WIP: Travel, non-combat miniatures game, and where to look when worldbuilding

Game Design Log #39 / Monthly recommendations #1

Sadly, for this week, I haven't made enough progress in anything to share with you, as I have been working in parallel on many things, which has made my progress a little slow. So for today, there are no fun tools nor new concepts to apply to your games.

But in any case, I want to take a little of your time to tell you about what I’m working on.

Travel procedure

I have been digging into the idea of making a procedure for travel for No Peace for the Heathen (NPFTH), my OSR/NSR-like game where you play as islanders that fight against conquistadors, in a setting based on the culture of my country, Chile.

As I told you in this post, I was having a look at the three “pillars” of play (combat, social and exploration), as understood in some “dnd-adjacent” games, and I was trying to codify them in the same way I codified combat; in a way that gives weight to the grief that comes from exerting domination trough violence, which is something foreign to —or at least frowned upon— the islanders. Following this idea, I made the social “pillar” into manipulation, as an expression of domination learned by the islanders from the colonizers to be used against them.

Doing the same with exploration/travel wasn’t so easy. Domination of the land could have been an expression of exploration, but this didn't feel appealing enough, nor important for the goals of the players/islanders in the game.

So I decided that exploration/travel will not be an expression of domination, and instead use it as a medium to express how islanders experience the world around them, the place they call home, which has been interesting but challenging, and I’m still testing some ideas.

The chaos of working with new ideas. Sometimes drawing helps.

“Summer Myth Hunt” as a non-combat miniatures game, and preparing the print-on-demand.

In the previous post, I explored taking the ideas one has about games and evaluating if the medium through which you are expressing them (TTRPG, wargame, setting book, adventure, etc…) is the best form for them.

For me, I did this by looking at SMH and identifying the parts in the game that were more fun and interesting for me, and determining if these parts of the game were maybe best suited for another medium that wasn’t a TTRPG. In this evaluation, I realized that perhaps SMH could have been a non-combat-oriented miniature game instead of a TTRPG.

Well, I’m working on that idea. In this project, one of the things I’m especially excited about is making the “leveling” up, or “improvement” of the miniature capacities/abilities, shown through a progressive evolution of the crunchiness of the game, that comes from the reality-changing capacities of the “Myths” players’ hunting-bands hunt on the game.

Also, I’m trying to set the print-on-demand version of SMH on Lulu.

Worldbuilding sources and looking at the many possibilities of societies

Another thing I have been working on is a fantasy novel. This is a project that I’m working on in Spanish, with other people. Although I can’t discuss a lot about it, one of the things I wanted to share with you is one of the books that I have been using as a source/inspiration, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

The book is eye opening in many ways, but in regards to worldbuilding its particular strenght comes from how it washes away the myths of societies having a somehow clear “smooth” evolution, that separate civilization by a heararchy of complexity, that is mostly driven by technological advances (the most typically brought to one's mind being the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution).

The book depicts a much more nuanced and complicated view of the movement and evolution of societies, showing from archaeological evidence and historical records that the will of people has a lot to do with what kind of society people decide to live in, giving a very beautiful focus on the cultural eccentricity of human beings and a lot of examples of different types of social organization from where to draw from when creating imaginary/future worlds.