According to Merriam-Webster, genre is “a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content.” Genre trappings are mostly the things in the “content” part of that definition: people, places, and things that help define the genre. While these trappings help us recognize which genre a story belongs to, very few (if any) stories incorporate all the trappings of their genre. Most super-hero stories include colorful costumes, but there are also super-hero stories about people who wear street clothes (Heroes, Unbreakable, and Hancock, to name three). You don’t have to come up with a complete list of which genre trappings appear in your game, but you do need to establish what fantastical genre trappings (advanced technology, magic or supernatural abilities, aliens and monsters, etc.) the story will include and whether any expected genre elements, like stock characters or distinctive costumes or props, are conspicuously missing.

There are a lot of standard fantasy genre trappings, and the overall tone and flavor of most fantasy worlds is heavily influenced by which trappings the creator chooses to include and how they’re presented. When considering genre trappings, the first step is to think about the source material and decide which elements made you want to run the game in the first place (and which ones you don’t particularly want to bother with). If the players have already started making their characters, their choices might also help you decide what genre elements you’re going to need to include. As you start choosing your genre trappings, consider what role they should play in the overall campaign. Are they a central feature of the game or just part of the backdrop? Knowing how important a genre trapping is likely to be will help you decide how much work you’ll need to put into detailing (and coming up with rules) for it. 

Most of the trappings for Guardians of Aetheria are genre standards, so the main thing we have to decide is which version of the genre standard we want to use. For example, are dragons (assuming they exist) ancient and powerful god-like beings, or are they more like really impressive flying horses? For most genre trappings, it’s probably best to start with a broad concept (like “magic” or “monsters”) and work out some ground rules before you start thinking about specific elements. Those ground rules will help give the world some consistency that will make it seem less like a random collection of cool ideas. 

Character Gimmicks

Traditional fantasy character gimmicks are grounded in the genre in the form of magical items, fantastic beasts, or supernatural/superhuman traits. King Arthur had Excalibur, Daenerys Targaryen had her dragons, and Raistlin had that whole “eyes that see only death” thing. The difference with He-Man (and many other cartoons) is that character gimmicks can’t stop at just making the character seem unique or special, they’ve also got to sell action figures. The sorts of gimmicks that can be incorporated into a cool toy led to all kinds of weird-ass characters with strange abilities that were as awesome and unique as they were inexplicable. Players in Guardians of Aetheria are free to go the safe route and make their Toy Gimmick a cool weapon or pet owlbear or whatever, but they’re strongly encouraged to come up their gimmick by coming up with a cool action figure feature. 

Science Fantasy Technology

In addition to all the typical fantasy props like swords and armor, most of our sources also include items that clearly appear (to the audience, at least) to be technological in nature. These often simply exist with no explanation or are presented as a form of magic. The society that the characters live isn’t advanced enough to make much distinction between magic and technology. They may recognize that a laser rifle and a magic sword are different kinds of “wondrous artifacts,” but both are equally mysterious and inexplicable to most people. Even the scholars/wizards who specialize in what we would consider (mostly based on appearance) to be technological artifacts use methods that have more in common with alchemy than engineering. They may know from trial and error that Contrivium (a mystical mineral that Deadlands fans will recognize as Ghost Rock with the serial numbers filed of) can be used as a power source, but they probably understand it as working more like blood or a magical sigil “powering” a spell than how we understand a battery powering a flashlight. The main rule for technology is that it has to be appropriately sci-fi pulpy. Your character can’t have a car, but he might have a land speeder. 

Magic

As those of you who have been to a Hex convention panel know, the “flash-bang” style of magic common in modern RPGs and video games has little or no precedent in real-world magical traditions. In this game, that’s not a problem. There are wizards, and the magic they use is functional, somewhat commonplace, and flash-bangy as hell. Other, subtler forms of magic almost certainly exist in the ficton, but when a typical Aetherian thinks “wizard,” he imagines someone who can throw glowing balls of mystical energy at his enemies. 

