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I’m still recovering from OMGCon, which keeps getting better every year, and getting ready for DieCon, so this week’s blog is another quick one.
I’ve been wanting to submit something to Game Chef for a while, but always end up missing it. This year’s event kicked off on June 12th, the day I left for OMGCon, but I found the announcement yesterday as I was trying to make my way through my once-again out-of-control newsfeed. The deadline for this year is the 21st, which is the last day of DieCon, which gives me until Friday morning if I want to get something submitting. Despite only having something like 3 of the 9 days allotted for the competition, I decided to give it a try and started writing last night. I’m already up to about 1500 words and there’s a 4K word limit, so I think I should be able to pull it off.
Since this year’s theme is “a different audience,” I’m writing a game for players who don’t put in consideration into the lives of their characters beyond the central activity or “mission” of the game, which is a major departure from the more sandbox-ready kinds of games I tend to write. While I did include a paragraph about how a group might go about running a game that contextualizes the PCs’ actions within a larger setting (I’m not a monster, after all), the game itself deals only with what happens when the characters are adventuring.
The game is called “Law & Otherworld” and is based on a blurb I wrote up for one of the weekly challenges on the reddit /rpg sub a few years ago (though I can’t use the blurb as written since it would violate the rules of the competition):
“In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by three separate, yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime, the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders, and the psychopomps who travel into the Land of the Dead to retrieve the souls of deceased witnesses and victims. These are their stories.”
The ingredients for this year’s event are abandon, dragonfly, stillness, and dream and you’re supposed to use 2-3 of them. The “dream” ingredient is easy enough, since I can just make the Otherwold where the dead people are the same place where dreams happen (which means in this world Inception and What Dreams May Come are even closer to being the exact same movie). “Dragonfly” is the name of the group assigned to act as bail bondsmen for the dead, and one of the symbolic associations of the insect provides me with a justification for the name as well as an in-game way to use dragonflies. “Stillness” and “abandon” are less central, but do make an appearance in the form of “The In-Between,” the Otherworld wasteland between the individual dream realms of the dead and sleeping. The different (for me personally) audience theme is met by making the game take place entirely in the Otherworld except for perhaps framing sequences at the beginning and end of adventures (and even those can happen in dreams if the GM prefers). Except for a couple of paragraphs to provide the set-up, the waking world is left completely unexplored.
If you’ve pledged at least $3 to my Patreon campaign, you can read the game as I’m working on it (and $5 patrons can comment). If not, you’ll have to wait until I release the game into the wild either Friday morning or when I get back from DieCon.
