Mists & Memory (Inception and Discussion)

[Ravenwind]

Hi, all--

While I'm looking around the forums, I figured I'd take advantage of an offer someone made to start a discussion about the game my husband (Jason) and I created, which is going to Kickstarter in August. (Nope, no links here, I know better! )

We had played Tomb of Annihilation (D&D 5e)with our then-nine-year-old kid. He's got anxiety, autism, and ADHD. And the anxiety about what was going to happen to his character *kicked his ass*. We built him as tanky a character as we could, and he still vapor-locked regularly.

We tried the much-less-scary Hoard of the Dragon Queen. He was a year older. He absolutely lost it when I suggested that his druid could, in theory, polymorph into a wolf and trot through a camp and release a prisoner. Nooooope. Can't do it, cap'n, we don't have the power!

So I looked around for stuff that might be less scary. Bunnies and Burrows? Out of print. A promising-sounding, kid-friendly game was supposed to be played at Comicpalooza here in Houston, but when I went to the gaming area and showed the folks there the line item for it in the program, they went nooooope, never heard of that, don't know what you're talking about.

I figured, what the hell, I'm a writer. I've written novels. I've developed whole worlds. Let's make something less scary for him, but still engaging for my husband and myself.

The result, I called Tinytown. Anthropomorphic animals, check! Less of a chance of dying? Check! Noir investigators so as to not make my husband fall asleep while playing? Check!

Annnnnd kiddo once again wanted to roll-play rather than role-play. I'd ask him to do something as simple as "ask the person at the door some questions to see what they know" and he'd fidget and say "Can't I just roll a dice for it??"

Time advanced, and Covid hit. Suddenly, my husband and I were playing the game every night, without kiddo's involvement, and the game became, inexorably, more and more for adults. This was all still in 5e, but I added a memory system. Originally, this had a whopping TEN memories that described every iota of who your character was until this point. . . but the body-horror THINGS that dwell in the Mist that surrounds the city in which the characters live have the ability to devour memories. Taking little pieces of who you are, until you don't KNOW who you are anymore, and you fade into the Mist.

Those first cases have become a novel, in support of the game, lol. That's also coming later this year. But right now, we're talking about how games develop over time.

Time advanced further. We started playing online with some UK friends, the first time we'd played with an external group in over a decade. And that group introduced us to Blades in the Dark. I introduced them to Tinytown and 5e at the same time, and they all seemed to really enjoy it--got a couple of comparisons to the World of Darkness at how *dark* the memory system can get (yes, people who can be effectively *rewritten* can be used as perfect assassins or callgirls or worse)--and that pleased me, because everyone was a little dubious at first about "anthropomorphic animals? Memory? How does this even come together?"

Annnnnnd then, right when I was starting to think about getting this together as something to offer to WoTC, guess what happened? Yep. The OGL fiasco occurred, and I went "hell no, they're never getting their hands on something I've made, ever, ever, ever!"

So I tried rebuilding the game as a Blades in the Dark game. Jason handled the playbooks and the skills while I worked on putting the world together into a format that someone besides me could actually use. I playtested it with a second group, got positive feedback, and kicked it over to Evil Hat games.

Got as far as a playtest with them, which was . . . nervewracking. Their biggest comments were "Ditch the name" and "Also, ditch the anthropomorphic animals, they don't work in a dark, gritty setting."

But I'm stubborn. So I sent it next to Darrington Press (the publishing arm of Critical Role!) with the title changed, but with the cute furry animals undergoing existential horror unchanged. I said that I'd be willing to shift the game from BITD to Illuminated Worlds.

They were interested enough to have me sign a NDA while they considered it! But after six months of silence, they released me, saying that I could, if I wanted, publish the game under THEIR community license. Which is what we're doing!

Illuminated Worlds is *like* BITD, but it's lighter weight, and we've supplemented their Scars system with our Memory system--whittled down from ten memories to just five.

When you have five memories, you know who you are. Mostly.
When you have only three memories left, the holes are starting to show.
When you have only one memory left, you *don't* know who you are, other than your Name.
When that last memory goes, you go. You dissolve into the Mist.

But! This isn't a survival horror game. It's an existential one. You have the option of buying memories from the Memory Market, a black-market venture that might leave a Cat with the memories of a Mouse's life running around inside their heads. How you reconcile those new memories--do you now, suddenly, have siblings that you never had before? Ones that won't recognize you when you spot them in the street? It's a roleplay challenge.

My husband likes to call the game "Come for the cute furry animals, stay for the existential horror." I call it noir, pastiche. And I'd like to think that it's absolutely perfect for role-play in the written form.