Non-Humans

Talislanta’s “no elves” rule applies to Aetheria, but anyone who’s seen an episode of He-Man knows that the characters certainly aren’t restricted to humans. I don’t think the cartoons ever specified whether characters like Beastman were unique creatures or members of a fantasy race, but Wizards has fairies and Thundar had moks, so there’s definitely a precedent for non-human species. Players are free to write their non-human characters off as mutants, but I’m not going to outlaw making them members of a larger tribe. The key word there is “tribe.” There are non-humans in the world, but none of them exist in large enough numbers to form nations or play a major role in world politics. Most non-human populatiions are either somewhat integrated with humanity or they exist in small and isolated groups. There aren’t any Dwarven Kingdoms or Elven Nations. In fact, there are no dwarves are elves, because my other rule is “No Traditional Fantasy Races.” The standard Tolkien/D&D races are definitely forbidden. Whether other races (fairies, minotaurs, whatever) are allowed will be determined on a case-by-case basis. “New” races that are influenced by traditional fantasy races (like Jesse’s “Snooks,” which are kind of a cross between dwarves and Sand People) are allowed if they’re interesting enough. 

Monsters

Monsters definitely exist in the world, but I want them to feel more like the monsters from mythology or sword & sorcery novels than the monsters in a typical RPG. There are definitely monster “races” like the demonlings (Guardians of Aetheria’s cannon fodder) and probably some trolls and fairies and other critters from mythology and folklore, but there also a lot of unique monsters (like The Minotaur or Medusa in Greek myth) as well as Conan style snake things and gorilla men that don’t even have names because nobody’s who’s seen them has lived to name them. Basically, there’s no Elminster going around classifying monsters and studying their ecological niche in this world. For the most part, they should be mysterious and weird and otherworldly. 

I’m still not sure what to do about dragons. Right now I’m leaning toward dumb giant lizards that look cool when you ride them into battle. 

Good and Evil

Aetheria is a world of Good and Evil and the heroes are unambiguously on the side of Good. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re paragons of virtue who always do the right thing. Heroes can be flawed and complicated and make bad decisions, but ultimately they must be decent people. This is not a game for sociopathic characters. The Han Solo range of moral ambiguity is probably the outer limit for PCs. On the flip side, most of the bad guys are capital-E Evil, at least on screen. They may be complicated and tortured and angsty in private, but the audience mostly sees them torturing people and burning villages.

And No Religion, Too

There are probably gods in Aetheria, and some of them may even have worshippers, but religion isn’t a factor in most people’s lives and churches don’t play a major role in Aetherian society. While are strong societal concepts of right and wrong, their basis is more philosophical than religious in nature. It’s more Jedi and Sith than believers and heretics. 

Next week we’re going to talk about Tone and Mood, and maybe some other stuff. 

Since setting is the foundation of most fictons, we’re going to start our design of the Guardians of Aetheria ficton there. Setting, as we all learned in English class, refers to the time and place where the story happens: Civil-War-era Texas, Middle Earth shortly after the Battle of Five Armies, or Earth-That-Was in its final days, for example. Sometimes all you need is the basic setting and maybe a more specific starting point. Everybody has a baseline idea of what (at least the genre version) of late 19th Century Texas was like, and Middle Earth is prominent enough in pop culture that most people know enough to get by even if they haven’t drudged through the books. Original worlds (and unexplored times/places from existing universes; all we know about Earth-That-Was is that it got used up, for example) require more work to get everyone on the same page. 

Our ficton’s setting is “present-day Aetheria,” but we don’t really know what either of those things mean. Since this is a fantasy game, we’ll start with “Aetheria.” Since this is a fantasy world, we’re eventually going to need map (it’s the law), but that will come later when I know enough about the world to tell Josh Burnett what to draw. Currently, the map consists of a world divided into three big sections: The Mordor-esque hellscape of Bloodgrave the Demon King, the blasted ruins of the Scarred Lands, and the Saturday-morning cartoon kingdoms where Aetheria is located. I’m picturing that list going from west to east, because I tend to put the frontier lands of any world I’m creating to the west. Maybe it’s an American thing. 

