I have this the startings of a hack that maybe should be split into two hacks. I have the notes containing all of it here for you fine people to give your thoughts on.
I have this the startings of a hack that maybe should be split into two hacks.
I have this the startings of a hack that maybe should be split into two hacks.
I agree with your initial assessment as to this being two hacks. Your ideas about Nature / Transformation are brilliant and should be developed further. Equally, these ideas of comedic actions and attributes are great (and close to my heart), and should be developed further. But to me, they’re not part of the same whole.
I think your idea of the the Weird is compelling and interesting, but I would want to know what characters do in that world. It’s like a kind of weird cyberpunk, and I confess to loving it wholeheartedly – like a grimier version of the bathhouse in Spirited Away, perhaps. It’s a beautiful concept.
Equally, the idea of comedic and satirical games is very attractive. I’ve recently toyed with a similar idea in Fate, and found it had legs. My great struggle with that was to flatten characters as opposed to making them three-dimensional – comedy and satire is about archetypes and stereotypes rather than realistic representations. If it’s a route you want to go down, I’d be happy to share what I had in Fate, although it’s quite genre specific.
Thanks for sharing!
The idea of what characters would do in the Weird hack is like a mix between being Scoundrels and being otherworldly supernatural forces. Convincing fools that you are a god to con them, smuggling goods and people to and from realms they shouldn’t be, trading souls for talent. The authorities you would have to worry about are orderly pantheons with their clergy and men in black rather then governments. The Shade playbook is supposed to the playbook for playing slender man or one of his friends.
Many people I play with already play flattened characters, so I haven’t observed the issues you mention. Hell, the play books could literally be stock characters.
The comedic stuff is interesting but the attributes you’d want for that are just.. out of theme with the things you want to deal with the what sounds a lot like strangeness horror. Not to say they cant be paired, but it’s likely to be a mess. If it were me, I’d write one game about the Weird, and pair the Funny with another meta.
Do you have any ideas what would make for a good setting for the Funny hack, since by separating it from the Weird causes it lose a setting. My only thoughts I have so far is either base it on Comedia Del Arte, which case many of the playbooks write themselves and the aesthetics of 18th century Italy could be taken from liberally. But that seems like an obscure frame of reference that wouldn’t resonate with that many people. Or having it be a world with citys that have names like Somewhere, Nowhere or Anywhere for a gag that might get old incredibly quickly.