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.

A Carnival World of no Prisons

This was drafted as far back as February, but I recently watched the original Wicker Man and it was really good and reminded me of this post. Also spiritually connected to The Apologists. It's another thought experiment / worldbuilding thing, just exploring ideas.

A world where the prison system has largely been replaced by a practice of public shaming and light corporal punishment.

Except where shame would not be effective, removal of bodily autonomy is kept to a minimum after the completion of the mandatory Carnival.

While some question the cruelty of the shaming and humiliation, or the stigma offenders carry well past the end of their sentencing, it is efficacious and minimally disruptive to both society and the individuals.

Periods of sociopolitical polarity or apathy threaten the efficacy of this system.

Carnivals usually involve some kind of poetic punishment, up to a certain physical and psychological threshold. Systemic bias and corruption are sometimes reflected in the nature and degrees of the events. For the most powerful, the events may even take on an heir of celebration, an effective soft power attack against the state, making a joke of the whole affair.

Some of the Roles in this new system (Jobs has become a loaded term) include:

• Master of Ceremonies
• Carnival King
• May Queen
• Fool (aka Punch)

The Carnival King in Yellow of the city-state of Gorgonesia is a notable example of how this system can catastrophically fail.

Not actually no prisons but it makes for a better title.

Weird & Wonderful Worlds

Have I defined Weird and Wonderful before? I talk a lot about Weird, but why Wonderful?

Weird is what is juxtaposed against the known and normal. It is a feeling, unsettling, or like the appeal of poking a stinging blister. It is something for which you lack frame of reference, or is beyond frame of reference. It can also be an anachronism, an uncanny valley. It's a kind of spiritual openness. Weird has been explained elsewhere better, but this is where I'm coming from.

Wonder is when the known and normal are exceeded and redefined. It is eureka and understanding and doing. It is the scientific method and systems and information theory, coding, math, linguistics. It's like the Dunning Kreuger Effect; the more you know, the more you realize there is to be known.

"Weird & Wonderful" is a common enough phrase, but actually, they are often placed at odds. Spiritualism vs. Materialism, Ancient vs. Modern; these limiting false binaries.

Statistics and probabilities, germs, genetics, atoms, control systems, are all really Weird. They are not necessarily intuitive, and for all the Wonder that comes from understanding them, it reveals more Weird unknowns that never quite reconcile with our sensory-perception of the world.

The majesty of nature, the interconnectedness of collaborative spiritualism, the introspection that can come from ritual, are all Wonderful; they reveal hidden aspects of the self and the world, without diminishing what else can be.

Wonder in the absence of Weird is like an addiction, an unsustainable compulsion to squeeze more out of the finite. It's wanting answers in the absence of questions, wanting not for Wonder but just to get back to baseline.

Weird in the absence of Wonder is meandering and circular. A kiddie pool can be mistaken for the infinite expanse of ocean if you refuse to measure its bounds.

Wonder creates the space for a far more vast and rich Weird, and Weird asks the questions and demands the slow contemplation to keep Wonder from spiraling out unsustainably.

BONUS: An Invitation

I recently did a light purge of my blogroll. There are enough blogs on there still that you may not have even noticed. I do them occasionally, but this time was the most expansive.

Going forward, as a rule, I will not follow any blogs that have a blogroll but don't include Weird & Wonderful Worlds on it.

I don't love how as a side effect of this it disincentivizes people from having a blogroll at all, because I love discovering new blogs through blogrolls and I love the blogospheric interconnectedness that it fosters.

But all the same, that kind of asymmetry has always bothered me. If somebody isn't interested enough in my blog to add it to their blogroll, I understand that it is not necessarily personal and that it is their prerogative to not do so, but likewise, it is my prerogative to not include them either.

One might argue that if blogrolls are just a quid pro quo that it cheapens their value. I disagree. If you add me to your blogroll, I will add you to mine, and I will read your work, and I may comment on it too, and the more actively you engage with my work, the more likely I am to actively engage with yours in kind. Maybe I would have read it anyway, maybe not, but now you know you have one more reader, and potentially more if any of my readers find you, and maybe conversations will form that wouldn't have otherwise, and what started transactionally evolves into something greater.

I'm not as active on the broader RPG/OSR/NSR internet world anymore and that will probably continue to be true; I'm trying to cut back on online stuff in general. That said, if I am on your blogroll and you are not currently on mine, please let me know and that will change.

EDIT: Following up on Semiurge's comment, if the only thing stopping you is technical complexity but the intended sentiment is there, feel free to reach out to me and we can work it out or come to an understanding or whatever makes sense.

The Dimensional Hierarchy is a Lie

The cube is a lie.

The square is a lie.

Even the line, is a lie.

Imagine two lines:

━  ━  ━

━  ━  ━

Or this way:

│ │

│ │

│ │

What is their relationship? Which is length? Which is width?

│

│

│━  ━  ━

If I rotated them, how would you know the difference? (Ignoring that these are different ascii characters...)

We think of dimensionality as a hierarchy; a one-dimensional line, two-dimensional square, three-dimensional cube, four-dimensional hypercube or time... but really, these are all single dimensions which may or may not have their own properties (is time just a rotation of space, or something fundamentally different?), which may very well be heterarchical, but we've chosen to think of them hierarchically.

