Treasured Possessions: What and why, perhaps?

Oh hey, I was just thinking it had been a while and now I look back it turns out it's about six months since I last posted something here. Which tells you a couple of things: I don't fill up your inbox with nonsense, and also I only post when I've been thinking about stuff.

Well, that's not strictly true, I guess, I think about stuff all the time, but I mean thinking about writing something that someone else (if I'm lucky) might read.

I started writing Treasured Possessions over two years ago, and while it started off as a cross between a bad pun and a desire to try and make something that used cards instead of dice (because I realised I was resistant to the idea of using cards) it has developed a life of it's own and taken up inordinate amounts of thinking time, that I've enjoyed devoting to it.

All of which is to say that I took some decisions along the way about how I wanted the game to feel and what I hope people will discover in it's not-so-very-many pages. Some of that grew out of writing a setting for the game; Langwick for Dungeon23 and having to figure out what was happening in the area and why, but others were deliberate decisions about the game I want to play.

If you've not read anything about it before, Treasured Possessions is a rule-light game where you play spirits who inhabit the bodies of physical beings, such as villagers. The original thrust was to play spirits protecting a village and that idea is still in there, but it's much less hard-and-fast than it was originally. The basic rule booklet, at around 36 A5 pages is ready now, and I plan to release it shortly along with an introductory adventure, after another burst of play testing, just to be sure.

First attempt at some NPC cards for the residents of Langwick - I was happy enough to print a page out to see what they would look like in the flesh. I think that adding the underlining helps separate the areas. Each NPC has a keyword for how they appear, how they come across, what drives them and something that they are good at

So, the main thrusts of the game are (there are eight in case you're worried this is going to go on forever):

It should all work logically

I don't like loose ends. I don't like "but why x if y?" questions. I spent a lot of time figuring out how things fit together. While I was writing Langwick, I spent a lot of time wandering in the woods with my dog, figuring out how spirits and magic work together and why*. This changed the way the game worked and made the idea of wizards into something quite different. If you need to trap spirits to create magical items, then that frames you as a bad person from a spirit's perspective. It also makes magic items an opportunity to free a spirit, rather than a powerful freebie.

People are just people, not heroes

All of the villagers and NPCs are created using variations on the same set of tables. There aren't unnaturally strong or skilful options that can overwhelm everybody else. At its heart, this is a game about the lives and fates of normal people. While your spirit can jump from body to body, those bodies will accumulate scars if treated badly, a record of spirits putting them in harm's way.

There are no "evil" races, but there are some unpleasant individuals

OK, so being a wizard and trapping spirits is pretty bad, but there is no race of "evil humanoids" that you can feel good about killing or thwarting. Even the more chaotic and unpredictable creatures are usually reacting to their environment or how they have been treated. Beastmen are a good example, they are created by wizards (hello again, more bad press for wizards) and if they gain their freedom they are looking for somewhere to live. As magically created beings, they don't have a culture or civilisation to return to, so they can behave in unexpected ways that can cause a problem for people in their path.

Fighting is dangerous and uncertain

Because everyone is people and because saves are usually a skill value of 1-5 plus the value of a card, there's a large range of possible outcomes and you can be caught out by luck. I purposely chose this way to resolve saves because it means that you need to move the situation into your favour. Gaining advantage (draw two cards and use the higher) or taking a lucky break (Jokers are kept when drawn and can be used to change a draw that doesn't go in your favour) give the characters a hand up, but there are either uncertain or limited in numbers, so your luck will only hold out for so long. Serious wounds will reduce your ability to function, and even Minor wounds add up to incapacitate you eventually.

It should be easy to create the world during play

A few card draws generate an NPC from a set of tables. The expanded rules do likewise for generating a point crawl landscape, features and settlements. You could sit down with the rules and no prep and start playing quickly, generating the world around you and opportunities for adventure.

Lean into myths and folklore

I love myths and legends, I always have. I like learning new stuff and I enjoy googling my way around an interesting topic. So lots of the details draw their origins from folklore that you either already know, or something that you don't but that is wild enough to include because it makes things fun. From fairy folklore to Sumerian myths and a host of country-specific legends that are enticing, I've tried to load the game with things that struck me as being cool or interesting.

The rulebook should be easy to read

After years of working in public service organisations, it was drummed into me that any document should be easy to read. That means a larger font for legibility. I went with a 12 point serif font (Palatino) because it's easy on the eye. I would have gone larger, but keeping the page count down led me to find a happy place. As the new owner of bifocals, I am glad I took that decision.

There is a lot of white space in the rules. I think that relaxes the eye and lets the text breathe. Big margins also encourages you to pencil in notes or your own rulings, which can't be a bad thing, right?

Each page is one rule (or maybe two if they're short) and each rule is a maximum of one page. I have Iko of The Lost Bay to thank for that, it's such a simple and elegant idea and I think rewriting that rules that way really helped me to figure out my explanations.

No special materials are required to play

We don't all have sets of polyhedral dice, we don't even all have Jenga towers to hand (I wish I did, it's on my list of things I'd like) and so I made the choice that it was the rules and a deck of cards and nothing else. I spent a while considering whether cards were banned in more countries than dice (d6) and figured either were fine, I couldn't cover the whole world with either. But if (like me), you live a long way from a games shop and would prefer not to toss money to Amazon, then you're covered. The set of cards I use cost 1.50€, and they've lived through a couple of years of regular use. Full disclosure; I have three decks of cards shuffled together that I use so I don't need to reshuffle so often.

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As I've been writing this, I realised there are a lot of minor intentions in the game, but they'll keep for another day - they're more based on how I believe the world should work and perhaps make more of an appearance in Langwick where I was writing adventures. One of the biggest delights was play testing the rules and discovering that the players had a similar mindset. I can still vividly remember the uncertainty of whether or not to attack a giant spider because, after all, the characters had invaded it's burrow (to rescue someone), and it was just spidering.

*Right now we're walking and thinking about werewolves. I have a lot of ideas about werewolves and how they fit into human society.