Going Retro with New Deliberateness

We’ve been talking a lot about the strength of traditional systems lately, the SI group and I. One of the things that we find they do best is, by supplying details, both in setting and in character, they help a play group converge on the same page about events and persons in the game. They help us lock in on a coherent vision, and provide repair routines for when the vision’s consistency suffers. The result is a form of play where formal procedures often recede into the background, being pulled out only when the group agrees they are required for something. I find it to be a really rewarding kind of play.

I’m trying to take what I’ve learned from the Forge school of indie design and import it into this form.

One of the big things I want to touch on in Earth & Sky is the matter of far-flung and far-different cultures, so I wanted to provide a system tool for evoking these. This tool is the Sky: We all live under the same stars, but in different parts of Heaven, the stars are differently arranged.

Each star represents a location of activity – the place for study, the place for eating, the place for cleansing, the place for combat, the place that is refuge, the place of business, and so on. The constellations of each planet describe the planetary culture’s arrangement of their places, and how their skills lie and interrelate.

I’m not sure how to lay out the constellations for the different cultures yet, or how to name the resulting relationships (since we really only have words for them corresponding to cultures that are quite familiar), but I’ll get there.

Sorry for the long delay in posting, by the way. My family has been visiting and it’s been really hectic at work! It’s been a struggle to find the time and the mental energy.