And there is value in doing so, both because there is still clearly some kind of underlying systemic relationship, but also, having a shared understanding of what is up or down, left or right, lateral, before or after, or causal, is just a very useful assumption to make, and makes our perceptions of reality more communicable. Yet, when we fail to recognize that we are not always sharing this understanding, that our different perceptions may reflect the relativistic nature of reality itself, it only holds us back.

A zero-dimensional space is simply a dot. A line is a series of dots that can more parsimoniously be described by the equation Y=A+BX (or you may have learned it as Y=MX+B but it amounts to the same thing...). From the two-dimensional graph space, we can explain a series of dots in terms of their distance from a line cutting through them; the slope, B, being our one dimension.

If we add a second dimension to explain a three-dimensional graph by the distance of dots from a plane (or square) cutting through the space Y=A+B1X1+B2X2, we get something like: 

To the extent that we can conceptualize information, data, as a series of zero-dimensional objects, and create lines and planes and hyperplanes, cutting through a graphical space necessarily at least one dimension larger than the shape we cut through it (this is related to degrees of freedom or rank in statistics), and use that to often quite effectively explain patterns and even create learning algorithms, is it hard to imagine that this might speak to the nature of physical and metaphysical reality as well? We have plenty of other reasons already to believe that reality is better explained via probabilities than causalities, admittedly outside of my wheelhouse. 

Maybe all of these data are just being funneled through the fixed structure we think of as spacetime. But I dunno, maybe it makes more sense to think of reality as an "emergent" property of interactions of data- not that it can't be represented or interfaced with, but that, necessarily, part of the network exists in a larger (NOT "higher", necessarily) dimensional space than we can perceive all at once.

But it may not be that we can't perceive those other dimensions. Again, thinking of them as "higher" may be erroneous. It may just be that we can't perceive all of them at once; we may only be able to perceive, at most, n-1 of them at any one time.

But also, remember, these dimensions may themselves be unfixed, whether it's a matter of rotation, translation, reflection, or maybe even entire re-configuration.

They say that to effectively break the rules, you have to understand them first. I believe there is a numinousness that comes from the ability to think in terms of graphical representations, equations, and probabilities. Maybe it's all something between panentheism and animism? A series of wills superimposed on top of each other, a systemic or functional relationship between all things, each operating within their own dimensionalities; different frequency networks or phase networks, a push and pull of "spiritual forces", no one seeing all of reality, any one only seeing at most n-1 of it; none of it existing in isolation, every one making up its ever-changing totality.

Speculative Fantasy

Another old unfinished draft from 2019. Tbh these are a little half-baked and I wanted to have more of them, but it's a kernel of something. I'm sure people could run with this; any suggestions, recommendations, etc. appreciated

Inspired by Speculative Fiction such as Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross, and Adrian Tchaikovsky, and TTRPG works such as Lichjammer, Cryptomancer, and Magical Industrial Revolution. Exploring the implications of magic or other fantastical concepts not so much in a hard scifi sense, but extrapolating as if they were real.

1. The nobility are ancient and powerful Warrior-Wizards, immortal Liches, who are worshiped by their subjects as God-Kings. They are not necessarily evil, in fact many are quite wise, but they are ruthless and cunning.
   
   
2. The peasant and warrior classes have been largely replaced by undead labor. These workers that have no needs or wants, that can persist in any environment, and that follow orders instantly and without question, have made human labor obsolete. This is how the Dwarven Mines, the Underdark, and the Deep Oceans were conquered. Most humans live simple and easy lives of sheltered ignorance and luxury, at the expense of other peoples and the natural order.
   
   
3. Magic doors and teleportation spells have made traditional geopolitics obsolete. "Kingdoms" no longer exist in a literal sense, but are distributed across the world, by ideals or interests. This affects everything from architecture, transit, art and culture, and commerce. Small or self-sustaining villages far along the abandoned roads may as well be another world from the "kingdoms".
   
   
4. Communication and information storage has been made near-perfect and near-instant across a complex network of message spells and other similar magics. The security of this information is the lynchpin of all social, governmental, and military influence, and so while warrior-mages still exist, most magic-users are effectively cryptoanalysts and cryptosecurity administrators. Basically Cryptomancer bc I never fleshed this idea out further than that...
   
   
5. Uber-powerful magics such as wish spells have been so thoroughly exploited, that reality has exceeded a threshold of acceptable paradox, and has fractured into a non-linear, mega-dimensional multiverse. World-breaking magics have as a result become almost completely devalued, like magical inflation. Instead, various factions use more subtle magics and espionage in synchrony across the multiverse to manipulate reality in their favor. It's a magical multiversal super-spy cold war.
   
   
6. The discovery of divine magic, irrefutable proof of (at least one) Divinity, a True Metaphysic and True Ethic, changed everything.