The first question we need to answer about the world is “what exactly is Aetheria?” So far I’ve been using it interchangeably to refer to the ficton, the “good kingdoms” (assuming there are more than one), and the kingdom the default PC homeland. That works fine for a Saturday morning cartoon where the main villain’s goal is indistinct “evil-doing” that doesn’t involve geopolitics, but since the over-arching plot of the game involves an army of Evil trying to take over the world, we’ll probably need to define our terms. My first instinct was to keep it simple and make Aetheria the sole kingdom of Good, but that seems boring. I don’t want to force a single culture (even a vague one) on the PCs, and I like the idea of exotic people and places that aren’t inherently dangerous like the Scarred Lands and the Demon King’s realm. Also, the idea several kingdoms putting aside their differences and joining forces to say “fuck this guy” when the Demon King’s armies start moving has more resonance and fits well thematically with all the World War 2 stuff in Wizards. 

Of course, if Aetheria is just one country and the PCs are the Guardians of Aetheria, were’ back to PC cultural homogeny. So I’ll hedge a little bit. Aetheria is a distinct country. In fact, it’s the most powerful country on the “Good” side of the map, which is one reason why the King of Aetheria is also the head of the Aetherian League, a loose confederation of mostly-sovereign nations set up to promote peace and prosperity among the enlightened kingdoms of the East. That’s the “Aetheria” the PCs are Guardianing for. They answer to the King of Aetheria, but he answers to the Council of Kings (at least as far as the Guardians and their activities are concerned). The capital Aetheria, Lighthaven (because this is the kind of ficton where names need to be on-the-nose or nonsense), is a center of learning, art, and culture, the proverbial Shining City on the Hill. The Kingdom of Aetheria conveniently borders the Scarred Lands and probably has a coastline where all sorts of interesting visitors from across the sea mingle with the locals.  

That’s probably enough about Aetheria itself to get started. We don’t need to know its imports and exports, political term limits, or most popular sexual positions unless a PC decides to be a merchant, politician, or whore. The rest we can come up with during play (with help from the players) or as we need them. The one thing we will need a bit more detail about is the Guardians themselves. Factions like the Guardians are probably technically genre trappings, but since the name of the game is Guardians of Aetheria, they’re also probably central to the setting, so it makes sense to try to pin them down here. You don’t become a Guardian of Aetheria by being born into it or working your way up from the mailroom. “Guardian” is a title given to those who have fought heroically or done a great service for the Aetherian League (so all our PCs start the game as recognized Heroes of the Realm(™)). Heroes who are inducted into the Guardians take an oath that technically binds them in service to the league, but unless there’s a major disaster or war, each member has a lot of control over their involvement with the group. Some go to the occasional meeting and use the title to pick up chicks, some sign on for missions or garrison duty when they need some extra cash or a place to stay, and others are lifers who spend most of their time working for the Guardians in some capacity. 

We’ll need to name some of the other nations in the Aetherian League and maybe come up with a few details about some of them (especially those that border Aetheria). We’ll get to that a little later. For the time being, let’s move the the central section of the map, which I’ve already named The Scarred Lands. Thanks to their location and being littered with all kinds of ready-made Adventures of the Week, The Scarred Lands are almost guaranteed to be a recurring setting for the game. 

A Long Time Ago, the area now called The Scarred Lands were the home of an advanced civilization with powerful magic and wonderous inventions (your basic Atlantis-type place, but above sea level). Eventually, the kingdoms and city-states of the area warred with one another, unleashing insanely powerful weapons that destroyed everything and wrecked the land. Now the place is a wasteland dotted with ruined cities, wracked by earthquakes and other natural disasters, and home to monsters, brigands, mutants, and other unsavory types. The ruined cities are of course filled with powerful magic, lost technology, and ancient treasures, including valuable Contrivium (which we’ll get to in the post about genre trappings), making it a place of interest to both the Aetherians and Bloodgrave the Demon King. As with Aetheria, we’ll need some more details before the game starts, but for now we just need a flavor, and that flavor is pretty much “great danger and fabulous prizes” 

The third section of our map, far to the west, is the home of our series Big Bad, Bloodgrave the Demon King, and is thoroughly Modor-rific. Since the PCs are unlikey to end up there any time soon (if ever; there’s an excellent chance Bloodgrave will come to them), we don’t need to go into a lot of detail. We just need to know that it’s chock-full of misery and death and there are probably swamps and volcanoes and man-eating monsters everywhere. Otherwise, all we really need is a name. Let’s go with on-the-nose here and call it Nefaria. 

