I’m kind of obsessed with this article over on the excellent Indie Game Reading Club. It’s a guest post by Jason Morningstar in which he describes his process for throwing together a game in an hour. And I don’t mean prepping for a session, I mean soup to nuts all the mechanics and everything, done in 60 minutes.
This post is more or less a love letter to that article. Here’s how my playgroup did that and what we learned.
The deeper I get into this hobby, the more vibes become everything to me.
Vibes are just as important to a game as the rules. Rules moderate your story / adventure / experience as you tell / navigate / experience it, but vibes guide what everyone brings to the table before a single rule kicks in. A beautiful picture can inspire the mood of a whole session or campaign. The design of a pdf or even just an itch page can tell every player what kind of character to think up when called to. Is this a mechs with emotions evening, or are we descending step by step into a scary murderhole? Either’s fine by me, we should just pick ahead of time, and the Pinterest board the GM put together half an hour ago might get us all on the same page…
There’s a (potentially apocryphal) story about the design of Apocalypse World that says that the first thing Vincent Baker designed for the game was the Angel playbook. (Or possibly Brainer? I’ve heard both.) Before what dice you were rolling, before the basic moves, before any kind of MC-facing mechanics, Vincent started with some evocative stats and abilities. Before he knew what “open your brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom” meant, those words existed on a page. From there, he and Meguey built the game around what that playbook would need to function instead of starting big picture and gradually filling in.
Now, I’m sure that first playbook was iterated on later. Maybe it was completely revised. I’m sure a lot of that game existed before the fifth playbook was written. Maybe all of this is a lie! But I think there’s something very useful about the idea of starting a game’s design with its character sheet and/or playbooks and building out…
On this week’s episode of the Dice Exploder podcast, I talked with Michael Elliot (@notwriting in most places) about Antiquarian Adventures. And while editing it, I was reflecting on our discussion on conflict in games and stories. We talked about how providing mechanical motivations for players to lean into conflict is a great thing to propel your story go forward. Failure and disaster are great because they give your story something to react to. Without conflict, story is boring, and at that point what are we even doing here?
...right? Is that true?
I love so much of what this game is doing. Its vibes are immaculate. It has… just… so much, for better and worse. I wish my experience playing it had been more satisfying.
Apocalypse Keys is designed by Rae Nedjadi and published by Evil Hat. It’s “the Hellboy RPG” — a game in which you play monstrous humanoids investigating world-ending supernatural mysteries while you balance your humanity against your monstrosity. (It’s gay.) It kickstarted fall of 2022, and a full version of the rules was released to backers during the campaign.
Because I’m shy on twitter, I never talked about the first RPG I ever finished designing: Space Train Space Heist. But I recently remembered how much fun it was, back when I was playing a lot of forum mafia, to read and write debriefs on a given game’s design and playthrough.
I thought today, while STSH is part of this itch bundle of Forged in the Dark (FITD) games, would be a fun time to revisit it. So let’s do it! Here’s a post mortem, retrospective, “director’s commentary,” and/or essay about the design of STSH.