Weird & Wonderful Wavelengths (Variety Show s1e3)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4jtIDaeaWI

It has been a while

Welcome back to this weird show

Beware the monsters

Somewhere between the blink of an eye and a dissociative episode, the Weird & Wonderful Wavelength oscillates backwards in time. Transposed along the imaginary plane, playing imaginary, we find ourselves in a peculiar black and green room. The striking contrast, jarring sometimes, the pain compels like poking a blister. A mild irritant, a bulging wallet in the back pocket as the waiter lights the absinthe and the green fire and black-burnt sugar drips into the glass. A pyrite spiral, a heckler aggressively ignored, a mild imperfection steals a degree of freedom from an otherwise perfectly composed show. A mildly amusing non-sequitur. 

Reruns

Episode 1

Episode 2

https://twitter.com/TuffGhostArt

A not even quite not-review of Russian Doll Season 2 in all of its amazingness.

Just finished Russian Doll season 2 <Editors Note: This was a while ago! Fortunately we have Spacetime Breaching Technology (TM)>, damn this was incredible. I can't believe more people aren't talking about how good this is. It's kind of uncanny how much it is my jam lol. Like without spoilers, it's got the unfinished corner, metro as metaphor and setting, exploration of self, magical realism, weird high concept scifi. Natasha Lyonne as Nadia is also just like the biggest fucking badass of all time. Like she just does not give a fuck in all the right ways, but also is unafraid to challenge herself. She's just the right amount of deranged, but also no matter how badly she fucks up or delusional she seems, she actually has her shit together and wins at life. And Allan is also this really healthy version of feminine masculinity not played as a joke. He's vulnerable and expressive and even though he's a neurotic wreck he ultimately knows how to take responsibility for himself, however he defines it. I'm not claiming it's as good as Season 1, but it was good in its own right.

Philosophical Soapbox

I was thinking about the nature of "evil", and Boltzmann Brains, and one possibility is that it's kind of like that. There are various evolutionary pressures both ways, and mostly they balance out to a degree of functionality. But given enough complexity i.e. time, improbable events occur and we behave in ways that are not truly rational, even if they maybe work in that myopic moment. That's a way of thinking about the nature of evil that's almost independent of any prescribed ethic.

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.296781716.3978/flat,750x,075,f-pad,750x1000,f8f8f8.u6.jpg

Psychedelic Pedantry Pastime

P^3 (P-cube): Perpetual Psionic Process: A psionic process is of the mind. Mental processes are multiplicative; the activation of one memory coactivates related memories which reinforce each other; reliving the memory of a psionic process is itself an instantiation of a psionic process, and every other psionic process in memory; a lifetime of psionic processes coactivate as a product across consciousness*spacetime.

More plainly, the idea is that if a psionic process is, by definition, mental in nature, then there is not a meaningful distinction between physical reality and simulated reality- a memory- except that memories can be wrong, can change, and can violate physical assumptions.

When a psionicist reflects on their own thoughts and memories, or times they used their psionic powers, they aren't just remembering those events, they are recreating them, and possibly altering them. It plays into some ideas around quantum animism or consciousness as a set of dimensions alongside the dimensions of space and time.

Psionicists have to be conscious of their thoughts and memories, and how they perceive them. The less structured their mind, the more powerful they become, but it can recurse and multiply beyond their control. Whereas a psionicist with a very structured way of self reflection, and of how they relate their memories and their internal semantics, will not be as powerful, but much more controlled and precise in how they use their abilities.

Last Call

One more cup of coffee for the road, please. There's a kind of ennui, or horror in the mundane, haunting reminiscences, the tension of an unwitting voyeur catching an embarrassing faux pas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mto47BMT3yA

Superheroes pt.X1: Panic Attack

Had a writeup for a different character for a Pt.2, and referenced a superhero team called Panic Attack as a part of that character's backstory, and I want to come back to that character, but I ended up becoming more interested in Panic Attack themselves. I do really like the wiki-style approach from the first one and this kind of free-associated inspiration is exactly what I'm going for (even if I mostly end up just inspiring myself lol), but I ended up doing some really good short-form writeups for them, so I'm just going to roll with that instead, maybe interchange both formats.

Superheroes pt.1: Vision Serpent

Panic Attack are superpowered individuals connected by The Panic Room, which can appear in any time or place. Members of Panic Attack all seem to have powers involving physical or psychological pain.

https://gifer.com/en/VPy8 Rhett Hammersmith (?)

The Itch

The Itch is the most brilliant person you'd ever know, if they could only think straight for a moment. But always it's there, The Itch, just underneath the skin, gnawing and crawling. The worms exist, they've been assured, it's just that no one else can see them. 

The psychic worms of The Itch evoke cosmic entropy like that moment pouring cream into coffee when the tendrils slither.

Peek (created by Semiurge)

Everybody's got an angle - Peek sees them all.

A woman suffering from agoraphobia. She entered the Panic Room, and never left. She's a sort of mission control for Panic Attack, muttering premonitions and observations while she stares into its corners, nodes of mineral intelligence crusted on and outsourced to her cheeks.

I imagine that Peek is never fully seen, only her eye or a portion of her face at any one time, from a viewslit in her Control Room.

Thiotimolina

The magical little girl shining brightly. She says in a tinny voice, "Here's an easy spell that anyone can cast, even you. A spell to flip causality itself. Malicious things may hide in shadows, but shadows are not the cause of malicious things. We make the shadows in which malicious things thrive. All it takes to defeat the malicious things is to smother our shadows; to rest and bask within the light."

