A long damn time ago, I defined the word “ficton” (it’s a contractual obligation) and told you that you could break a ficton down into 5 main components: Influences, Setting, Genre Trappings, Tone and Mood, and Dramatic Rules. Now that I’ve talked about all the rest (and procrastinated a lot), let’s talk about dramatic rules….
Tone is the attitude that the players take toward the game: is the goal immersive role-playing, a more beer-and-pretzels experience, or something in between? Mood is the atmosphere of the story: are you telling a grim story about characters trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, or an action-packed story about kicking zombie butt? Since it’s…
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,…
Since setting is the foundation of most fictons, we’re going to start our design of the Guardians of Shymeria 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…
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…
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…
With the new rules changes, I had to change a few things around with character creation, so while I was at it I rearranged, renamed, and simplified character creation. Since I also had to rewrite the Sample of Play Theater entry for character creation, I went ahead and upgraded the characters for the Guardians of…
