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.
