Once again I’m fiddling with Remnant, my setting hack. For a long time I’ve had an inkling of what I want it to express, the ecstasy and agony of my creative process, but I’ve not been able to think through an implementation that doesn’t feel like a set of obvious ‘game benefit’ levers. The rough loop goes like this:
Players need a scarce liquid resource called ‘Color’ to survive.
1) Drink the Color – This makes the player flush, luminous, the world around them feels better, npcs enjoy their presence because they feel more alive around them.
While flush the player is able to make things out of ash and memories. These things can be public or private, durable or impermanent. This includes objects, places and even people.
Players get bonuses to their rolls when they use their flush state to pursue personal goals.
2) Burn – Color was never supposed to be imbibed straight, but the world went to shit so now you do. Color burns off your pangs, which are like… Think of the strings from monster hearts but tethered to your personal goals, things you want, things you want to make, etc. whenever you make a successful step toward achieving one of your pangs the burn grows. The stronger your burn, the greater the bonus to your rolls.
Depending on how you got the color you’ll have a varying amount of Tint. This substance builds up over time and can kill you eventually, but the first thing that burns in a body is tint, followed by your harm. If you don’t spit the color out the burn will consume you.
3) Hollowed – Once empty of color a body is empty and dull., You don’t shine, and you give off no warmth. The tint that you hold works against you wreaking havoc on anything you try and do. The things that you made while flush will now begin to display their flaws, breaking down, or turning on you. This is when the Downside begins to rear it’s head.
This cycle of superb artistic freedom, marred by an encouragement toward self destructive behavior, culminating in a depressive and impotent state is what I’m trying to paint here.
I just can’t figure out how to do it elegantly.
Gotta understand what you are doing here to know what “it” is. Cant figure out how to do what elegantly? Consider your objective with this fiction, and what you intend to say about your setting to have everyone “need” the Color to survive, but also get ruined by it when they overdo it.
Also: why do they need it?
Well the setting is a crumbling city, Remnant, built around a spire that’s pulling color from a hole in the sky. Color used to be part of the world naturally, but it was lost in a cataclysm that is only half remembered through religious metaphor and wild allegory. Some say a Dragon did it, some say a betrayer who turned on those that trusted them. It torched the world and ascended to great heights above the smog.
Now people have to drink it straight to feel human. It they go without they fall into a consuming despair, turning into hungry monsters that will lash out at friends and family for a drop of the stuff. They used to get it from the Authority in the inner city, but they’ve shut the gates, barred the way and only offer up well placed bullets these days.
In the other direction you have the world left over from the time before. Everywhere outside of the city, the Ruin, is filled with creatures like those your friends and family are slowly becoming in their hunger. It’s a cooling structure fire as far as the eye can see, smothered in an ash fog and choked with soot. The creatures that slither in the coals and are held at bay by the light of the spire, but are drawn toward it by the gasoline stink of the color it’s leeching.
Drinking color, holding it inside, makes a person feel like they’re really breathing, truly human in a way no longer possible without it. Color’s inspiration lets you make things from the ash by mixing it with memories, your own and others, to make things that were exist again. You can bring a little of what was back to life. It’s easy to forget things doing this…
But whatever let people hold color naturally before the cataclysm is broken, or we were never meant to drink it in the first place. Either way once imbibed it begins to burn at the soul. You can hold on to it, riding the flames to incredible heights, achieving impossible goals, but it has to be spit out eventually. It you don’t you go up in flames, becoming a human torch, an aspect of the Dragon that burnt down the world the faithful say.
Most people are husks, burnt out and unable to hold color anymore, forced to subsist in a walking purgatory on a mix of spent color and spit, but not you, not yet. You can still hold it inside. You can still forge the ash to your will. You can still chase the dragon and try to make the world right again. You just have to hold on. Just hold on a little bit longer.
That’s the setting I’m trying to make.
So.. Horrific Addiction Metaphor: the RPG (lol, that’s an admittedly gross oversimplification, but basically that’s what I’m seeing as a theme)
I guess.. play up the downfall by having a set of missing feelings to model the loss of their self during overuse. I’m reminded of something I saw in Danse Macabre, a V:tR supplement. It was called Hell is Other People. It modded the Humanity stat to be your actual human connections, and fiction for losing it was losing those people as a result of your vampirism.
Yeah, I had a moment sometime back where I realized that there was an expression of addiction to the presentation. A strong part of what I want to lean on with it though is the act of making or expressing in some fashion. Every playbook has at least some portion of the Savvyhead built in (however constrained) and being able to build something, but never quite complete it, either before your color burns you too badly, or before the work crumbles, is critical. The end game would involve unlocking the ability to build something that lasts in some fashion or another… I’m not really a mechanics guy, I’m just a visual thinker and the setting won’t let me be. I really like the notion of each playbook bringing some created thing, something the player forged (object, person, structure, or organization) with them. It would be an imaining, a forgery. Not truly real, but real enough to make someone feel. And because so much of this world is built on stealing memories to make something real, can you resist devouring your own creations for a bit of that much needed color, especially if and when they start to go sour when you’re running on empty?
Putting it another way, I’m in love with monstrously nihilistic settings for the fact that any act of humanity and compassion within them thends to he magnified a thousand fold.
shorten what you said into like 9 or 10 sentences, say something which conveys a bit of its imagery, and broadcast what makes your game different: then you’ve got an elevator pitch
Do another 10 or so to describe an initial setup that you should present to start your game.
