Author: Darrin Michelson

Remnant Post

The long slog continues. Recently a couple things helped me dial in the focus of Remannt. The most important was a conversation about my process for drawing and sketching. Nominally I’m a happy artist, but lately I’ve been doing some soul searching and I’m realizing how hard it can be to see something to fruition. I found myself outlining the stages of creation, beginning with a swell of the oncoming idea, followed by the burning passion of the work, which at some point flips and becomes almost painful as you push to finish a design. Then once it’s complete there’s this void in you, something that filled and animated you to such a frenzy is gone now and you become listless. That feeling can be eased with some ego boosting “wows” and some “good jobs” but eventually that need to make something creeps up and you’re compelled into the dance again.

That’s what Remnant is. It’s not a game I want to experience, it’s something I want to subject people to. It’s a creative drive simulator from my perspective of the act, and the emotional rollercoaster involved.

Here’s the current review of the resource loop of the game based on those feelings and goal:

Remnant Color Wheel

+Feel the Gnaw – The empty hunger has overcome the body and it casts about for some color to ease the pain and distract it from the Ruin.

+Consume Color – Consuming color flushes a body and makes it luminous. The brighter a body is the higher quality of the the color they’ve imbibed. For a time holding color will ground a body and enable them to face the Ruin with confidence. The higher quality the color, the more unflappable the surety. As time goes on however the color will inevitably begin to burn.

+Holding Color – If a body has any tint inside the color will invariably ignite it, making every problem sound like a threat or challenge. As the burn grows the desire to solve these slights, real and imagined, with immediate and unrestrained aggression becomes more and more appealing. Hold the Color too long and a body becomes a structure fire, a smog huffing avatar of the Dragon’s fury personified.

+Color Types – All color from the Ruin begins mixed with tint. This unrefined color is referred to as Crude. Once the tint has been strained out by a human vessel the color glows brightly, is a feast for the senses, and is referred to as Pure.

-Crude Color – This color appears like a thick, gloppy paint. It glows faintly but is mixed with ropes of tarry, black tint. It adds to a body’s total tint when imbibed.

-Pure Color – Eases all pangs and burns the same way Crude Color does, however it can burn off tint as it does so.

-Pure & Crude – Both burn a body, both can impart a memory, and both can whisper something true, but pure color will do these things more intensely.

+Expell Color – Color burns the holder so it has to be expelled from a body eventually. Uncreative souls expell it as Salve Water, a weak sauce color substitute. Creative souls can invest it into objects of a specific nature, but investing can cost a memory.

+Hollowed Out – Once the color is expelled the body will begin to feel the empty howl of the Ruin rising again. Tint is left behind, but without the color to ignite it it merely smolders. When hollowed out a player’s affectation becomes an important support. Playing to it, and having others buy into your personal lie eases the yawn. The presence of others who are flush can slightly ease the empty feeling, but the more tint they have inside the more that cold comfort is just that, a reminder of what you don’t have. That emptiness needs to be filled or it will overwhelm a body and they’ll become a hungry ruinbirth).

I showed this to a friend of mine and he suggested that maybe AW isn’t the game I should be hacking at. Suggesting both Inspectors and Don’t Rest Your Head as options. I’m not ready to walk away from the Apocalypse Engine just yet, I’m a huge fan of its specific responses for moves and events, but he’s right when he says I lack the skills to understand the nuance of those systems enough to create my own expression of them.

For reading this far here’s some post-it sketches as thanks.

Still poking at my AW setting and sketching up the playbooks. Doodled up the Hard Holder remix: The Echo of Authority.

Originally shared by Darrin Michelson

I was going to hang onto this one until it was at touch further along but in the words of Frau Farbissina, “We got a little impatient”

Here’s an in progress view of the archetype character for the Thane playbook for Remnant: Thane Doe. Gotta get her corset drawn up along with her zippo hand lighting that molotov of color she’s taking a pull on. Bottom line is she is a maniac that holds a mock court, insisting on pleasantries that can turn to gut wounds in the blink of an eye. YOU DO NOT CROSS HER.

I’m sketching up an inspiration piece for Remnant and I paused to do some detail/exploratory work on the Thane’s tattoos. 

Remnant: We Burnt Down The World And Blamed A Dragon

They built a machine. A tower. It drilled into the afterlife or heaven or someplace that took the name. Sure as hell they lied about it to anyone who asked, but after anyone saw what was there, what was coming out they stopped asking. The machine heaved, and out came pure color. Undiluted and vivid hues that burned the naked eyes, singed the nostrils with it’s sweet perfume, and they doused the world with it like a sauce. Whatever the stuff was it was FUCKING flammable as hell.