Thiotimolina is a fairy of the mineral intelligence. She is an epiphenomenon of the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline.

https://www.deviantart.com/merulagfm/art/Cyborg-Fairy-419432766

I'm gonna be honest I'm still not totally happy with how the "spell" is written, hard to balance evocativeness with logic with symbolism, maybe need to dedicate more time to polish it, but I still love the idea. 

The Man and the Monster

They embrace, a stimulating shock, an aggressive tickle, the primal fear of sitting in a tub of wriggling worms or the urethral penetration of the candiru. Squirming critters morph into butterflies fluttering in the stomach, a bloody new sensation. Beyond absolute terror, a novel awareness. A marriage of convenience gone awry, all with one little mistake. A little mistake called Love.

The Horror Frog

Broken bones, flexing phantom limbs in twisted sockets, sharp weapons cutting both ways, and other ways as well. A metamorphosis, a tadpole racing down a one way stream. A wisdom honed in a mangled form ill suited for anything else.

:= (The Walrus)

A poltergeist, an undead dream, the manifestation of a teeth-related nightmare. Temporarily assigned to haunt the Panic Room.

Superheroes pt.1(?): Vision Serpent

Despite numerous posts about superpowers, I've yet to properly make a bunch of superheroes. The Recursers and Nazarites and the various other characters in MRD and MRDVol2 and the campaign are in the vein of Superheroes, but still. I get so caught up in the worldbuilding, but there's value in having Superheroes that can be a bit more plug-and-play, so that's my intention here. You could build a Superhero universe around these characters, or adapt them for MRD, Marvel, or DC.

I'm considering making a collaborative superhero worldbuilding project if there's interest, these could be seen as the seeds for that. I was originally going to make several of these but only had time for two and only received feedback on one of them (which is a little discouraging but oh well...), so this post will just be the first and I'll maybe make it a series for the rest of them.

The idea is that they're a little more straightforward than the stuff I would usually do, and while they might homage traditional superheroes or tropes, as the sum of its parts it shouldn't feel like a Marvel or DC universe knockoff, but something original and thematically distinct, with an emphasis on progressivism and solving systemic problems vs. brute violence, reactionary action, and defending the status quo. Also a heavy emphasis on diversity, intersectionality, and globalism.

The format is reminiscent of a wiki article or those old superhero handbooks, with things like "Power Level", but instead of any numbers it's some abstract description, a parody of the idea. Some words might be bolded where those could be articles in themselves which could be hyperlinked.

The "wiki articles" should be written in a way to invoke the sense that there is more between the lines; feeling not like the cohesive narrative of one writer's vision but a living collaborative world developed by many creators over time under various corporate, economic, and creative constraints; an emergent pattern, a character arc or narrative conceit built around the noise and chaos and incoherence of a superhero connected universe not bound by the notions of fantasy or science fiction or horror or even itself.

First an Index of previous Superheroes-related posts:

Weird & Non-Violent Superpowers

Superpowers 2.0

Cantrippers

Superpowers or Mutations

Maximum Recursion Depth, or the Beginning is the End is the Beginning (MRDVol2 abandoned concept)

Three "10 Superhero Fantasy Species" Settings

100 superheroes and villains as fantasy species 

FASERIP Marvel/DC/My Hero Academia Crossover! (Play Report)

Vision Serpent

Name: Len Levi (aka Veto Sanz)

Appearance: Unassuming size, light bronze skin tone, five o'clock shadow, tired and wise eyes, casually strong posture.

Costume: Lightly armored dark green serpentine body suit with red and yellow trim. Helmet reminiscent of a crested rattlesnake with a retractable lower face guard.

Powers and Skills: Wings of Saturim (Flight; Mildly Hypnotic); "Spiral Senses"; Master of the martial art Spiral Minding; Knowledge and gadgets of Saturim science and technologies.

Power Level: Just above human in most regards, but with a certain je ne sais quoi.

Biography: Trans-Masc (He/They) Mizrahi Jewish Mexican from Mexico City. Has a Ph.D in signal processing, where he developed a prototype Inverse Frequency Oscillation Device (IFOD), which had the potential to radically disrupt the telecom monopoly MegaXCom in Mexico and revolutionize communications across the world. Betrayed by their startup cofounder Gil Peretz in a corporate espionage showdown, just as the device was about to be destroyed and Len "disappeared" in a bodybag, instead he disappeared for real, teleported to another galaxy to serve the alien god Bright Mujo.

Serving in his Wave Palace overwatching the Saturim Civilizations, Bright Mujo personally educated Len in the sciences and technologies of the Saturim and their gods, modified them with the wings and Spiral Senses of the Saturim, and trained them in the martial art of Spiral Minding, incorporating the Wings and Spiral Senses to unique effect.

After an extended stay in the Wave Palace and after developing a complicated relationship with Bright Mujo, Len wished to leave, but Bright Mujo jealously would not allow it, and certainly not with the IFOD, nor the knowledge that went into making it.

