Game Design Pattern: Concept Crafting

As part of WORDS!: The July 2024 Blog Carnival hosted by Beneath Foreign Planets, I thought I'd revisit one of my favorite game mechanics of all time: 

Concept Crafting

Credit to Saker Tarsos, his Crafting with Concepts post from 2020 was the last TTRPG mechanic that truly inspired me. I'm sure there's other really innovative things I haven't given sufficient consideration or am not aware of, let me know in the comments, but this one was a game changer.

I have been under-inspired lately so I'm not going to re-hash too much. 

The core mechanic is as follows:

WORD1 + WORD2 = WORD3

e.g.:

FIRE + BALL = FIREBALL

Go read his original post or any of the following.

In my original Mecha Gear post I describe a system for building Mecha with Concept Crafting, but this could easily also apply to Power Armor or Battleships or other mechanical things.

I created three spark table posts for creating various kinds of weird mecha:

• Superorganism Mecha
• Embodied Cognition Mecha
• Nihilistic Mecha

I also wrote Pre-Gens for a Super Robot Wars (videogame series)-style crossover Post Apocalyptic Mecha setting including the Ichinana from Mazinger Z, Jet Alone from Evangelion, and Hyakku Shiki from Mobile Suit Gundam.

The final play report of my Maximum Recursion Depth Volume 2 Campaign has a writeup of an awesome Concept Crafting-based Mecha boss fight, with an index to all the other PRs. The penultimate play report also had a really cool sandbox survival module that leveraged Concept Crafting for a variety of things like salvaging resources and constructing a base.

I also proposed a "monster" collecting mechanic using Concept Crafting (e.g. Pokemon, Dragon Quest Monsters, Shaman King) in the form of Anima Crafting for Maximum Recursion Depth Volume 3.

I've talked to people who were not aware of Saker Tarsos' post but had independently come up with a similar idea for things like a magic system (Maze Rats' magic system may have worked similarly, I don't remember anymore), or for something like Zelda Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom.

I hope this blog carnival brings more awareness to Concept Crafting and that more people begin to design around this mechanic. I imagine there's a whole lot more that could be done with it if people put their minds to it.

Grotesque Gains

Treasure table of grotesque items

#7 and #8 were written by Beneath Foreign Planets

1. An Unkindly Face: The face of an orc warrior tanned into a mask. The face is pensive and still; it is silent only because it is on the hunt. One's eyes turn red, and red is what one sees. The Unkindly Face provokes fear and evokes an inner power, a will to violence.
   
   
2. Spell Golem: Spells are alive, and to cast a spell is to summon the spell for a mere moment. By carving a sigil into a fresh corpse, the spell may come alive for a longer duration, fueled by the body. The spell consumes the soul, metabolizing it to mutate the body into a shape, still vaguely human, suiting its purposes.
   
   
3. Fairy Cell: An innocuous rectangular handheld device of cold iron, glowing and beeping. Inside are fairies, bound in place, the cold iron tortuously funneling their magical energies through miniscule apparati of logic gates.
   
   
4. Vampire Bloodwine: The ancients learned to alchemically transmute vampire blood and holy water into a potent concoction, but the means of its creation are now long lost. Humans who drink the bloodwine temporarily gain the powers of the source vampire magnified, and without any of the weaknesses. The Bloodwine only works if the vampire is still (un)alive, and for the duration of the effect, the vampire will be able to sense the location of the imbiber.
   
   
5. Acupuncture of the Dark Meridians: Acupuncture needles carved from undead bones, their power proportional to that of the undead creature, and its freshness. Piercing these needles through one's flesh, and especially into the bones, into the marrow, unblocks energy through the Dark Meridians, unleashing great power at a terrible Karmic cost.
   
   
6. Trough of the Were-Hog: A filthy thing covered in excrement and rotten corpses. A unique living stench that blasts its way into the limbic system, into memory, a singularity of self and were-hog. Leave the trough out for some time unattended, and consume whatever finds its way inside without remediation. The duration and strength of the were-hog transformation is proportional to the time left unattended, the quantity of edible materials, and the degree of repulsion.
   
   
7. The Cloak of Control: A voluminous mass of yellow and fleshy segmented strings that sprout from the shoulders and drags across the floor. This 'cloak' is made of overgrown and swollen nerve endings. To wear the cloak is extremely painful but it allows the wearer to interface and control the corpses of giant beasts and meat-mechs of their own design.
   
   
8. The Third-Eye Syringe: Made of blackened hihi'irokane, this wicked and wide tipped syringe is designed for the theft and reinsertion of human pineal glands. Those that use the syringe overstuff their hideously swollen cranium with dozens of ill-gotten and semi-calcified pineal glands in a weird bid to boost their psychic powers.

Weird Colors

1. Halla: Like the elation of dancing to exhaustion and the warmth of close bodies on a crisp night.
   
   
2. Dimenoir: Like the fading memory of a dream and bittersweet reminiscences.
   
   
3. Inflaur: Like the compulsion to pick at blisters and the guilty pleasures found in an unjust world.
   
   
4. Psinreka: Like novel sensations and the fleeting satisfaction of solutions.
   
   
5. Gallentia: Like an uncanny presence and unshakable thoughts of unanswered questions.
   
   
6. Iskandalia: Like the awe of collective greatness and the validation in unexpected gestures of love.

Wrote these on the flight home from San Francisco, inspired by the colors in A Voyage to Arcturus which I started reading on the flight. The names were free associated and I tried not to overthink them.

And here are several more contributed by Rook, of Beneath Foreign Planets:

7. Pinznot: A writhing, squamous colour that stings the eyes. Like struggling to sleep only to find your pillow is filled with screeching, glowing worms.

8. Ablanense: A neutral tone like a slow, smokey exhale after waking at sunset. Some call it pastel dimenoir.

9. Prostklint: A hard, inscrutable and disquieting colour. Like waiting for your turn on the dentist's chair or the operating table. Like tight fitting braces, a coffin opening by itself, a pill just too large to swallow.

10. Krinderblesse: Like throwing a book onto a bonfire, the thrill of a toppling statue, the feel of a party just before a fight breaks out.