Genre Advancement System

I've just offered a concept for a challenge at the Forge.

I've done this for a simple reason. I'd like to find out what constitutes genre in different people's minds. I could have simply posed a question, but I probably wouldn't have had anything useful come out of it, and would have had a dozen partial concepts.

I figure that offering a contest in this manner will generate a couple of well-considered and fully rounded ideas that I can then use as the basis for genre advancement within the Eighth Sea, or within some of the other game concepts I'm working on.

At the moment I'm finding a lot of products on the market to be very generic and flavourless. This seems to be with the intention of allowing different groups to inject their own style into a setting, but my question is how that style really becomes a part of the setting.

What makes "film noir"? What makes "horror"? How do you convey these concepts in a game mechanic?

It will be interesting to see what results might develop.

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