First Glance Vomitorium

[Ben Lehman]

[hamsterprophet]

[Paka]

I am having some dry heaves before I call it a night. Things are beginning to take some kind of a shape in my head. It might not make sense to you yet. These are, after all, dry heaves in the vomitorium.

I see colored cups for conflict resolution. One is red for offense. One is blue for defense. One is clear for story bidding.

d4 is Heart, when a 4 is rolled it is rolled again, adding up upon each 4

d12 is Honor, wound dice won't effect honor.

d20 is Steel

d6's are wound dice

Blades will clash even as the reality of the crime is determined.

I'm feeling Dogs in the Vineyard inspired die pools with a Universalis-inspired collaborative story mechanic.

The role of the second and the judge in forming the story that drives the trial.

Its a busy weekend but my notes are down and come Monday, the time for vomitting will be over.

And the cooking will begin.

[jwalton]

"Invincible wine!" Ha! Seadog Tuxedo II, baby! :)

Avast you scurvy scallawags!

[Doug Ruff]

I've just crawled out from bed to check the ingredients, so I am bleary and excited at the same time. Neat.

First thoughts? I want a game inspired by

In other words, a game inspired by 1970's dinner parties; a game about social climbing, bitching and one-upmanship.

Which lends itself to ingredients of wine, companion and accuser. Maybe with fixed characters as the limitation.

This also gets to be a game about "ordinary people" as a bonus.

- Doug

[kenjib]

For the pleasure of the judges and audience, I present the merest hint of the delicacies to come in the forthcoming array of finely prepared cuisine...


The Hammer of Witches

“Whether the Belief that there are such Beings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the Catholic Faith that Obstinacy to maintain the Opposite Opinion manifestly savours of Heresy.”
-The Malleus Maleficarum

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
-Exodus 22:18 King James Translation

Malleus Maleficarum will be a game about a small community which unravels in an orgy of intrigue, envy, greed, fear, hatred, and fire. There is no magic. Witches are not real. Will those with the darkest shadows in their hearts be the ones that burn at the stake, or the ones who orchestrate the destruction with malicious precision?

Historical Period
The late 16th Century. Small rural village in France.

Ingredients
Accuser: Oh, I don't know...
Companion: Having allies and companions is a critically important currency
Invincible: Will be worked into the mechanics of the game, perhaps kind of like immunities in the television show Survivor.

Rules Limitation
System designed cards that create random, unstable, situations and force players into conflict.

[matthijs]

THEME: Northwest France, 9th century.

INGREDIENTS: Invincible. Companion. Accuser.

RULES LIMITATION: Hand gestures have mechanical effects in-game.

A conflict storytelling game for three to five players. The Frankish empire is crumbling, the Breton rebels are helping it crumble, and the Viking raiders are picking up the crumbs.

Franks are scissors. Bretons are stone. Vikings are paper. Players use paper, scissors, stone to decide what parties are involved in each conflict, and who gets to win. Different combinations - pairs, all different, all the same - have special effects, so player tactics can backfire severely.

Each side has special abilities. The Vikings are Invincible - they just have to choose their attacks for maximum profit. The Bretons can Accuse - they uncover intrigues in the Frankish court, adding plot twists. The Franks have Companions - they can bring in allies to add their chances of success.

There will be a winning player at the end.

[redivider]

If I can find enough time & clear enough counter space, I will prepare a banquet of four dishes. (Hey, i can dream.) All four fit into the period ‘between the wars,’ roughly 1919 to 1938. Each course in this meal will feature some of the flavors of early 20th century modernism: a sense of innovation, of boundaries shattered, perhaps soured by a whiff of extremism.

first course: Manifesto

Characters are members of a cultural or political movement, an avant garde in the midst of writing a bold manifesto. To play, you’ll need to modify an old board game you drag out of your closet or buy at a thrift store. By moving pieces around the board, players will resolve their characters’ personal and collective struggles while also collecting words/ ideas/ images that will become the building blocks of an actual manifesto that the group will complete by the end of the game.

