destroyed - usually a bad thing)?  It seems like I have all the brew I need to create some serious play - but I can’t get it to come to a boil in my head.  I can’t seem to get a real handle on what the game is about, which is stalling my ability to define the conflicts.

Any suggestions?—————-

Now playing: Pilgrims of the Mind - Something’s Pulling Me Under

Cairn.

After much deliberation and a lot of searching, I finally have a name for the core mechanic that is underlying DEAD, Cold War, Merchant and a lot of other ideas these days. It took a long time, but now it seems intuitive and simple: a cairn - a pile of stones infused with meaning.

Awesome.

I tinkered with the idea of using the Inuit word inuksuk, until I realized that I’d be the most recent in a long line of white folks co-opting the term. Inuksuk are fascinating, though - check out a scholarly paper here, and some photos on Google Images. They were used in some instances as hunting blinds and ‘beaters’ - fake humans that would confuse caribou being herded into a slaughter area by Inuit hunters. Inuksuk means “something which acts for or performs the function of a person.” Which is something to take to heart for the games: That the cards and tokens themselves act like an additional player in the game.

Speaking of which, Tycho on Penny Arcade was talking about the function of raid decks for the World of Warcraft TCG, particularly the Molten Core deck. I’ve been studying the WoW TCG for a while now - mechanically, it’s pretty standard, but the execution is very cool. The Raid decks are an excellent extension of both the gestalt of online play to the TCG, and a fun idea in and of themselves. They’re essentially ‘dungeon decks’, played by a separate player, which have highly synergized and powerful cards. Defeating a raid deck requires that multiple players act cooperatively to defeat the challenges within.

This is the same idea as with DEAD - an antagonist deck that the other players cooperatively are trying to defeat. DEAD simply rotates the roles of the antagonist, and adds some suspense to the game by giving the antagonist some bonuses against the players.