The Treasures, Realms & Guys Manifesto (Part 2)

Into the air...

In her song It's Okay To Cry, the late great SOPHIE explores the protective shells we put up, not just over our emotions but over our internal worlds, the fantasies we make for ourselves, the homes we build inside of ourselves.

There's a world inside you

I wanna know what it feels like

I wanna go there with you

It's a deeply intimate song, and a deeply intimate thought - to touch another across the hills, mountains and skies that hum inside.

I don't know if I believe in 'love languages', but if I did, this would be my love language. I want to know the great Treasures, Realms and Guys in my love's heart. I want to know the stories of the Treasures, I want to travel the Realms, and I want to kiss the Guys.

I love games that let you make your own worlds, but there's something special about being invited into another writer's secret place. It's a less romantic thing than what I described in the last paragraph, but it can be intimate in a different way.

There is a certain affection written into Ultraviolet Grasslands, an expectation that it will be known. Even more sparse worlds like that of The Electrum Archive fuel me in ways that worldcraft tools just can't.

In the first part, I told you what shapes Treasures, Realms and Guys can cut in your book, and how you can use them as tools. In this part, I'm going to go deeper, and try my darndest to give a convincing argument for setting-specific TTRPG design, and give some tips for how to deploy it. The last blog was about works I've enjoyed, while this is the self indulgent one, perhaps a slightly egoistic one. I want you to have the specific autism I have.

The Specific Autism I Have

The Craven Citadel from one of my first games, Warehouse Bitches, and my first with a pre-written setting.

One might threaten, through gritted teeth - Eclipse, if you intend to create a whole ass setting, why not write a damn book? I would then pull the knife from your hand, and look into your eyes, and smile. My friend, my reader, it's because I want you to devastate the thing I've made.

It's a painful and joyous process, to see someone take the world you've made and do their own dance with it. I dream of pulling this great and gnawing worm out of myself, this thread of mountains and plains, and nestling it inside of someone else's brain.

I want others to obsess over the relationships of my Guys, the histories of my Treasures, the great castles on the edges of my Realms. I want to be infected with other people's brainworms, rebuild their worlds in my heart, and bring that reconstruction to the table.

Love, art and play intersect as wrought worlds come to the table. This has been extremely clear to me as I've created Sapphicworld, as people's little theories continue to dig their way into the book. The setting transforms around them, and ideas greater than any I could invent spring up randomly.

What fascinates me, what grips me about a pre-written setting, is the potential for order and chaos to meet, for research and meticulousness to be completely, beautifully fucked over by interpretation and desire. I am a person who outwardly longs for control, but deep down I want to lose it. One of my partners described me once as a free-use poet; I would be a free-use poet, who reads and plays so very many free-use poems.

A World That Demands Your Attention

Art of Sapphicworld's Skull Hold. Ignore the reflection. Ehehehe...

I think the best argument I have for setting-specific writing is Sapphicworld, a game I haven't released yet and likely won't release for a while. If you're a Patreon subscriber, you've got access to the whole damn thing, so maybe you already get what I mean by that.

Sapphicworld is a huge, kinky, mythopoetic fantasy TTRPG with a very specific setting, and an overabundance of Treasures, Realms and Guys. It has 100+ NPCs, a ton of places to go, and a few dozen Relics which are magic items that almost act like mini-playbooks. Somehow, despite this, it all works in playtests. People lean in rather than leaning away, and I think that's because I've hit on something - while some TTRPG players want to bring the same OC to every table, others come to the table hoping to be drawn into to a truly unique world.

To refer back to the previous blog - players want to be freed from the woods. Many, many players have been lost in a setting-slog for years. I think this helps make my writing for Sapphicworld work.

The person in this world who has probably thought more and better about Sapphicworld than me is my friend and peer Ira Prince. Besides creating some lovely art of its Sapphicworld OCs, Ira's posts on Tumblr about the game have said it better than I ever could. One element Ira hits repeatedly is the fact that Sapphicworld wants you to be deeply involved with it. It wants you to make an OC for it, rather than bringing your same bisexual tiefling to the table. It's a world sculpted for play.