Influences: artistic manifestos of the period

Wine –the intoxication of creating a new way of thinking
Accuser – critique of the stultified, tired art or politics that you are burying
Companion – your colleagues & co-authors

Limit: No character sheet


2nd course: All that is solid melts into air

This is a horror game inspired by Lovecraftian cosmic horror’s ambivalence to modernism. Characters are either reactionaries who resist the innovations and attitudes of modern thought or progressives who embrace modernism and hate superstitions and unjust traditional attitudes. The horrors in the game directly or indirectly symbolize the ideas that the characters loathe and fear. The character sheet is a portrait of the character cut into a 3 by 3 grid. The vertical and horizontal rows and columns represent mental strengths and motivations. As the characters are impacted by horror, some of these 9 pieces are flipped upside down or removed in a graphic representation of the character’s crumbling mental state

Influences: H.P. Lovecraft, the ‘culture war’

Entomology – characters scrutinized and/or squashed like bugs by greater entities or an indifferent universe
Invincible – the shattering of the fortress mind
Accuser – making a fear worse by linking it to an ideology you despise

Limit: fixed characters or dice showing 3 pieces of info?


3rd course: Down & Out

Characters in Down & Out have sunk into the dregs of society. They are addicts, losers, felons, misfits, the underclass, anti-heroes. They drift in and out of abject poverty, scrape by in deviant subcultures, populate the criminal underworld, try their hand at degrading menial jobs, rent rooms by the week in filthy boarding houses, all the while scheming and coping. Character traits are defined by features like tattoos, scars, addictions, afflictions, convictions, and possessions.

Influences:
• Celine: Death on the installment plan & journey to the end of the night
• Orwell: Down and out in London and Paris
• Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer
• Chaplin: modern times
• The Three stooges: short films

Wine - addiction
Accuser – social stigmatization
Companion – loneliness & companionship

Limit: Hand gestures


4th course: Which side are you on?

Characters choose sides and take action in the three great ideological struggles of the era: (pro or anti) colonialism, fascism, and communism. The game mechanics will probably focus on debate and ideological strife, with colors representing the red, blacks, and whites of political movements and the ‘color line’ of race.

Influences: Orwell, ?

Companion – comrades & fellow travelers
Entomology - mass man analogized as social insects
Accuser – propaganda of the word and deed

Limit: Colors

[MikeSands]

[gordonclandis]

OK, here goes - I may be stretching the meaning of "Historical Period" here, but to produce a truly extraordinary taste sensation, it is always neccessary to take risks. If a certain college-level biology teacher is among the secret ninja panel of judges, I am in so much trouble . . .

Silurian Emergence: The true origin and meaning of class Insecta

Theme - The Silurian period

Ingredient #1 - Entomology. This game reveals the true origin of the class Insecta to have been in the Silurian period. That is, if the players find a way to keep their species' alive to the Devonian (and beyond, though the game assumes that those species that exist in that period become the "root" species of the future of Insecta).

Ingredient #2 - Companion. While the acting creatures in Silurian Emergence are primitive members of class Insecta, the "PC's" of the game are actually OC's - Ordovician Cephalopods. Or rather, the disembodied consciousness of an Ordovician Cephalopod. The OC's had developed intelligence, emotions and society of roughly the same style that humans will (or might) eventually develop; a player should think of an OC as essentially human in terms of motivations, feelings and personality. The end of the Ordovician period brings with it the inevitable and unavoidable extinction of the OC species. But rather than simply fade into oblivion, the OC's have found a way to bind their consciousness as a "Companion" to a terrestrial life form. A life form created by OC science to emerge after the glaciation of Gondwanaland begins to wane. A life form that can be . . . touched, molded, and sometimes even controlled by that disembodied, Companion OC consciousness.

Ingredient #3 - Invincible. Only an OC that is exceptionally driven can become a Companion - driven to fight for the survival of something of their civilization. Driven to be survive, in the face of extinction, in the face of geologic time, in the face of an indifferent, uncaring universe. Driven to become Invincible. What it is that drives you to be Invincible is the key, and only, attribute of your OC.

Limitations - I think there will be no character sheet, there will be designer-created cards, and there will be a dice system with 3 distinct pieces of information. Or maybe only one of those, strictly, and others if you allow creative use of pleasing ingredients rather than strict adherence to literality. This needs some additional thought, to ensure the evocation of a maximally pleasurable taste for the players (and the judges!). Also, I might well utilize many components of my SNAP system, which my-soon-to-be-numerous detractors may call an unfair resource advantage. I consider it rather an intelligent use of previous experience, but it will be neccessary to embark on combining the flavors before it is certain that such a useage will provide the proper mouth-feel for the dish.

Gordon