Posted by adamebell on Apr 26, 2022
Preamble
Hey there! Comradery as a platform is still in alpha, and following suit I'd say my project here is in alpha as well. I'm still doing some thinking on how I want to engage with it, what should go here vs. what I should put over on HYPT since life got alittle hectic for both of us right about when Jeremy and I launched the dang site (we'll come back I promise!). As such, beyond a tweet or two I haven't posted about this anywhere or tried super hard to advertise it. I'll get there, but I'm keeping the pressure low for now--I recently started a new job and am adjusting how I interact with game development as I go.
I do think I'd like to use this page as sort of a loose design diary for different projects. This will be a public post, and then when I get the game to a playable state I'll make a supporters-only post with the game's materials and text included so people can play it! Or just read it, which is also a form of play.
Promise the Moon
This is a game I've been kicking around in my head for a while now. I've been wanting to create a more "traditional" roleplaying game, meaning one with a GM and a pile of players going on adventures or whatnot. A lot of that thought is going into something I'm currently calling the Bell Hack, but a simpler version of it has manifested in this sci-fi game I'm working on for a very specific purpose.
I've been playing an informal campaign with a few friends that started with two games of Grasping Nettles and then spun off into one(and a half)-shots of Follow, Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, and The Zone. I'm enamored with the world we created--one that branched off from ours in the 60s or 70s and led to Apollo 11 being the first mission that established a colony on the moon. We've got it all... spy intrigue brought by a faction called the Troy Agency, presidential elections leading to debates about militarizing the moon's population, life-lengthening moon dust immediately hoarded by the rich, the USSR existing into the future and allying with other Communist countries to form the Interstellar Futurist Republic.
We've also got an assassination plot against the president of the moon, which leads to the reason for me making this game. It's a game design hyper-focused on a single session of play that my group is planning, but one that I think will be really fun beyond that because of the setting it's baked into.
I've been in a bit of a slump lately as far as actually writing words for any of my WIPs, and part of the reason I think is because I work best when I have a rough layout figured out and can just type directly into it. This might be sacriligious to some, but it helps me a lot. Sure, it makes it a pain in the ass if later I want to re-write anything or change the way it's laid out, but it's a bigger pain in the ass to have no words written that you can plug into your layout program.
In the past couple of days I figured out how I want this game to look. It's just written as a dossier from the Troy Agency. Here's a sample:
I'm a few spreads in at this point and am just getting to the part where I'm figuring out how to write game mechanics like this. I've just decided to lean into the dissonance and just write them. Yeah, it doesn't make sense that a dossier is suddenly talking about creating characters or rolling dice but to me it's pretty funny.
So keep an eye out for that, and subscribe to get a hold of the first draft of the document whenever it's finished! That's hopefully very soon.
-Adam