I’ve been caught up in larger (paying) projects and I haven’t been able to spare a second to sketch anything for Remnant. Doesn’t mean it’s far from my mind though, specifically I’m thinking of principals these days. I’m having trouble understanding them, which seems kind of silly when some of them are so obviously about pushing or encouraging immersion.
I’m often told that my notions of what are polite nudges toward the setting as I imagine it are actually coming across as mechanistic and obvious levers. Worse, they lend themselves toward gross manipulation and power gaming, which is not what I’m trying to encourage.
Does anyone know of a good breakdown on how the Principals work, or how to add new ones without making it sound like something that would have been written for D&D 2nd ed?
Are you talking about Principles or Agendas? I tend to think that it’s the Agendas that help push immersion while the Principles tell you how to achieve that.
Well that doesn’t quite stand because the Agenda is three notes that are super broad and have little to do with a given setting specifically. It’s the good advice for any system.
The principals are the ones that start talking about immersive techniques, right?
I’ll disagree that the Agendas have little to do with a given setting. There are differences between the Agendas for Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, and Monsterhearts for example.
The Agendas are the “big picture stuff” and the Principles are how to achieve the particular style of game the author intended. Some of them are immersive techniques I guess, but not all of them are.
What kind of game are you making?
Yeah all I’ve got is AW to work off of so I might be missing some of the exploration the community has long since deemed trod.
It’s important to lead with a disclaimer: I’m not necessarily designing a game to be played, but to understand. by placing this setting/mood/urgency into the framework of a game it forces me to make decisions about it; like trying to push playdough through a specifically shaped hole, I end up with something defined on the otherside. If a game pops out of that explorative defining, GREAT! If not, I wont feel too terribly. It’s also an excuse to ART, so there’s that benefit as well.
With that out of the way, Remnant is a game about hunger, nihilism, and inhumanity in a world draining of color, and the lengths people will go to in it to feel like a person for just one more day. I’m building it using vanilla AW at the moment, but I get the feeling I’ll eventually need to start thinking about altering the base stats to express a character’s light when they’re flush with color, their growing, smoldering tint, their relationship to the memories they’ve stolen and are projecting into the world, and how well they lie to themselves and others that the world isn’t coming to an end.
It’s an emotional setting, and I honestly don’t have the subtlety to describe it in all likelihood, but damned if I’m not gonna explore it.
Chris Stone-Bush can you explain the significant different between AW and MotW then? As far as I know, they’re nearly identical. There’s something I’m not grasping.
I’m on my way to work, but I’ll address both your comments once I’m at my desk. In the mean time, have you looked at the latest Bundle of Holding? It’s all AW-based games. Less than $20 for seven games, not including AW.
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Apocalypse
Yep, I bought it. Just haven’t read through everything yet
That is a lot to read through. 🙂
Designing to understand/create are is a totally valid and awesome reason Darrin Michelson. Remnant sounds very interesting as well. Would you mind haring the Principles you’ve come up with so far so I can see what you meant about them being “too mechanical”?
Oh yeah, of course. At the moment it’s just setting and mood, AW’s principals should handle the rest of it for the moment.
-Paint Remnant as vividly as you can
-The Ruin stains everything it touches, inside and out
-Give the hues a voice, but muffle their words
-Make the Dragon’s presence known, but never show it
-Let color’s presence saturate and illuminate
-Show a body’s (lack of) Color
-A body’s first voice is their color, their second voice is their Ruin, and their third voice is their Dragon
-Tint fuels Ruin, Color engenders hope, betrayal wakes the Dragon
Hmm… “Paint Remnant as vividly as you can” sounds like an Agenda to me. Not a Principle. It seems to be giving “high level” advice on what to do during the game without explaining how.
The others do sound like Principles to me, but it’s hard to say. There is a lot of “game language” in them that I’m not understanding (Ruin, Hue, Dragon, Color, etc.) I know that you understand then, but writing them in layman’s terms would help a bit.
