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Oliver Twitt
United States
Virginia
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For the past few weeks I've been rediscovering King of Dragon Pass, a neat little strategy game released in the late 90s on PC. I've never heard of Glorantha or the RuneQuest/HeroQuest system before this game but it floored me with its rich lore and alternative fantasy setting. Inspired by Bronze Age Germanic tribes, KoDP was a game about tradition, lore, and family. It completely went against all conceptions of "modern" fantasy settings in video games at the time.
And so, the idea of building your own tribe has sparked my interest as a designer. As with Glorantha, I want a world where legend, myth, and tradition rule. As with real life, the myths are never consistent. Your tribe may have a different creation myth than the tribe across the plains. After a few preliminary drawings, the game world became situated in a fantasy Africa with Middle East (desert tribes), Asia (plains and horse tribes), and India (jungle tribes). This coincides with my love of Morrowind and it's beautiful Africa-Meets-Orient design. Every tribe in the game world reveres "The Spider", a story telling trickster deity shamelessly pulled from the African god Anansi.
I have ideas but they're vague shapes without form. I've felt the game could work as a multiplayer board game similar to Through the Ages, or as a solitaire game accompanied with a Fighting Fantasy style gamebook for events. For multiplayer, I want to put heavy emphasis on communication. Victory points are earned through maintaining tradition even if breaking tradition would be more beneficial.
There will be worker placement but nothing more complicated than Through the Age's system of placing little people in the worker pool. Actions would be simultaneous with everyone revealing their actions at the same time after choosing them. There must be direct player conflict but I want to set a system into place that keeps one tribe from "farming" another (a video game term for siphoning off the weakest player). In KoDP, waging war during the planting season meant a poorer harvest while waging war during the winter may halt your troops. The summer months were ripe for war but in effect, 6 out of 8 yearly turns were poor for waging battle.
I definitely like the events cards of TtA and that is definitely a system I would adopt. I want there to be mandatory events but the players can contribute for tactical benefit.
This has been rattling around for a while. I doubt I'll ever get around to writing even a modest design document but I desperately want to explore the idea visually. I feel there is a lack of originality in fantasy settings. How much longer must we suffer faux-medieval European architecture and bad British accents?
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