Sculpting A World For Play

Some more kinky Sapphicworld art. I mention pirates in this section, and this art takes place on an island. Kapeesh?

So, beyond vague philosophizing, how do you make a world that works well for play? That's where our Treasures, Realms and Guys come in!

See, more than anything, TRG (Treasures, Realms & Guys) is a framework for designing games with specific, rich settings. It's how I think about my own games when I start designing them when I want to explore setting as a major organism of the game. I always start by writing a rough mechanical framework, and then if I decide the game demands a distinct setting, I answer the following questions at one point or another:

• What Guys will you meet in this game? Will they be hyper-specific (i.e., The Wifekisser) or more generalized (i.e. Wifekissers, as a faction)? Both?

• What Treasures will you find in this game? How will they interact with the mechanics, and how will players connect to them?

• What Realms will you visit in this game? This is an important one, as it shapes the outer limits of the other two questions. For my own sake, I often ensure the answer to this one is short.

Once I have these questions answered, I often categorize and produce examples of these elements. If I'm creating a TTRPG about pirates and naval adventure, I might write out a few loose ideas for islands (Realms), unique ships and trinkets (Treasures) and other pirate crews (Guys). I'll also often use this opportunity to create templates for each element - with a pirate crew, for example, I might need a brief description, a picklist and some basic stats, for example.

This is an important part of the scoping process for me, as it helps me understand roughly how much work I'll need to put into a project overall. Despite how long Sapphicworld is, it has been scoped out in this exact way. I know the rough limits of its setting, and I know the types of characters and things I want players to discover within it.

Example: Creating Autopsy Feast

Autopsy Feast's cover, minus its logo.

A solid example of this TRG-rich process can be seen in my work-in-progress Autopsy Feast, where I think I really solidified this mode of game design. The development process of Autopsy Feast went like this:

First, I conceptualized the gameplay. For those who don't know, Autopsy Feast's main mechanic is a body grid, as you can see below, which you slowly add to and alter by befriending and fighting other creatures. The body grid below is specifically a Skelite, one of the imperial machines you might fight. In each sphere, the top word is the 'type' of body part, each of which has its own loose capabilities, and the lower word is the specific part.

I came up with the idea for the body grid because I wanted to create a very 'material' and 'scientific' Star Wars-like game that still had room for poetry and fiction. Ultimately, I landed on a mechanic that emphasized the physical buildup of characters, ships, machines - the little bits and pieces that make up an exciting sci-fantasy creature, gadget, weapon.

Ideas like this kind of come as they will - it's not something you can force. If you're ever lost on this step, I recommend considering why you're going for a TTRPG first, and then looking elsewhere for inspiration. Video games, board games, movies, TV and even bureaucratic systems are great places to find inspiration for game mechanics. Our world is rife with norms and structures, and all you have to do to make a great game is identify them and use them.

The structure for the body grid, for example, was inspired by old chemistry sets I used in high school, the ones with the ball-and-rod system. I loved the idea of slowly adding spheres to a character, ship or building's body, and then losing a bunch when a core piece breaks off.

The body chart for Autopsy Feast's Skelites.

Second, I figured out the bounds of the setting. As mentioned previously, this is where I set up my Realms. In this case, this was a few planets. I wrote a little gimmick for each - one was a weird nail of twisted metal, another was a great and misty sea-planet, another was the home world of the ruthless empire. These gimmicks gave me a great sense for how to do the final step.

A big part of this process was also detailing out all of the different basic body part types, which would wind up being my Treasures. In a game so focused on gathering and using body parts, it was important that they had flexible, memorable uses that interacted first with fiction and second with mechanics. For example, the LIMB is described as such:

A long and wiggly thing. No one really understands these.

Useful in gripping, standing, balancing and moving carefully.

There is obvious utility in this, and that's what helps it be Treasure-ful despite being fairly concise. You know immediately what it does, what it might look like, and how it works. It does something no other body part does, and the way it's described is unique to the world of Autopsy Feast. This calls back to something I discussed in the first part of this blog - specificity really makes Treasures shine.

As a side-note, Templates are so important if you're creating a game that's very modular, which many TRG games tend to be. You'll thank yourself for, early on, examining each module-type's needs and creating a template that fulfills those needs. That template may change eventually, but it's worthwhile setting up a baseline.