Paint Remnant vividly is really just a rewrite of AW’s first principal: Barf forth apocalyptica.
Getting some of those elements explained is going to require more setting description because they don’t necessarily correlate to any game functions yet.
Before
Some time before things went bad, the tower was constructed. Whether it was made to extract color or it merely dicovered it, isn’t super important. What is important is color is AMAZING. It makes life better in every way and is an incredible source of energy. There’s a story of friends from those times, sometimes revered to as the heroes or the brotherhood, but mostly just revered to now as the Martyrs. Lift up the man beside you, amen.
Then
One of their number betrayed the others and ignighted the fires that burned down the world. In the chaos that individual took the mantle of the Dragon and ascended. The world burned so completely that even time and relative space became uncertain, a wasteland of ash snow, choking fog, sizzling concret, and smoldering timbers that radiating a dying fire that never completely goes out. This is the Ruin.
Color and Tint
Color is everything. It makes you feel real, it can quiet the Ruin, it can rekindle the potentia in the ash and make it become things. But it’s mostly gone now, even the ambient stuff that kept you human just because had burned up. Now you have to extract it from your own memories, devouring who you were to keep from stealing it out the hearts of those you care for. You can suck down the tint from the heart of a ruinbirth, or extract it from an object that was cherished, but that still has to pass through a body to become pure. Something has to strain off that tint. If you don’t get color, if your tint starts to burn in you, it’s visible. You get palid as ash, your veins go dark, you start huffing smog with each breath. When your eyes go dark, there’s almost nothing separating you from a ruinbirth. You’re a walking structure fire, a human stain that everyone will decide to throw over the wall. Stains don’t come out.
Remnant
The tower was the only thing left and the city built itself around it. A grandiose refugee camp, swolen with lost souls that wandered out of the fog, drawn to the light of the tower and the smell of rich color. In the early days It was almost a real city. Governance, law, burroughs, high society, gutter scum, faith and maddness, love and life. It was ruled by an elected authority, but no one can remember electing them. No one remembers why they shut the gate to the tower either.
The Dragon Days
Things got… Colorful…
Now
No one hears from the authority anymore. Their echos, lonely and unsupported try to hold fast to a haven, instilling an increasingly brutal martial law. The riots left most of the streets silent canyons, save for the roar of the Thames and their monorails, screaming and hollering as the claim to rule their poles of trash. The Church of the Martyrs is scattered, but if you need relief and retribution some of their number still preach from the book of consiquences. If you’re in a real bond you could bond you coul always have your hues read by a luminous speakers, but those guys freak me the fuck out. Whoever you turn to Remnant is dying. The walls are unmanned and the gates unbarred. The Ruin presses on and the ruinbirth slither after it. Much like the waste itself the channels of the city are less and less certain. Paths that knee took a few minutes can now take hours, through streets cinch into blind alleys, and doors open into empty voids. We dwindle, our color and humanity fade and we lie to each other that it’s not so bad, or that it’s getting better, anything to ease the ache in our souls. And above it all the hot air stirs to the beat of impossible wings as the Dragon gazes down upon it’s creation with indifference and contempt.
Man. That is incredibly evocative Darrin Michelson. I really hope you do take this further, whether as a game or a writing exercise, because it sounds awesome.
For purposes of writing Principles though, I’m having trouble imagining what the characters would do.
At the moment the game is about survival because a friend suggested I use AW as my framework, and survival in this case means keeping yourself and others in your tenement block flush with color. The resource scenario feels like a vampire apocalypse if the vampires were all that’s left, and the blood was more of a conceptual happiness and sense of who you are. As an example players would have precious memories that they could cannibalize for color if need be, but that memory might produce a figure in their hard hold. So you eat that memory for a bit of color NOW and Tom is now gone. So is the memory of him for everyone else.
