I’ve been peeking around at a few freebie games scattered across the web and found one that manages to strike a resonant chord with me: Elegia by John Higgins of Relative Entropy Games. It’s a retro-clone, as are so fashionable among the tenured tabletop gamers these days, and it’s built to support a specific style of tabletop-videogame hybrid, the 8-bit quest RPG. With that in mind, it’s got an absolutely brilliant approach to creating the proper world feel on p. 34:
The world is suffused with a vague, quiet, mostly unspoken sense of lamentation. Nobody knows why this is so, because most of the world’s true history has been forgotten.
I love games with this feel, particularly because they appeal strongly to my sense of nostalgia. In fact, I’m particularly enamored of this specific phrasing. The rest of the paragraph dwells a bit too much for my tastes on Tolkien’s mythology and how Elegia doesn’t hit those notes, but the core is there.
In particular, I like the sense of innocence that slowly spalls away from the characters in the elegiac worlds often found in vintage video games. It’s part bildungsroman, but that’s not its only element. Indeed, that tragic loss of innocence as the adventuring characters slowly discover more of their cruel, monstrous worlds and attempt to make them right is very compelling. Their quaint, localized worldview is forced to mature in a bittersweet trek into the world. Dungeons that have lurked perilously close to their homes turn into a globe-spanning adventure to thwart the evil machinations of creatures initially far more powerful than they, and the only way to achieve their goals is to “grow up,” sonner than they had planned and possibly in opposition to their simple, idyllic prequel lives.
To that end, Higgins’ game has a perfect name, suggesting that loss and emphasizing it in its worldbuilding section, which is admirably brief and poignant.
Special bonus points to Elegia for reducing the encumbrance rules to a coarse-grained “stone” measurement, which lets you get on with the elegia and doesn’t make you fine-tune how many pounds of rope your character has in his backpack.
Go get Elegia. It’s free to download, and if you dig it, tip your hat by buying a print copy.
Huh. Again, very timely. The game I’ve been running since November for Rich, Aileen, Aaron and Jeff is set in a Gormenghast-inspired city, mostly empty, with the populace broken up into baroque, overspecialized guild-clans who trade with one another like “the Library” and “the Battlemen.” The PCs were brought together to investigate a couple of problems, and are gradually discovering that the city’s old systems of doing things are breaking down. From there I pretty much let them figure out what to do next: are they going to have fun putting out fires as more things are let in from Outside, or are they going to do more to revivify the culture of the city? So far, seems like they’re leaning toward the latter, but Aaron is super-proactive.There’s an interesting balance to be struck in designing settings like this: things need to be problematic enough that players who aren’t as proactive have a selection of things that are compelling to react to, but there also needs to be the flexibility to let things be better, to let proactive players close some doors and make things better. Of course, the balance issue really arises mostly over long-term play. But it’s something worth bearing in mind.
I do so love reading all these little games.There are always little gems in them that i want to incorporate into my games. I love the 8-bit tropes – very appropriate as I’ve been trying to put together a “pulp fantasy” game. The trouble I always have is working out how to make the game fast to pickup (character creation in 15 min or so) but involving enough to grab the attention of players in the first place.
Huh. I missed that, and I was just looking at REG just a couple of months ago (Engines and Empires, primarily). I’ll have to see how this game stacks up with Super Console.
Yes, I found it while looking up Engines and Empires, which I haven’t yet read and can’t comment about as sagely as I normally proclaim ;)Kenny, next time you’re here, we’ve got to get in a game of something.
As a fan of the old FF games, and 8 bit games in general, I’ll be giving this a look. I liked Engines & Empires quite a bit as well.