The promised ones – 4. Who The Promised Ones are.

Game Design Log #4

As I told you on the previous post, a few months ago I came up with something more robust as a base from which to explore what I wanted to do with this game –this sort of simple and flexible system that I already created for Summer Myth Hunt (to which, as a side note, I will add a map and a Spanish version in a couple of weeks)– and also I had an idea for a setting and its cosmology as I vaguely sketched on the first post of this game design log.

But with these two things now settled as ground, I still had to answer the question, “What is this game about?”.

Although I had this vague idea of a world scarred by a calamity (where the remnants of it created regions of ever-changing reality) what focused the idea was an experience I had as a player that I found myself falling into every time I designed or thought about games; the archetype of the outsider, the cursed one, the one who has been bestowed by a sign that others look at with a certain wariness, suspicion, and even fear (perhaps having had my first ttrpg experience with VTM is to blame).

In fact, I fall into these themes over and over again, and they are present in both of my games, SMH (Summer Myth Hunt) and The bookworm Circle –one about hunters of the myths created by the imagination of humans who have to be careful of being caught by the human-world, and the other about a group of birds that take human bodies to infiltrate human society and to stop the destruction that humans will cause to their native forest.

But for The promised Ones this idea began to grow from one of the strokes of the setting sketch I already had on my mind; that the remnants created by the calamity were pockets of reality ruled by some kind of being or deity.

From there the train of thought began; what if these beings can give favors? Maybe the PC (player characters) had their favor? No, wait. What if the PC's progenitors took the favor of these beings, and what they gave in return for their gift was their unborn child?

That's how The promised Ones manifest themselves, and what they will do in the game, or in a more precise way, what players will do as promised ones, is what will ultimately answer the question “What is the game about?”.

And this is when setting, characters, and character sheet began to merge, to form new things.

I saw from the character sheet (and its slots to collect things from the world) that PC could “hunt” for something (as characters in SMH did), and then characters came into play, to show me that this hunting was a task entrusted to them by the being they were promised to, and then setting presented itself, telling me that “this” they are entrusted to hunt is something that was a consequence of the event that created the pockets of realities that these beings govern.

Yes, I know this whole thread is a bit chaotic, but I just wanted to try to convey to you how these ideas became something in my mind and in my notebook, how things blend and stick together to become something new.

But maybe it's better if I show you the first page of the game, so you can all see the result (It's still in the process of finding its right shape, which will probably take a little more time because I want to give this game time to develop on its own, and me to find nooks and crannies and depth within it).

So here it is, the first ideas, maybe the basis of what this game is about. I hope you found something interesting in here, perhaps something that inspires you, or at least makes you want to see what else is in here. In the next post I will show you how the character sheet evolves and what other interesting things I have found along the way exploring how the setting, the character sheet and the character interconnect and enhance each other.

Have a weird and wonderful October!