Memories give players things to lose if they get too hungry. A person, a thing, a place, an institution. When you’re flush they have your back, when you’re wan they begin to get flighty, and when you’re drab they’re indifferent or hostile. You need people too because they help you keep up the lie of still being human. Your tint burns in you, coreing you out. Acts of humanity, reaching out, exposing yourself emotionally, insisting things are ok and getting others to believe it never kills the ache, but it can dull it a bit. Only pure color can put out the fire, but getting it takes some doing. A body can strain tint, soil can strain it, it can be distilled with the right know how, but anyway you go you need time and effort. This isn’t on the run shit. Worse color only comes from other people or cherished things, so unless you’re a luminous speaker who can steal color with a tough (brainer shit) you’re killing someone or scrounging for it.
Scrounging means geting out into the dark blocks of Remnant’s teniments, looting for things that meant something to someone, then destroying that thing and taking in the memory of it. That can get a body… Less stable, so it’s not really an on the spot type of operation either. And it’s not eve, remotely safe in the ashencrete, brutality alleys. Thanes lay claim to whatever they can tear ass around or beat to death with a chain. Gangs of drabs are out scavenging just like you, and odds of them being friendly are thin as the Dragon’s handshake. Then you got the ruinbirth. These are monsters on a whole other scale. They walk in shadows, wear ashencrete for skin, can smell color for miles, and steal color with their eyes alone. No one faces them alone. A sustained stair from multiple flush souls can do it sometimes, push the horror back, sometimes you gotta douse it in more color than it can drink then light it up. Point is they cost, they’re bank breakers and you’ll need help to walk away with your life.
A longer term there are questions about the setting that could hold the key to saving it. The Authority sealed up the tower but it and it’s color are still there. The strange figures that seem to walk out from the central district, despite never walking through the gate might hold the key if you could catch one. They’re more smoke than body it seems. There’s also the matter of the towers sometimes visible out on the horizon in the Ruin. Are they like your tower? Are they something else? Who were the Martyrs and we’re they actually crossed by a Dragon? Is the beast really up there judging us beyond the churn of ash fog or is that just the ask listening to our collective fear and saying, “well if that’s what you really want…”
But right now I’m trying to understand principals so I can condense all that PLACE into a soundbite that a player can read and understand what they’re doing and how to sell it. That’s my challenge.
Honestly, and this is not to discourage you, but I don’t think those are Principles. I think those are Basic Moves. Agendas and Principles instruct and assist the GM in running the game. Basic Moves are what the characters most often do and therefore help the players see what the game is about.
Haha I’m not discouraged at all! It could very well be that I’m having such trouble shoehorning it into the AW system precisely because it’s less of a hack and more of a rework than I initially thought. I was encouraged to start with it because my friend thought I was eventually going to run a game of it, but he and I have both realized that I’m using the systems and mechanics to describe This setting for its own sake rather than the end goal of playing it. This is part of why I’ve shifted from trying to think only of the playbooks to more of the MC’s end. How do I enable them to accurately describe the setting? Or are you saying the basic moves would be a better jumping off point?
I picked up that bundle on your recommendation Chris Stone-Bush. I plan on doing some heavy skims over the long weekend.
Also, I linked this elsewhere, but this is as strong a visual anchor of the feel of the setting as I’ve been able to find: http://powl96.deviantart.com/art/Heart-of-the-city-387862434
That is an awesome and evocative image. Beautiful.
When I’ve thought of doing hacks and reworks, I often reach a point where coming up with Basic Moves has been very helpful. It really helps solidify what the characters and players would do in a game. Which in turn helps me figure out what the GM needs to do and where to push the characters.
Even pushing to that point feels a little out of reach. I’ll be there sometime, but for the moment I’m working on collecting reference images and music (music is a huge help) and imagining the setting as an HBO series. Pairing ideas for characters with faces from this site (http://veraxvoltus.tumblr.com/) tends to late me see them as less abstract concepts and more as people with intent. Intent translates to potential moves… I get the feeling of it at least.