We’ve probably got enough to get going, but it wouldn’t hurt to come up with a few places of interest that we can toss out for flavor and use to fill in the map when the time comes. We don’t necessarily need any details, just some evocative names and maybe a few details to give us a starting point. We can develop things more as they come up in the game (or when good ideas strike us). Here’s a quick list of possibilities:

1. The Plains of Bone
2. The Forest Kingdom of Arboria
3. Kargoth, City of Ten Thousand Swords
4. The Shattered City (Scarred Lands)
5. The Island of the Sea King
6. Dalmaria, The Shining Kingdom
7. Gianthead Keep
8. Winterhome, land of the Ice Folk
9. The Spired City of the Sorcerer King of Arcadia
10. The Broken Kingdom
11. The Begorian Highlands 
12. Ortellia (commonly known as “The Land of Decadence”)

That gives us a basic overview of the world, but what about the “time” part of setting? Since any Aetherian reckoning of time is going to be meaningless, we have to compare it to known times from our world or other fictons. At first, it seems like a typical fantasy world, but there’s also a post-apocalypse element to the ancient cities of the Scarred Lands. There was obviously a long Dark Age after they fell, but humanity (at least in the east) has managed to crawl back up onto two legs and form a medieval-ish society. There is a lot of amazing ancient (and some more recently invented) technology floating around, but the distinction between technology and magic is extremely vague (thus “science-fantasy). So it’s somewhere in the “Thor movie Asgard” era, but more influenced by Heavy Metal than Jack Kirby. 

Next week we’ll start adding genre trappings. 

Once you’ve got an idea of the basic premise of the game and who the characters are going to be, it’s time to start figuring out what kind of world we’re going to need to accommodate them. As those of you who have bought just about any Hex supplement ever know, we like to call this world a “ficton.” I’ll just take the definition from QAGS 2E: “‘Ficton’ is a term coined by science fiction author Robert Heinlein. It means ‘fictional universe.’ Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, Frank Miller’s Sin City, and Kevin Smith’s View-Askewniverse are all examples of fictons. A story’s ficton combines genre conventions and setting details to create a set of “rules” that governs the environment and probabilities of a story. The ficton describes what sorts of things are (and are not) allowed to happen or exist within the story. Stories can have the same world and genre without having the same ficton. For example, both Scream and Nightmare on Elm Street are slasher-type horror movies with a modern-day America setting, but they exist in completely different fictional universes. The main divergence is that the Nightmare ficton includes blatantly supernatural elements not found in the Scream ficton.” 

[For those of you playing the Hex Games drinking game, that’s 1 drink for shameless self-promotion, 1 drink for defining “ficton,” and one drink each for references to Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, Kevin Smith movies, and Wes Craven, plus a bonus drink for specifically mentioning Scream. Whether or not you want to count Sin City as a Robert Rodriguez reference is between you and your liver.] 

When I create a ficton, I start with what I know and try to figure out what else I’m going to need to know to actually run a game set in that ficton. At first these things are obvious: if you’re running a fantasy game, you need to know how magic works; if you’re running a Fast & The Furious game, you need rules for car chases and stunts; and if you’re running a Guy Ritchie game you’ve got to come up with a bunch of character names that are simultaneously dumb as hell and cool as shit. As you start pinning things down, each new thing you know about the ficton will introduce a whole new set of questions. As things get more detailed, you’ll have to start making value judgements about which of these new questions need to be answered before you can run the game. Just because something exists in the game world doesn’t mean you have to know how it works. Focus on the things you’re going to have to know to make the game work. Overdesign is bad. It also wastes time that could be used focusing on the important stuff.

In Cinemechanix, I break the idea of a ficton down into five core elements: Setting, Genre Trappings, Dramatic Rules, Tone and Mood, and Influences. Since that particular order of elements puts the most central and easily-recognizable aspects first, it works well for describing what a ficton is or presenting a finished ficton to an audience. However, since all of those elements are interrelated actual design is a lot messier. So you’ll probably be jumping from one the other a lot as you try to pin down what your ficton’s all about. Trying to describe that would lead to a messy series of blog posts, though, so I’m going to keep the discussion of each element self contained and go in whatever order seems natural as this thing unfolds. Screw parallelism. 

