[Solar System] Developing Territory for Werewolf
Courage75:
Sorry to bombard you all with posts, but I am having difficulty coming up with additional crunch for my Werewolf: the Forsaken game which I am running with Solar System and I am after ideas on mechanics on how to develop territory.
For those of you not familiar with the fiction of Werewolf, the premise is that the PCs are a pack of werewolves who have carved out a piece of territory and defend it from threats, usually supernatural. The pack often doesn't legally own property in their territory, and don't usually seek to change the physical landscape in major ways.
Instead, the pack looks after the spiritual reflection of their territory, known as the Shadow realm, and deals with the local spirits who inhabit the territory. The spirits are not ghosts, but spirits of things in the territory - cars, plants, trees, buildings, emotions and even ideas. Usually, a spirit only comes into being if a lot of effort is invested into something, so not every tree in the physical world will have a spiritual reflection. However, once a spirit comes into being it is largely autonomous from its physical counterpart.
Werewolf packs spend a lot of time interacting with spirits, usually in conflict. Werewolves, being half-spirits themselves, have the ability to enter the Shadow through rare gateways know as loci. Over time, packs can also influence and develop the spiritual side of their territory, changing the spiritual ambience to suit them better.
So that's the fiction. What I want to do is design mechanics that handle developing the Shadow of a pack's territory on a large scale. I've looked at the Season mechanics in Houses of the Blooded and also the Company mechanics in Reign, which has given me a few ideas, but I would like to know if there is anything I could use with the Solar System that might assist me. I was thinking of dividing the territory into distinct locations, each being a "character", but I am not sure how this would work.
Any suggestions?
Eero Tuovinen:
Have you looked into the Qek knotwork mechanics? Something like that might be interesting, as they deal with a similar notion of spiritual landscape. Under those mechanics you divide the territory into a number of spiritually significant "knots" or points, which are then known to varying degrees by the individual shamans. Each knot is then a Secret, and you can assign mechanical benefits to knowing each terrain bit. Under those rules it would also be easy to make each "knot" a character (or "roho", a disembodied spirit, to use the Qek terminology) if you wanted to.
Both Reign and HoB are fine sources for ideas, although Solar System tends to thrive in a somewhat more dramatic cut - usually we don't track large-scale developments mechanically so much as just state that these developments have taken place and then find out how this impacts the individuals in the story-verse. Thus we usually have Secrets that describe how characters stand in relation to the world, but most of the time the rules for gaining and losing these Secrets are relatively simple and rely on the conflict resolution system.
dindenver:
C75,
Well, usually, with white wolf ips (I will admit I am not totally familiar with werewolf in particular) there are multiple tribes. So, I think a lot of crunch can ceom from describing how one tribe is different from the other. So, if you used that as a jumping off point, you can get a ton of mileage. So, for instance the Lunars in Exalted have different castes. Full Moon, half moon, etc. So, if I were to try and differentiate them, I would so something like this:
Key of the Full Moon General
1 xp for leading your followers
2 xp for leading them into a dangerous situation
5 xp when they save you from a dangerous situation
Secret of the Full Moon General
You can spend more than one pool on an ability check, if that abilty check is being used to help your followers
I know Werewolf is totally different, but I think this is a good example of how you can use keys and secrets to really distinguish one tribe from the other, right?
chance.thirteen:
I would think traits about the Shadow nature of the territory would be of use. Things like regardless of how it looks now, it has many ancient spirits from the previous centuries, so perhaps many tree spirits in what is now a town. Likweise, just having many spirits vs few would be of note, as would having conflicting spirits, for instance the tree spirits from a century ago and their interactions with the spirits of travel and cars and concrete from the highway than now goes through the area.
Spun the right way, there could be Secrets to handling the situation, and larger or smaller consequences to various conflicts.
Courage75:
Quote from: dindenver on February 11, 2009, 08:58:51 AM
Well, usually, with white wolf ips (I will admit I am not totally familiar with werewolf in particular) there are multiple tribes. So, I think a lot of crunch can ceom from describing how one tribe is different from the other. So, if you used that as a jumping off point, you can get a ton of mileage.
Yep, I have already designed Keys and Secrets to represent the different auspices (Full Moon, Crescent Moon, Half Moon, Gibbous Moon and New Moon) and the five different tribes. I have also designed Keys for Renown and Harmony, which are aspects of the Werewolf game that I want to reflect in SS.
I'm pretty happy with them, except that converted PCs end up with a considerable baggage of Keys and Secrets right from the start.I could probably cull a lot of the Keys, but I wanted to represent certain aspects of the fiction I liked as mechanics in the game.
Anyway, I'm more interested in mechanics to handle developing territory at this stage.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page