By having all my Treasures, Realms and Guys use three, maybe four templates, I allow myself to enter a flow with creation. When every guy, or place, or chapter, or act, or relic reads the same as the other ones, the differences matter more. There's more space to play with the form, to add special rules, and to have fun with it. I find templates very freeing.

Third and last, I filled in the gaps. You've probably heard me use that terminology a lot if you've read any of my monthly blogs, and it's one that has defined my approach to TTRPG design. 90% of the work I do isn't in building the framework, but in filling it in with details - descriptions, mechanics, special moves, and yes, Treasures and Guys. I wrote out lists of characters you might find on each planet, little locations you might visit, and rewards you might receive from all these worlds' myriad places and people.

Referring back to my earlier templates was extremely helpful here. With Autopsy Feast, I was very careful not to make my templates too elaborate, and that really helped keep my workload to a minimum as I wrote out all my Treasures, Guys and micro-Realms. Each element was at most two paragraphs, and there was usually at least a sentence that tied back to the game's mechanics.

A Harmonious Approach

Art from WE LIVE FOREVER (And We Love To Live), featuring elements from myself and IFeelOdd.

The ultimate reason one might use the setting-first TRG approach I describe in this blog is, in my opinion, harmony. I can only speak from my own experience, but thinking about TTRPG design from this perspective has helped make my games feel connected within themselves. They also let my games connect to others, let people create their own versions of the world I've made. It's a joyous experience.

On the play end, I always love when there are bounds that I'm asked to restrict my character to. I love making a hero for a specific table, for a specific set of people, for a specific fictional land. My care is a sweet and inebriating liquid, and I'd rather pour it into a vessel than pour it into nothing at all.

Obviously, this is just the way I do things, and it's not always the way I do things. Biotrophication was made without this setting-first approach, and while I'd argue that it still has TRG qualities (distinct places to go, people to be and know, transformations as Treasures), it's mostly a normal lyric game. I highly recommend new creators diversify their approach to creation - what I present is just one model, and it's not a model I use all the time!

Still, I think there's a lot of value in exploring specificity, in 'cappy' games, and I hope to see these design philosophies extrapolated into the future. I hope reading this has given you some inspiration for your own TTRPG design approach, and god bless the Treasures, Realms & Guys theory forever.

The Treasures, Realms & Guys Manifesto (Part 1)

A quester's rest...

I've mentioned it a couple times elsewhere, but I did my undergraduate studies in journalism. For many of my stories I drove to remote edges of Long Island. I was focused on marine sciences stories, so I wound up talking to a lot of fishers and dredgers on quiet, cold docks - some did it for pleasure, others did it for work.

By the end, I'd met an ailing and retired clammer, plenty of shuckers and restaurateurs, a saltwater savior with a seagull companion, a couple who mistook me for their former student and promptly kicked me out of their house. Kindness, cruelty, unstoppable disaster, vast and sweeping fortune, and the daily grind of it all.

There's still a clam in a plastic bag in my freezer. The aforementioned retired clammer gave it to me. His ship was wiry and broken, duct tape and exposed fiberglass, old machines latched onto new ones. I'm glad I was able to take a part of that little world with me on my next journey.

This, to me, is the emotional core of the theory that I'll be describing in this post.

An Introduction

When one plays a more adventure TTRPG that requires the table participants to invent much of the world and its material or use a pre-established but lightweight setting (think Fellowship or Armour Astir: Advent), there is a vast space for creativity. To be very clear, I adore games in this model, and I don't want them to ever change. I love creating a setting with my friends, and I'll snarl and bite in advocacy for games like this to continue existing.

What I think these games lack, and what I hope to see more in the years to come, is specificity. Specificity can be toothy, it gives a game well-made places, characters and items can stick with a player character for a long time and shape the adventure to come, and ideally stick the participants at the table. A great world lives forever, made great by the little things it hides.

Part 1 will explain Treasures, Realms and Guys themselves, while Part 2 will elaborate on ways to combine them in your design!

