Some of My Brainkids

Here are 3 of my brainkids. I'm raising them, but some may be locked in the attic while guests are over, or when I can't think of what to do with them.

"Jets Game"

My design buddy and I have been hitting our heads against this on and off since NYE 2023. As soon as I learned about the rpg system framework LUMEN by Gila RPGs, we agreed that it could possibly work for something related to playing as high-flying fighter jet pilots. Zippy pace, arcadey combat, standout archetypes, stunts, drama that shifts how your team works together... We had a good skeleton for everything. Unlike some of these other pet projects, Jets actually has a lot of legwork done! 

Oh by the way: Happy 4th birthday, LUMEN !!!!

Pilots accumulate Nerve from death-defying stunts, like near misses and evasions and high-g maneuvers. You can use it up lending aid to teammates, red-lining your machine's components without dying, and rerolling certain checks. You don't want to have NO Nerve, and you definitely don't want to max out; bumping against your min or max limit would cause your pilot to make the wrong call, whether from being on a hair trigger or from freezing up. The key is to be in the Zone; if the max is 10, you'd want to keep your Nerve value between, say, 4 and 6, or other ranges depending on your archetype. Doing so grants you enhanced or extra capabilities; e.x. the Hotshot's odds-defying evasion boost, the Human Calculator's predictive targeting skills, and the Sensitive's strange missle-kinesis.

We moved from abstracted range zones to a hexagon grid, a la APOCALYPSE FRAME, to inject some tactical decisions and maneuvering. Why be in the plane at all if flying it isn't a focus, right? Yet, movement is sticky and exact on a grid (obviously), even with 6 directions to go. Worse, you'll need an enormous grid to be able to feel anything like a plane. The fantasy of flight is hard to reconcile with all this. Plenty of games and wargames get along just fine this way, but looking for a fresh approach for so long took the steam out of us. And our unfed brainchilds were calling.

And so, the winds of change and the march of time have pushed this beloved project onto the backburner- FOR NOW. I spend a lot of time racking my brain on how to inject the fun, and on whether my hangup is even that big a deal. I feel like there's an elegant solution, just outside my current knowledge base. I'm excited to refocus on Jets when I'm 100x smarter. It's sort of our white whale, or one that got away, or whatever you like. 

The Brutal Lands

This is a setting I've had in my head since 2018. I wanted to move my D&D 5e campaign of the time to a sandboxy situation for some classic questing, and dreamed up "a place where everyone is fighting all the time." It's a raised mesa (plateau?) far from civilization, that entices warriors with a magic whisper promising them any one wish if they prove themselves worthy. Players would galavant around, dealing out steel, spilling blood, waging full-blown war, and perhaps allying with anyone sane enough to resist the "combat madness" that steeps your mind the more you kill.

World map from MHW, featuring all the classics: forest, desert, city sized pile of rotting flesh and bone, national park sized coral reef, mountain solely inhabited by the most powerful beasts alive

Monster Hunter: World came out in 2018, and I really liked its region setup. Big themed zones, with an ecosystem of relations to each other. It was also around this time that I learned what a hexcrawl is, so things started to fall into place. Soon I had pages of unique regions with special foes, hazards, events, mysteries, allies, and of course, loot.

TBL is perfectly suited for nonstop violence, and every warrior finds their niche hunting grounds. Ninjas and rogues sneak around the dark forests assassinating each other, foul sorcerers harness the mountaintop mana crags to supercharge their spells, barbaric warlords paint the desert red smashing their legions together, and those with true potential are able to enter the forbidden keep to duel among the elite. But if you want a shot at that wish, figuring out what "worthy" means is going to take some digging. Is it pure kill count, or maybe like a prowess or honor thing? Who's running this joint, anyway? Better get galavanting for answers.

Now that I'm older and wiser(?), I've got plenty of other systems I'd prefer to run this in. It tracks as MORK BORG appropriate, since life is cheap and all you need is kill, but I also need to check out some things with a little more combat meat.

Rebellion Story Cards Game

Are you familiar with mapmaking rpgs? Instead of being single characters doing things in a GM-provided scenario, the players are collaborating on coming up with a place, piecing together a layout and a history. A really good one is "Beak, Feather, & Bone." 

You pick some factions of townspeople, like fishmongers, pickpockets, merchants, aristocrats, farmers, craftsmen, so on, and take turns drawing cards. The card's suit tells you a building's purpose, and the value is how influential it is, from 1-10. Face cards are worth 0; locations currently inhibited by a rival from another faction. Using all that, you then come up with the details of this place: broadly speaking, what people say about it, what it looks like, and what's inside. By the end, you've got a place full of interesting landmarks and little conflicts.

I love that game, but one of my personal gripes is that it creates a snapshot of a still world. It's sort of like a picture coming into focus: not changing per se, just becoming clearer. Not really a problem, but what if changing or shifting was baked in? It also self describes as lightly competitive; the winning faction claims the "seat of power" building and is considered to be most influential at the moment. But the winner is determined by highest influence, which is solely up to who drew higher numbers. Maybe realistic, but not competitive, right?

