An Introduction to the Game and its Designer.

Hey everyone...or anyone. I have no idea if this design blog will be of interest to people other than me, but I felt like it was a good time to start it. I've been thinking about it for a while and my game has finally begun to coalesce enough that I can talk about it without the whole thing changing the next day.  

First, a bit about me. My name is Scott Kennan, or R. Scott Kennan for official paperwork. I've had two RPG books officially published in the past, both during the d20 boom. The first was my campaign setting, "Morningstar" which placed in the top 11 out of 11,000 entries in the Wizards of the Coast Setting Search and was later published by Goodman Games. My second book, "The Complete Guide to Fey", was also published by Goodman Games and got better reviews, and I'm pretty proud of it even though I might do things slightly differently today. I've also done a few mini games, my favorite being a version of Fudge that uses numbers; called NUDGE (Numerical Fudge).

I hope the above doesn't come across as bragging, I just wanted to lay my credentials out there. To counteract the sense that I might be bragging above I'd like to share one thing about myself; I haven't historically had a good work ethic when it comes to my game design. It's certainly why I don't have more products with my name on them, and why I am no longer working with Goodman Games or other companies. I blew too many deadlines or outright flaked on assignments. You see, I used to write in quick, manic bursts of inspiration, followed by long periods of procrastination. That's how I wrote my first two books, the second during a very physically and mentally destructive period of about two weeks when my deadline loomed.

Back then, I didn't know I was bipolar, and I was unmedicated. Today I'm medicated, but the ideas don't hit me quite as hard, and the excitement isn't anywhere near as powerful as it once was. Still, I have at least one project that has been gnawing at me, and which won't let me go.


The Game

I am working on an effects-based generic RPG called "Tribute", and have been for a few years now. I wanted my game's effects to be more "atomic" than say GURPS or Hero, meaning that instead of buying the "flight" power, you build the power from rules "elements" that accomplish the effect of flight.

In short, Elements are words that are simultaneously nouns and verbs and which have about a page of rules attached to them describing how they can be used, and what they represent mechanically.

This allows me to have fewer rules while retaining all of the power (in theory) of games with more pages of rules. It also allows players to write all of the rules for their character's powers right on the character sheet using a shorthand called a Tribute Expression.

The reason that Elements are both nouns and verbs is so they can be the active force of an effect, or the object acted upon. Proper names for things can take the place of a noun element when they are specifically targeted or referenced. Elements are in all caps. Non-elements are not, and are often placed in quotes to signify that they are specific instances of the Element they take the place of.

Continuing the flight example, my game in its current state models the effect with the expression:

MANEUVER "Body": { RELAY "Body" via CHANNEL ("Air") [ 10 ] }

The value 10 is arbitrary in this case; it stands for the speed of the RELAY effect. Things like how much weight you can carry with you are inherited from the stat that you use to power the ability (defined by where you put it on your character sheet).

I was at a loss after coming up with the original concept as to which elements I'd need. I thought about reverse engineering GURPS and Hero powers, but at that stage I didn't even have enough clarity in my ideas to mock up working expressions.

So I went looking for premade systems of classifying and describing phenomena. I figured that a lot of my work would be done for me if I found the right system.

Eventually I hit on the idea that I might be looking for some sort of pictographic alphabet. At some point I came to the Wikipedia page on Phoenician, and recognized the letter names as being the same as the Hebrew alphabet (Aleph-Bet). Then I remembered reading a few things about Kabbalah when I was younger, and began looking into it.

I studied and learned old-school Kabbalah (to a low level) for my game over the next three years. I was and am an agnostic- at no point have I been pushing an agenda of faith in anything. But the funny thing is; it worked.

In Kabbalah the 22 letters* are attached to concepts like giving, accepting, and a lot more esoterica. However, I've done my best to extract the axiomatic concepts independent of Jewish spirituality, and to this end I've had to read a lot of writings on Magic, Tarot, Astrology and other occult matters as they tie into Kabbalah by a system of correspondences.

Keep in mind that this was all as an unbeliever. I figure that even if these belief systems are much ado about nothing (and I can't claim that they are or are not) they at least have internal consistency to a large degree.

I've also made a lot of tables based on ancient astrological rulerships and a system that one occultist purports shows that the Hebrew alphabet's (and by extension the Phoenician) letter meanings combine and build upon each other in an additive fashion to create each successive letter and its meaning, etc. The cool thing is that I can do a find and replace on an Element name when I think I understand a letter more fully and see how it fits into the tables, and whether it follows from its related elements in a logical fashion. It actually does far more often than I would have expected and when it doesn't it means I need to reexamine my understanding of the concepts.

That's a bit far to go for game design, I know. But it's been very interesting. 

*I'm still deciding whether I can use the 10 sephiroth of the tree of life, but they don't seem eminently gameable at the moment. I just might not understand them well enough, though.

Also, I can't understand Hebrew at this point aside from a few words, but I can read it out loud.

Coming Soon: Details on the System.