The Whatever-It-Is-Mike-Comes-Up-With Thread
devlin1:
It's changed quite a bit from what I posted before. I decided the whole outer-space, sci-fi setting just required too much set-up and convoluted explanations. It started to feel very inorganic -- like the premise was extruded by force from the ingredients. Plus, the premise really encouraged PC deprotagonization. Someone's curing the galaxy's deadliest plague... but not you. And even if you were, it'd be pretty one-note.
So I dumped everything except the idea of a turncoat character.
The setting has become the present day. Instead of trying to save humanity, the PCs are now a group of nutbag cultists trying to bring about the end of the world. They have several goals to accomplish if that's going to happen -- the premise provides more of a hook for the PCs to be active and central to the story. They're hampered by their lingering worldly attachments, but if they can manage to distance themselves from nuisances like family and friends, they'll find that setting their minds to the task of summoning some bizarre, unthinkable entity from beyond time and space to consume and/or enslave humanity. They only have one chance to conduct this ritual -- during the Grand Convergence -- so if they screw it up, they've forever failed their otherworldly master (with dire results).
However, one of them is not who they seem, and in the final act of the story, with nearly all the pieces in place, this impostor goes from investigating undercover to quite overtly trying to screw everything up. Instead of the mimic being the character who's failed the most (as it was before), now it's the one with the strongest worldly attachments. I.e., instead of a fairly arbitrary game element, now it's tied directly into the fiction. Of course you betrayed the others -- there's no way you were really a cultist, not when you have a husband and kid you love so much! For the cultists, these worldly attachments are liabilities, but for the investigator, they're a source of strength.
In accordance with one of my ingredient-threads, there will be no random element here -- it's all about allocating resources, but in ways that are significant both in terms of the fiction and the characters. There's also no GM (in accordance with another ingredient-thread), or rather everyone's a GM at some point or another. There's just no central governing player. Instead, you have your Rival (the player sitting across from you), and your Rival has you.
A surprise influence here has been Lords of Waterdeep, although I'm definitely keeping this in the realm of RPG vs. a boardgame. My only real fear now is finishing in time. My notes are... scattered and scatter-brained. Communicating all of this in a way that immediately facilitates play will make or break this thing, IMO. There are kind of a lot of procedures to detail, though none of it's particularly difficult or complicated.
devlin1:
Okay! It's done.
The game rules.
The character sheets.
The cult sheet.
After I submitted, I realized I'd accidentally left out a pretty important rule: When choosing an Attachment during your Rival's turn, it can't be the same one you picked last turn or the turn before. I.e., you have to cycle through all three before repeating one. That's it.
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