Of the Woods is a collection of six single-player lonely games. A lonely game is a game of questions to tell haunting, introspective, and quiet stories. The original game by Brie Sheldon, Locked Away, inspired the subsequent games by Kimberley Lam, Moyra Turkington, Meera Barry, Chris Bennett, and Adam McConnaughey, the last of which involves a tarot card mechanic. When you play a lonely game, you tell a story no one else has told – to keep locked away, or to share with others who are lonely, too.
Proceeds from the sales will go entirely to The Trevor Project (www.thetrevorproject.org/) to support LGBTQIA+ youth.
This is a post about my current project, Turn, which is a game about shapeshifters in small towns. See more posts about Turn on the Thoughty Turn tag.
There are a number of mechanics I’ve been working with to make Turn the game I want it to be, but one of the most vital components of the game is a mechanic called exposure. Exposure is what happens when a shapeshifter’s identity is made evident to an NPC or the town itself. It is, in essence, more dangerous than any physical damage a shifter could take (which is why damage isn’t really A Thing in Turn), but also potentially very fruitful.
You start off with a character that people know, that people have impressions of. Everyone knows everyone in small towns. When you act unusual? People notice, especially the closer they are to you.
Who are you? Who do people think you are?
Exposure isn’t necessarily bad. There are risks – if the whole town finds out you’re a shapeshifter and doesn’t like you or you’ve hurt someone, admittedly torches and pitchforks may be in your future. However, if someone you love slowly discovers you’re secretly an otter part-time, they might be willing to accept you.
Shifters mark their exposure track when they use their abilities outside of their current form – like when someone who is in human form uses their beast abilities, or when someone in beast form uses their human abilities. Some beasts have flexibility in this, like trash pandas raccoons who can casually escape exposure:
In Plain Sight – You never generate exposure for being seen in beast form if there are no witnesses to your transformation.
…or those who have animal groups (herds, romps, flocks) who can avoid exposure to humans while in animal form – but risk exposure to their group:
Otters have romps!
Each instance of exposure is either marked positive or negative. Each space on the track has room for a + or -, and when the exposure is assigned, the players will mark appropriate to the experience. Eventually, they’ll reach the end of the track, and add up their positives and negatives – and from that, determine the path they’ll take when they resolve the exposure.
If they ignore resolving NPC exposure for too long, it can overflow into the town – gossip is a bitch – and lead to further complications. Every town has themes and bloodlines that interconnect, and events that can be dark, or happy, or simply mysterious. What rumors led to those events? Did someone get hurt because a shifter just didn’t “act right” and someone saw them slip-up? In small towns, deviance is always noticed.
“We don’t talk about that.” – 13 deaths.
The exposure mechanic is really important to the experience in Turn and I’m hoping that, as play happens, it will be as fruitful as I want it to be. Fingers crossed that when it’s revealed to more players, I get a positive result!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
This week we cover upcoming interviews about The Quick and Cortex Prime, and my past and current work with Cortex products, as well as how to make sun tea!
My stretch goal at $45k – Solarpunk! A post-scarcity setting where powerful corporate interests seek to destabilize the fruits of progress and the heroes try to stop them – it’s not about what you don’t have, it’s about keeping what you do.
Put 4 to 8 tea bags into a clean 2 quart or gallon glass container (4 teabags for a 2 quart container, 8 tea bags for a gallon container). Fill with water and cap. Place outside where the sunlight can strike the container for about 3 to 5 hours. Move the container if necessary to keep it in the sun. When the tea has reached its desired strength, remove from sun and put it in the refrigerator.
I add sugar and lemons, too! Lemons you add while it’s in the sun, and sugar you mix in while it’s still warm before refrigeration so it dissolves. Sugar is mostly to preference, anywhere from a half cup to a whole cup, in my experience. (Some people who LOVE sweet tea put in two cups!)
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
This week we talk about upcoming interviews, my little game Off Target, and one of my dad’s favorite cookie recipes. The kind of annotated read of the game starts at 6:08 and the recipe section begins at 12:30. Designer & Devourer Episode 3 on Patreon Kevin Allen, Jr. on Trouble for Hire (not on KS yet)
Playlist of muzak, played in the background with random control of the volume. Include at least one song played twice in a row (“Call Me Maybe” is great for this).
Roles
Four players are the cognizant, and control the mind.
Four players are the present, and control the body.
Setting
Players are people shopping at a Target [or equivalent shopping venue] for five things on their list. Each character will experience the dissociation of their mind from their body. When the parts of the character separate, the players will risk failure.
