Mmmm… it’s more of a mission statement for a player. With respect to being a culture designer for No Man’s Land, I’m writing setting: the only say I have in mechanics is a strongly worded suggestion (or puppy-eyed pleading when it comes to mechanics for poison (what can I say? I want people to worry about what they’re drinking)). If you’re interested in how I think about that task, read on.
In a sense No Man’s Land is designed by a committee - all the culture designers are working on their own things, talking among ourselves to iron out snags and spark ideas, and looking up to the GMs for a final say and advice on mechanics. I’m personally happier to have Stephanie as a partner to work with on my Culture - it’s not just having a damn smart and creative person giving input, it’s being able to bounce ideas and get a synergy going - we get a lot more done together than apart. I don’t think any of the Cultures have less than two people working on them right now.
No Man’s Land is intended to be Player-Driven. I’d say that’s the most important aspect of the design brief, affecting all the consequent building of the game. We aren’t working out storylines or set encounters, we’re working out settings that have inherent conflict. If all goes well, how the Players react to and resolve that conflict will create more, in a nice, juicy unfolding of the setting. I don’t think this kind of game would even be considered without a solid respect for the players to roleplay, and think, and strategise (some of the most delightful parts of Mordavia came to be through Player-Driven Plot).
Character backgrounds become very important - the ties that they have with other characters will mean a great deal. One of the reasons each of our Cultures is based on a historical setting is so that we get instant familiarity with dress styles and basic patterns of thought: it’s a quick and dirty way of getting people up to speed on their character background, and helps them tell, visually, who is probably going to be helpful to them.
When designing our particular Culture, the Free Cities, Steph and I had a brief, Frockcoats & Flintlocks/Renaissance, because a lot of people wanted the whole swashbuckling thing. Black powder, yeah! We took a bunch of other things, including my desire to play a particular kind of character (have fun!), and evolved a setting that has several distinct locations, a rough geography, basic trade agreements, lots of internal conflict, an ethos, an attitude to the other Cultures, at least two reasons for heading into the region where the games will take place, and well, you know, flair. We want players to want to inhabit our Culture.
We have distinct locations because we like colour, and because part of the Renaissance feel is loyalty to a city-state over loyalty to a country. The geography came from explanations of how the Free Cities came to be, and why they are seperated like they are. The visual look and flavour of each region had a lot to do with the geography: sometimes the lay of the land influenced a region, sometimes the way we wanted a city to be dictated how the land had to lie. With geography came items that each region finds easy to produce and we started thinking about balance of trade and so forth. We wanted to keep each place fairly equal in terms of power military and power economic, but we also thought about what they could make from where they were. One of the major grudges in our setting is between two cities that, logically, both have a lion’s share of the same trade but have very different philosophies about it. Now that should be interesting.
I believe that the Free Cities are interesting enough to campaign in all on their own, now. And that’s kind of cool. No, it’s really cool. There is still a lot of blank in there and, while we will be filling in a lot more gaps, we’re planning on letting the players add in stuff as they go - other people’s creativity is a wonderful thing, and it helps endear the setting to them.
There is a lot about the other Cultures that I just don’t know, and probably will never know. I will be playing in the game when it starts, and pretending not to know Out of Character information gets really tedious. As a Culture Designer… I know an awful lot about the Free Cities. I’d rather know as little about the secrets of the other characters as I can possibly manage.
And that took an excruciatingly long time to write, so I hope you don’t mind if I stop here. Is this the sort of information you had in mind?
) and don’t have the mental capacity right now.