Forking The Culture: Making "New Model Colony" Pt. 2

Following from yesterday's post, I will explain a few decisions on mechanics for the setting.

The initial Character Generation guidelines emphasizes that your past is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you're a nobleman or a commoner, a convict or a farmer, exiled from your homeland or willingly abandoning it; you gain no benefit from it in mechanical terms. It is presumed that getting to the Colony reduced you to your starting state. How or why it did so is the player's task to define, and that assumes that it will ever come up.

Restricting playable races to Men only emphasizes that the world you came from and the Colony's world are not the same; you cannot assume anything about the setting given what the player is allowed to play. Class restrictions follow a similar metric, implying that the world of Men is a classic Sword & Sorcery world but assuming nothing about the world they now inhabit.

The real game changer here is in using the concept of building an economy at the metagame level. Gaining access to new playable races and classes is treated as a form of treasure. Players have to seek out new races, establish friendly relations to them, and negotiate a binding alliance with them so as to open trade and other exchanges that would allow a critical mass of that alien race to be in regular contact with the Men of the Colony.

Classes are treated the same way; players have to divine that they exist somehow, seek the means to become one, and successfully bring back that lore to the Colony in order to unlock the option. I see this as a viable path to pursue for players with characters in the Domain Game realm, since seeking yet more dungeons to loot in and of itself ceases to be fun at that point and instead increasing one's holdings takes over as the primary motivation. The implication of needing to establish friendly relations is that they need to be maintained, and if neglected they can be lost- and with it, access to that option.

Special abilities are also given this treatment. It's long-established that spells are treasure; while the Colony has a senior magician, even he doesn't have all the spells, so from the beginning magic-users will need seek out magics from places they explore, trade with others, or attempt research to invent their own. Clerics are subject to veto with regard to spell selection, as Cleric spell-casting represents divine blessings- the power they wield is not theirs, but that of God.

The theme here is that players who want a thing have to make the effort to get it. I, as the Dungeon Master, will do nothing for them in these regards; the issues are theirs to solve, and theirs alone. Once they have it, they have to keep it--this is "Take And Hold"--or they lose what they got out of it.

Which brings me to how gameplay is structured, which is tomorrow's post.

(Side Note: Someone claiming to be a former Blizzard employee went to the Chans to spill the beans on how bad it is inside. Read the archive here. The World of Warcraft items seem to square with other stuff I've seen and heard, so I'll entertain this for now.)