All Souls Day

This month I am creating a game for NaGaDeMon 2016. You can follow along from the beginning.

Before I dive right into writing a game in Texture, I want to get a sense of the setting, characters, and plot I could work with. A lot of my creative energy recently has gone into preparing material for the Xenoarchaeology game I want to run, and I don't want to use that for this game project.

My favourite tools to inspire some creative thinking are random generators, and one I like in particular when thinking about setting is Instant Game by Mike and Kyle Jones. The pdf was available for free from the Animalball games website, but that has gone offline and now it's available from archive.org. It's a rules-lite game system that comes with an incredibly useful set of d100 tables with titles like "Tones" and "Things" and "Other Things".

To generate an instant setting, you roll on the tables {Setting, Tone, Thing, Thing}, which I will do below and see what ideas the results spark.

Setting: 19--Contemporary
Tone: 77--Realistic
Thing: 11--Blood
Thing: 55--Mysterious Energy

Well, I'll admit that initially I'm a little disappointed... but there's definitely some interesting stuff here. The first three elements immediately put me in mind of police procedurals, and serial killers, of crime or horror, involving some kind of investigation. Maybe I could twist that: perhaps this takes place in a blood bank, or a hospital, or a slaughterhouse. Maybe it's somewhere that involves blood in a less direct way: out hunting in the woods, or in miniature, inside a body.

The final element of mysterious energy adds a nice feel. Perhaps the police are investigating cultists who might be conjuring something up. Perhaps the blood is part of or being affected by some energetic phenomenon (like mutations, or superhero origins). Maybe the blood is the source of magic, in some ritualistic way, or maybe in a sort of druidic/natural/life-force way.

This is a rich vein (ha!) to draw from, but maybe another roll on the tables will help narrow it down. I'll roll on the Descriptor table to modify one of the Things, and on the Places table to narrow down the setting.

Descriptor: 31--Extravagant
Place: 36--Graveyard

Crime and horror it is, then. Lets say that "extravagant" goes with "blood". Some kind of intricate pattern of blood is necessary for a ritual, and it all culminates in the graveyard?  What if it -begins- in the graveyard? What if the player is not investigating a cultist/murderer, but actually IS one? Maybe a reluctant one who doesn't want to kill anyone, so instead digs up graves to acquire the necessary blood.

Alright! We have a game. The player chooses bodies to dig up in a graveyard in order to collect blood which must be arranged in a certain way to accomplish a ritual involving mysterious energy. Darker than I thought I'd go, but I suppose today IS All Souls Day...

Next steps: play some games in Texture to familiarize myself with it, and flesh out this graveyard game by adding some plot details and obstacles.