Author: Darrin Michelson

While Remnant waits for that proper dose of inspiration I find myself considering another setting of mine that could be a lot of fun as an Apocalypse World hack: Dungeonauts. It’s a mash up of Buck Rogers, Mega Man Legends, The Warriors, and the perils of opening a small business. Along with Remnant and You Can’t Take It With You, Dungeonauts helps form a trilogy of settings that are all about money, debt and barely scraping by; each of them is a depiction of my 20s and early 30s. While it sounds kind of desperate on the face of it, the setting is largely a comedy but with some character drama about ambition and knowing one’s self (again my 20s). I can see some of the potential books already, things like Planet Hacker, The Indestructable, Boot Day Survivor, The Red Suit, The Sharp Talent, The Boss, The Legend, and The Talking Robot.

Remnant Post

This is an underdone turkey of a document, but if I go any further without some form of feedback it’ll be too complicated to unravel. If anyone has the time to give some thoughts I would appreciate your opinion.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oFQpC6pW8WvZCaoFZcrr1EKXZgyIJdBBIRkOzCM40Ps/edit?usp=sharing

It’s really satisfying to look back on a weekend and find yourself with three strong additions to a project, two section rewrites, and having also started merging an old flavor text dog in with the larger whole.

Pangs and Curator moves are there, though the Curator needs explanations so shit like make a Rule of Thirds move comes across as having any sense to it at all. The basic moves have been given circumstances to proc, but not 6/7/9/10 results yet. I may post up a preview of the Remnant doc before those are in. I know feedback or any kind will be hampered by their lack, but I’m reaching a point where I’ll need some outside eyes to ask some hard questions about how this jalopy is going to fly.

I hit major stride this weekend and figured out Remnant’s Stats, part of what drives the player’s actions, and part of the game’s core concept: The pangs you obsess over drive you, the passion inside ignites you, the light you radiate enshrines you, and the stain in your heart devours you.

The range of emotion the player can express, and how capable they are at chasing their obsessions, reaching out to others, and staying afloat in the sea of their depressions are linked. If you need the passion to succeed you can stoke the fire inside to increase the odds in your favor, but that fire isn’t going out on its own. You have to talk yourself down, have someone reach out to you, or let the color that empowers you go and watch your dreams drift further out of reach.

I’ve got further to go on this, but the direction feels thematically appropriate.

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.

Remnant dev post.

I had a bit of a breakthrough in my understanding of the PBTA system. This is probably going to sound pretty yah-duh to most of you but I’ve been struggling for a while to wrap my head around the concepts. Most of my background is in video games where almost anything a developer wants the player to experience is driven mechanically. If I don’t think of a given mechanical lever to throw to encourage player behavior, I have no certainty of outcomes. As a result, most of my thinking thus far for Remnant has been rather brute force and obvious when it comes to systems.

As an example one of my latest efforts, Pangs, has seen a lot of rough and stupid ideas end up on the chopping block. Its supposed to be a PC’s desire which they find easy to race toward half the time, and the other half sits out of reach as they sink into their self loathing. My notion for the first was to make it a bit like Strings from Monster Hearts, but always on so long as an action is aimed toward reaching the goal, so bonuses in other words. When the player is in the morose state however the script needed to be flipped with the Pang providing debuffs as you reach toward it.

I presented this to a friend who is smarter than me and he asked why it needed a debuff? I was puzzled, how else do you tell the player that something is bad now, because you cant just do nothing, because that would suggest it’s normal or as valuable as anything else. My friend said the MC will handle that, going on to explain that just having the Pang at all was enough. But how?

“Your character has a car. As the MC I use ‘Take Away Their Stuff’. Now you dont have a car.”

It was a very pure rundown.

So getting back to the original point I’m working on some elements of the game, this time it’s Precious Memories. You need color to live in Remnant, and in a pinch you can eat your memories to do it. I wondered how the game would handle eating a memory associated with the learning of a skill, or of a friend, or of a bad scar, and what would happen in the game if you couldn’t remember something when there is evidence of it’s existence? It would leave a Hole in your memory, and on your character sheet.

Oh! My brain said excitedly, What sort of debuff does a Hole put on someone. Well… Losing a memory of a skill doesn’t take your muscle memory, it doesnt make your friend vanish, and the scar is still there physically on you. losing a memory is in no way debilitating, but it leaves a hole in your narrative.

It doesn’t do anything I realized. You just mark it down and move on. If your character is the type to find a gap in their memory uncomfortable, they’ll be motivated to do something about it in the fiction.

I don’t need a debuff to prod them. They’ll prod themselves!