Play testing is important. Why? Well, you might have made some broken thing that doesn't work. Or it might be balanced but boring. Finding faults or omissions is a fantastic argument for play testing, probably the first one you'd think of, at least as you're initially writing rules?
On the other hand, you might have written something that allows exciting options you never foresaw. You want to see those, don't you, those little gems of what-if-I-did-this?
Which brings us to tonight. Last time I was playing through the rules for combat, Alpha had got poor Olive Hunter killed. Alpha decided to take on three bandits without help and that was a recipe for disaster. To be fair, Olive did herself proud, she incapacitated one bandit and wounded another, but it was too much and she succumbed to multiple attackers and without any aid, was doomed.
Alpha, spewed from the host body, realised that one of the bandits (let's call him Crispin) was a good match and managed to possess his body. Surprising the other wounded bandit, Crispin incapacitated him and was able to finish off both incapacitated bandits in short order..
What now? Well, Alpha can take Crispin's body back to town and turn himself in as a bandit. A quick battle-of-wills as Crispin definitely isn't keen on this idea, but Alpha has much stronger willpower and keeps the upper hand. After Alpha leaves his body, Crispin will regain control but by that point he is safely behind bars.
It's safe to say that, until the situation arose, I hadn't thought about possession as a tactic. It doesn't fit with the overall game to go hopping from body to body willy-nilly, and I might want to find a way to discourage it as a go-to approach, but it definitely has potential as an unusual resort.
In other news, I've started to put a few ethereal creatures into the menagerie. Thinking about well-trodden folklore creatures from the perspective of spirits is an interesting exercise. A wight becomes the spirit of a powerful lord or ruler who is bound to their physical remains because of the importance they placed upon those items in life. They will jealously guard against any (perceived) attempt to loot their grave-goods.
A zombie is a spirit that has somehow managed to inhabit a body that is already dead. How they manage that is something that needs some exploration I think, but having done so, they are stuck in the body and cannot get out, as death is the usual trigger for release. I initially wrote that destruction of the body would release the spirit, but then zombies would surely hurl themselves off cliffs or into fires as soon as the animating spirit wanted release, wouldn't they? Perhaps the act of possessing a dead body so exhausts the spirit that it is reduced in power and unable to think coherently (zombies aren't noted for deep thought, after all)?
I retyped the rules so far into a clean text document. It's really helped me to organise things. Now there is a player's section and a referee's section. I might well split the referee's section into the bits you need to play the game and the bits you need to generate the world, but at the moment most of what I've got in is the generation tools as most of the rules-to-play are in the player's section, as you might expect.
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