Devlog 01: What about focusing?
Updates on game development, my journey in design, and the tools & principles guiding me
That’s my first actual devlog post. Despite some huge news in my life, I am continuously working on my game design projects. Some days may be very short, but I have spent some time on those projects daily.
Establish a focus!
In a previous post, I said I was reading "Guida Punk alla Progettazione di Giochi" by Helios Pu, a book published in Italian that could be translated as "A Punk's Guide to Role-Playing Game Design".
One of the first suggestions in the book is to establish what the game is about and to write it down. It may sound trivial and obvious, but I haven’t done it. I haven’t done it for games I am working on on my own, and, even worse, I haven’t done it while working on Mindfuckers, a game I am working on with four other people. We have spun around for months, brainstorming and changing the game so many times that I think we have started three different games. Then we wrote down the focus, and now we have much more constructive discussions.
I have also started writing down the game's focus when working on myself. It is extremely useful to read the focus over time. Whenever I have a doubt or a choice, I go back to the focus and ask myself, “What fits better with this game?” Most of the time, at that point, the choice is already made.
Shadows of London - Updates
The game focuses on characters investigating crimes during a fictional Victorian age, looking deep into the human dark heart, and dealing with their Double and monsters.
The game is mainly inspired by the series Penny Dreadful and the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I thought of it as a gothic noir game focusing on the psychological development of characters and featuring action scenes.
Other than the focus, I have also kept one principle in mind: if it’s important, it must be in the character sheet. If it’s not there, it may not exist.
As a player, in the last few years, I started finding it very useful to have all the information about a character described in the sheet:
As Master, being able to quickly read over a few sentences to get the most important things about a character is incredibly useful for creating exciting scenes;
As a fellow player, I always find descriptive sheets of other players’ characters very useful to keep my mental image of their characters aligned with theirs;
As a player, I look very often at the sheet itself to remember myself who the character is and how it would behave in that scene;
Monad Echo uses Descriptors in the character sheet. They are similar to Fate’s Aspects if you are familiar with it. I find character sheets containing similar information much more useful than sheets containing a list of traits or skills associated with numbers for the purpose of the list I have made above.
In the Shadows of London (SoL), the character sheet will contain a (basic) descriptor for each of the following categories:
My profession: Describes what the character does or did to live;
I, Me and the Society: Describes the social class of the character and his relation with the Victorian Society;
My morality: This describes the character's morality, some self-imposed limits, something he is prone to defend and protect, and some lines he won't pass.
My past: Describes a traumatic or relevant event in the past that shaped the character.
Then, during the game, the players may also add new (shadow) descriptors, one for each category. Those new descriptors will have to describe how their shadow influenced the character in the area of the previously presented categories.
I thought it would be enough. But then I realised there was nothing, especially initially, to describe what the character’s shadow was. This is a game in which monsters are real, and human demons are actually demons. So, a shadow can be being (also) a lycanthrope, a witch, a vampire, or an evil mastermind.
I have also added a special descriptor called My Shadow. It will give an initial description of the character’s shadow, which the shadow descriptors will further detail.
What next?
I am done with the alpha version of the rules and have a ready-to-use adventure called The Spirit of Progress. But sadly, as of now, I don’t know when I will have time to focus on some alpha playtest.
Contact me if you are curious about Shadows of London and want to reserve a spot for future alpha playtest sessions. I'd be happy to play it with you!