Carta Galaxia Development Update #24
Whoooee, this has been a heck of a month. Sorry for the lack of updates!
– Got to run a small booth at Montreal ComicCon. It was super fun meeting folks, and some even joined the community, so warm welcome to all of you! Bienvenue parmi nous!
– I’ve been doing crazy overtime with my day job. We’ve got a pretty huge update coming, and I’ve been up to my neck in deadlines and hard-locks and devtests and so forth. Haven’t had much time or mental capacity for writing, sadly.
– On that note, I’ll be away until September; I’m going to be working the demo floor at Gamescom in Germany. I’ll try to check in but my access to internet will be horrifically limited.
I’d like to get feedback on something I’ve been tooling with:
As with every chapter, I’m including a handful of examples. What I’ve linked here is one of the examples from the Scenario chapter, meant to be the start point of a campaign. The intent is to give the players a rough idea of what the universe is like, the look and feel and tone, etc. I’ve tried to condense that down to a single 6″ x 9″ page. But it’s a fine line to tread between “too dense” and “not enough to work with”
This is part of my growth as a designer, so I’m still toying with ideas, layouts, etc, and I’d appreciate comments. Does this work? Is it usable? Or is it missing something major?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zjoiaypdi7j4a1k/Example%20-%20TheSword.docx?dl=0
I love it. It feels usable in parts but I can’t see framing a whole campaign from this… I don’t know what’s missing.
It feels like a “just enough” approach that can be filled in by questions asked by the GM to the players. “Why does the Raven’s Guild avoid this place under penalty of loot forfeit?”
There might be a spot for alliances and rivalries between the factions, unless you want that to be derived in play as well.
Maybe…. could it be spelled out with loaded questions rather than statements?
Aaron Griffin I would be down with that. That approach also ensures some interesting situations where group 1 and group 2 have very different experiences due to those answers.
I feel it’s missing a central conflict or tipping point. What is the thing that upsets the status quo, that propels the campaign forward? Or earlier than that, what is likely to upset the uneasy peace between the factions? Could certainly be set up as questions to be answered in play / in Session 0.
I do like the layout though. Very easy to consume.
I’m with Aaron on this. Love it but don’t know if I could frame a campaign around that one. I think it’s (and without seeing more couldn’t conform.) a case that, if one of these resonates with you, you’ll instantly see possibilities otherwise not. I think it would better if rounded out by 2 or 3 example question. To help jump start things.
I love this a lot. I think Questions would be good, but at the same time I’m also wondering what questions would guide play without forcing a very specific campaign framework onto players. Because I, personally, can see two or three different launch points from this, but they depend on what characters the players make and who they’re in debt to. Again, I really like this, and the formatting looks good to me.
I’ll take the minority stance and love it as-is. But then, I get a kick out of world building and this gives me the seeds that I need to run with it.
Alfred Rudzki Hitchcock Well isn’t that the idea of this? “Here’s an example campaign framework”, right?
Aaron Griffin While it is a tonal / aesthetic framework, there’s certainly leeway in what kind of activities the player can get up to within those bounds.
Alan Tsang That’s a very interesting angle. I’ve been basing myself off of classic campaign settings like Darksun, Planescape, Forgotten Realms (Waterdeep, specifically), and so forth. I haven’t really come across a tipping point or central conflict in them; in fact, they seem to be entirely about the status quo. Now, specific stories within those Campaign Settings have certainly had tipping points, but that would come during Chapter 2 (Jump Points).
Keep it coming folks, this is super good stuff. I’m considering how to implement suggested World Building Prompts.
For “a setting in a page”, its great, the perfect level of detail for a con one-shot or a campaign starter. Obviously, it would be better if combined with a Jump Point which built on the themes and tone of the setting, but that would take more pages.
I think those settings still have central themes (even if not explicitly laid out) — Darksun is about scarcity, Ravenloft is about gothic undead / horror, Planescape is outer planar weirdness, and Forgotten Realms is about the novels. But all of those settings are designed to support a commercial line of products, and so the goodies are given out more piecemeal, or kept intentionally mysterious / vague.
I think in a more bespoke setup enabled by Uncharted Worlds let us to do better. We have an opportunity to frontload the cool stuff, and dive into what really matters about this setting / campaign.
Maybe Jump Points is a good place to put them, though if you are putting together a setting, it seems like a missed opportunity to have the questions be specifically about that setting.
Justin Phillips That was why I mentioned them at all in the Raven’s Guild; out of all the Factions, you’re most likely to have a pagan in there (maybe in the Ulmyr Dynasty). I wanted to avoid exhaustive world-building, aiming for small seeds for people to latch on to.
On that note, I’ve toyed with a bunch of different layouts, and I’m currently torn between the one-page setup I have now, and moving to a two-pager with more detail about faction relationships, current events, and maybe a setting-specific Jump Point or setting-appropriate character Archetype ideas.