Since it’s short, let’s go ahead and get influences out of the way. Every story borrows from those that have come before it, and admitting where you’re stealing from is a great way to help make sure everyone’s on the same page. Influences are often a handy shorthand to describe other elements of the ficton. For example, the group might decide that they want magic that works like it does in the Harry Potter books, fight scenes like a John Woo movie, or spaceships that look like the ones in Firefly. Citing influences can be especially helpful when discussing tone and mood. If you’re playing a game about killer sharks, establishing whether it’s influenced more by JAWS or Sharknado goes a long way in making sure everyone knows what to expect. 

If I had to describe Guardians of Aetheria in mash-up form, I’d probably go with “He-Man meets Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards.” Those are the two central influences, but 80s fantasy animation and art in general are going to be sources of inspiration. I’ll also probably borrow from non-animated fantasy fiction, especially pulp-era fantasy like Conan and trashy 80s fantasy movies like Beastmaster and the Deathstalker series. Since there’s an ancient ruined civilization right in the middle of the map, there will probably be some nods to Gamma World and various post-apocalypse stories as well. The war between Good and Evil that’s brewing can’t help but be influenced by Tolkien and Star Wars. If you made a soundtrack CD for the game and put it in a jewel case, cover art by Frank Frazetta would spontaneously appear. 

Next week I’ll talk about the setting. 

Since the whole idea behind Cinemechanix is that you use the core rules to create the kind of game you want to play, it seems like it might be a good idea to go through a sample campaign design. I keep going back and forth on whether I want to continue the Sample of Play Theater examples in the book beyond the rules section, in part because eventually things boil down to the GM figuring things out. Unless I want to write awkward monologues, the whole script/play format breaks down and framing everything with “and then Bianca decides…” gets tedious fast (I know, I tried it in So You’ve Decided To Run A Role-Playing Game). So for now, instead of trying to figure out if/how to include a detailed design example in the rulebook, I’m going to do it here and see if it turns into anything useful. Since I still need to write the Elevator Pitch for Guardians of Aetheria, the game used in the SOPT examples in the books, I can kill two birds with one stone. Or kill one bird and just leave the other here because it’s unpublishable. Whichever ends up working. 

The first step in designing a game is coming up with a premise. The initial premise for Guardians of Aetheria came from frequent Hex writer/artist Joshua LH Burnett (of Funkadelic Frankenstein on the Mean Streets of Monstertown and Leopard Women of Venus fame). Years ago, he proposed a QAGS game based on He-Man style cartoons from the 80s. The hook was that your character’s Gimmick (as in the QAGS stat) had to be based on the action figure gimmick (as in the special whatever that made kids want to buy the toy). So Ram Man’s Gimmick would be “Spring-loaded Legs” or whatever. Josh got some writing done on the game, but eventually lost interest and moved on to other things. Some time later, Leighton and I decided we needed to to more games like Laser Ponies and got Josh’s blessing to maybe steal the basic idea of the He-Man game at some point in the future. That didn’t happen either, at least until I decided that it would make a good sample game for Cinemechanix.  

Josh’s initial idea was (I think) going to be a straightforward He-Man “homage,” but I was a more casual fan (I watched the cartoon, but didn’t have any of the action figures) and there are a lot of other things I like that are He-Man adjacent enough to cram in, so I decided to start fresh with just the action figure Gimmick thing and see what I came up with. The first round of refinement of the “He-Man Gimmick and other things I like” premise came while I was writing the first Sample of Play Theater. I’m going to just cut and paste that. Basically, Bianca is me brainstorming the game and all the other characters are me second-guessing myself.

Bianca: Ok guys, I’ve got a lot of ideas floating around in my head for a fantasy game, but it’s kind of a mixture of different things and I haven’t entirely worked out how they fit together, so I’m not exactly sure where to start. 

Jesse: Start with the simplest you can boil it down to and we’ll go from there. 

Bianca: 80s science fantasy cartoon meets high fantasy as imagined by Frank Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi. 

