I’ve backed off from taking PMG too seriously these days, as I don’t have time for all the things I want to do, and taking things less seriously is one way of coping. My goal is to keep creating games under the Perfect Minute banner, but without the pressure to make money. I think that’s doable.
With that in mind, I’ve started fiddling with an idea I’ve had for a pen and paper roleplaying game. This isn’t related to the Card RPG (at least not yet). Where that project is about finding a genuinely interesting and novel (to me) diceless and possibly GMless system that can be used for quick RPG-lite style play, this one is much more rooted in older games I’ve played and loved for one reason or another.
The new thing is more setting-focused, for one thing. One of my first experiences at the table, the best part of 30 years ago now, was a longish campaign in the Rifts setting. Rifts is a funny beast; its setting, in particular, is impossible to pigeonhole, combining as it does super-tech and mecha and Nazis and gods and magic and dragons and entirely too many other things. It famously discards any notion of balance between player characters in favour of OH MY GOD DID YOU SEE WHAT I CAN DO? It does this kind of stuff well, at least at the level of setting.
But. Rifts also has some really massive holes in it. Some are mechanical, and they’re simple enough to paper over for an individual game, maybe even a full campaign. If you’re willing to deal with the cut and paste books and some of the…difficult…writing, and and and. Or If you buy the Savage Rifts books.
And if you’re not, say, a member of a First Nation. Or a kid from Africa. Or basically any non-white person.
But I digress.
I’ve been thinking about what my take on a Kitchen Sink setting like Rifts would be for years. I’ve had individual notions about what a “real” mecha suit might look like, and I’m seeing it show up in media over time. I’ve played with different incarnations of mashup settings and mechanics.
But the seed of something good finally clicked for me recently when I posed myself the question What Do I Like About High Magic and High Tech?
I’m an avid reader of science fiction, and so I have a really strong notion of what I want the tech half of that to look like. At its core, the tech of the new thing is rooted in the works of folks like Greg Egan and Charlie Stross. They write almost unimaginable futures that challenge the concept of selfhood in the face of immortality. They frequently push the limits of your imagination as a reader; I can’t even imagine what it’s like to live inside their heads. How could I not use them as the starting point for my vision of Highest Possible Technology?
For magic, on the other hand, there was only ever one candidate for my core inspiration. See, shortly after that first game of Rifts, a bunch of us started fooling with White Wolf’s World of Darkness games. Our “main” DM started with Vampire, and then our “off” DM got into Werewolf, and then I bought Mage: the Ascension, and it changed how I think of magic and just about everything else.
Mage, particularly the Ascension incarnation, isn’t really a roleplaying game per se. It’s more of a whole-brain metaphysical workout regimen. The notion of magic it purveys is rooted in the concept that belief makes reality, which sounds like something Tony Robbins might say, but it’s a deeply powerful idea in roleplaying terms. The game hit me at the height of my adolescent powers while I was on a whiplash trajectory of life changes, and instead of calming me down it kicked me up about four notches. I can never be anything but grateful for its influence.
So that’s the seed: Taking my lead from Rifts’ gonzo, go-for-broke mashupisms, I’m going to try to design a game where magic that directly incarnates reality interacts with tech that pushes the limits of possibility. I’ve already started tweaking that mix, throwing in a few doses of my own creative energy and stuffing the whole works into a “bright forest” universe (like a Dark Forest, but less murderey). We’ll see where it takes me.
It’s called Demiurges, at least for now. I hear that Kult uses that word as a pretty key part of its setting, but, you know. It’s a word. I like the sound of it. It means what I need it to mean. So. Demiurges. Watch this space for more details.
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