[To Playtest] Colonization of Qek
shadowcourt:
I should add, as a postscript, that part of my incentive around this was to do the following:
Force families to communicate with each other more, so that these little "islands" in the jungle have a very social reason to go interact. As such, there's an opportunity to hide in your little knot if you want, but you don't reap many benefits. Instead, you've got to send your sons and daughters out to maintain those lines by visiting your neighboring knots, which leads to all sorts of potential drama ("Bakish went missing while maintaining the paths! Where is he? Form search parties! Contact our neighboring families to beg for aid! This is their moot grounds, as well!"), which means you've got grounds for small family diplomacy and a culture which has a need for more mutual trade and mutual aid. Nobody wants to visit your inlaws, but if you don't periodically, you might find jaguars inhabiting the Clear Pool in your Moot Grounds.Have situations which can destablize. When the Tazamec family to the far east goes missing, your area can fall apart quickly. What do you do? Maintaining a knot where you don't live takes real work. Will the other two families combine their efforts to turn the southern knot into a little outpost which they share the burden of maintaining? What will they do when this starts to stress their resources? Will this prompt an early marriage between a son and daughter of the other two families, just to have some kids to shove out there and keep the knot (and by extension, the paths and area it defines) from falling apart?Keep the jungle discovery work from being all on the Qek side. People love to play the bad guys and invaders in most groups I've ever played in, so allowing the Ammenites to have a chance at finding all this stuff seemed to make sense, particularly in light of some of what Eero said about invading the knot network and becoming so dangerous thereby. Hopefully it forces some hard choices about how and when you isolate or build/maintain a path. It also makes it a little more clear, hopefully, just how and why you might sever a path or abandon a knot to let the jungle take it. This also hopefully protagonizes the Qek a little more, as well, making them less purely reactive and more actively engaged in maintenance or discovery of their stuff. In my mind, they are NOT in perfect harmony with the jungle. They've got to keep those borders and paths clear, or else it swallows them up. This also feeds my evil agenda about where the Qek really came from up north, and why those northern patriarchs haven't swept down to just gobble the Qek back up.
-shadowcourt (aka Josh)
Eero Tuovinen:
That's some serious feedback, Josh. Thanks for lifting my spirits. I'm swamped with work right now, though, so can't shift through the nuances this week. I get the impression that you're mostly putting this stuff out for my benefit (as opposed to needing feedback yourself), so I'll just make a note of this and get back to it when I have the time. I've been working on the witchery stuff lately anyway, have to get that into some sort of shape before I nail down the knotwork rules.
shadowcourt:
Eero,
Yeah, that was mostly an attempt to retool it for you, so you might not have to. I like my peanut butter smooth, but my posts pretty crunchy. I loved the knotwork rules when I first saw them, and had some anxieties about how it would work, but was still eager to use it. I haven't had a chance to field test either the old version o this one yet; I've sworn I was going to do a story set in Near's north, but have been too occupied with work and other games (including using the Solar System to play a massive romping Stone Age game, which is about 2 sessions from being finished...) to do it. That, and I have the rest of the whole "Near's Arid North" stuff to hammer out.
But this was an attempt to do a quick rethink based on your Effects rules and the stuff you'd already established with knotwork. Use or modify at your pleasure. It's hardly original work on my part, just be riffing.
Funny that you're working on witches. I've been lamenting that my version of Goren has little to no non-witchy cultural flavor. I was just about to post a public call for help lamenting that I need some ideas, if anyone has them, on how to make those Russian-y/Viking-y folks have a bit more spice.
Maybe I'll start a thread about it, and solicit ideas.
-shadowcourt (aka Josh)
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