Eclectic Bastion Jam Project: Maximum Recursion Depth, or Sometimes the Only Way to Win is to Stop Playing

Content Creation
#1

I’m working on a game for the Eclectic Bastion Jam based on my setting Maximum Recursion Depth, or Sometimes the Only Way to Win is to Stop Playing (initial post, premise explained).

I’m running a one-shot of it with some friends tomorrow and I’m really looking forward to it!

It’s mostly Into the Odd with a bit of Electric Bastionland and Tenra Bansho Zero, this draft explains it in more detail and this spreadsheet has the first four Poltergeist Forms, which are somewhat equivalent to Failed Careers in Electric Bastionland.

If you don’t want to follow the links, they’re called Ghost in the Mirror, Pyramid Shining Brightly, Afterbirth of the Broken Machine Dragon, and Crashing Rocket Nixie, and if that doesn’t sound intriguing to you then I don’t know what to tell you.

I had shared some stuff in the Eclectic Bastion Jam post but had not shared these four Poltergeist Forms. I would definitely be interested to hear peoples comments, questions, or suggestions about the setting, the mechanics, the Poltergeist Forms, etc.

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#2

I posted this in the eclectic bastion jam community page as well, but I just ran a “one-shot” (it’s going to slip into a second session) and it went really well! Granted it’s a group I’ve played with before and people who have very similar sensibilities as me so it was stacked in my favor, but it basically played out as a best case scenario of what I was expecting, so I’m really happy about it. For the most part the mechanics worked well; I’m sure they could be refined further but the core of it worked well. The players were able to understand the abilities and the karma system, and I really liked how an encounter could be framed either as a Save challenge or a “Combat” and how that affects how things play out, that was probably the stand-out part of it imo even if someone were not at all interested in the setting or the karma system.

I was able to explain the system, the setting, and use the roll tables to create the characters with them, all in about 45 minutes, and they came up with some brilliant character ideas given the way the rolls built their characters out. It really makes me think this is a good system and a good setting, so I just need to put it all together and write it in a way that conveys what I was able to convey in person with them.

2 Likes
#3

I know there’s way too many in the way of systems but of course I’m going to make another system —

  • it’ll be D6 only with harm lookup à la Dungeoneer
  • stress tracks up against stats
  • saves made by rolling 2D6+stress
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#4

Ever since Cypher System / Numenera I’ve always liked the idea of stress / HP for each attribute, in the same way that I prefer doing attribute Saves rather than having separate Save attributes. I guess technically separate stress for each attribute is more complicated than a single HP track, but it is still easy and intuitive, and I think more satisfying than generalized HP and opens up more possibilities. HP is nominally supposed to be an abstraction, but I think people rarely leverage it to its full potential, so separating it out by ability, it’s still an abstraction, but with a bit of direction for how best to leverage that fact within a given context.

#5

Yeah I’m lifting a lot from Resistance System games like Heart as much as I am looking back here. It’ll feel odd, but hopefully not more odd than no to-hits