To win their freedom, Len was tasked with telling a novel story profound enough to invoke a novel dream for Bright Mujo, the god of Memory, Patterns, Learning, and Nostalgia. After conceiving nights upon nights of stories and never succeeding, Len eventually resorted to generating stories from pseudo-random equations, mathematically derived poetry skat, inducing in Bright Mujo from his memory patterns a pseudo-novel narrative of his own free association. Bright Mujo accepted this partial solution, allowing Len to leave, but keeping the IFOD and the knowledge of how to produce it.

Returned to Earth, Len's startup was acquired by MegaXCom under Gil's leadership. Assuming the fake identity Veto Sanz, Len infiltrated MegaXCom, working to set right those harmed by the corporation both as Veto and as The Vision Serpent, while systematically instigating a boardroom coup. Complicating matters, just as Len was settling back into life on Earth and hitting their stride, Saturim agents reveal themselves, on the hunt for Len on behalf of Bright Mujo, seemingly reneging on their agreement.

Soft Warhammer 40K

A world like Warhammer 40K except where the lore doesn't implicitly justify the Imperium.

I realize this is a somewhat contentious topic; I'm not judging anyone for liking WH40K- while I am no lore expert I do enjoy the setting, but I believe it is important to at least acknowledge or confront this, in much the same way that one must as far as I'm concerned confront the xenophobia of Lovecraft and how that is largely inextricably linked to his works, no matter if you still appreciate the work in itself in the end. 

Anyway, right now we're just taking that as a given and exploring the worldbuilding implications. If you disagree with the premise that's fine, but just roll with it so we can have fun worldbuilding.

At risk of alienating even more people, I asked on my server if anyone could generate art of Warhammer 40K meets Hieronymus Bosch and Jack Kirby, and Peakrill obliged with some wonderful pieces, to help bring this to life. Do I think these are as good as, or as close to the ideal of what I'm looking for, as what a human artist could make? Probably not. But I was never going to commission an artist to make these anyway.

If The Imperium is almost like a dark ages post apocalyptic take on the post Roman empire world, this would be more like a post post apocalyptic take, something closer to the more modern understanding of history or at least my understanding, that while in some ways it was a period of loss of knowledge and infrastructure, in other ways they were more progressive and functioning reasonably well just on a smaller scale. In this world, it would be like Star Trek almost, like magical philosopher explorers, encountering all the craziness out in the universe with technology they only barely understand, wonders and reminders of what they can one day become.

The space orks are like rowdy punks in some cases, or psychedelic social anarchists, the Eldar are a little uptight but they'll take you out for a good meal and even if it's just to show off just take the lunch ya know? The tyrranid are an invasive species that need to be dealt with by social environmental institutions, like Space Rangers of galactic parks and recreation.

Oh and Chaos are just space Nazis of course.

Rather than looking like a mix of grimey industry and dark fantasy, it would be whimsical and Weird and Wonderful, like Hieronymos Bosch. Eh and throw Jack Kirby in there too. Decidedly not Moebius I think that would actually be too obvious and take away from it.

In the same way that I want for instance the tyrranid to still be a threat, but the way they confront that threat is profoundly different, and I think dealing with fascism and hate and violence is still something they should have to confront and I like the play on "Law and Order" types actually just creating Chaos, that the dichotomy of Order and Chaos is often just a fabrication or means of weaponization.

GItMS! Mecha Gear

This is an old draft, way before I decided to start using Concept Crafting for Mecha Gear. I think in all likelihood it's too fiddly, and I wasn't satisfied with it even at the time, but it's interesting seeing how it got me to where it is now.

This is for my Into the Odd Mecha Hack: Get Into the Machine, Shinji! The mechanics have changed to varying degrees since I've been running my MRD2 Campaign, but this post more so corresponds to the original GitMS! than to MRD2. Most notably, it is no longer the case in MRD2 that Golem (the Mecha) have their own Ability Scores anymore, instead just sharing the pilot Ability Scores, but having their own Damage dice and of course the Gear.

Here's my Weird & Wonderful Table of Super Robot Wars-inspired Mecha and a "Gacha" Mecha Dispenser generator as well, and if you want some weirder MRD2 stuff I have several posts of Weird Golem for MRD2.

I don’t want the game to be too crunchy, and I don’t want to go too wild with the core resolution mechanics because that rarely goes well for me and also doesn’t appeal to me anyway, but Mecha RPGs is maybe the one RPG genre where I still want there to be something mechanically distinct about it; can’t explain why, I just do.

While I have not playtested it yet, I am reasonably confident in and excited about the way that GItMS! distinguishes between Pilots and Mecha and how their abilities interact.

For the most part, Mecha Gear and abilities are very FKR-ish- little to no explicit mechanics, and where a roll is necessary, some kind of basic Save approach, but I’m thinking over just a few more mechanics that hopefully keep it interesting without getting in the way, but I want to hear what people think.

Idea 1: Mecha and Pilot rolls for Advantage/Disadvantage

Normally if a Mecha would need to make a Save, they use their own Ability Scores or relevant rolls; Pilots can spend their Ability Points to use their Pilot Abilities but otherwise don’t directly affect Mecha rolls. However, I’m thinking that where Advantage/Disadvantage would come into play, instead of rolling the Mecha Save twice, instead they roll one for the Mecha’s Ability Score and one for the Pilot’s.

