New Game Name

After the feedback I've gotten, combined with my own preferences, I've decided on the new working title for The Fifth World. Henceforth, the game shall be called How We Came to Live Here.

[Fifth World or Something] Quest Rules

Last week, thanks to a long business-related train ride, I got several hours to work on that game (not called Fifth World any more). I put together the basic die mechanic, and worked out how one of the types of scenes is going to work in the game. The section I'm working on is about quests, where characters leave their community in search of some item or just to gain renown.

I've ventured quite far from The Shadow of Yesterday at this point, even though that was the original inpiration. TSoY just wasn't supporting what I wanted out of the game, and shoehorning it was starting to really frustrate me.

Here's a basic summary of what the quest system is about:

Characters have traits, which they call on to overcome challenges. I'm using Fudge dice for this, since they have a nicely constrained set of results. The players gradually build a pool of dice to use in a challenge, where + counts as an attack opportunity, - a defense opportunity, and blanks serve to absorb attacks. If a player uses a + on his turn, the target of the attack can either discard two dice of his choice from the pool (the attack succeeds), use one of his - dice to block the attack (the attack fails), or use a + and discard one die to suffer the attack but return attack.

Renown and inside pools can be used to supplement traits in the challenge. Players can also do criminal or dishonorable things which raises their outside pool. I wanted this to be an attractive option, so if a player runs his outside total up by one, he gets two new dice and can choose what value he wants on them. Outside basically gives the GM a pool of points he can spend to mess with the character after the challenge.

I ran this little conflict system out with some friends last weekend and it works quite well. The players, thanks to some rolls that weren't as useful, ended up tapping into the outside option, so the temptation is definitely there. It's also quite predictable how effective a character can be (barring really crappy rolls), so it makes challenges easy to construct. This is good, because there will be some quest guidelines for GMs to build proper challenges for the players. The more difficult the quest the players choose, the more renown they can earn by completing.

[Fifth World?] Name Changes

It's been a very, very long time since I posted, my apologies.

Anyway, short version, it turns out that another group of game designers is releasing a game in December called "Fifth World," and they very politely contacted me and asked that I not release my game under the same name. Since they are beating me to the punch, I agreed to come up with a different name for this game. After some advice on various message boards, I've come up with a short list of names:

Twin Souls
How We Came to Live Here
Up from the Fourth World
So That This World Will Not Be Destroyed
Into The Light

Feel free to comment on these (and add other ideas if you have them). I've got time to ruminate, and the game's got the working title of The Fifth World until I settle on a new one.

Design Journal: Getting Going on The Fifth World

It's been a while since I've touched this project. Last year, I decided to finish Mortal Coil, the game closest to completion at the time. I did finish it, and now it's out and ready for sale. Ever since I got it off to the printer back in June, I've been meaning to pick up on The Fifth World again, my project for next year. All summer long, that hasn't happened.

Yesterday, I took a long look at the project and tried to see what was hanging me up. I had decided to use Clinton Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday as the core rules for the game, and elaborate from there. Some of my issues stemmed from attempting to repurpose those rules, because copying and altering the existing rules turned out to be pretty boring for me.

I was looking at the introductory paragraph of The Fifth World when inspiration hit. The opening paragraph is a brief sketch of a story about how the First People came into the Fifth World. It struck me that since the inspiration for the game was Native American folklore, that is the form the final version of the game should take. I had just read The Dictionary of Mu by Judd Karlman, and his setting takes the form of encyclopedia-style entries that gradually flesh out a fantasy world. I decided to present The Fifth World as a series of stories, told around the fire in a kiva, that gradually introduce the setting elements and various other aspects of the game. The rules would be in the form of asides in the margins, and appendices in the back of the book.

This is probably going to be a difficult way to present the material, but the goal is to make the rules clear while at the same time evoking setting in the strongest possible way. To do this, I am going to need to pare down the rules considerably, and the final result may not resemble The Shadow of Yesterday hardly at all. Part of my problem was me limiting myself to the TSoY rules, so this is freeing my creative juices a lot. I think it will end up being "inspired by" TSoY, rather than a full TSoY mod.