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Ava Islam, Josh McCrowell et. al. are doing a blog on a similar subject over at A Knight at the Opera. Go check that out! It's on Capsule Games, games with complete or partially complete 'encapsulated' characters, locations, adventures, ideas, all of which serve the game. It's a great analysis of a certain style of game and I think those folks are creating language that TTRPG designers are going to be using to discuss their work in the years to come.

But that's Just a Theory

I still really like the little slime guy I drew for this, hehe...

In early 2023, I posted this image which continues to draw a lot of attention across the TTRPG scene, to this very day. My precious and beloved TREASURES, REALMS & GUYS THEORY (TRGT) is a TTRPG design philosophy, though you can certainly extend it to what makes a good GM's Treasures, Realms and Guys work so well. It's a philosophy of location, of specificity, of history, of materiality. A setting made with TRGT in mind sinks its talons into both readers and participants in play.

I stand by everything I wrote across this image for the most part, except for a few key notes:

• In my opinion, Treasures, Realms and Guys all make life easier for the GM, since they don't need to invent cool stuff to give or cool places to go.

• Guys can be intrinsically connected to Treasures beyond just telling you about them, which I'll get into!

• Guys can also be in Realms, which I'll talk about!

So, I'd like to do an in-depth breakdown of the ways Treasures, Realms and Guys connect, stand on their own and can make a TTRPG really exceptional. Join me on a journey through my twisted mind... uehehehe...

Treasures

Used to fill these fuckers with jewels and coins and gems... oh LEGO chest, my beloved!

Oh, my treasures! I must locate my ten magnificent cryst - Ahem. Treasures are the clams the player characters keep in their freezers, the strange fragment of glass they find on the beach, the old couch they nab from the side of the road. They are wet with the world's soak, and should read as such.

When I say Treasures, I mean a variety of things. Items that come with playbooks, at the end of dungeons, as the possessions of creatures and baddies... these are all Treasures! Treasures can also be the deeds to castles, the strange and wonderful things that happen to your characters, relationships with strange Guys, and secret stairwells that lead to exciting Realms.

As noted in the initial text, you can get so tonally silly with Treasures. I'll probably write a blog on tone and voice sooner or later, since it's a really important element of design for me.

Objects Unique to the World

From Roll 4 Tarrasque's Brave Zenith, p. 43

The best Treasures are invitations into the world, incentives worth pursuing and gleefully discovering.

A great example of this that I read through recently is Brave Zenith by Roll 4 Tarrasque. Brave Zenith has a very loose setting, but the items available within tell you so much about the world it's asking you to expand on. For example, the Pinball Gun, which players can buy during character creation or at a store, or find on an adventure:

Although called a gun, these weapons do not use any type of gunpowder. Rather they harness the mechanical prowess of the eldritch pinball machines of yore. Pinball guns may either use pinballs or sea urchin spikes as ammunition. When they fire, they make a really obnoxious sound. Ammunition goes into equipment slots, as long as it’s there, you can shoot.

We can learn so much about the implied setting just through this description: Brave Zenith's world is post-apocalyptic, but also marine, whacky, and time-bent. The Pinball Gun could exist in any world, but this Pinball Gun exists in Brave Zenith's setting, The Archipelago.

As a reader, this makes me want to play this game and concoct a character who fits this setting. Perhaps my character is a literal pinball wizard, who wields a Pinball Gun and treats it as if it's a magic staff! There's so much potential with just this item.

So, what can we learn from this? Well, it can be really exciting for a reader to give your items a clear connection to the world itself, and ideally some wonderful flavor text, if it's appropriate for the structure and layout of your game! Flavor text can be as simple as the sorts of adjectives you find attached to items in Wanderhome, or as intricate as what Brave Zenith does.

Treasures can absolutely be non-objects, too! For example, I think a transformation in To Change is a Treasure, advancement in a PBTA can be a Treasure if it's compelling enough, and a specific win-state in a war game can be a Treasure. Overall, creating Treasures that fit your setting is about giving the players truly gorgeous incentives.

It was her Sword! She was Number One!

Pizza Friday's Electro-Kantele & Greatsword, from Sapphicworld

Treasures can and should be about the past, the future, about people, about change.

