A Worldwide RPG
From across the seas of space and time, I arrive, creatures.
I’ve been throwing together an RPG, because every shitty RPG blogger needs their own RPG. Hold on though, because I have design goals and intention with my game beyond just the want to make an RPG. (I’ve made shitty RPGs too, you can find them here and here) Like so many OSR enthusiast designer wannabees, Into the Odd is where I get my love for lightweight systems. Well, my first love was Knave, but ItO and the bastionland blog did a really good job of helping me figure out the reasoning behind why I love this kind of design so much.
I’ve always loved the aspect of otherworldlyness in RPGs. Existing as part of a fantasy world, not just in it but a part of it, is something I’ve always found to be deeply compelling about RPGs.
I wanted to make a game that forced you, by the structure of the rules, to give at least a little thought into the place you’re from, and I didn’t want to write tons of lore. I love Into the Odd, and one of the reasons I get such a huge hard-on for it is cos it delivers setting through content and you end up accidentally caring about the structure of the world cos it just drips from all the interesting stuff on the page.
So, using KNAVE as a base, and working with the goal of making the player fit into the world, I created what has been lamely named Worldwide RPG.
I dont… have a title for it yet. Ideally it would be named after the world the game takes place in, right, since mechanics and setting are so heavily intertwined, but the world is just earth, and I can’t call it Earth RPG. So, worldwide RPG will have to do for now.
How it Works
Core Goal: Present a diverse world through meaningful packets, without relying on lore
This one goal informs pretty much every decision I made. For example, elves are their own region supplement. Why? Because elves are weird, and have their own culture, seperate from everyone else in the world. The elf supplement is a meaningful packet, without giving you the same class as every other fighter and saying “no but its different because your ears are pointy”
It means different things to be a fighter on Korianis than it does in Mangayaw. Magicians look and feel different in Ajirah compared to Ekoya because the way those cultures view magic is different, and the mechanics and names of each class reflect those cultural differences. This culture is presented not through paragraphs, but through terse flavour text that describes the class.
Since the game is lightweight, this flavour text serves two functions. Firstly, it lets you know what the class does e.g. “fighters fight.” This is standard in RPGs. Secondly, the text shows what the classes mean. On all countries, fighters fight, but a Korianite fighter serves a different cultural function to a Mangayawan fighter. The little description that explains what each class or ancestry is has this lore woven into it. To learn what you are you have to also learn about the culture in which that thing exists.
This also extends to Ancestries. (I would use the term races but you actually have a geographical race in this game)
A teaser: In the feudal kingdoms of Korianis, Humans come in two flavours: Tallmen (Typical human) and half-foot (Typical Halfling). Both ancestries are called Human and viewed as such by the people that live there. Across the sea in the harsh dusty landscape of Ekoya, halflings are seen as pests, vermin that crawl on the dirt. Humans dislike them, hunt them sometimes. Halflings are not presented in the Ekoya Supplement for the same reason troll is not presented as a player option.
The Rules
There is one PDF, a core rules document, formatted as landscape A5 spreads, that details most of the rules - ability rolls, fights, how magic works, how to make a character (at least in part).
In addition to the core PDF, there are region supplements that provide the classes, ancestries, equipment and general lore for different regions around the world. These could probably be called Country Supplements, but region leaves it open for me to do a supplement thats just one little place instead of a whole country.
Here are a couple of other goals I had with this game:
- Force the player to care, or at least know, where they are from
- Patch the weird way languages in D&D work
- Intertwine setting with mechanics in a natural way
- Deliver lore in small parcels, bundled with interesting stuff
- Tease players with incomplete details to tease out questions
- Keep math small and numbers simple
Work in Progress
Having different rules for each setting kind means writing a new RPG when I want to write a new setting, and that means having an idea for one that I like and then developing it over time as I write rules.
As of the writing of this article, the core rules are in version 0.3 and the Korianis supplement is in beta. It’s (barely) enough to run a game with, and I have been running with it a little bit, maybe I’ll post a playtest report at some point. But I was mostly keen to share this neat modular worldwide RPG I’ve been working on cos I think there’s something special here.
Alright creatures, I’m gonna go shit out some more setting :)
Enjoy!