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:
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:
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.
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