I’m hesitant to put too much weight on Ability Scores, but I actually think this works in the favor of that goal; a Pilot with a similar Ability Score distribution as their Mecha will be more likely to succeed on Advantage/Disadvantage for their good Abilities and less likely for their bad Abilities, whereas a Pilot with a different Ability Score distribution is still affected by Advantage/Disadvantage but in less Ability-preferential ways. Neither is better or worse than the other, just different.

Idea 2: Gear

I like how ItO and EB are very items-heavy, and I’ve similarly enjoyed Cyphers from Cypher System. I want a Gear mechanic that allows for Mecha customization and churn of various unique special items, but not to the extent that the Mecha loses its identity.

Idea 2a: Gear Level

Gear has levels, tentatively 1-4. They affect the various 2abc’s following. The idea is not to be too mechanical with it though, it’s mostly just an indicator of relative power. I don’t necessarily want to have Mecha Levels, but there would still be regular Pilot Levels, and possibly Pilot Level might determine the highest level of Gear they can use, or use reliably (using higher-level Gear might force a Save for Gear Damage, as explained below).

Idea 2b: Gear Damage

Rather than rolling a Damage die to deal direct Damage, Mecha can target exposed Gear, where Players roll Saves either to dodge/defend or to attack depending on which side of the equation they’re on, and they go from `Damaged -> Disabled -> Destroyed`. Gear Level may affect how many times a Gear would need to be successfully hit to move from one stage to another, where from Disabled onward it can no longer be used until repaired and Destroyed means it normally cannot be repaired at all. On the flip side, Gear Level also would determine the cost to repair.

I worry somewhat about coupling Level, Damage, and Cost too tightly; probably there would be many exceptions but this would just be the default case.

I also like the idea of having to expose Gear, because then you can create interesting encounters that force Players to come up with clever ways to expose protected critical Gear, so it makes Conflicts potentially less about just slinging dice and more about clever problem-solving.

Idea 2c: Iconic / Permanent Gear

I want to come up with a better name for this, but tentatively we’ll say Iconic or Permanent. This could include the starting Gear for a Mecha, the stuff that makes it unique, and maybe Pilot Level number of additional pieces of Gear can also be marked Permanent. These Gear can be repaired even from a Destroyed State. They can also be stored for free. Their Level might scale with Pilot Level or something like that.

Idea 2d: Gear Storage

Pilots may want to build a small arsenal for themselves, more than they can carry at any given time, in which case they can be stored wherever their Mecha is stored or at some other facility, at some cost relative to Gear Level. There could maybe be a maximum storage number by Pilot Level as well, but that seems extraneous. Iconic / Permanent Gear can be stored for free (assumes Pilot always saves a little extra cash for their important Gear).

Idea 2e: Gear Points

I keep referring to cost. Gear have a value, generally relative to their Level. So if you destroy an enemy Mecha, you get 1 point for the scrap (or maybe more in special cases), but if you Damage or Disable enemy Mecha Gear or the Mecha themselves without destroying them, you can potentially recover their Gear to keep and/or sell. These Gear Points are used to repair, store, or less frequently, purchase or upgrade Gear.

My hope is that this whole Gear system allows for a nice balance between having an Iconic Mecha but also the fun of load-outs and loot, and it can allow the setting to explore some capitalist themes, without over-relying on a complex economy or being too crunchy. And additionally, it creates a unique and fun, but still rules-light play experience, and differentiates Mecha from regular play in an interesting way.

REMINDER: This is no longer the Gear System in MRD2, but it's still interesting in its own right imo and maybe with some playtesting could work for regular GitMS!

The Art of Chrono War: A Hexcrawl Across Time, Space, and the Multiverse

I get really excited about timey-wimey stuff, but then inevitably get frustrated when either I overcomplicate it or fail to explain it coherently or whatever, so I will try not to do that this time. This is not a redo of my previous multidimensional hexcrawl post which I'm still going to hyperlink but that is definitely a case where I overcomplicated an idea that actually isn't that complicated, and this is actually a completely different thing from that anyway, so don't bother reading that unless you like weird complicated shit. I liked the post even if basically nobody else did :(…

This post is partially inspired by Skerples' post OSR: Time Travel Tips for GMs and the idea that I had suggested in the comments that frankly I felt like he was a little too dismissive of so now I'm coming back at this partially out of spite (come at me bro >.<!), but also because it's rooted in ideas I've had basically for as long as I've been doing TTRPGs so it's about time I actually try to do it in a more coherent and fleshed out way.

Was not a great RTS, but had a really cool time schtick

The High Concept

With this mechanic, time is multidimensional and causality is non-linear, and I think that is rad as fuck but if that means nothing to you then don't worry about it, hopefully it'll still make sense as a game.

I'm going to say the setting is a generic war across multiversal spacetime between two factions just to keep it simple, but if I were to use it I'd likely make the setting more interesting (maybe my Cold War Under a Rising Sun setting)

We begin with a Hex Map

Let's start with 7 hexes, so a middle hex and six hexes surrounding it. It can get bigger, it'll just be easier to start small.

