Last night Toph and JB and I got together to game, as is usual for a Tuesday night. Having only three we decided to have some kind of R&D session rather than try to get into an existing or new campaign. Last time around we ran some 3:16. This time around JB was really eager to pitch his new game idea to us as a potential VSCA project.

Now JB is a smart guy. And he loves — and understands — games. But his game until now has been a work of fiction. Not to say that the game itself is fictional, but rather that he has story ideas in his head and story ideas are not games. So this session was basically me and Toph trying to prise the game out of his head. I’m sure this was a little brutal from his side of the table but the end result was elegant indeed. We certainly found the game in there.

So here’s the process. JB has the audio and I don’t, so keep in mind this is my second-day memory-fiction version of the process. It’s not a transcript but a second- or third-order analysis dressed up as an anecdote.

First, every time JB started telling us the story we cut him off. Seriously, you have to do this. You can’t get into the weeds of the story because the game is not usually in there. The weeds are a fun place, so we were pretty hard on him here I think. He didn’t cry or anything (which is pretty good for a guy recovering from a groin injury), but I think it stung at first.

Anyway, Toph asked the kicker, “What’s your game about?” I’m not sure Toph has the Forge-GNS-etc context for that question. I don’t think so. It’s actually a pretty natural question. It just doesn’t get asked enough. Thing is, though, it’s not actually a demand to give up the core element of the game, which is what it sounds like it is. It’s actually a demand to invent it.

When we got to it — it’s not, for example, about crazed druids battling demons after the invasion using the powers they get from the dangerously warped orbital warfare platform — it was at once crystal-clear and lovely and puerile nonsense. Fortunately, puerile nonsense is where gaming rocks out. It’s a post-apocalypse story.

See now we can get our hooks in! We have touchstones! I rummaged through my library and hauled out some gems. Not gems of literature, but gems of fiction that lit up my imagination for post-apocalypse games — Lucifer’s Hammer, Eternity Road, and like that. We chanted off the names of more — A Canticle for Liebowitz, Hiero’s Journey, and War Day.

So that done, we step back. For the moment not caring what Chimaera will do, what do post-apocalypse games (and stories) do? Well, they travel, for one. To some extent they are about experiencing all the ways in which the players’ familiar world has been changed by the Big Bad Thing. And so you travel around it, seeing what the ref (and, at our table, the rest of the players as well) has to reveal. And your motivation for this? You are looking for the old things still preserved that will save your desperate community. You’re a young guy that the community can spare on a desperate journey to find Something that will make life right again for your people.

So now we know what the game does. It does that up there. Now we can get down to how the fiction crystallizes that and also makes it novel. It will be useless effort if we just re-write Twilight:2000 or Gamma World. And so we won’t. So we talk about setting and what setting elements need to be delivered (axioms, per Diaspora). There are humans trying to survive after alien demons are set loose on the world. The demons bring with them a plague of mutation but they are susceptible to something in their new world. They must transform it and absorb it. They enslave humans to use them to solve their problem and they battle the borders of a powerfully mutated wilderness that they are inexplicably terrified of.

And where humans? For symmetry, they are in both hostiles zones — humans live within the demon enclaves, bred by demons for horrible purposes. And humans live free in the wild, making pacts with mutated hive minds and eking out a desperate — but free — life there. Turns out this diagrams nicely, and it was a simple diagram that made it clear how the symmetry works. So do that — draw things; circles and lines and like that. When you diagram relationships you can start to apply symmetries (or carefully deny thems). Now manipulating the diagram manipulates the game idea. Feeding information from multiple sources (verbiage and diagrams enter ears and eyes and get processed by different parts of the brain — different things happen because you are not one magical place in the middle) is super-powerful. This pays and pays and pays.

I’d show you the diagram but it’s too cool. Suffice to say that JB’s inner buddhist seemed pleased.

Short version: Chimaera went from a story that was mostly in JB’s head to a probable game that’s in at least three heads. The moment that shift happened was simultaneous in all heads — Toph got it, I got it, and JB got that we got it. One giant brain. A little hive mind.

–BMurray