Play
There are ten things in the store as options to buy, and only five of them are on the characters’ lists. Characters must buy exactly those five items. When they enter the store, cognizant players flip a coin. On a heads, the character buys the first item on their list. On a tails, they miss it. After flipping, the cognizant steps one step back, away from the present. They must verbally communicate to the present no matter how far away they are, or how many people are shouting.
As they travel through the store, the players should converse about their day (in character or out). As each character finds an item, the cognizant will flip the coin to see if they buy it and take a step back. The present will pick up the item if appropriate. If the coin is ever dropped, the present will drop an item at random.
Play continues for no more than 15 flips. At the end, the cognizant tears up the list entirely and throws it away. The cognizant and the present come together and look at the items, to see if they matched their list to their remembrance.
Even if they did, they have no means to confirm.
– end –
It’s recommended to use the Script Change tools to ensure all players enjoy the game. It’s highly recommended to have a Wrap Meeting to go over the events of the game and decompress.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
This week we talk about upcoming interviews and features, as well as Turn (my shapeshifter game in progress), poverty in rural towns, and a recipe from my childhood, Brownie Stew!
1 lb ground beef (seasoned as preferred, optionally using garlic and/or pepper) ½ onion, diced to ½ inch or smaller 1 bell pepper, diced to ½ inch or smaller 4 regular size cans condensed Campbells vegetarian vegetable soup 4 cups of white Minute rice with 4 cups water (if using other rice, this is 8 cups cooked equivalent)
Brown the burger with onion and pepper. Drain grease from the mixture. Add into the mixture the cans of soup and add one soup can of water. Heat the mix until it is evenly hot.
Separately make the 4 cups of white Minute rice using the Minute rice instructions or the 8 cups rice otherwise cooked. Pour the stew mix over the rice. Salt to taste.
Note: I do really hope to get these podcasts on various sites like iTunes and Google Play soon but it’s a combination of energy and money to do so. I hope you understand!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
ETA 4/16/2017: FYI, the recording for Designer & Devourer Episode 1 has had the hiss removed, so hopefully will be easier listening. Brie learned a skill! https://www.patreon.com/posts/8779339 — New podcast, I think?
Note: This is my first time recording a larger piece and my first podcast, so please understand I’m new! I hope to use some music in the intros sometime in the future, possibly? But here’s it!
Designer & Devourer is a 15-30 minute audio episode with my thoughts on upcoming games, design, and game theory, plus a semi-relevant personal or internet-sourced recipe. This week I talk upcoming interviews on Thoughty, the #200wordRPG contest, and my Great Grandma’s punch recipe.
I wanted to write a bit today about a technique I’ve been using for a long time now to design games and conceptualize sessions and campaigns (even if I’m not running, I know how I want my character to feel, or how to advise people who are running). The technique is what I call an “emotion map.”
Emotion maps use word clouds to establish what emotions are the most important to put into a game, and what ones you want to avoid. I have a few different ones I’ve used – one for designing a game itself, one for session planning (for one-shots), and one for campaigns. I’ve put together some examples of them to walk you through!
The first thing I do is grab a piece of paper and pen (you could do this digitally, though!) and title whatever it is I’m working on. Here’s the starting page for Turn.
Look at all that beautiful blank space.
A title is important because it reminds you of what you’re looking for when you’re stumped. You want to have a relatively big space to write on, because it gives some room to breathe or scratch stuff out if you need to.
(ETA:)
Emotion maps are kind of like our solar system, where the words all have different sizes and go around a point just beside what we consider the center (our system circles a spot right off center of the sun). You can choose to put them closer or farther away based on importance as well as based on desired impact, or you can scatter them. I generally use the mapped out on importance with bigger things.
The words are intermixed to show that they can conflict and interfere with each other. You could list them or order them otherwise, but this visual representation works best for me and provides an organic representation of the emotions I want present in the game. (/ETA)
From here, I’ll write in a few words in larger text. Let’s start with four!
Companionship, conflicted, desire, hopeful.
The words here are the most prominent emotions. I want the characters in Turn to feel these things during the game the most. The words don’t have to be consistent (verbs, nouns, adverbs, adjectives, whatever), they just have to mean something and relate to emotions.
The words I chose are companionship, conflicted, desire, and hopeful. You can see how these things would tie into a game like Turn, which is about shapeshifters in small towns struggling between their two identities, wanting to satisfy the needs of both, in need of support from their fellow shapeshifters, and looking forward to finding balance. Right?
