I am going to publish the setting, Deluge, sometime in the next month or two. I did a bunch of new writing for it on the weekend and I feel inspired to do some artwork for it and I had fun experimenting with layout on it. So it’s fun, and you can have it if you want it. I want it — I’m playing it and having a great time.

Here are the four three experiments.

Systemless Experimentation

It’s an experiment in systemless setting design. Not just in whether or not that can be done — it’s been done often enough before that I see no essential controversy there — but whether there is a process for doing it. Is there a way to reliably take an idea and turn it into something others can and will use as a setting? So this process is pretty straightforward:

Describe the idea

Obviously you have to tell the audience what the setting is about. I’m looking at a very rapid development cycle here, so I’m not relying on writing a ton of exposition and fiction. I’m also using an original idea, so I can’t just point to existing canon and say, “like that.” Instead I am relying on the three solutions we used in Diaspora:  micro-fiction that delivers tiny scenes that illustrate how I feel about some aspect of the setting, mechanisms that deliberately create the tone I intend both in play and while reading, and a willingness to back away from stuff that I think is cool for the user to create.

Answer the question, “Who are these guys?”

Who are the agents in this place? Who will the players play? What kinds of characters live here that are worth pretending to be?

Answer the question, “What do they do?”

What do the characters do that’s fun? How do these activities chain together to form adventures? Why do the players care to pretend to do what the characters do? In Deluge we find the answer is (concisely) that they go on missions essential to the survival of communities that protect and love them. That last turns out to be important. Another post though.

The fact that they “go on missions” is not quite enough, though, and so there are mechanisms in Deluge that imply, suggest, bribe, and even bamboozle players into the mission mentality. Mission-driven gaming is one of the most profitable forms for me because you can get going so very fast and everyone knows what’s what right away. It’s why practically every MMO that makes a crapton of cash uses a quest scheme of some kind. And you can always excise it — if you sit down to play and describe the world and the players already know what they want to do, you can just sit back and watch it happen, regardless of whether or not a mission has been offered.

Answer the question, “Who opposes them?”

What is the nature of the conflicts that the characters will face but, more importantly, what are the agents on the other side of them? What are the monsters of this setting? In this setting the opposition takes many forms. The ultimate agents opposing humanity are the angels, but more immediately characters will confront other humans with opposing interests, wild animals, the environment itself, and the decaying ill-understood ruins of the old world.

This is tricky in a system-free setting because obviously you can’t provide stat blocks and stat blocks are part of what people expect to pay for. But you can talk about the kinds of mechanisms that need to come in to play for each form of opposition and you can talk vaguely about representation (these guys are strong and smart, but slow and ugly). So that’s a challenge.

Interface to systems

Finally, to be systemless, I choose to be explicit about where the user needs to attach her system. So throughout the document there are passages that are solely about ways to make the intended effect happen in any system, sometimes with examples from specific systems. Mostly, however, the concepts are general and the solutions will require a little work (but not a lot) from the user. The assumption underpinning this is that one person at every table (at least) loves this kind of thing. As evidence I offer the fact that most of the posts about Diaspora are about how to make it do something else. I expected that. I love that it came true. It might be an essential fact of populist role-playing games that they succeed when they facilitate mis-playing them.

Publication

Publication itself is going to be an experiment as well. I intend to publish Deluge solely as a PDF (I know you’ve read my opinions and blitherings about PDFs but a hallmark of experimentation is that it could come out either way — you don’t experiment when you believe you know the outcome with any certainty). I intend to make it cheap because it’s getting written whether I publish it or not because it’s in my head and trying to get out.

Perhaps oddly (but it’s my experiment so I can do what I want) I am laying it out as though it were destined for print. There are a few reasons for this, but foremost is that laying out for electronic use turns out to be a dull and aggravating job. It holds no artistic interest for me and the only academic interests in it have already been resolved and I see no need to re-explore them. Most of them stem from correlation between re-flowable and paged texts anyway, and this is not an issue here.

I am, however, laying it out as though it were destined for your printer. It will be on standard US Letter sized pages, though oriented in landscape, and it will use fonts and graphics that I have chosen partially for their functionality on the low resolution devices we have in our homes (and, secretly, our offices). It will assume double sided printing and binding, but only because that doesn’t hinder it much if you choose to print it single sided and staple the corner.

I will test its viability as a document viewed on a screen, but I don’t care if it works on my Kindle.

Licensing

Deluge will be licensed under a Creative Commons license allowing free use, modification, distribution and all that good stuff provided it’s not for commercial purposes. I’ll be selling it but you can give it away once you have it. I think there is plenty to be learned from this, though it will be hard to disassociate other factors in sales and availability. Ultimately the normalising number I will need is evidence of actual play, and you can’t command that and you can’t even know what percentage of actual play is reported. So it will be hard to draw conclusions from this unless the results are dramatic.

–BMurray