Designing From Media Sources Part 2

Or how a chapter from a book inspired me to write a one page game.

Last Week I went through the design Process of With Haste And Anger one of my two entries for this years One-Page Jam 2024, this week I’ll go through FORERUNNERS and how the the opening chapters of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson inspired the game.

Grab FORERUNNERS here

FORERUNNERS came to me halfway through the jam, half-cocked and nothing like it ended up. I’m currently reading through Snow Crash, and had only just started it at the time. [Note I have since finished Snow Crash but I already wrote this newsletter]

For a short recap of the early chapters it introduces the Protagonist (that’s a little inside joke for fans of the book) as the Deliverator, a Pizza delivery driver in a dystopic America where the only game in town is Uncle Enzo’s a mafia run pizza place where they are always delivered on time. Always.

Something in that immediately sparked an idea in me, and also the line “When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun.”. I wanted to make something around that idea and that line and started working on the bones.

I have to admit more than half the time I design in layout (a faux pas depending on who you ask), and I did with this as well so I started laying out concepts whilst thinking up mechanics, and knew I needed to at least have a GUN stat and VEHICLE stat, since that was all I really had from the book.

Early version of FORERUNNERS

I started with the trusty d6, d12 is my personal favorite dice but I was also working on With Haste And Anger so it was in the forefront of my mind.

Wanting to keep the pool smaller I gave the GUN and VEHICLE 2 stats for how many dice you roll (Speed & Rate of Fire) and how effective that roll is (Precision & Effect).

so now I had a roll mechanic but no idea what you’re rolling against, but this felt more of a light boardgame with roleplaying elements than anything so why not go all in on the dice.

The GM introduces challenges that are rated from 2-5:

• Easily rollable numbers on a d6 and I want players to roll over so we top out at 5.

• And you can also use a d6 to track the challenge.

• ie: Bikerpunks with weapons(3d3), Crowded Side streets(2d4), Johnny Law with a Harpoon Gun(3d4 + 1d5), Corpo-Drone-Crafts(5d2), Portable Market Stall(2d5), Jay-Walker(1d3)

So players roll their dice pool and any die over the challenge succeeds, and then we knock the challenge down by the effect, making it easier next roll.

The Deliverator coming up against 3 BikerPunks(3d3) rolling up around his vehicle on the main stretch of road decides to pull his handbrake spinning the VEHICLE 180° trying to knock them over. He rolls SPEED(4)d6, rolling a 1,1,4,5. 2 numbers are over the difficulty so they get knocked down by PRECISION(4).

The car spins, one BikerPunk see’s the move starting and breaks where as the other two are caught in the spin being knocked off and into the gutters.

Side-note: I also started work on a game for the Summer Mutant Jam, most of it was written but I never found the time to finish and definitely want to revisit. That was also a d6 die pool, 5 is a success and because it’s set in a post-apocalypse and everything is constantly breaking down, rolling a 1 degrades the item, stamina, mutant power. I like that idea so rolled it into this, since it is also dystopic.

So we add ARMOR for the VEHICLE and AMMO for the GUN that can tick down on 1’s rolled, and have the total be 6 so you can again track it on a d6. Whilst I had a central resolution system I liked, the game as a whole just wasn’t clicking for me.

Took a few days, read more of the book then went looking for some art for the game and came across //WARPHARE// who has some really cool 3d art that just grabbed me. (I’ve checked but can’t seem to find if they have a current presence online but have have noted All of my art (both audio and visual) is licenced under Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY)).

3D Art by //WARPHARE//

The Skate culture image jumped out and it hit me, there is a second character in Snow Crash, YT a courier who uses a futuristic skateboard know as a plank. And the idea of Cyberpunk 90’s Skate Couriers was an idea that worked much better for me.

Keeping the same resolution mechanic I switched out Vehicle for Board (and later added Bike) and changed the Gun to Weapon, which gives players a little more wiggle room about how they want to interact with the world.

The Bike/Board let’s players describe how it looks and works and kept the same stats, Weapon now has Aptitude instead of Rate of Fire.

For how to set stats, I played around with a few numbers but ended up with having them spend 8 points in Board and 8 in Gun with the highest they can allocate being 5. Which is essentially the same as saying set it to either 5/3 or 4/4, but it feels different.

Following that through and keeping the d6 as everything I added a mechanic for the “30 minutes or less”, 5d6 set to 6 that tick down every time a player rolls. And with this I wanted to add a way of rewarding the player for using their Board/Weapon in interesting ways narratively so the GM can double or halve the effect depending on the described action.

And that was basically done, just laid it out, designed it as a gatefold (since I’ve never printed my games for sale and not sure how difficult that would be).

To recap the design:

• Copied d6 dice pool from my other game.

• Created 2 things to interact with from the book inspiration.

  • Vehicle and Gun

• From there gave them stats that made sense

  • Speed/ Rate of Fire: Die Pool size

  • Precision/ Effect: The effectiveness

• Added something to roll against, a d6 set to 2-5

• Changed the core vibes without losing the core idea.

  • Always follow the inspiration, it will serve you better

• Rethemed the stats, and added the amounts.

• Added a Pizza Clock to give the players a visual.

• Tied the narrative back into the mechanics with the GM altering the effectiveness.

I also cut a small vibes trailer since my main skillset is video.

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Some more One Page Games

A few more games that I have added to my list.

AUCTORATUS

“A gladiatorial game of Mech vs Monster” with a really cool mechanic called The Rondel. From M. Allen Hall

Suffer Not

A coven of heretical witch’s outrunning the church, where you use 4d6 to assign to a tarot oracle. You decide as a group where to assign the die, trying to minimize the consequences which I love as a mechanic.

It also introduced me to HAGAZUSSA, which I’d never heard of. Also the art!

From Katt Kirsch and Brandon "Chaoclypse" Yu.

Charon’s Obols

Greek underworld, Dead Heroes, Charon the ferryman with an outstretched arm. Sounds great, with optional solo rules as well.

From GomezWritesGames.

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Digital Scraps

A few other things that have been swirling around that I want to write about.

Public Access

A Nostalgia Horror game I have been running by Jason Cordova built of his fun Brindlewood Bay system. It’s a game that if you really dive head first into the Buy-in, it can give your sessions a lot of unhinged horror, dark moments, and gross twists. I have been hacking this system to try run a Blade Runner game (I ran the Blade Runner RPG and have some thoughts).

Everything but Kessel Sabbacc

I’m still playing through Star Wars Outlaws and I want to talk about it, how it feels like it builds on the 60s/70s design aesthetic from the original trilogy, how so far it’s created interesting characters that don’t rely on being Han Solo but X or Luke Skywalker except Z. And especially with the internet in the state that it’s in, going anywhere there is talk about this game it devolves into something worse than a hive of scum and villainy.

It’s fun, I’m enjoying it and putting interact on R3 is something I wish more games would.

Conspiracy X

An older game from 1996 that I randomly found on the shelf at a comics store that has an interesting approach to the age old question, “How do I let the players feel like their skills matter but still let the dice dictate chance“, along side a heavy amount of jank that older systems tend to have.

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Who am I

I’m a former wannabe filmmaker, I did film school a decade ago, worked in production since then, and over time life slowly changed, found my new creative outlet in game design that combines the technical stuff I love (my film vocation is Camera, lighting and Colouring), with the narrative storytelling aspects.

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See you next time as I add more stuff to my own Digital Wasteland.