Dispatches from Nowhere

You may have noticed that I recently released a mini dungeon game. I never talked about my design choices for any of my games (except for a few podcasts/interviews), but here I will try to take a short look on my thoughts and intentions on Dungeon GiG. Let’s go by Topics: Single stat, lots of meanings: I don't like tracking a lot of things in character sheets, as it usually makes the players think about action options through it and don't really interact with the fictional space. A single stat that means a lot of the things you can do, synthesised in a single number, easily remembered and weighted for the choices to be made, making the interaction with the fictional space, or the game itself, more fluid. This was heavily inspired by Fighting Fantasy (FF), and the brilliance behind it. I only expanded it by taking some B/X choices in HP, damage, etc., so that these stats could modulate even more things in the game.  Magic powers over stat is  what magic represents in the game, ...

As you guys know, the Hollow Earth setting is something that I'm trying to slowly build here in this blog, and in this post I will try to ramble about some mythology. You can check in other posts to get some background about the setting, or just read it through and steal some ideas, get some inspirations for your own setting/games, or whatever you feel more inclined to. I am not thinking here on a macro level, a big-bang-ish thing, norse mythology or  something like “In the beginning there was Chaos…” and this sort of thing. Here, all I'm thinking about is a landmark present in the world and, like we see on our own, it has power, or is surrounded by events that cannot be easily explained, and then a mythology is built around it. Bromo is a volcano, it is in a frozen land almost forgotten by the world, with the exception of a single village. Local legends that have spread say that Bromo is responsible for all life present in the world as it is known. The dust from eruptions, tho...

I read an analysis of Kafka’s Castle, I can't remember where. Either way, I'm pretty sure the author says that the characters never reach the castle, so they miss or idealize a place that they will never be, no matter which goals they achieve or things they do.  What’s your character's objective? Why do they go on journeys? Some TTRPGs have this objective very clear, like in Electric Bastionland, they have a debt, and have to run from, or solve it (Yeah, I know that’s a really simplistic analysis of it). If the characters live in a post apocalyptic world, they have to survive, or to find a way to continue living.  In vanilla games or games made for long campaigns, in the OSR vision, they are looters that search for gold and glory. Oh, gold and glory doesn't mean anything for the players, so my theory is that they continue adventuring because of FOMO. Either that, or the characters are puppets of the players' will, because characters' objectives do not mean anyth...