Hey y’all! This is my first OSR blog post, which is super cool!
The current concept is that players act as the elders or nobles of a settlement. As a classics major, my Appendix N inspirations are Gordon Childe (“The Urban Revolution”), Marcel Mauss (The Gift), and Lewis Mumford (The Myth of the Machine). Throw in some Freud, Marx, and Lacan for good measure because they’re helpful to contextualize the game mechanics and their design.
This is 100% an experimental game to see how far the principles of OSR can be taken, especially outside of the original context of dungeoneering/adventuring games. I talk about this in my original post.
I can’t wait to hear y’all’s thoughts! This is going to be super fun.
I did one brainstorming session where I organized turns according to the seasons–Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer–where each one has its own procedures. As you can see, it’s definitely a bit much.
My first reaction after looking back and realizing what I had written was “Damn, I don’t wanna do that shit!” This is absolutely too eurogamey, and the only things that provide resolution through roleplay are the encounter rolls that have yet to be elaborated on. This means most of the conflict is between players with their collaboration being limited to combating outside forces. Although I think the game concept itself has an unavoidable political aspect to this (which I think will be fun as hell), there is no external conflict here.
It also doesn’t do a good job of presenting the option between risk/reward and safety/nothing, since it is basically just a numbers game. First off, you’ll need cards or meeples to play this because otherwise your “character sheet” will be super messed up from writing and erasing. Second, it’s too much math on the spot. I don’t think it necessarily needs abstraction of resources (I think Food and Goods are two decent categories of things) as much as it definitely needs abstraction of processes.
So, I’m going to change gear into more RPG style abilities and rolls. I like the idea of Food as an expendable resource to convert into valuables or to force good results. For example, if you have to roll above your Population value to avoid Starvation, you add Food to make up the difference and still succeed. I might also have to reconsider the role of players and to what extent they act independently, since in this own version they basically each managed their own village. I still like the idea of a Commander that acts like the caller and who can make large-scale decisions.
I also want monument building to be the XP engine. Ideally, you want to invest labor that you don’t need for food into monuments so that people aren’t standing around doing nothing. Maybe this costs food per worker that you conscript. Which means, it’s really more like 1 Food = 1 XP for every unit of food invested into monument building (which is basically a waste of resources, like carousing). You can exploit villagers to extract more Food–though what does this look like?–or force outside settlements to send you tribute and slaves etc. More spitballing!
This is super interesting! Do things like libraries count as monuments? What about supporting a knight and a squire? Food = Time = Effort = Food so tracking everything from Food is fine.
I’d probably start with a big list of physical encounters (wolves in the forest), social encounters, and maybe a catch-all spiritual/mystical/political encounters? Each one will end up going badly if they aren’t resolved, but aren’t bad right now.
In my current “draft” (an open notepad file), I’m going to list every action as costing 1 Food! I’m thinking each player gets to take one action associated with a free clan per season, so everyone gets the chance to spend 1 Food except maybe for the Commander if that role is still around.
Right now, I’m defining each suit of cards (Diamonds, Clubs, Hearts, Spades) as being good for particular tasks. Diamonds are good at farming, clubs at fighting, spades at foraging/gathering, and hearts at something else–who knows! That way, as an action someone could trade out one type of card for another as if they were training them. And that could cost 1 Food
So on that note, using a card to invest in a monument is specifically going to represent a waste of resources. A monument is a social construction as much as a physical one, whose function is to contain the social surplus (literally in the sense of how palaces would act as granaries, and symbolically in how much coordinated effort was required to make them). So, I think it would be appropriate if monuments also corresponded to increased capability to stockpile food/resources and thus support more people.
And this is all assuming I stick with cards! I think having suits and numeric values offers a good amount of granularity, maybe the number represents something like AC.
Ohhh I like that! It would be fun to use something like clocks for this Like, problems that are left unsolved accumulate and even get worse. Maybe each card in the deck can correspond to an encounter too, where the numbers act as the common comparator (like AC).
I can see a simple combat system where clubs beat non-clubs or else the higher rank wins, comparable to the Avalon Hill Civilization board game. If you don’t have any individual cards strong enough to beat an enemy, you can combine them but that means you won’t be able to use those cards for other actions that turn. But will combat cost food or be a freebie? What if not being able to use that card for the season or year is enough a cost? No idea!
Great read! I really enjoyed Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night of This Cold Winter as a simulation of a town on the edge of failure. Your idea of replacing the core gameplay loop of dungeon crawling with a sedentary town is really cool.
