“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: The act of accusation is the most important action in the game, and is explicitly defined with mechanics.
Companion: Each player has a secret companion among the NPCs whose actions they can guide. This NPC serve alternately as their spy, hatchetman, fawning toady, or anything else as desired, but revealing who your secret companion is though actions which are too obvious will allow the other competing players to target and destroy them.
Invincible: The player characters are invincible. This is a war waged through proxies, subterfuge, and attrition.
Rules Limitation System designed cards: The deck of cards is used for meta-game resources and positioning. They grant special abilities to circumvent the cost of certain actions, to automatically succeed, gain bonuses, etc. They can also interject new complications into the game.
______________ Tentative rough outline of how the game will work:
General Design Concept The game is highly competitive between players representing a rash of frenzied witch hunting running rampant through a small rural village. It is a race between the players to first amass a certain quantity of personal gain, which can only be earned at the expense of other characters. They earn this through social positioning, manipulation, and accusations which ultimately end up in numerous characters burning at the stake falsely accused as witches. The players represent the most manipulative and shrewd power brokers of the town, all of whom are trying to turn the frenzy to their favor. The game relies heavily on sowing secrecy and distrust between the players.
Very important to the game is the fact that nobody in the village actual is a witch. Witches do not exist. There is no magic. This is not a game about witches, but rather a game about the witch hunt itself and how the process is manipulated for personal gain.
Starting Play First the GM (this game needs a GM for important reasons) declares an event which begins the witchhunt - for example the crops are failing this year, a church inquisitor appears in the village asking questions, an important person's baby is born stillborn for the third time in a row, someone in the village acquires an illness that is interpreted as demonic possession, etc. The game then begins with all players taking turns creating, one by one, the various inhabitants of the village and the relationships they have with one another. These are all charted on a big map. At the end of this phase each player chooses a character from among these as their PC.
Resources Players may take advantage of or suffer from the following resources:
Social Standing: Social Standing is not about what you do, but what you get caught doing. Lose social standing from accusations, not from doing bad things.
Personal Gain: Achieving goals and eliminating enemies earns points in personal gain. Amassing enough personal gain ends the game.
Secret: Every character has something kept hidden from the other characters
Envy: Something someone has that they want but can only have if the character burns at the stake. They get a pot of personal gain and a new envy if their target burns.
Vendetta: Someone they hold a grudge against. They get personal gain every time they make that person lose social standing. They also get a pot of personal gain and a new vendetta if their target burns.
Facts: Several facts about the character. They grant bonuses when they can be used to advantage in a given situation - whether they are the player's, the targets, or any other character's.
Relationships: Relationships on the map grant bonuses on actions. These are critical to success and are the primary modifiers to any action.
Ongoing Play Players each take turns framing a conflict to pursue a certain agenda. When doing this they may choose to either continue the current scene or to start a new scene. If continuing the current scene they may bring new characters into the scene as desired. The agenda they pursue is one of the following:
1. Change a relationship on the map: For example, change someone's ally into their adversary.
2. Make an accusation against another character: The player must stake some of their character's social standing in order to accuse another character of something. If successful they regain not only the amount they staked, but more in addition while the target loses a certain amount. Other players and NPCs may stake social standing on either side of the conflict as well, as best serves their interest.
3. Change or introduce a new fact: Spend social standing to change a fact in the game. For example, a character might become pregnant, a farmer might lose one of his cows, etc.
4. Bolster another character's social standing: Stake your own social standing in an attempt to bolster that of another character.
5. Try to learn another character's secret: Typically done during the secret action phase.
6. Blackmail a character, if their secret is known: Typically done during the secret action phase.
Secret action phase: After each round (consisting of each player having one turn framing a conflict), all characters must write on and submit a scrap of paper to the GM, which must at minimum state "no secret action". The actions therein are carried out by the GM. They may also pass secret notes to one another at this point if desired.
Resolution Exact mechanics for resolving a conflict are not yet determined, but will involve staking social standing toward a goal. Other players may stake social standing on either side of the conflict as well, in secret if desired.
When social standing drops to 0 for a character, they are burnt at the stake.
Player characters do not burn at the stake. They are immune.
Players' characters can use personal gain in lieu of social standing if social standing drops to 0.
Players get one card per round (one cycle through each player's turn). There is a maximum to how many they can hold in their hand. They can play them whenever appropriate per the card.
awesome premise, kenjib! it reminds me of a party game i recall named "The Werewolf". basically, there's a bunch of peasant, tradesmen, a seer, and someone who's secretly a werewolf. over time, the werewolf kills people, and you have to figure out who the werewolf is.
the stated goal of your game is kind of puzzling, though: to amass X influence? it seems incongruous with the rest of the game... something like completing a set agenda or maybe reducing other players to Zero could be more dynamic, might offer a better "fit".
