Sword And Sorcery Tabletop RPG Which Includes A Long, Rambling List Of Magic Spells With Weirdly Specific

Sword and sorcery tabletop RPG which includes a long, rambling list of magic spells with weirdly specific affects and annoyingly particular casting requirements, kind of like if Dungeons & Dragons decided to be about 40% more precious about its magic system, except it's a group worldbuilding game, and one of the first steps is for the group to collectively choose exactly seven of those spells to be the only ones anyone still knows how to cast. All of the spells that didn't get picked might be spoken of in legend, but the knowledge of them has been lost over time. The remainder of the group worldbuilding phase consists principally of brainstorming what a society built around these seven annoyingly specific spells would look like; for example, perhaps the knowledge of their working is jealously guarded, with each of the setting's great nations constructing their entire cultural identity around Their Spell, or perhaps the setting's industrial base is dependent on combining these spells in increasingly unintended ways to form a sort of sorcerous Rube Goldberg machine of production.

(One of the default campaign premises for this hypothetical game would, of course, cast the player characters as a gang of mercenary scholars on a quest to rediscover an eighth spell. Depending on what sort of setting the group initially brainstormed, keeping their intentions under wraps may be strongly advisable.)

So I just discovered that elephants can communicate via seismics!

And now I want to design a fantasy proboscidea species for my world that are intelligent, nonverbal, and communicate with said seismic waves. Maybe they can even harness magic this way!

Solving this exact design problem is why I've been toying with the idea of a GM-less horror game where the details of the monster are revealed via playing cards as the players encounter the monster in increasingly dire situations.

The card system would be inspired by Sleepaway's Lindworm events, but each encounter would then be logged into a Monster Sheet that documents what the players have learned about the monster so far.

if you want to make your players roleplay out the process of trying things on the monster to learn its weaknesses in a challenge game, it behooves you to invent a monster they don't know about.

them playing dumb until you arbitrarily decide they've experimented enough to be allowed to try what everyone knew was the correct answer going in is not a satisfying play experience for anyone

I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.

Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.

Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.

Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.

And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.

Finally playing Elden Ring and wow it has exceeded my expectations as a designer. From the ways the game handles difficulty scaling with summoning ashes, its diverse methods of player expression via a more comprehensive magic system, and the map design all have me impressed.

But I've got one (singular) thorn in my side about Elden Ring that has made me think about the pros and cons of... prose and cons.

So, From Software games have a reputation for cryptic lore veiled behind equally cryptic prose, usually squirreled away in item descriptions. In past From Software games, this has mostly been an opt-in experience for Players. Want to dive into analyzing that prose to find some interesting world building nuggets? Knock yourself out. Think that's too much work? That's fine too! Since past From Software titles are linear experiences with minimal narrative player choice, one could ignore the prose-veiled lore and just enjoy the game from a mechanical and power fantasy perspective.

But just like Elden Ring is different from past From Software games in a myriad of other ways, Elden Ring is different in this regard too. On one hand, the open world nature of the game helps couch this prose in a more intense sense of discovery. Instead of walking down a fairly narrow exploration space and then being delivered these nuggets of lore, you (the player) are actively venturing out to a location because it looks interesting to you. Therefore, there's a sense of personal investment in what you find there and what you learn! And that's really cool!

But on the other hand, From Software's tendency to veil its lore in this way can sometimes work against Elden Ring's nareative design. Specifically when what you find is a who and not a what. Sometimes those NPCs you meet will want something of you that requires you to make a choice between people, factions, or even cosmic powers in the world. Now of course in any story there is bound to be hidden information to the Player, but due to how From Software lore is presented, it can be difficult for a Player to make an informed choice about the actions their character is taking.

This can lead to situations where an NPC attempts to con a Player or undermine their belief in a faction in the lands between. But due to the cryptic nature of Elden Ring's prose, these important decisions can go right over a Player's head! And if the Player doesn't know what they're getting themselves into, they might feel confused or even cheated when their character does something that doesn't match the Player's expectation of how their Character has acted thus far.

For some Players, this could manifest as the Player being ambivalent and not particularly invested in the Characters within the story. But overall this is a minor bump in an otherwise pretty fantastic game, and I wouldn't be surprised if I received comments saying that this Player experience absolutely didn't happen to others.

The easiest way to fix this would simply to be a modicum more transparent to the Player about the choice they are about to make once said choice is in front of them. That way, Elden Ring could throw as much cryptic prose as they wanted at the Player, and then when it becomes decision time, the curtain could be pulled back juuuust a little bit to give the Players key context to what their deciding to do with their character.

Hell, doing this could even expand the design space From Software has to work with regarding their quest lines! It could allow for more meaningful and interesting narrative choices on the Player's part to foster further replayability.