Liminal Void received another update, somehow, bringing it to its 4th distinct iteration (not counting sub-iterations and tiny fixes). It’s a neat little subset of a game about how much it sucks to live in space under capitalism, largely at this point in its development through the lens of “what if your employer just sucked at keeping you alive”. It’s also been kicking for more than 2 years, periodically updated, never completed. Honestly even the name is a work in progress, if I get a better one I might change the name.1
In
Valiant Horizon, crystals and the magic from them are a big part. Drilling further into that, though, magic itself is further expressed through the 4 -Magus classes. Each of those represents one of the 4 elements. Why is it like that and where did I go with this?
Crystals in Valiant Horizon hold the souls of ancient heroes. This is one of the handful of setting elements explicitly expressed that the game is written around: it serves as the foundation for player characters. Crucially, a crystal is the source of all magic in the game, as lesser magic is intended to come from the souls of less prominent but still powerful heroes.
So one thing where I feel like I don’t have like…authority in but at the very least have thought about is the concept of performance loss (and specifically avoiding it through process optimization) in TTRPGs: the kinds of things that bog down a situation in a process.
WARNING: This post started as me making a little comment on
a great, concise post on Fool’s Pyrite. Then I decided to make it a fun little post on its own. Then I thought about it some more. Then I drilled down and kept drilling. This starts simple enough but quickly becomes a True Sicko Post. You have been warned.
I’ve been meaning to try to post more on my blog/site following the death of Cohost, which made it very easy for me to toss design thoughts out. Writing into VScode and pushing to my site via git has no juice at all by comparison. But we press on anyway.
On November 27th of 2022 - a little less than 2 years ago as of writing this - Dan Phipps (of
Gem Room Games, go check them out, they’re cool folks!) posted
a neat approach to worldbuilding based on Gygax 75. I don’t know how long cohost links like the above are going to last so I’m going to reproduce the post here for general preservation’s sake, at least until I’m confident it’s been posted up somewhere else (drop me a line if and when it is):
Last time I did a brainstorm session like this was for Persona: 1, 2, 3. This one's way shorter though. The idea is to flesh out some kind of specific JRPG-inspired campaign structure for Valiant Horizon.
So let's say there's these crystals, right? Used to be 12 of them - nowadays there's, uh, let's say 3-5 PCs crystals remaining. Each of them has the power to maintain the last few villages that stand in the world and prevent them from being swallowed up by the darkness that has consumed the rest. The crystals' power is not infinite. Every decade since the beginning of known history, each crystal chooses a Hero: someone to carry on its legacy to perform the Ritual of Rebirth at the origin of life, which imbues the crystal with their soul for the sake of all. The herald of life then returns their crystals to their village to maintain it until next time. There's never been any resistance on the road of rebirth: it's still hallowed ground, after all.
Liminal Void's quickstart has been around a little more than a year now. It's the first Total//Effect thing I put out and it's...fine. It's fine. Total//Effect is a strong backbone, the vibe carries it pretty far in my opinion, and again in my humble opinion, my two quickstart scenarios are decent. (Read it yourself and see if you agree. It's free. Click that little liminal void tag at the bottom if you want to see me everything I've written about it here, which is quite a lot.)
*Before I release the extra edition that tacks on like 2 more posts.
In Part 1 we established what kind of game we're using. In Part 2 we tied together Valiant Horizon's class system with the tarot thing Persona has going on. In this final installment (because at this point more beyond what I'm covering here would involve just making the thing) we're gonna think about using what we set up in part 2 for a session and campaign structure.
So we started poking at turning Valiant Horizon into Persona in Part 1 by establishing initial premises of what even this kind of game is like. It's got a lot of the DNA of urban fantasy/masquerade style games (WoD, Unknown Armies, etc) but with a very different emphasis, and especially the fact that there's a harder divide between the two "halves". Now we start digging in to what we want to do with that.
I'm thinking about Persona* a lot lately, partially because P3 Reload is out and I kind of want to play it but also it's $70 so fuck that shit. But partially it's because I realized while putting together the playlist for Valiant Horizon how well the two concepts overlaid with each other with only a little reflavoring/stretching:
Normalish people given extraordinary power
Powers come from discrete beings with archetypical distinctions that are intended to match with the character
Huge emphasis on relationships and building both towards understanding that archetypical power better and being closer to the person who wields it, is associated with it, etc.
*3-5. I know 2 has its fans but I've never played it and honestly it's a little longer in the tooth than I have patience for nowadays. I'm sure 1 has its adherents too but I don't know them.
Written for Prismatic Wasteland's "make a new mechanic and give it a name" challenge.
You have two approaches to a situation on either side of a spectrum. For example, let's say... Soundwaves and Emotions. Decide which is "high" and which is "low", then define your Number between 1 and 10, inclusive. A number skewed towards one side means that you'll have high chances of success but also high chances of consequences for the other side, and vice versa.