When the fire started it covered the world, rendered it to ash. It all went away in a metaphysical firestorm and only the tower and it’s shadow, bless it be, the spiritual equivalent to a shining oil rig, glimmering and proud in the middle of a night sea ablaze, was spared. All that was left was an ash caked remnant.

Every poor soul wandering out of the Ruin, with a bit of color in it’s gut and heart to light it’s way, is just that, a soul. A ghost getting a little more real as it comes closer to the tower and the last bit of real color in the world, their noses following the fumes still leaking out of the bleeding hole in the charred sky. The body needs it now, they all do.

The fire took the heaven color, took whatever color was there before too because fire does not stop when it’s belly is full. Whatever made us people before, the stuff that sustained the soul without having to ask or take: it all burned. Now that the excess is gone there isn’t even enough to just take in naturally. You gotta drink the shit straight. It shimmers with the wan hue of gasoline, the pretty hues look nice dancing on dead eyes. You smell it almost everywhere, but not enough to tell you a baquet is on. Just a hint, a reminder. It’s a cloying odor when you’re hungry and a stench when you think about it too much. Spend enough time near the tower and it gets in your skin, fogs the brain and curb stomps its cells. You NEED it.

You do it because the burn left a hole in everything, and that hole let the Ruin climb into all of us.

It isn’t healthy. Drinking it doesn’t sustain or uplift. It curdles and burns and as it sits in your soft, wasting body. Color makes you feel warm and alive, filling your head with thoughts of what was, giving you a life you might have had, making you see the people around you as they could have been. But it doesn’t last. Eventually the fire it makes in you goes cold, and the Ruin howls somewhere distant, and the shivers take, and you try and make due but eventually you gotta light the flame again. Suddenly that memory you had of yourself, of the people you knew is a little further away, a little less pure, nothing but cold comfort. When it finally goes you don’t even feel it. You certainly don’t remember it. You cry sometimes over nothing and you won’t know why. Take another drink.

All a body gets from drinking color, pulling on the pure shit, is a burn in the soul that feels like being somebody, while your humanity drifts away a cinder at a time. It scorches you, turning your skin ash white, making you drab as the world over the lip of your bottle. Your lungs belch smoke from that part of you burning away deep within, and when the fire blacks up someone’s eyes it’s time to keep a close eye on them. A structure fire in the shape of a man in an ocean of smoldering timbers and concrete rubble popping and whistling from it’s own internal heat. You go that far and you’re the Ruin now, all hunger and howl. Don’t even think about it, you cut that shit out and toss it over the wall before it melts and becomes a stain. You toss anything it killed with it to be sure. Stains don’t come out.

They blamed it on a Dragon you know. All wings and flames and heat and hate. The world burned down and they blamed a Dragon. Maybe there is one now.

Sometimes the hot stagnant air rolls through in waves and it feels like something vast and terrible beat it toward you. The ash was the world after all, and the world was all of the things that were possible. All that potentia is just right there in the air around us but no one thought to ask it to do anything other than to scare the shit out of us, to be every fear on every scale anyone ever offered up. Maybe you don’t even need color to make the magic happen, to make something be, but at this point everyone is such a threadbare addict you just try and tell them they can smile without taking a pull? Not gonna fucking happen. So maybe all that fear and hunger and color haze works on the world a little bit, everyone wailing and hungry and scared, and the ash fog gave a little shrug and said “If that’s what you want…”

We curse the Dragon and we hail the heroes, the martyrs, the fellowship. We lament the beast turning on them and burning the world down, telling stories to look backward so we don’t have to dream up new nightmares about what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Or, hell, maybe it was just a guy after all. Maybe the Heroes were a bunch of guys and maybe they all pushed the button to stick their silly-straw-dick-metaphor into the sky together and they all had a good suck.

Man, maybe it worked. The clouds shit color into everyone’s brains and maybe it was just so impossibly good for a while. Heaven on earth, heaven spilling onto the earth. And we all breathed really deep, rolled around in it and got so fucking stupid.

And then someone lit a match…

Spent the evening listening to insp music and drawing up a Thane for Remnant. I mostly wanted to feel out the monorails, which are going to the be the super-kludge replacement for motorcycles.