Playtesting is always full of opportunities. Let’s look at two different things and see how they come together because of play and offer a design method. Not the only one, not a whole methodology, but rather a tool for your toolbox.
In the current Sand Dogs playtest our intrepid heroes have left the world. So they are pretty much done with the Sand Dogs concept except as it impacted their character creation and development to date. New world! They are chasing the slaver Harrison who turns out to be a planewalker and since they freed his slaves and broke up his gang, he’s looking for greener pastures.
So I have to make a new world.
This is great because the next Soft Horizon book is to be the handbook which tells you how to make worlds. And I don’t know exactly how to do that yet. But I am an experienced referee of role-playing games and I’ve developed settings before. I have the intuitive talents to do this already.
The opportunity here is to design observationally. I have an artistic intuition about how to proceed but I need to formalize it so others can reproduce it. I could start by imagining a process but in this case there’s a more fertile possibility: I can just watch how I do what I do naturally and take notes.
I’ll work in cycles here — make a thing and then look back over what I did and turn it into a process. Now, I’m not done yet so I can’t tell you the whole process, but I can talk about the meta process — the process of developing the process.
The new world started with an image that I dropped on the table in a panic at the end of the last session as the characters arrived in a new world: it’s a jungle and there’s a huge ziggurat and it’s at the end of a long straight path of churned up earth: the ziggurat appears to have moved albeit very slowly.
Seriously that’s all I have to work with here.
But hang on let’s start there if that’s what we start with. We start with an image. How do you get an image? Imagine a place with at least two things that don’t fit together. When I think about how I got to that bit of loopy ad lib, I realize that’s what I did: invented a contradiction. A mobile building. A fixed structure that isn’t.
So now I have to wonder, what’s a good way to get to that? And how exactly did I do it? This is the meta-process: when you ad lib something cool, look back on your own process. How did you get there? Can you make that a procedure? Can you mechanize that, at least in part, so someone else can reproduce it? You did it. Tell other people how. That’s how writing game texts works.
Oracles of course.
My brain kicks out some random shit and I try to make sense of it. That’s the frame we build this house on: some random crap that you have to make sense of. That’s the heart of every great Traveller session: how the hell can there be a population of billions with stone age technology on a world with no air? Don’t start with “that’s stupid”. Start with “how do we explain that?” That’s where creativity thrives. Don’t block, as the improv folks say. Make it work.
So to start with I want to emulate the random crap generator that’s in my head. I talked before about using oracles and the random noun generator and that’s the model.
Start with a couple of random words. For the game text we’ll call them “elements” and we’ll have some mechanism to deliver them. Probably they’ll be printed in the margin of the book so you can flip to a random page and get an oracle. That’s pretty much an exact model for my brain anyway. But for now here’s the start of the process: get two random words. For my new world those are “wild” and “wander”. Everything about this world is going to be about either wildness or wandering or both. If there are fixed structures they wander. If there are civilizations, they are wild.
And there’s clue two: find the contradiction and develop that. If your element is “water” start thinking about things that can’t be water and make them water. Hunt the contradictions. That’s where the meat is.
The next thing I did was draw. I want the players to immediately meet someone so that the world can be introduced through the eyes of someone who knows how it works. And whenever I do that I start drawing. So I drew this … person.
Obviously I’m not going to write a procedure that forces you to draw. That’s not practical. But at the heart of my instinct to draw were a couple of things: again I want an image. And I also want someone to meet, someone through whom the players can experience the world as a native. And so this is that person. But what can I tell you to do? And how did I get to this thing in the first place?
But maybe I’m missing the heart of this. Maybe the heart of this isn’t that I drew a cool insect guy. Maybe the heart is: create a non-player character to meet who illuminates the weirdness of this world. Yes, that’s what it is. That’s the next step. My personal process is to draw them first but that’s not the important part. Invent this character and then think about how they fit into this weird world. What does it imply about the culture? What does this character do from day to day? Is that typical (awesome, now we know a lot about the culture)? Is it weird? That’s awesome too because whatever it denies about the culture (making it weird) is just the complement of what the culture is. As long as the character is extreme one way or another, we can derive What People Here Do. At least some of them.
Obviously there will be more and more material but the important part is the meta part: if you do something intuitively then analyze it and figure out what a procedure might be for other people to replicate it. Maybe not your procedure exactly but one that gets close to it. Think hard about how you think hard and write it down.
brad j. murray 