Playing around with the recent release from Inkle, Heaven's Vault, I got a bit of an epiphany of ideas regarding my own little homebrewed RPG. But first things first. Heaven's Vault is a archeological sci-fi game, consisting mainly of investigations, talking to people and finding old artifacts. Inside the game is a dead language you are trying to decode through a mixture of previously known words, guess work and contextual hints.
Lets say they are looking for previously mentioned character Serkis. Persuming you've read my last post on the topic, we already know who he is and what he is capable of. But what if the Players only got a single snippet. Like knowing he lived by the old highroads and made his armor of things found there, they might mistake any caravan guard or looter for Serkis, or alternatively they might know that he is covered in bright scales and is thus easily identifiable, but wont know where to look.
And this brought me to a pretty natural next step regarding True Things. Namely that why would I assume players to be omnipotent - knowing every single true thing by default? It would be much more interesting diving True Things into categories, like common knowledge, uncommon knowledge, to be discovered and finally misconceptions, lies and stigma. So on the GM's side of things it'd be much the same, have a set of miniatures with some statements written. And of course which ones were true and applied to the models stats the GM'd already know, but the players likely wouldn't unless they did their research too.
Lets say they are looking for previously mentioned character Serkis. Persuming you've read my last post on the topic, we already know who he is and what he is capable of. But what if the Players only got a single snippet. Like knowing he lived by the old highroads and made his armor of things found there, they might mistake any caravan guard or looter for Serkis, or alternatively they might know that he is covered in bright scales and is thus easily identifiable, but wont know where to look.
And the way to make this social aspect of the game deeper, to make it more than a simple dungeon crawl, would be the inclusion of falsehoods too. If you threw in rumor or two into each characters list, players would have to deal with sorting through these things or might actually prepare themselves for dangers that aren't at all real, which to me seems like a very interesting way to expand upon the game and its systems.
Since its core component very much is these sentences about characters and what they can, I think adding a flipside to that in the form of misinformation could be really interesting.
Since its core component very much is these sentences about characters and what they can, I think adding a flipside to that in the form of misinformation could be really interesting.
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