Some of the ideas I had reading through the blog and the posts:
Could you combine good seasons (spring, summer, fall) into one sort of standard good season? This might help reduce the amount of bookkeeping. Every season gain 1 Food for every 2 Peasants, every player consumes a food, etc.
Could some of the other bookkeeping be applied to a table? In any given season you might have Nobles consume Tribute or get frustrated, or generate a new clan for two food, or Feed a Clan.
A thought towards maintaining risk/reward was the video/board game Reigns. In that you have to balance your economic, social, religious, and monetary(?) aspects of your domain. If you go too far in either direction (good or bad), they overthrow you.
Monuments build up xp, but could controlling special resources (for building monuments) or defending yourself from other towns (or attacking them) work similarly?
You could potentially check out the boardgame ‘The King’s Dilemma’, it’s a legacy game with a lot of elements similar to what you’re thinking (I think? I’ve never played it myself). Here’s a BGG link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/245655/kings-dilemma
I didn’t read the previous thread yet, but I just wanna throw some ideas up! I really like the deck of cards as a tool. It’s like a d6, something every household has, very iconic. I also dig monuments for XP, and 1 food = 1 action = 1 XP. Very osr!
I’ll be repeating your ideas in my post, and adding my own, so here goes…
The way I imagine the playing cards working is they represent a single new person in your town, or a newly trained professional. You draw a card each “round” (season, year?), and that a card represents a single person entering your service.
The suit is the specialisation, the number is their… proficiency? Roll a d12 under this number or lose the person when the card is used. So you’d have your “9 of Clubs” badass hunter you could reliably send on a hunt. But if they roll badly, they are wounded, or grow too old to hunt, or whatever. A “1 of…” is one-use only, while a King (13) or Queen (12) is never removed, unless by a special circumstance.
You’d be making decisions on which of your underlings to send on a particular mission - will you send a seasoned pro for a risk-free completion or risk losing a medium valued one, and save the pro for a more vital mission. Of course the tasks they perform can be anything from farming, building, teaching, making babies (new villagers?) etc.
I think you’d actually have more people in your village than you have cards. The cards are just the ones who “work for you” or have skills that apply to the particular problems your village has to deal with.
Oh I actually love the idea of turning this into a table! I think I’m going to cut out loyalists/nobles since reading over the rules, they were too complicated. I’m just going to have players be able to use available cards to make actions each turn. But, tables for more specific mechanics sound really good.
Since the seasons are going to have less specific mechanics I might end up combining them into two or three total, but I also think it’s nice to have “break” turns where you don’t have to do mandatory bookkeeping.
I absolutely love Reigns!! That game is great. If I choose to abstract mechanics any further, I might resort to events like that to determine internal (and external!) conflict. However, I wouldn’t do something directly like Reigns where you shift sliders around–instead, events will be more looming over and drop at certain moments if not preemptively taken care of.
Monuments = XP are gonna be my one hardline goal actually! I’m not going to ascribe leveling/XP to any measure of success that I inscribe onto urban history. If a city has enough excessive wealth/power that they can spend it on superfluous projects, they’re retaining that wealth/power well. I will also introduce something to where monument construction is necessary to maintain increasingly more/complex production.
My worry is that cards representing individuals, even special individuals among those unrepresented in the background, would be a little too involved. Then too, I don’t want this game to focus on those who are outstanding enough to be represented. I want the players to feel the pressure of the masses while organizing and managing them for their purposes.
I think I’ve decided to use cards for random mechanics too, to compare against the rank of the card used by the player! That way there’s a consistent theme going and some level of predictability with what cards are out and which aren’t. Then too, I can avoid using special dice and this game is easier for people to print and play
I wanted to edit my reply to say this is totally cool and what I want to go for!!!
Thank you for the recommendation! I really like the slow decision making this game has, and it would be super cool to add a roleplaying dimension to that. I haven’t been able to watch the play video yet, but I will soon as I’m home! I’ll probably refer to it in another blog post
Here’s an update post where I explore how to abstract population and player actions, as well as how to handle success and failure through card comparisons.
I am trying to decide whether these mechanics are harsh or not harsh enough! And I want to explore negative space in the rules, which is where the OSRness really shines through: for players to avoid the rules and come up with creative solutions. If y’all have any suggestions or input on that I would love to hear!
Update: People have talked about how an important aspect of OSR is how every system plugs into the same canon of dungeons and modules and so on. This is my attempt to approach that, since I agree that it’s an important aspect of OSR as it exists in the DND context, and that “portability” in general is desirable. However, I think that this facet is distinct from OSR as a playstyle.
I definitely think a police procedural would be more readily OSR style than whatever the hell I’m doing, though!
This is my first OSR blog post, which is super cool!
This is going to be super fun.