Thank you for the reply. Just to make sure we are coming from the same place, I would like to further explain the current plan, as I think it already kind of does what you are describing.
The two most important resources for a player are social status and personal gain. Social status is a value that will fluctuate with the game and represents your influence in the village. It is an enabler that allows you to be more aggressive and seek changes to your advantage. Personal gain is the value that you are trying to accrue to win the game. You accrue personal gain by fulfilling your envies and vendettas - which requires that innocent people burn at the stake. Personal gain is a mark of how much you have accomplished rather than your influence. Personal gain is like the notches in your gun or your score in pinball.
So, the goal of the game really is to accomplish a series of set agendas, which are defined by envies and vendettas. The goal here is to reward the cruellest, most ruthless and manipulative behavior until the person who gets the most "loot" wins. In this game "loot" is defined as savoring the destruction of your enemies, running off with your neighbor's wife, inheriting your half brother's cow, etc.
A trend I hope will enter the game is the old "playing off of alliances" trick that happens in many multiplayer games, like Risk. As soon as someone is approaching the endgame, the other players will probably start teaming up against them to keep them from winning - for example they can figure out who their companion is and having them burnt at the stake and then team up to outbid the player and strip them of social status. So there will not only be the mechanical politics of the game itself, but also social maneuvering between players at the table. That so many elements and actions are kept secret will help to build this tension between players. However, social status will be a public score. So, if someone builds up social status very quickly, I suspect that other players will most likely notice and take action accordingly.
So, how do you win the game? There are at least five vectors at work here. Social status is, indeed, a very important one. However, there are also the player politics, the ability to act secretly through your companion (who could, for example, actually have more social status that your main character), the ability to manipulate NPC relationships and facts to thwart other players (relationship modifiers will be critical to success), and finally the cards you are holding in your hand.
After this explanation, do you still think that the goal of the game is to amass X influence? If so, that is not my intent, so I would greatly appreciate if you clarified further so I can try and figure out what's wrong in my plans.
I do like the idea of trying to reduce the other players to zero though, and it was my first thought (i.e. burn all of the other players at the stake). One problem I have with something like this is that I don't want a game where one player is essentially taken out of the game when there are still several sessions of play left. The other problem I have is that I think the current endgame goal lends itself more to a recreation of the situation I am trying to create - i.e. people gaming a system they all know is based on complete lies in order to get what they want without concern for the lives they destroy. That is my rough opinion of what the historical phenomenon of the witch hunt was often all about.
that actually clears things up a lot, thanks! good luck to you!
incidentally, my first thought on that Historical Period theme was "i wonder if anyone will pick up Puritan New England.." close enough, yes?
First, the initial event which starts the witch hunt needs to be more carefully defined. I think that all of the examples I gave previously except for one do not carry enough kick to really throw everything into motion. I will instead now make it clear that the initial event that starts the game must be so dramatic that everyone in the village is directly effected. So, the crops failing would definitely meet the criteria but the others would not. Other possibilities would be a sudden and large tax hike, or bubonic plague hitting the town. These are things that effect each and every person in the village. Some of the other kinds of examples I gave are more like the kinds of things you would use the accuse action for, establish a new fact for, or perhaps might happen as the result of a card draw.
The reason I make this change is that the potential to blame someone for witchcraft should be ubiquitous. Anyone can be responsible and everyone has something to lose. This leaves it much more easy to make accusations against anyone instead of just the characters implicated in the event that starts the game. It should be quite clear that what everyone is blaming each other for is truly nobody's fault.
Second, there will be a set of facts regarding what the superstitions about witches are. These will work just like character facts in that they can be used to augment conflict resolution when applicable. Most importantly, when someone makes an accusation, it will benefit them if their accusation is related to these types of behavior.
My biggest challenge right now is working out how secrecy will work. Which stats are secret and which aren't. For example, should envy and vendetta be public or private? More particularly my concern is that since the social standing and personal gain stats are public, I have to make sure that when secret actions cause these to increase, the rules are such that this does not automatically give away who initiated a given action even while it still gives subtle, but inconclusive, hints to the astute observer.
Okay, now I am thinking quite a bit about Dangerous Liaisons and what it means to the phenomenon of the witch hunt. What kind of systems are moving in both of these cases toward the same end? I think this is the central concept around which I am designing this game.
This leads me to a thought. In the film, Vicomte ends up falling in love with someone who is supposed to be his pawn. This love then becomes another tool that the Vicomte and the Marquise use to ruthlessly destroy each other. What is really happening here? I suggest that perhaps facts can somehow be introduced to a character which are contrary to their envies and vendettas. These facts then, at face value, interfere with an otherwise immoral pursuit of power and ego. Can this be accomplished, perhaps, by a competing character as a form of sabotage via the "change or introduce a new fact" action? Can the newly established fact, supposedly an act of sabotage, then be twisted to advantage by a clever player?