A good GM can and should develop fascinating, contradictory memories for people that will change who the players are--if they choose to take those new memories on.

But that's enough nattering in this infodump of a post. Ask me anything you like about the creation process. It's taken us four years to get this far; I'm just happy to be able to talk about it now. (No more NDAs!)

[zevonian]

Okay, I'll get this going with one question regarding pitching the product.

Did anyone involved in potentially publishing the game say they thought the term Mists might be "Too reminiscent of Ravenloft" for their liking?

[Ravenwind]

Originally Posted by zevonian

Okay, I'll get this going with one question regarding pitching the product.

Did anyone involved in potentially publishing the game say they thought the term Mists might be "Too reminiscent of Ravenloft" for their liking?

The folks at Evil Hat didn't like the term Mists---they said to find a synonym, because there are lots of games that say "Mists." (City of Mists, for one.)

I toyed for a while with the title Aether & Memory, but it really, *really* doesn't roll off the tongue.

ETA: (Also, any name that requires the end user to wonder 'how do I pronounce that??' is probably unfriendly. )

Great question, keep 'em coming!

[lostcheerio]

Hi! Congrats on launching your game! Interesting mechanic with the memories. Best of luck with it!

I have to add that Bunnies & Burrows still exists. I play it with a classroom full of middle schoolers whenever I teach Watership Down. It is *not* low-anxiety though -- it's violent, like the book. There's an original version, and then an updated version, with some adventures written for it.

For what it's worth, I like the name TinyTown!

[Ravenwind]

Everywhere I looked for Bunnies and Burrows, I could *not* find it--maybe that's changed in the intervening years and it's easier to find now?? . . . but my hope at the time was that the distancing mechanism of "this is not you, it's not even shaped like you" would work.

(Friends, it did not. LOL.)

Tinytown definitely worked for a while, and it's what I still call the dang thing when I'm talking to my husband about it, in the main. Then again, it took me a few years after being married to him to NOT accidentally call him by his net name, given that we *met* playing role-playing games online. (Baldur's Gate 2 forum, thank you much!)

[zevonian]

Is there such a thing as an ideal number of players? Is long term campaigning a possibility or is it meant for "one shots"?

[Ravenwind]

Originally Posted by zevonian

Is there such a thing as an ideal number of players? Is long term campaigning a possibility or is it meant for "one shots"?

Long term campaigns are definitely encouraged! Candela Obscura, the original Illuminated Worlds core book, has a lot of things that suggest that the game is supposed to end rapidly, generally in the destruction of the player characters. There's a forced retirement mechanic in CO, that once you've advanced your "circle" through as many improvements as possible, the only thing left to do is play your final adventure and finish the story. We didn't like that, so we removed it.

There are multiple ways to avoid fading and death--there is healing magic in M&M, there are free clinics, there are ways to retrieve your own memories. . . some of the time. . . and methods by which you can absorb other people's memories to replace your own.

We definitely want the players to feel as if they're in charge of their story, in the drivers' seat, and some of that is a conversation with the GM around "how are we going to end this story? Dying in a blaze of glory? Defending the Lord Mayor from assassins? Do we transform into our better selves through the path of Ascension [there is totally a path of Ascension, by which you become a more warlike creature type, and leave the city to battle the Things in the Mists first-hand]? Do we fail, but for the right reasons?"

And that's where we differ from many more horror-oriented games. We want people to have the chance to feel heroic, but we want that heroism to feel earned, and the changes we've made to the rules support that--we hope!!

As to an ideal group number? I've play-tested this with up to 7 players, but while I *can* GM it with that many, the ideal number is 4-5.

The max number of dice that can be rolled at a time is 6d6, but I wanted to incorporate more than just player assists--the Powers of the world can take a hand and aid you from time to time. . . for a price. So you can make Pacts with the Powers to gain a die (Up to the max of 6), but you'll generally have to trade something for that. . . a minor injury, showing that you've shed blood for the Powers! A chance that you will, in the near future, have your autonomy taken away by the Dark Power that you've pacted with. A sacrifice of some meaningful object of worth to your character. And so on down the line.

There are no flashbacks, unlike Blades in the Dark--flashbacks make it more difficult to PbP Blades, though not impossible (I've PbP'd Blades). But the equipment remains open to be filled in as you go along. Up to three items may be selected during any investigation, and if an item has the potential for multiple uses (silver bullets, alchemical explosives, etc.), the limit for the number of them available to be used during a case is also 3.

Keep the questions coming. I love talking about this.

[Ravenwind]

I've uploaded an image of the deluxe edition, the basic edition, and a sneak peek at the interior pages. We go live August 20, and I'm so excited to finally share this with the world. <3