How I wrote City of Judas (part two)
Back to the design process of City of Judas. Again, I’d love to hear your opinions – as fellow game designers and as players as well. So feel free to comment, ask questions, present your own experiences!
How it started
As I wrote in the introduction to the manual, I was lucky enough to put my hands on the Dark Age beta version from Vincent Baker. It was an inspiring game, and the sessions I’ve ran, at the table or in forums, where always really good.
Now that I designed my own game, I fully understand why Vincent needed to take his time between the various releases of the different versions of his Dark Age game. But back then, after playing the first beta, and while waiting for the next, I grew very impatient.
I didn’t design any AW-hack before, and I thought: “Well, if he doesn’t put out a new version soon, I will”.
And I thought also: “How hard could it be?”
It turned out to be of course harder than I expected, and way more exciting and rewarding, a great and interesting experience. And frustrating at times, tiring. But most of all, it became clear that it was necessarily a slow process. It took me a year from the first public beta to the manual now published, and I had the luck of having a lot of time on my hands to work on it.
Where did I start
Honestly, I don’t remember exactly but there were two things: the Harm Moves (which were inspired by Paul Taliesin), and the Playbooks, and especially the Barber.
While I was still undecided about how I was going to approach the subject (doing my own AW-hack or not, work perhaps with DW instead, or FATE…), I drafted an alternative combat system for Dungeon World. That system was never really tested and I believe it never made it to any real game at the table, but it stuck with me. It felt rough, harsh, and with a flavor to it, something that made it different from AW or DW harm for example.
It felt exactly like the things I would have liked in a slightly crunchy fantasy RPG with bloody, risky combat. And it had no Hit Points, but a Health Counter, from +3 to -3 like a Stat.
Then there was the Barber. Later on I think I’ve read somewhere that Vincent – if I recall correctly, I might be wrong actually – designed the Angel as the first of the AW playbooks. If that’s true, it was a nice coincidence that I got to design the Barber as the first playbook of my own AW-hack (the Barber is the medieval surgeon, and the “healer” in the City of Judas game).
And then I started to play around with some ideas for this dark, medieval setting, and one by one the other Playbooks followed.
And what about you guys; does anyone what to share how did they start to write their game?
Where did the inspiration come from?
First part here:
I’ve created lots of campaign settings for lots of game systems all over the years and it was never easy to have one entirely finalized especially when it comes to make your own game system from scratch. I think that the key, as in life in general, is consistency.To me, you really have to put a lot of yourself during any creation process if you want it to be staisfactory (but it doesn’t really exist such a thing when you create anything, does it? ;)).
Another key component are the feedbacks and the game testing and they’re not always easy to come by!
Recently, I’ve made an entire setting for another game system (Barbarians of Lemuria) which i may try to describe as Post Apocalyptic Sword & Sorcery where barbarians fight mutants with swords and blasters alike (that is a very reductive description of it but i certainly don’t want to bother anybody).
For the inspirations, I mostly got them from others RPGs, Books, Video games and Movies (roughly in that order). For the setting above (which I’ve called Mutants & Barbarians to stick to the genre), I was very influenced by the movie John Carter of Mars, all the Robert E Howard’s Conans, a bit of Moorcock’s Elric and RPGs like Barbarians of Lemuria (of course as I’m currently using the its game mechanics) and Barbarians of the Aftermath (also based on the BoL engine).
Hope I was not too much off topic!
Grégory Doizi I agree with you; consistency is not the the same as inspiration, but without consistency and effort, it’s unlikely to be able to complete anything.
Send me a link (even privately if you prefer) to Mutants & Barbarians (if it’s in English and not in French); I’m curious to have a look.
A question about it: do you think you started designing it by being more inspired by ‘Barbarians of Lemuria’, or by some other source (i.e. the books you mentioned)?
Well that’s a good question. I think it just happened out of the blue, when having a glimpse of inspiration once about a horde of mutants storming a castle (more like oriental castle with minarets and other bulbous structures) in a desert made of metal dust. Then I was thinking about designing a system for it (because I kinda like that) but then dropped the idea an adapted it for BoL as it’s very flexible. Then i started to elaborate it more and more, incorporating other ideas I had for a while and the other sources of inspirations i was talking about, until i wrote around 20-30 pages of setting.
Anyway, I’d love to send you the doc but unfortunately (and as you justly thought) it’s been written in french 🙁 If ever I find the “consistency” (ha ha) in me to translate it I’ll let you know for sure! 😉