Traversing this hex map is not a traversal of space, as in going from one town to another, but of multiversal spacetime in its entirety, flattened out onto a hex grid where each hex is a key event in some place and time and universe in the multiverse. Also you could just get rid of the multiverse aspect if you want and make it just space and time, but I figured why stop there?

If the setting is about a war, the center of our hex map may be some pivotal battle. The GM should probably prepare at least a couple other key events, or the group can do it collaboratively, or they can mostly come up in play over time.

Chrono Points

While on a hex, as the group accomplishes some set of tasks, like the usual kinds of things PCs in a big intrigue/war game would get into, they acquire Chrono Points (CP). These CP can be physical coins or poker chips you can place on the grid, or you can mark them in some other way. Since this is a war, the enemy side may have CP of their own (should probably be a different type of coin or different color chip).

Before leaving that hex, the group can choose what to do with their points. They can use them, leave them on the current hex, or take them with them to the next hex.

…And How to Use Them

Because causality is non-linear, it is not necessarily the case that actions in the past affect the future any more than events in the future affect the past, and even events in an adjacent universe can affect other events in other universes across the multiverse, regardless of where in spacetime. So while the group's actions within a given hex may affect the circumstances in that given hex, that has only limited baring on the grand scheme of things; instead, the way in which those circumstances affect other events in the multiversal spacetime is determined by the use of CP.

The group may want to say that if, while on this hex where a major battle is occurring, they win the battle, then that will affect an adjacent hex in some favorable way. Maybe the event on an adjacent hex involves a political assassination of an ally in the near future of an adjacent universe, and so the group wants to cause a blizzard to occur on that hex, making the political assassination more difficult or less likely. You can call it butterfly effect if you want- the underlying "cause" in linear terms doesn't matter- linear causality is not how the multiverse actually works, that's just how we myopically perceive it.

The default cost might be 3, but depending on what actions occurred while they were on the hex (e.g. how favorably the battle went) and how they want that to affect another hex (e.g. change the weather vs. cause the assassin to have a heart attack), that might affect the cost at the GM's discretion.

If the enemy has CP on that hex, they might choose to contest the result. In such a case, both sides (the group and the enemy) would write down their bid, and whoever bids higher wins (but the CP are spent regardless).

Even after the group has left a hex, the enemy can return to the hex to change things in their own way, or by spending CP on that hex before leaving an adjacent hex in the same way the group uses CP, so there are reasons to return to hexes (although each time it will have changed in some ways), and also reasons to leave CP on hexes rather than always carrying your CP with you on each hex.

What Else Can be done with CP?

If there are any undefined hexes adjacent to the current hex, the group may instead want to create a new key event on that hex. They'll have to then go to that hex to ensure the outcome is favorable, but there is advantage and fun to be had in defining those events. Whether the event is viable, and the cost to create the event, will also be determined by the GM, with perhaps a starting cost of 3, and greater or lesser cost if the initial status is more or less favorable to the group's interests.

You can also spend CP to swap two adjacent hexes on the board (again, perhaps default cost of 3). This doesn't affect the outcomes, or how many CP are left on that piece, but since you can only move to or affect with CP the current or adjacent hexes, there may be advantages to moving hexes around on the board (like if you very desperately need to get to a hex that's otherwise too far away).

But it's Not Over Yet!

Sure you've won the battle, but time is multidimensional and nonlinear. The enemy may return to that hex to undo or alter what you've done, or spend their own CP on adjacent hexes to likewise change the outcomes, and you may need to return, but it should be notably different now. Alternatively, if you left some CP on that hex, you can spend it to start a bidding war to counteract their actions (but remember, they can do likewise to the group).

Why should we use this?

Well for starters, the idea of a world with multidimensional time and non-linear causality is rad as fuck, if you don't agree then we just don't see eye to eye.

But also, maybe there's a higher barrier to entry in wrapping your head around the idea, but once you do, it's actually way less complicated than most one-dimensional and linear-causal versions of time travel; there is no concern about time paradoxes, no convoluted logical chains of antecedents and consequences since causality itself has been modularized; if you just think of it as a flat board like any strategy game, that's all it is conceptually, and the mechanics themselves are about as rules-light as can be and can be bolted onto any TTRPG.

And it's just a novel way to think about space and time and the multiverse and causality and how to conceive of a world within a TTRPG and how you might interact with it as players.

And "Time Loops".

Since you will likely return to previous hexes- it's not quite like a time loop story because the circumstances in the hexes are changing based on how the group and the enemy interact with them or use their CP, but you can still to some extent explore some of the themes and ideas of a time loop story in a gameable way.

Alternatives?

This is still just a proof of concept and I've discussed with several others and we have a handful of alternative takes on this idea.

One idea would be to make the outcomes of using CP probabilistic. So you can try to alter adjacent hexes with or without CP, perhaps doing like a d20 roll under, but CP would lower the difficulty.

Another idea, closer to my original idea, would be to make the board more like a sudoku board, except instead of being 9x9 it would be 4x4. In this version, each of the events would be keyed to a number, and the rules of sudoku would be the underlying causality. By changing a number on a given square, given the rules of sudoku, it may be necessary to change the whole board.