Okay, so I hate to self-aggrandize, but I think this might be one of the types of Treasure where my work is especially unique. For example, my kinky queer TTRPG Sapphicworld has a number of Relics (special items with their own moves and histories) that are tied directly to specific NPCs, including Pizza Friday's Electro-Kantele & Greatsword, and Maxrum's Opulent Collar. The description from the Pizza Friday's Relic:

These items are clearly Pizza Friday’s, adorned with cute stickers and charms. Her Electro-Kantele appears to be made of a hollowed pike fish jaw, and its strings are made of her hair. Her greatsword is white as fresh-fallen snow, and its edge could cut Vestiture Tower in half with enough effort.

This, in my opinion, is a fascinating item to obtain. This specific one is most easily received by developing a relationship to Pizza Friday, which then quickly encourages the player character to continue and expand that relationship. This is especially great for a game like Sapphicworld that's largely about relationships and their qualities, whether they be tender, strained, sweet, toxic, obsessive, cold, fetishistic, etc.

This isn't necessarily just about a Treasure belonging to a person, however - this is about Treasures that belong to history. When I open a chest and pull a sword free from it, my hope is not to just receive a +1 Longsword. I want the blade clearly forged by a blacksmith seeking use for her old master's supplies, the blade roughly made with love with the pommel of cork and the haft of birch. I want to find that blacksmith's grave, and meet her family, and learn this was her last blade. It's about stories, because in real life our objects are never just our things, they carry such stories.

In actually designing for this effect, I think there's a lot to learn here from lifepaths and playbooks. Not all items need to be journeys, but it can be so exciting to create a few that invite the player to tell a story alongside the item. A Treasure can be a little character in its own regard, and then give the player a chance to hold tight to it or let it go in exchange for something else.

Realms

From Evil Hat's Blades in the Dark

Now, you might be asking - didn't you already talk about how Treasures connect to the world? And, I say, you absolute rube, you fell for my most fabulous trick! A Realm isn't just a setting, it's a place. In the map above, Blades In The Dark's Doskvol is not a Realm, but The Docks are, and Silkshore is. Realms are distinct locales with their own traits, places to go, Treasures to obtain and Guys to meet, for the purposes of this theory. They are traversable, and invite the players to use their character's qualities to maneuver their unique shapes.

Specificity of Place

From Possum Creek Game's Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast

A crucial element of Realms is that, like Treasures, they aren't just physical places, but they are always use specificity to their advantage, to give a location or moment character. Realms can be entered, and can be left - they are bouquet, and at their best they are all-encompassing, enrapturing. They use their details to dig their nails into the reader. They can be moments in time, pre-defined story beats, or in the case of Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, Chapters.

Yazeba's, or Zeeb, is one of my favorite games of 2023 for this exact reason. To highlight one particular Halloween-y chapter, Hey Kid Goes A-Guising, just look at all of these little details you get at the end of this chapter's card draw list:

KING OF CLUBS: A thin mist rolls across the street, and we suddenly become deeply lost. How do you help us find our way back to the streets we should be on?

ACE OF CLUBS: In the distance we can see an enormous striding skeletal figure, moving through the clouds. Its single eye resembles the moon, and it seems to be looking for something. How do you keep its spotlight from shining on us?

JACK OF SPADES: A group of kids dressed as monsters invites me to join in a Silly String fight. How do you keep me safe while still letting me have fun?

QUEEN OF SPADES: An older kid dressed in black robes with a terrifying mask stops us. She demands a candy tithe. How do you help her deal with her loneliness?

KING OF SPADES: I haven’t noticed the ghostly individual that’s been following us for the last few houses. How do you get rid of the ghost without me noticing?

ACE OF SPADES: A gang of older kids “dressed” as zombies, who call themselves the Ghoul Gang, are harassing us. How do you chase them off without picking a fight?

To me, this is an exceptional example of both making this Halloween environ incredibly specific to the weird 90's suburban-mystic setting of Zeeb (the Silly String, the striding skeleton, the mist, the kid demanding a candy tithe) and also ties into some of Zeeb's Guys in the form of a Ghoul Gang cameo, a Guest who might be unlocked already, or might be unlocked later.

