So, I got distracted by thinking about room tiles. I'm not even sure why or how that started. Before I knew it, I'd drawn a page of rooms and another of intensely boring straight tunnels and also some doors. I'm not even thinking about playing anything that would need them, so I really have no idea why, but I have quite enjoyed it, so that's not a bad outcome, is it?
I've been thinking more about this game about possessing people. I'm very aware that some people will be put off by the topic and I'm also trying to think more about the story as well as the mechanics. How, then, can we think about a nice form of possession that might also drive a game with more feeling and thinking? One of the things I love about our Mausritter game is that the characters care about the community around them, about what's happening to other mice (and other creatures) and about how to assist. As someone who last ran a game around the turn of the millennium, it's actually really enjoyable to run a game that is less "kill the bad guy, get the treasure". It's also something of a learning curve, but I'm also really enjoying the opportunity to create stories with my players as we explore what their characters are driven to do.
Back to 9/10ths of the Law and "fun possession".One of the early things I did, was to generate a set of 52 people - the idea being you could draw a card to decide who was present at the start of the game and that would be the pool of people to possess. But who are those 52 people? I was thinking they were the inhabitants of a village (medieval? settlers? post apocalyptic?), but maybe the characters (spirits) are actually assigned to look out for that village, so those 52 people are their people and as well as them being available to be inhabited, they need to be protected?
There's a nice knife edge. On the one hand, the people are the resource you're going to use to interact with the physical world, but on the other hand they (the village) are the reason why you're here at all, and you need to look out for them. Now you've got a reason not to use them as cannon fodder and attack things until they die, just to possess the next body and do the same again.
In the absence of anyone to play test this with, I need to write something to allow me to generate situations to play through. I did use the card dungeon tiles to create a wandering monster table situation and see how one spirit fared against an array of dogs, a bear and a bog toad. No, I'm not sure what a bog toad is, but I know that it has poisonous skin and you need to be done in three rounds after touching it or you will be incapacitated.
It was interesting - it threw up a couple of things I hadn't really considered about creatures (there's no point in a Giant Rat [Strength 0 / Skill 0] because it should already be dead, make it a [Strength 0 / Skill 1] creature instead - then any damage, major or minor, will finish it off).
It all made me wonder if a spirit can possess a creature - if I specify suits to traits and say that a Dog is Strength 1 (Heart), Skill 1 (Heart) then that opens the possibility of taking over a creature if one of its traits is in Hearts.
And so we go on, with more tweaking and expansion, more trying things out, more trying to create a coherent story as I think that's a lot of what's needed to turn the mechanics into a game. When a thought occurs t me, I like to write it in the working document as a question to myself - 'what happens if the mind tries to cast the spirit out?', 'what happens if the spirit is left without a body?', 'what is this idea for?' - the last is a win/lose/draw chart of suits, a bit like alchemical elements - one suit beats another but is beaten by another and some result in a draw. 'What does a draw mean when a mind attempts to eject a spirit?'. You get the idea. It works for me because those questions pop up during the day and I get to mull them over, often while installing plumbing.
In other news, I really need to get to grips with the Mausritter halloween adventure if I'm going to do one, and the DURF jam is well underway. I *think* I'm re-writing part of the possession rules from 9/10ths as a guide to playing spirits in DURF. I might also finish off my first DURF masterpiece*, The Cheese Dream Emulator, which uses tables to generate the creatures of nightmares, as you might...
*Masterpiece could be entirely the wrong word. Maybe go for 'tiny, tiny book' and that should cover it. Sixteen pages on one sheet of A4, cut and stapled.
The soundtrack to this week has been (and will continue to be) Sounds of Andromeda by Zé Burnay. I have been a fan of good ambient music since I started my teacher training back in 2018 (I listened to Brian Eno's ambient music and Omrr's evocative ambient-with-field-recordings as I studied maths into the night). Zé is also (mainly?) a graphic illustrator and I picked up a Portuguese copy of his fantastic book Andrómeda in Porto. The drone/ambient he has created goes so well with the story and also is a beautiful background against which to work. I'm about half way through the book, eking it out and translating parts as I go to check I am understanding correctly (or where I don't quite understand). I can't explain why, but I believe that I feel the story much more keenly in my adopted tongue. In some way, understanding each panel is like unlocking a gift, and makes me intensely happy. Track 5, "The House" is playing as I type and it is haunting and beautiful in equal measure.
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