Yak-Hack

Excerpt from my design document for Vrotrak Valley, a post-apocalyptic Hex Crawl : 7 hexes. A haunted old metropolis, filled to the brim with dungeons in the form of abandoned warehouses, apartment-complexes and office buildings. Populated by bandits and predatory animals. Ud stands for Usage Die . A “haunted” suburb that used to be a popular spot for rich and wealthy people. They all had servant robots programmed to love them. After they all died, their machines formed a suicide pact. Robotic body parts litter the area. They can be looted for scraps and fuel, but nothing mechanically useful. The houses of their former masters are filled with fancy technology and the occasional rare artifact. The last robot standing can be reactivated, explaining that it was left here to remember the events that led to the apocalypse. It will refuse to say, or can’t say, what it remembers.  A giant shopping mall that has collapsed into the asphalted-over wetlands it was built on. Inhabited ...

Expanded from my dice.camp thread : Besides the cultural reasons, the fact that violence is employed in games has to do with the fact that it carries with it inherent tension, which is how I'm thinking about design a lot these days. Inherent tension means the very nature of the action your character takes carries with it significant and immediately recognizable risks. A move that lets you research the lore of the world or location or person is useful for the player and the world, but it is not dramatic. This doesn't mean that the lore of the world is meaningless and ungameable, just that it is not going to drive the game forward on it's own. If, however, you need to speed-read an ancient scrolls to find the magic word that will stop the arcane death traps closing in on you, that carries with it inherent tension. I've been moving in the post-apocalyptic design-space for this reason - it carries with it inherent tension. How do I survive? Any character need to answ...