It has been entirely too long since my last post, and likewise, since my last title, so let me rectify that right . . . now!
In The Queen Smiles, I played with a new mechanical embellishment, on top of my usual Ghost/Echo-inspired framework. The 'One Red' system gave me a surprising amount of interesting design space to play around in, and as I said in the previous post, I found enough to make a fair supplement!
That supplement is here: One Red explores a wide range of different mechanical conceits and additions and minigames and subsystems, all intended to make even the most routine roll of two six-sided dice into as much of a workhorse as your group could want. You can put mechanics onto "unnatural mental effects on your main character", or "terrifying (or beneficent) being sharing your character's body", or even "procedurally generate the world or play an NPC no one should directly control". You can even play around with time itself, telling a story out of order, and zooming in or flashing back (or forward) to the causal connections between the key moments of a story. Whether you use this for Rashomon-style conflicting events, or creation-myth exploration of a people's defining tale, or even use it as a meta-narrative device, in which some mysterious sequence of events requires investigation, you can do things few other games can survive trying.
Mostly, I like exploring design-space in RPGs. While no one could ever hope to exhaustively do this, it has always fascinated me just how much you can get even a simple system to do, especially when that system really does the intended work. By that, I mean that while a game like Dread really does lend itself to feelings of dread . . . it doesn't lend itself to anything else in particular. It's not a system, it's a mechanic--like "roll two or more dice, one determines success or failure, all others determine complications or costs". And systems allow all the cool interesting exploration.
In particular, I had fun seeing just how detailed, or how abstract, one could be in figuring out the Queen's values, priorities, sensibilities, and attitude. One minute, She Smiles on you putting one of her emissaries in your rear-view and flooring it, and narrowly escaping. The next, She Smiles your getting pulled over and taken to jail. Why send that emissary after you if She likes that you escaped? If She likes that you escaped, why should She approve of you going to jail? These contradictions require some kind of resolution, whether it comes from the Queen having elliptical, corkscrew logic, or some simple, clear, but unexpected priority. Perhaps the Queen sends emissaries to provoke you to drastic action, and whether you succeed or fail, She wants you to become a champion, hardening through hardship. Or, maybe you carry some kind of contagion, and She never intended her emissary to kill you, because then you can't spread the lilting melody from Arcadia--but you can certainly spread it in a jailhouse.
But as I quickly saw, I'd created a mechanic and then built a system around it. So I began to ask, what else could I do with this mechanic now that I had it, and what other systems could I make with it? And that was before realizing, I'd actually made two mechanics, and only used one in The Queen Smiles. Clearly, I had to remedy this.
The first mechanic in the 'One Red' elaboration is the one that The Queen Smiles actually uses: adding a special significance to one of the dice in the roll, without changing its mechanical meaning. The rules don't care what you tack onto the Goal or Danger holding the Red Die, only that you tack on something. And given that in all of my Succession-derived games, the dice you roll have a hard and tangible link to the narrative, this means that the One Red die projects a narrative meaning on top of an existing narrative meaning.
But the other mechanic I realized I'd made, as ideas started to congeal and extrude, is adding a special value to one of the dice, layering a mechanic on top of a mechanic. This shows up more One Red, perhaps more than the former. In this approach, the story or narrative may not directly notice or care which facet of a roll you assign your Red die to. But the rules themselves, the ones that say when to roll, and how to interpret the dice, directly care about the added layer of value on one of your dice.
The former gives us things like "portraying a character that no one should directly control", whether that be an incomprehensible being from beyond, or a collective entity that players would have incentive to bias, or even a character that should seem unpredictable and unstable, at all times. You're using the same machinery for creating stories, but you've done something a bit complicated in tying the story back to the machinery.
The latter gives us things like prompts to cut forward or backward in time, defining parts or features of the world around you as you move through it, even nominally very mechanics-heavy things like a form of wild magic you only barely control at all--but that you still do, yourself. The same machinery, but tied to itself in a complicated feedback loop.
As far as One Red goes, most of its verbiage relates it to Succession, rather than The Queen Smiles, for a few reasons I want to get into here.
First, amazing as the scope of Cool New Mechanics might be with One Red, the nature of One Red makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to sensibly use the Red die for more than one thing. The Queen Smiles, as a game, really can't also use most of the ideas in One Red--while one or two could work, it invites confusion and doesn't directly aid the game's core intent.
Second, since publishing Succession, I've had a few readers describe the book as anything from "hard to read" up to "impossible to understand". I also have had readers describe it as a really great game, and say that its unique style and approach adds a lot to what kind of game it plays, and what way to tell its stories. I knew during writing that I wanted to try for the latter, and if I got it then it would come at the expense of the former.
But, I've also gotten better at writing rulebooks for public consumption--funny how repeatedly doing something can make you better at it, right? And while I still consider Succession a fine game, maybe better than anything I've made since, that 'expense' above is steep. Steeper than I want to pay again. So Chamber+Circle has its blunter, more direct, rule-focused style, and The Queen Smiles prattles on for a decadent twenty pages when its source material is literally "take Horror and Fairytales from Book of Sand, and rub in a novel mechanic".
So in making this latest supplement, by addressing the rules directly to Succession as a starting frame of reference, I hope to make Succession, retroactively, a bit better and more valuable. The book still has the same cryptic, sphinxian delivery as ever, because the book hasn't changed. But, someone getting Succession, or who already got it, has one more supplement that immediately speaks to making this cryptically-written game into something even more unique, and without any obfuscatory delivery. That's definitely not to say that One Red can't enhance Chamber+Circle, or indeed any Succession-related Ghost/Echo-inspired game. Just put a Red die among the ones you were already rolling, and see what you can do with that distinction within rules! But artistically, I wanted to tip the scales more for Succession, as the darling I made that has the most objections.
And as for future offerings, I have a book very much in mind. I haven't seen a lot of RPGs that deal at all with romance. It's almost a taboo topic, judging by the reception of Monsterhearts (now with a second edition!) And while Monsterhearts is a fine game for what it wants to do, it has some rough patches, and even if you sand those off, it wants to do some very specific things. If you don't, Monsterhearts has a lot for you to navigate around. So my next title will present my take on heartwarming, sincere, passionate romance stories, focusing on madness, tragedy, and personal loss. It's gonna be a fun one and I look forward to publishing it this year!
