[ADVICE] Making Bigger, Better

And why there's nothing wrong with a huge book of stuff.

In the past few months, I’ve been really thinking about The Shattered Isles, my dark fantasy setting that I’ve slowly been plucking away at, and trying to figure out what I want it to actually be.

It’s been a little difficult trying to nail down the scope of the project, as I’m coming at it from a “whatever I feel like writing, gets written” approach. What that ends up doing is creating a sort of cruel feedback loop of me writing something halfway because I’m energized, dropping it for a week or so, only to come back to it and be energized to write something else.

And so on, and so on. I’ve got a million threads unwoven, unfinished all pointing in different directions. The weird thing is, I don’t really mind this. I’m still enjoying writing about the Isles and all its weird, dark stuff. I still enjoy thinking about the broader implications of a setting and how it separates itself from other realms and places.

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A few weeks ago, I read an article on Sean McCoy of Mothership fame’s blog Win Conditions, where he interviews Watt, the author of Cloud Empress (itself a Mothership setting). While it’s a fucking stellar read and I would highly recommend you check it out, one exchange in particular stood out to me:

watt: As I gear up for the next Cloud Empress Kickstarter, I’m wondering how you think about planning for the future of Mothership. Namely how do you determine what to publish when and where to take future Mothership expansions?

Sean: Building a line is something I think about a lot. The timing of releases and what each module brings to the table. Even in our zine era, we were thinking a lot about this. Dead Planet was super maximalist because all we had was the PSG. We needed a book that could showcase literally everything we thought Mothership could do. It had to have a little bit of everything. A Pound of Flesh felt like it specifically needed to address space stations and then give players a hub to build off of. Gradient Descent was our take on a megadungeon. Another Bug Hunt was our take on an introductory module, which felt important because it would release with the boxed set. 

Now, we have a full time writer, Luke Gearing. One of the absolute best to do it. We haven’t had a full time writer before and Luke’s never been one before. So we’re developing our method for reliably putting out great adventures. What’s our system? A big thing is just asking ourselves “what’s the book that would be the absolutely most exciting to play if you’re a Mothership fan right now?” or “where are we weakest as a game? What kinds of play have we failed to support?” This doesn’t always mean that’s what the next release is, but it’s where we start before we start breaking it down to logistics.

That being said, I think this kind of thinking, this idea of going big, is often missing from a lot of good (even great) publishers. I’m always waiting (and pestering) my favorite designers to give me big toolkits, huge campaign settings, or sprawling locations to explore. It’s not just that more is better by any means, but some of it is about the opportunity cost of learning a game and running it for your friends. Give me something I can sink my teeth into for a long time. 

Do the hard design work. Go build a crafting system with 1,000 recipes for me that are all in world and tied to hexes. I think elided rules and minimalist and rules lite are really great for use at the table because they empower referees to make quick decisions. But back at the lab I want you to use that springboard to come up with something that I couldn’t prep myself. Complex mysteries, or evocative events for long term campaigns. 

Emphasis mine, of course.

I read those last two paragraphs and I remember sitting back and thinking “Yeah, that’s exactly what I want too.” I don’t need an elegant rules-light system anymore, there’s like a hundred of those. I don’t even really need rules at all, as there’s so many individual games out there that are all borrowing from each other, remixing, breaking apart, and smashing back together that I think it’s sort of expected every play group is going to have their own mish-mash “system” they use to play the games they enjoy.

What I do need are, like, hundreds of line entries for types of furniture. A thousand and one different herbs and plants and their magical properties. What types of gemstones are good for their antitoxin qualities and which cause sickness themselves. Deeply woven mysteries that are so character-driven that they can be largely extracted and plopped into whatever setting you want with minimal tweaking.

And to be fair, we’re seeing a lot of those types of books. Things like the Herbalist and Geologist’s Primers do exactly what I’m describing by giving you a huge grab-bag of mundane / lightly-magical st

uff to pepper your games with. The Book of Gaub has a ton of very evocative, creepy spells that you can completely imagine a whole setting around when you’re reading them. The Ultraviolet Grasslands are pretty much only tables and line entries of stuff there’s literally no way I could think of on even a good day. There’s even things like the Tome of Adventure Design which, while a bit old-school in its approach, is literally only tables of what I’m describing I want.

But we need more of these things. Everyone wants to make their fantasy heartbreaker (trust me, I know) but do we really need that? Do people really want another way to represent the six ability scores or how to handle saves?

I can only really speak for myself but, at this point in my game design / game mastering experience, I can come up with that stuff myself (on the fly, if need be). What I need are the things I can’t come up with. The things that take a lot of thought, care, and sheer force of will to create. When I’m at the table and the party finds themselves in a tavern, I don’t want to go to some generator online—no matter how good the entries are. I want a book of carefully thought through spirits and cocktails, ales and ciders, meals and sides.

Sean McCoy finishes his thought with the following:

So that’s how we approach deciding on where to go next. What’s the kind of work that only we can do because we’re getting paid to do it. If you’ve ever thought like “oh I’d like to run this sort of campaign, but I couldn’t because I don’t have the time to come up with all the NPCs you need or I wouldn’t have time each week to solve this or come up with that,” that’s the kind of thing we’re trying to do. Write the detailed prep and then display it in a way that makes it very, very easy for you to run at the table. 

That’s the kind of stuff I want to make too, man! The stuff that actually helps you at the table run exciting, lived-in games that lets us escape to a different place for a few hours on a weeknight.

Coming back to the Shattered Isles, I’ve really been trying to think of how to give a setting that not only inspires, but answers questions you have at the table. I’m not exactly at the level of Luka Rejec who can go totally anti-canon and it somehow just works, but I definitely want to make things that give GMs excitement without putting the burden of the more mundane creativity on their shoulders.

In video games, I’ve always found myself distracted looking at the random props placed around a level. In Dark Souls, for example, going into a scholarly location and seeing all the weird instruments lying around made of bronze and gold gives me a feeling of verisimilitude that the monsters and bosses just don’t. Its that feeling of “I wonder what the people who used to live here did in their normal day-to-day”.

Because that’s really what it comes down to—I don’t want to spend my limited creative energy coming up with tavern menus or things-you-find-in-an-abandoned-farmhouse, but I also don’t want those things to be hand-waved. The players are going to glom onto anything you spend more than two seconds describing, so the thing they stick to should at the very least be suffused with the setting. They’re important, because the people in the setting—which includes the characters!—deal with those things every single day.

So, all this to say, make the big things! Make a fantasy recipe book as Sean describes above. Make a book of books, with their titles, authors, and publishing companies. Tell a story interwoven in the details that you can bring wholesale into our games.

That’s what I’m going to try to do, at least.

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