More words! In smaller text! Use one more than the prominent emotions, to create some interference.
Hunger, wonder, rejection, isolation, trust.
These are secondary emotions. These leap off of other emotions or are in deeper and less often found, but are still vital to the story. They’re smaller than the prominent emotions in size to show their lessened influence, but big enough to start interfering with the others. The words are hunger, wonder, rejection, isolation, and trust. For Turn, PCs might experience love or greed, or just actual human or animal needs. They could also marvel at the abilities they use and gain, but be denied from the societies they live within – leaving them alone. That’s why they need to rely on their fellow shifters.
Final words! Smallest! Now use two more than the first (so six!), to make the sheet like a minefield.
These are avoided emotions. They are the emotions that can come from the experiences in the game that I want to have happen less, or not at all! They are the smallest because they can’t be forgotten but you don’t want to be reminded of what they really are until you look, because you don’t want to seek them out. The words are satisfaction, confidence, powerlessness, fear, pain, and loneliness.
Turn is about shapeshifters with significant power, so they shouldn’t ever feel like there’s nothing they can do. But, they shouldn’t ever feel like everything is done, or feel secure that they have everything under control. I don’t want players to struggle and feel like they’re in a bad state, and as much as there will be times when they are alone, I don’t want them without companionship (callback to the prominent emotions!) or someone to turn to (hey, trust!), components (from my translation) that when lacking produce loneliness.
Here are the notes I made on the sheet to give some context to the map:
Notes! I made them!
These notes are for a full game (obvs), but the point is that they’ll grow over time. You can expand the emotion map, adjust it as time goes on, and so on. You can also use the avoided emotions as reference for threats in the game – how do you have something bad happen without making someone afraid? These also will influence the core elements of my design.
The number of words is important because of where it places emphasis. You only have a few core emotions to focus on as the big ones, or else you’ll get exhausted trying to fill in every experience from just a top-level build. You have more of the secondary emotions so that there’s room to grow into them as the game develops. And you have even more avoided emotions to really highlight this is what I want to avoid, this is what will go away from the point of my game – when you know what you don’t want to do, it helps show what you do want to do.
You’ll notice in the final sheet that there are not just good emotions as prominent, nor are there only bad emotions as avoided.
Not all bad, not all good.
It’s important to know that in long term games, you’ll have good stuff and bad stuff, and when designing a game, you have to factor in all of those possibilities and figure out the big thing: if your players are going to have a negative experience – and they will! – what kind do you want it to be?
I also have in the following gifs the pages of the one-shot session of Shadowrun: Anarchy I conceptualized, and a three-session long-play of Monsterhearts.
Shadowrun: Anarchy Session – Prominent: Excitement, pressured, powerful, motivation. Secondary: Vindication, amusement, failure, anxiety (should have had 5). Avoided: Frustrated, anger, disappointment, boredom, lost, vengeful. Giphy Link
As noted in the gif and caption, I missed one in the secondary emotions, but I think the point still sits! This has a similar structure of fewer prominent emotions to more avoided emotions. The reasoning for this is that in a shorter game like a one-shot, you only have time to hit a few emotional peaks on purpose, but the secondary emotions might come in along with them or be good to throw in as additional bites. But you really want to avoid the emotions you focus on avoiding.
Here are my notes on the one-shot:
One-shot notes!
I noted here that this kind of structure is for one shots or single sessions, if you don’t plan out full campaigns or play an episodic game. It also has notes about having fewer positive emotions on it – if you look at the list, almost all of the avoided emotions are negative. This is totally okay! There are still some negative emotions in the secondary and prominent ones, but the point here is that hey, it’s a one shot of a bombastic game, and I super don’t want my players to get bummed out or bored.
The final Shadowrun: Anarchy one-shot emotion map:
Punchy!
Next, I did one of my more complicated emotion maps that I’ve used for both plotting game stuff, but also fiction! It’s for a three-session Monsterhearts game.
I feel terrible for the players in this game, honestly. Anyway, as you can see, there are some varying emotions all through the sessions, some that reflect off of each other, and some that conflict. This is good! You don’t want the same emotions every session, though you can have them evolve (no safety to finding comfort to building trust and having gratitude, suspicion to understanding to obsession).
My notes on the Monsterhearts emotion map:
In the Monsterhearts sessions, you have more prominent emotions and fewer avoided ones! Why change this? First off, you’re working with a full arc of story – this isn’t encompassing a potential of many stories or a single run in a one-shot, it’s a story told to complete emotional arcs for PCs. You could do something like this for a single session of Monsterhearts or similar games if you intend to go through a full experience, but if it’s a piece of time instead of a range, it’s not as useful.