In regular sudoku this would be way too complicated and also there are fail states if you're messing with the board like that, but in 4x4 it might be more manageable. The idea to reduce to a 4x4 was suggested to me by Deldon on the NSR discord server.

I'd also open to additional ideas.

Worldbuilding with Pokemon

An earlier version of this post was first shared on The Cauldron. I've fallen behind a bit and digging into my backlog, but I do have a few upcoming blog posts in mind that are more directly RPG related.

Pokemon is obviously a huge decades-long phenomenon of a franchise requiring no introduction. Yet despite this fact, I am surprised by just how little impact it has had on fiction, how little regard is paid to the fact that it is a unique science fiction or fantasy sub-genre. My intention for this post is to describe what I think makes Pokemon unique as a sub-genre, and using that as a case example for how to go about thinking about works of fiction and how they might be extrapolated into new kinds of sub-genres, which can then be explored in tabletop RPG form.

I am aware of the rash of Pokemon knockoff videogames or anime and manga, some of which have come into their own, or for that matter Pokemon-inspired TTRPGs or unofficial Pokemon fan TTRPGs, but that's not really what I mean. Yes, there is a unique gameplay aspect to the monster collection / monster battler genre, but I'm speaking more to the setting aspects.

Pokemon is a world of magical creatures that are not quite animals but also not quite human, even when they have human or superhuman intellect. They're more like nature spirits or fey creatures from mythology. The Detective Pikachu movie characterized it really well, such as the interrogation of Mr. Mime, where it could only communicate through mimery. It made really salient the way that, even when they look humanoid and seem to have human-like intelligence, they operate by a different, magical kind of logic. I had been interested in exploring the concept of Pokemon much earlier, such as the Monsters & Madmen micro-setting from my old micro-setting post (I'll come back to this later), or even when I was ~10 years old or so first playing the videogames and watching the anime, but Detective Pikachu was where this idea that they're more like magical creatures really hit me.

People have of course talked about the questionable ethics of monster collection and battling, and I don't think this idea of them being magical creatures totally mitigates that, but it does put an interesting alternative perspective on it. Pokemon are magical creatures, metaphorical extensions of humans; they can be examined from a human-centric approach and the monster collecting and battling can be recontextualized as a form of ritual and reverence towards nature and humanities place in it, as is often the case in animist religions and hunting in animist cultures.

There are a few not-obvious equivalents to this I can think of. Another series that I am shocked has not had more longterm resonance, is the Megaman Battle Network videogames (the micro-setting I-Cons in that micro-setting post linked above was inspired heavily by MMBN), where the internet is basically a virtual reality space where human operators use AI avatars called net navi to traverse the internet as if it were a physical space, and where the net navi usually reflect and exaggerate the characteristics of their operator. The manga/anime Shaman King also did a similar thing, where the ghost or spirit companions of the Shaman usually reflect some aspect of their personality or identity, and in this case the mythological elements are overt and literal. There's actually a recent ongoing Netflix remake of Shaman King, but sadly it's kind of mediocre (maybe Shaman King just doesn't hold up as well as I remember :(?).

So as I'm listing it out, I guess there were some other settings, it seems almost exclusively from Japan, around the early 00's, that either consciously or unconsciously got at these same sorts of ideas, but it was like a flash in the pan- maybe more exists out there, but not much I can think of, and nowhere near proportional to the continued popularity of Pokemon as a game or singular franchise.

So let's return back to Monsters & Madmen. That name is not great, it was always a placeholder, and I still have not developed this setting much or done anything with it, so here we're just using it to examine the thesis of this discussion.

The big war; the cities bombed and nations EM-pulsed; civilization as we know it is on the way out, but adults still cling to the old world from only a few years ago. On the other hand, the children wish only to leave their homes, to travel the empty, broken roads, and to collect and battle the monsters that have surfaced (or, perhaps, resurfaced) in the wake of humanity's decline. The world is in anarchy. Some of the magical creatures the children geas are intelligent, some infinitely more so than humans. They bide their time as anarchy ensues and humanity dissolves under its own weight.

I was inspired by fan theories discussing "The Pokemon War" that canonically exists in the setting, and how a world could exist where 10-year old children travel the country or world alone, towards this seemingly frivolous goal of becoming a Pokemon Master, where the protagonists are missing fathers (who likely died in the war).

I was also inspired by Mad Max. Not Mad Max: The Franchise as it is popularly conceived, but the first Mad Max movie, the one that still looks and feels mostly like the real world- where an apocalyptic war occurred, but where there is still conceivably a chance of a return to "normalcy", where the adults still remember "normal", but the children live in a very different world.

One can imagine why I was thinking about this in 2018, but it is perhaps an even more relevant idea post-2020.

On the surface of it this could be a dark and dystopian setting, and that was more so the idea at the time that I first conceived it. But even then, I wanted there to be that possibility of hope- again, it's no Mad Max Fury Road, it's Mad Max 1. But also, adding in this human-centric approach of the monsters as extensions of people, as a part of nature- it's still a bit half-baked within the context of this setting, but I believe this has legs.

So this is just one example of how Pokemon could be extrapolated into something fairly novel, and gameable, and how one might approach thinking about extrapolating other popular series into new kinds of sub-genres that have not been seen before.