Halloween 3 Part 6

In a previous blurb, I talked about the challenges of writing mysteries into your RPG's, but in that post I was talking about plot mysteries. What about mysteries about the nature of the world? The mechanics of magic and mythology.

From the very first Halloween I took a cue from John Carpenter interviews talking about the Gaelic festival of Samhain being an inspiration for his film, to develop an underlying mythology for my world. Borrowing their idea of another plane beneath the world of the living forced me to rethink the nature of death in my story, and that led to some new mechanics that I found interesting, and that played in fun ways with my mythology. (That mythology received some significant elaboration before we ran Halloween 2, and a bit of a touch-up before Halloween 3.)

Now my first bit of advice would be that it's probably not a good idea to rewrite the fundamental rules of your world unless it's something that comes to you organically and is fun for you. Every RPG system has working mechanics for death, and most have rules for magic and their own mythological backstories, all of which have been well play-tested. The benefits of the make-your-own approach are that it will be specific to what you're building and, of course, that it can be kept mysterious to your players.

Now, unlike a plot-mystery, this kind need not be resolved, and in fact, probably shouldn't be. The power in having this kind of ambiguity as to the nature of your world is tonal: It's the feeling that comes with playing in a world that's very nature is outside your understanding.

To achieve that goal, the mechanics of your magic or mythology need to follow the same principle of the rest of your worldbuilding: they need to be bigger than the area that your players can feasibly explore in the time they have. There's nothing that kills the sense of grandeur like the players realizing that they've bumped up against the edges of your map. There should always be more to explore; there should always be paths into the dark that they did not follow. The fundamental mythology for your world needs to be made deeper than your players will have the opportunity to dig. If the rules of your world can be fully explored by your players, they will quickly intuit how they work, and your magic will turn boring; it will become rote kinematics.

Now, I don't really think that I achieved the magical tone I was going for, but I'm ok with that. Tone is a tricky thing, and I'm much more intent on keeping the show lively than in trying to create a consistent tone. But I feel that the mechanics of the underworld, and the nature of death within have held up to the task they were created for: they feel mysterious but not unintuitive. The players are unsure how the world will react to their new actions, yet they don't feel that the consequences are arbitrary. At least I hope they don't.

The key is, of course, that no matter how complex your mythos is, it should be intuitive to you. You can always tell in a movie how well the internal logic that it's all resting on has been thought out. That's doubly true in an RPG, where you're going to be improvising, and you don't know what aspects of your world are going to be explored in depth. Everything should work via consistent principles which you fully understand, otherwise the whole game feels like it's made of cardboard. If your world doesn't have a strong backbone, it will wobble.

Now, on the other hand, if you want a magical system that is useful and functional for your players, then it does need to be simple enough to be intuitive. So for instance, the way that magic spells work in my world of Halloween is consistent and fairly straightforward. That's because I intended my players to be able to learn spells (sadly they didn't, much to their peril, but the point stands.) I intended the mythology of my world to be deep, but the magic system to be pared down and utilitarian. (I also made the choice that spells are sloooow, which I think is a really helpful choice if you want to have cool powerful magics, without centralizing all your gameplay around spells, but that's a topic for another day.) If on the other hand, you want your magic system to keep it's sense of wonder, (like in Tolkien for instance), develop a system that will remain out of the reach of the understanding of the players.

Ok, those are my thoughts for today. Hope you enjoyed part 6. One more to go!

Edit: My blurb above was written at 6 a.m. and I think it didn't make any sense, I've given it a second pass so it's hopefully clear now.