I also think that it depends on the type of game. Shadowrun, for example, can have emotion in it, but it typically has fewer, focused emotions. Monsterhearts is a game about teenagers and sex and horror, so it runs the whole range of complicated emotions, especially in long play. And you want to welcome all sorts of emotions – it is less common to say “Oh, I don’t want the ghoul to feel that right now” because you really want to see what happens when a ghoul feels, say, absolution, or joy!
The final Monsterhearts long-play emotion map:
I am really bad at sizes of words. I’ll work on it. 🙂
You can go inside out, or outside in, with how many words you use. Just be super cognizant of what you’re saying with that construction!
Remember:
Too many prominent emotions can wear people out in shorter games.
Fewer overarching prominent emotions for designing full games is better because you can’t predict every session.
If the game is super emotionally intense, go wild with the desired emotions, but make sure to avoid emotions that really spoil the essence of the game.
I hope you find the emotion map technique useful! It’s been really valuable for me as a designer, as a creator in general, and as a player. I think it looks at games from the perspective that matters to me as a designer and player, where things feel. I might not be super great at math or anything, but I know feelings pretty damn well.
Each town type comes with some themes, like tradition or poverty or something like that. Starting out from the town center, you can add themes, locations, events, and bloodlines. From those, you can add further locations, bloodlines, and events.
In the pictures, you’ll see I built the following town:
Westin
Industrial
Pop. 2000
Sq. Mi. 3
(You can tell it’s a low population town but it’s waaaay spread out.)
The options for themes for industrial towns include (but aren’t limited to) poverty, resentment, wealth, tradition, and waste. I added those!
I attached some locations, too, like the Mill, and Main Street, and from resentment, the Church.
Then I added the bloodlines, which are the families in the town, like the Blakes (tied to the Church), the Coopers (tied to Poverty), Tuckers (tied to Main St.), Westins (tied to the Mill), and the Lewis family (tied to wealth). These don’t all have to connect, but I did it for fun.
Now there’s a whole town! It doesn’t represent locations, but you can see how different things might fit together and where trouble might start.
John has been encouraging me to write about my new game I’m working on, Turn. Turn has been a project long simmering, but I’ve only recently begun putting down words for it, with John’s help. I wanted to talk a little about the relationship between the two aspects of the characters.
Turn is a game about shapeshifters in rural towns who experience the struggle between their human side and the call of their beast, trying to maintain the balance between the two and keep their identities hidden. Turn itself is not about external threats like hunters or other shifters coming to town. It is about internal threats, personal struggles, and achieving the goals you have as a human and a beast.
Each player starts with two sheets, one human role and one beast archetype. As players advance and gain more archetypes for their beast side, they can change out that sheet. I’d like to talk about two of the sheets we worked on last night, the Late Bloomer role and the Raven archetype.
The Late Bloomer
You were, and had always been, normal. You had a life as a human that was outright mundane, and it was satisfying. There were days when you looked out the window and felt a stirring in your heart, but that was all, until your beast burst forth. Now, you look at the world with new eyes, and struggle to find your footing while you straddle both worlds, wondering which side will slip first.
The Raven
Ravens are clever, omnivorous birds who are messengers of forewarning and can solve problems many beasts would find a challenge. Their ability to fly is valuable, but their keen intellect and sharp beak serve just as great a purpose.
The Late Bloomer can use their social status they have from their longer, uninterrupted human experience to influence NPC’s who are suspicious of fellow shifters to be less concerned. The Raven has a variety of powers, but I want to focus on a power called Ruffling Feathers. With Ruffling Feathers, they can spur dissent – distract others, make them angry or upset, etc. It’s really a shit-stirring power.
When a shifter is in their human form, they can draw power from relevant beast powers to influence their situation. A character playing the Late Bloomer, who would know a lot about how people behave and what makes them tick, could cause quite a ruckus drawing from an ability like Ruffling Feathers.
For each role and archetype there are a number of goals for shifters to achieve to progress. While some goals may be conveniently aligned, for the most part, these will be competing goals to contrast the powers and backgrounds that do fit together well. These conflicting priorities will hopefully result in hard choices with fruitful results.
This is just a simple examination of how the archetypes and roles interact in Turn, and as the design progresses, there will be more aspects to look at.
This post is free, but Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