That made me start wondering what a lightly competitve location-making game would look like. So, the main idea is still to invent an interesting fiction together, but there's decisions and a winner? To me, that sounds like the place is in a time of change, and the players control agents of that change. And lately, stories about rebellions or insurgency are on my mind, probably due to Andor. So I let those clouds swirl around for a while, and now I've got the early stages of something.

A "map evolution" game (pretentious enough?) where players flesh out a cool location in the midst of a societal upheaval; galactic empire, small village, cyber city, what have you. Players pick a faction or type of citizen, such as partisans, firebrand protestors, the downtrodden working class, whistleblowers, foreign agents, anyone who might want to overthrow the current powers that be.

Here's how it might work: Cards represent steps your faction is taking to progress the revolution. The suits represent the kind of action, and the value is how effective it is at shaking things up. On their turn, players draw 3 cards and choose one to put into play. (There'll be some reason to not just play the biggest card every time, eventually...) I'm thinking a given society might have abstracted areas to "target"- Cultural, commercial, and civil? The common people and public opinion, the industries and/or the affluent, and the workings of the governing body itself.

How it might look

Next, you flesh out how your chosen action went. Maybe by writing about the target, the plan, and the outcome? I was thinking ♥️Hearts are actions against/involving a person, and ♦️Diamonds involve a place or thing. ♠️Spades and♣️Clubs are the same, respectively, but represent violent actions. In this revolt narrative, drawing a little blood will drive home that you're not messing around. But that comes at the risk of much more severe consequences. 

Maybe it's a gamble on whether the masses will take to it, or it might provoke an immediate "reaction turn" from the city (more on that in a minute). Ooh, maybe before writing the outcome, you roll a d10 against the card value to see if things spiraled out of control. And of course, certain factions can have a preference or aversion towards violence, such as partisans being extra effective with it, or a reformist being able to convert a violent action into several smaller nonviolent ones. 

On faction specialties in general, some might have the ability to pocket a card of a certain type, for deploying in combination with another card later. One could reactively add a suit to someone else's play, representing a collaboration or interference from their faction. I think all these little side-actions and decisions will be how players scrape together influence or move it around. 

Some examples for the suits: Let's say I played my card in the "civil" pile. Our rebel cell is targeting a cog in the machine. The 3 of ♥️Hearts might be slipping someone a bribe, the 7 of ♠️Spades might be slipping someone a bomb. Meanwhile, the 1 of ♣️Clubs could be smashing some regime cameras, and the 10 of ♦️Diamonds could be shutting down the regime camera factory with a historically huge occupation. 

I think the 2 cards you don't play could get given to the Powers That Be for a "reaction turn" of sorts, where a card is selected (random, or highest value?) that prompts you to come up with how the current order is striking back. Arrests, disappearings, spies and moles, and of course, cracking down on the populace at large. You'll probably lose some points with the average citizen if they're being subjected to "instant kill" curfews because of your BS. 

Oh, and I guess face cards could be really important people, like icons of the revolution? Or, if played by the city, they're the big-name denouncers, enforcers, public faces calling for "moderation"... any of the white blood cells released in response to the infection of dissent.

In "In Too Deep", you play secret agents trying to foil a crime syndicate's Evil Plan by cyber-jacking into the minds of criminals and influencing their actions in ways that allow you to gather evidence. The entire game is moving these bad guys around and choosing how they act, so why not just BE them? There's a whole page in the rulebook saying "remember, you're not the criminals, you're just nudging them in specific directions towards crimes they would have committed anyway!" Hello? What is this? Let me be that guy?

Early into this idea, I was really set on including a rondel somehow, due to this Skeleton Code Machine piece lighting up my mind. I thought the segments could be the districts of a dystopan city, like In Too Deep (pictured above). It's probably not literally a donut shaped city, like, the rondel movement could represent the steps your agents need to take to move around covertly, or something, don't worry about it. Sadly, districts didn't really scan as easy to prompt writing for, at least not as easy (and setting-neutral!) as abstracted aspects like cultural and civil.

So, the rondel is probably out, but I liked the idea of a pile of tokens or chips in the middle of it, roughly gauging the overall stability of the society. Through your actions, you'd bring that pile lower and lower to incite the populace to wake up and do something. But! Reduce it to nothing, and the society properly collapses. Game over. (At least for your factions; for players, a prompt to write a catastrophic conclusion!)

So, the loop, as of now: Players draw and choose an action prompt, write it out, and after everyone goes, the city deploys a retaliation prompt. Repeat until win or lose. If you lost, write the failure out and the fate of your factions. If you won, determine who came out on top and thus gets to drive the city for a while.

Ok Woah Easy There Tiger

Damn, should the rebellion story game have been its own post? Nah, it's good that sharing it caused me to develop it more. That was the point of the blog! Nice!

I'll get the other brainchilds out of their cages soon, there's plenty to go. After or parallel to that, there's all kinds of other crazy stuff I wanna post about. Thank you very much for reading.