Zeeb also uses excerpts to this purpose, with each chapter bearing its own five-ish paragraphs of narration before the actual chapter. In a location, this might be your little bit of flavor text or full-page prose before you get into your pick lists and more workmanlike descriptions.

In design, I love looking back at an area I've written and seeing just lush picklists, and my hope is that this sort of specificity brings GMs joy when they can present that to the table. I highly recommend, if it fits in your game, writing even some rather cursory locations - specificity doesn't always have to mean density, and you can give your readers such a great sense of what a place means with only a few words.

Vibes Everchanging

The world map from Freehold Games' Caves of Qud

When people ask me why I stopped playing D&D 5e, I often say that I got tired of the fucking woods. By this, I mean I got sick of the same introduction in every game - the tavern, the plains, the trees, the rocky caves. Where are the donut swamps and the ruins that stretch for miles, choking all life? Where are the factory-cities of cold glass, the rococo moons?

I like my variety, and so variety is something I aspire for in my own Realms, and appreciate in world design more generally. I adore a map like that of Caves of Qud above, because it says so many interesting things about its setting - this is a world that nature has reclaimed from the ruins of something vast, with crystals and pale deserts and a spire and buildings dotting the jungle canopy. As you actually play Qud, you can tell where people live and where they don't live, and why.

The best maps contain many little Realms with diversity and definition, places that people imagined with their chests puffed and their minds open. It takes a certain level of confidence to make a forest of banana trees and killer flies, you know? To designers creating distinct places, I recommend confidence, research and exploration. Think about the world around you - how can you remix elements that you see into something that will truly fascinate your readers?

Then, take that idea, and think about what elements of it are playable, what might be a Realm or a Guy, and then define and expand upon that. This should give your reader, and especially your GM (if your game has one) a chance to immerse themself in this space, imagine playing the game and bring that to the table.

This is the power of thinking in terms of Realms - to enchant, and to create play experiences unlike anything else.

Guys

It's lowkey true though...

I write a lot of Guys. I love to write a little character, give them a silly little name and send them off to become someone's fetish. I think the pre-written character is a vastly underappreciated part of TTRPG design, and was a big part of why I initially made that tweet! Still, there are lighter ways than my thousand-word Sapphicworld characters to create some awesome Guys, some of which I've done myself.

A Guy is exactly what it sounds like - a complete character, ready to be used by a GM or player. This can be as light as a name, a profession and an adjective, or it can be as complicated as some of the bouquet baddies you see in something like Pathfinder 2e. A Guy is, of course, not exclusively a man. I used to call my LEGO minifigures "LEGO Guys", and I guess old habits die hard.

Themed Attraction

Crooned Symphony from WE LIVE FOREVER (And We Love To Live)

Guys are at their best when they say something about the game rather than just filling in a space. After all, your game is a work of art!

When me and IFeelOdd created WE LIVE FOREVER (And We Love To Live), we had a very specific tone and set of themes we were going for. We wanted something dark and urban, but also Jim Henson. We wanted something transgender and thrilled with the prospect of transforming that also showed the terrors of change, the ways the world can be warped by our lust for devastation.

When we made our Pactmakers, NPCs who manipulate and use the player characters with the promise of ever more cataclysm, we considered this tone and these themes. We made characters who were puppetlike, jazzy, occasionally kitschy, and almost always scary. We especially made sure that the consequences of accepting full dependence on these creatures was devastating and game-ending. We created strange wolf-ladies who give you perfect knowledge of the universe but gag you eternally, terrible women who turn you into a living viola, and big alligators who eat you when you finally give in to them.

Of course, this is an extreme example, but I do think tying your Guys into your themes, tone and broader ideas is a great way to tie everything together. Your Guys will be the life blood of your game, and they should feel like it. It's also fun to contradict your tone a bit - if you're making a comfortable game about running a zoo, what does it look like if one of the zookeepers is a big butch dragonslayer? What are her regrets, and what pulled her into this place?

The possibilities in combining tone and character in a TTRPG are so exciting. I mentioned it earlier, but I think Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast especially succeeds here, as many of its characters feel like they would be monsters or villains in a traditional fantasy game, but are able to be more humanized in a story about people living together in a joint space.

That's all for Part 1. Here's Part 2!