Write the basic resolution mechanics for your game, and one character sheet
You’ve got a basic Playtest packet v0.1; worry about the rest as you go
Thank you for the direction, I’ve been kind of aimless on the project but a handful of currated sentences is something I can do!
Yea and see then maybe you get some people interested, which will also push you further. What you are doing is a highly iterative-dependent process, and by that I mean, unlike some writing, you need a first version as soon as you can for playtesting rather than towards the end
Glad to help
As an update I really wanted to thank you for that homework assignment. it gave me a framework to pare down what I wanted in this project and I’m making strides into sections I never thought I’d reach.
It’s also helped me produce the most thematically consistent iteration too. I don’t have the stones to run it, and I don’t expect anyone else will want to, so I’m free to implement mechanics that I don’t think would consistently work at the table, but do express the setting well.
Anyhoo I’m still a ways out from something to post, but it’s feeling good and I really am just very thankful for that nudge and wanted to say so.
that is great to hear. I am glad to have delivered that nudge – we all need them sometimes.
case in point, this was helpful for me too: after commenting here, I realized how I have an incomplete game that needs the same treatment. And as of Saturday, I resumed playtesting of that.
So, you’re very welcome, and I look forward to hearing how you move forward with it
I’m currently chewing through moves for the players and MC, which I’m now referring to as Talents and the Curator for theme. I’ve got stats done up and have a system to them that anyone will look at and say ‘that is a dumb idea’ but I’m designing like no one will ever play this so it’s all indulgent.
Here’s that elevator pitch I promised:
Header:There’s a hole in you.
You need Color to be right.
A fire burnt the Color out of the world leaving the Ruin as far as the eye can see and as deep as the heart can feel. Now you drink it liquid to get yourself right. Bottled Color glows like nuclear coolant, Shimmers like an oil slick, stinks like gasoline, burns like thermite, and tastes like heaven. Everyone needs Color to keep the Ruin at bay, but only you actually shine with enough inspiration to plagiarize the world that was. When the Color runs dry, when the Ruin takes everything that made you human, what will be your remnant?
Oh and I forgot to ask Mark Cleveland Massengale, what’s your hack and how did the playtest go?
That looks good so far. I feel monochromatic already 🙂
It’s a fantasy/post-apoc/er.. something-punk. Like if.. World of Darkness and Numenera had a mutant baby, and it destroyed the world. It is a Blades in the Dark hack: but it’s got impossibly advanced tech, dystopian downfall, and ancient ruins in forbidden lands. We are one session in, so it’s hard to judge, but since I lost zero players at End of Session I’d say it went well.
D looks up Blade’s in the Dark…
Oh, it’s Thief: The Ocean’s 11 Project. That sounds fucking RAD actually. As for your game the description is pretty evocative. I’m totally not doing this to be a dick, actual curiosity behind this question: What’s your elevator pitch?
theme-wise: yea, pretty much. It is also a surprising evolution for games PbtA. Can’t recommend it enough, especially to those who feel that AW move formats are a little.. too freeform, despite being superbly written. There are no moves which tell you exactly what happens when there is a mixed result: instead, the consequences always depend on the situation at hand. Sometimes it makes sense that you can try again, but risky are heavier; other times it makes sense that you get hit hard. Another big difference are the existence of an effort mechanic, and a resist mechanic that always gives the players some reduction in consequences (albeit, at a price) but doesn’t remove the bite of the GM’s move.
But okay, enough gushing:
—
Legacy of the New World is a game about a group of daring adventurers building their legacy during the dangerous times that surround a dystopian fantasy/post-apocalyptic society. There will be dangerous exploration, frantic chases, daring escapes, devious bargains, and fantastic discoveries; there will also be surprising deceptions, betrayals, victories, and deaths.
We’ll play to find out what happened to make the characters strike out as adventurers, and how their first big expedition goes. Can they survive amid the interference of rival explorer outfits, powerful highlander houses, oppressive justiciars and ministers of Truth? In addition to the dangers of this world, there are those of the next: constantly-shifting landscapes, unforgiving superstorms, otherworldly predators, and your worst nightmares made manifest.
So light a torch, load your repeater, and breathe deep of the cost of building your legacy in the New World.
Summary
You play as adventurous hunters in Lower Dervish, a sword & sorcery city on the edges of the inhabitable. There’s experimental power sources, repurposed ancient tech, sunsails, and rudimentary gunpowder weapons.
You and the other players create a fledgeling enterprise- a crew of treasure hunters- and then take on dangerous missions to gain assets and notoriety.
Gameplay focuses on the daring actions during expeditions beneath the Clouds and the downtime between them when you recover and pursue your personal interests and relationships.
Ah, I think I’m beginning to see where the various elements are being drawn from. It’s an archano-tech fantasy, with weird world elements, megalithic structures and high adventure tied in with some cutthroat and morally ambiguous political allies/enemies?
Yea I think so. I don’t know what archano-tech fantasy actually means but it sounds right: if that is “soft” sci-fi, then yes (unlife after death, and other “impossible” feats of technology)
Also, the other parts you mentioned are in there (and possibly a couple others). Good summary