Zoe: Who? 

Luke: Frazetta’s an artist, Bakshi does animation. Have you ever seen Heavy Metal? 

Zoe: The one with the big green orb? Yeah, I liked that. 

Luke: [handing over his tablet] Well, I don’t know if either of them actually had anything to do with Heavy Metal, but they’re both Heavy Metal-adjacent. Here’s an image search of some Frazetta stuff you can scroll through, and I’ve got a DVD of Bakshi’s movie Wizards that you can borrow if you want.  

Zoe: [scrolling through images] Hey, I’ve seen some of these before! That’s Conan, and I’ve seen this one on some metal CD my brother used to have. So kind of dark fantasy?

Bianca: Kind of. I want the part of the world controlled by evil to be grimdark as hell, and I want all of the action to have that kind of “riding into battle on my dragon while ‘Immigrant Song’ plays in the background” epic feel, but I also want there to be a good kingdom that’s almost Saturday Morning Cartoon light and sunshine, with a wise and beloved ruler and prosperity and shiny happy peasants holding hands. 

Jesse: Ok, so is the stark contrast between good and evil where the high fantasy comes in, or were you thinking more elves and dwarves and dragons?

Bianca: No. Well, maybe dragons, but the characters are straight from 80s cartoons, with weird powers that can be turned into gimmicks to sell toys. The high fantasy stuff is story backdrop. I don’t want a story about the heroes foiling Skeletor’s evil scheme every week, I want a story that builds toward all-out war between good and evil, with earth-shattering battles and cities in ruins and whole new wastelands created.  

Sparky: Can my guy come with slime? 

Everyone: What?  

Sparky: My toy gimmick. I want a character that comes with slime.  

Bianca: Why not? Actually, doing character creation in action figure terms might be a good idea. Every character could have a toy gimmick and a piece of equipment that comes with the toy. 

Jesse: You said you want to build toward all-out wars. How far in does the game start? Are the characters marching off to meet the evil armies, or are we still safe and secure in our Hobbit holes? 

Bianca: Somewhere in between. There’s been an uneasy peace for generations, so there aren’t even any real rumors of war yet, but the PCs are heroes of the kingdom.

Sparky: What are we heroes for? If there hasn’t been a war with the evil empire lately and the kingdom is all sunshine and rainbows, it doesn’t sound like there’s much hero-ing to do. Is “hero of the kingdom” a hereditary title or is there a prophecy or something? 

Bianca: Good point. I think the PCs should be heroes who have been tested, but you’re right that there needs to be some kind of conflict for that to happen. How about this? There’s a big no-man’s land between the two kingdoms that was decimated in the last war. There’s powerful magic and sci-tech buried in the destroyed cities, so there are always agents from both sides as well as scavengers out there looking for useful artifacts. There are also monsters and mutants lurking there that occasionally raid the edges of the kingdom and need to be hunted down. So let’s say that the PCs are part of whoever does that kind of thing. Maybe a knighthood? 

So yeah, king of contrived and there are a few outright lies there for the sake of providing a good game example (I knew about the toy gimmick going in, but making it seem like Sparky’s idea better illustrates the design goals of Cinemechanix), but it gets the basic point across and gives us a starting point. 

For most games, the standard seems to be for the GM to come to the table with a reasonably (and sometimes extensively) fleshed-out idea and the players to build characters that fit in with whatever the GM gives them. In my experience, though, the best games are ones like in the example where the GM has only a vague concept and the players help build it up. It gives everyone a sense of ownership and generates a wider mix of ideas than the GM is likely to come up with on her own. 

The next Sample of Play Theater in the book moves directly into character creation without any attempt to pin down the Ficton in more detail, and in my experience that’s the best way to go about it. Character creation will answer some of the questions left unanswered in the initial brainstorming session, raise some new questions, and give you a good idea of what kinds of things you’ll need to focus on for the game you’ll actually be playing. You don’t necessarily have to fully create the characters--in fact, you may not be able to if your game will need “crunchier” character creation rules--but you need to have a good idea of who the PCs are, what they’re doing, and how they fit into the game world and the group. Once you’ve got that, you can start defining your ficton in more detail. We’ll get to that next week.