Familiarity

Revising Darkhive for the "SNAFU SRD and Cookbook" has been like putting on a comfortable old pair of sneakers, or a favourite old band t-shirt. I know how it works, it's familiar, and it's nice to see some progress on a project that was basically abandoned a decade ago. 

It's interesting to see how some of my game design ideas have changed in that time, and how they've stayed fairly consistent.

Now the thing is trying to fill in gaps, and convert a world into a game.

That's where the art comes in. Anyone can make a world, then say "Compatible with 5e", or whatevere the current incarnation of D&D is... a plethora of mediocre gaming products do that. They might even throw in a bunch of new weapons and equipment, a couple of new monsters, a new race or a new character class so that they can use this as a selling point. It's a whole lot rarer to see a game adapted in such a way to tell different types of stories rather than dungeon bashes, quests given by prominent townsfolk, or investigations. 

I've rarely seen a game regularly produce good "horror", "hope", "comedy", or pretty much any other emotional energy for that matter. All of that comes from the table and the players... 

Darkhive needs to be surreal, strange, and horrifying. So I need to take the pieces, and combine them in ways that facilitate that. Diegetically through disturbing things in the setting, and non-diegetically through ways to enhance that mood in the rules and rulings. (Actually rules and rulings is something I've really thought a lot about recently, and I should address my current thoughts on this concept in another post). Anyway... back to work...