{"id":659,"date":"2019-07-11T23:49:09","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T23:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/re-thinking-aetheria\/"},"modified":"2023-02-22T21:27:21","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T21:27:21","slug":"re-thinking-shymeria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/re-thinking-shymeria\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Thinking Shymeria"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a while now I\u2019ve been working on a game called Guardians of Shymeria, which was going to be the setting for the Sample of Play Theater game in the Cinemechanix<\/a> rulebook. The basic idea was \u201cHe-Man meets Heavy Metal,\u201d with 80s cartoon characters (because I really wanted to steal a rule Josh Burnett had come up with where characters had to have an action figure gimmick) having their happy Saturday Morning Cartoon existence destroyed when villain more along the lines of Blackthorn from Ralph Bakshi\u2019s Wizards than Skeletor decides he wants to rule the world. I wrote parts (mostly the easy ones) of the rules and ran it at several conventions, but it didn\u2019t quite gel. Part of the problem was that the nature of con games meant that the larger background was mostly ignored in favor of dungeon-crawl\/fight the monster type games, but I also kept running into problems when I tried to write the parts of the setting where the worlds collided. I just couldn\u2019t find a way to make the extremes fit together in a coherent way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The set-up works alright if you think of it as a story: The characters start out in their happy Saturday Morning Cartoon Kingdom, where the Good Guys beat the Bad Guys and learn a valuable lesson every episode. Then they venture out into the wilderness where they have to face real dangers and situations where Good and Evil isn\u2019t so clearly defined. Just as they\u2019re starting to get their bearings, True Evil comes out of the West with an army of monsters to crush everything they believe in or care about. The problem, as I have to tell nearly every writer when they submit their first game supplement or (especially) adventure is that a game supplement is not a novel. In a story, the characters can experience these reality shifts in terms of experience and perception. In a setting guide, the three realities have to coexist in a believable way. I thought I could do it with geography–this part of the world is Kid Friendly, this part of the world is Morally Gray, and this part of the world is Metal As Fuck–but it didn\u2019t work. Every attempt to make them fit together killed the tone and raised questions with no good answers.<\/p>\n

At DieCon this year, I mentioned the problems I was having with establishing a tone for the game to Leighton Connor<\/a> and Jeffrey Johnson<\/a>, telling them that the best bet might be to pick a tone and stick with it. Either it would be a straightforward He-Man game or it would be more of a \u201cA Peanut Scorned\u201d re-imagining of He-Man through the lens Bakshi, Frazetta, Heavy Metal, etc. We discussed the options with no real solution or resolution for a while. At some point, Jeffrey said something to the effect of \u201cMaybe it should be 3 games,\u201d which Leighton and I immediately dismissed because we thought he meant some kind of \u201cofficial storyline\u201d type set-up like White Wolf used to do.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for us, Jeffrey is persistent. We didn\u2019t really grok what he meant, so he kept circling back to it and trying to make us understand. If I remember correctly, we talked for an hour or so, left the hotel for dinner, and were finished eating before we finally started to understand what he was trying to tell us rather than what we assumed he was trying to tell us. Once we finally stopped swimming in dumbass, it made perfect sense: It\u2019s 3 games.<\/p>\n

Just in case you\u2019re as dumb as Leighton and I, by \u201c3 games,\u201d Jeffrey meant 3 distinct games. Each one is a complete game that can be played by itself. One game is a straightforward Saturday Morning Cartoon. Another is the Metal As Fuck epic fantasy war story where characters ride into battle on their dragons with \u201cImmigrant Song\u201d blasting in the background. The third game was more difficult to pin down at first, but as we talked it through it became by far the most interesting. The morally gray game is something along the lines of \u201cGame of Thrones, but with dumb names and action figure gimmicks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Each game stands alone, but you can play all three in order to create the kind of story that I started out wanting to do. You\u2019re probably asking \u201cDoesn\u2019t that lead to the same tonal dissonance that kept it from working as a single game?\u201d My answer to this question that you\u2019re only asking because I need you to ask it is a firm \u201cNo.\u201d The tonal dissonance is avoided because (and I\u2019m not sure we actually articulated this during the brainstorming, but it\u2019s the key) the world fundamentally changes from one game to the next. If you\u2019re playing it as a storyline, Season 1 is all bloodless skirmishes between Good and Evil and lessons about sharing. Then SOMETHING HAPPENS and the characters have to deal with a more noirish world with no easy answers. As soon as they start getting adjusted to the new reality, ANOTHER THING HAPPENS and they\u2019re in the final season with all the dragons and Frank Miller blood spatter and Zeppelin. The “three games” solution is actually a perfect test of the Cinemechanix system’s “adaptibility” design goal, since the three settings need different rules to support the different tones: non-lethal combat for the kiddie version, unsettling dark magic for the metal version, and intrigue rules for the more political shades fo gray era (just for starters).<\/p>\n

While I watched the He-Man cartoon in the 80s, I never got too deep into the fandom or had any of the action figures (for the price of a He-Man toy, I could buy a marked-down D&D module at Kay-Bee Toys), so I\u2019ve been doing some He-Man research recently. This has mostly consisted of reading MOTU-related web pages and watching the recent documentary on Netflix. I tried watching the cartoon, but it\u2019s even worse than I remember and I can only handle an episode or two here and there (though I just finished Season 1 of the new She-Ra and it\u2019s wonderful). Even though I\u2019m still only a few feet into the research rabbit hole, I\u2019ve picked up enough to see that the kinds of things we need to make happen in order to move from one game to the next can be done in a way that fits naturally into a MOTU-style ficton.<\/p>\n

Right now I\u2019m working on the Saturday Morning Cartoon version of the game, which is currently slightly ahead of The Six Gun Seven in the competition to be the first Cinemechanix release. I\u2019m still mostly working out the rules at this point, but I\u2019m looking forward to the world design. I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll be posting more about the game\u2019s development here, but if you want to follow along in real time all you have to do is become a $3\/month patron of my Patreon page<\/a>, which gives you access to my active projects Google Docs folder (Batteries not included).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a while now I\u2019ve been working on a game called Guardians of Shymeria, which was going to be the setting for the Sample of Play Theater game in the Cinemechanix rulebook. The basic idea was \u201cHe-Man meets Heavy Metal,\u201d with 80s cartoon characters (because I really wanted to steal a rule Josh Burnett had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2000,2064],"tags":[47,649,1104,1739,1778,1826,1843,1979,1980,2088,2109,2119,2120,2121,2122],"class_list":["post-659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-design-ramblings","category-shymeria","tag-rpg","tag-frank-frazetta","tag-wizards","tag-cinemechanix","tag-he-man","tag-heavy-metal","tag-masters-of-the-universe","tag-motu","tag-frazetta","tag-champions-of-shymeria","tag-ralph-bakshis-wizards","tag-science-fantasy","tag-she-ra","tag-thundarr-the-barbarian","tag-fire-ice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3684,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659\/revisions\/3684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}