The Glowing Gunpowder Spot
Pirate Borg Game Jam: Cabin Fever - Hitting the submit button
Welcome to the Glyph and Grok - A “weekly” blog-letter exploring topics in the tabletop gaming arena. We explore design, execution, and culture relating to anything played on a tabletop.
If you’d like, start with my recent Pirate Borg review or my first design blog for this topic Cabin Fever - Pirate Borg Game Jam.
Introduction
My submission has been put forth for the Cabin Fever game jam on Itch.IO and it is available now under a “pay what you want” (read: you can get it for free) basis at least until the jam judges conclude their deliberations and declare winners! - Check it out
Entry Design
As stated in my last post, Cabin Fever is a game jam for the Mork Borg hack Pirate Borg with prizes for best entry, judged by 7 judges, in a number of categories.
I had intended to put forth an entire adventure, but I was right in thinking that I could likely fill an entire month on one small rules feature if I’m doing all of the rules and the art myself. And so I have focused on a small rules-lite bolt on system for ASH-Infused tattoos.
In Pirate Borg, ASH is a magical substance wrought from the ground bones of undead in an alternate reality 1700s known as the Dark Caribbean.
Reading through the Pirate Borg book and PDF about 20 times to soak my mind in the style and internalize the ruleset, I found myself thinking multiple times about maritime fantasy sailors and picturing tattoos on most of the characters. Magic tattoos are hardly a new idea, but after some searching I didn’t find anyone else had put forth rules for them within the context of Pirate Borg or Mork Borg.
Mechanics
As a game designer, mechanics are my favorite focus. I love a feature crunch that gives the player an interesting decision and serves as a backend scaffold for front end storytelling to be filled in.
Pirate Borg is rules lite and narrative first, so I felt the crunch needed to leave plenty of room for interpretation but have a short list of direct tenets for the GM to follow (or ignore) as they see fit, but the tenets communicate my design intent for the GMs consideration.
The basic concept is simple, once your character acquires one of these ASH-infused tattoos, they have a new ability that can be activated once a day, but then they have to roll to keep the ability after each use. I’ve been a fan of roll-to-cast lately and I thought this an interesting way to key that up and allow any player character to find themselves with a badass magical effect with some involved risk to make the decision of when and how to use more interesting.
I used a small system of slots that works just like inventory slots in many games to give some limitations to the number of tattoos a person could have with these effects and to vary the strength of them. So each PC has 5 body slots they could theoretically fill with ASH-infused tattoos that can create magical effects, and in the table later you’ll see how I organized them.
After some reading of Pirate Borg and Mork Borg again, I wanted to make the test to keep the effect after use something that was combined between two attributes to make it feel like a player could go two different ways to help the odds of keeping them longer. Toughness is commonly tested for resisting things, and generally represents your body in its ability to keep from something detrimental happening to it, and the nature of ASH is connected to the spirit world and magical effects. I didn’t see a check just like this elsewhere but I really like the idea of doing a Toughness DR 12 - Spirit check, so if you have high toughness you are more likely to pass the DR 12 check, but if you have high spirit - even if you have lower toughness as more mystical classes tend to have - your higher spirit would reduce the difficulty rating of the roll.
I noticed that there were some real beneficial effects when using ASH as a character, and I wanted the ASH-infused tattoos to have some give and take with this existing system and I didn’t want a PC doubling up on basic effects. Thematically I think it makes sense that if you have ASH just in your body at all times, it’s conceivable that will effect your use of ASH elsewise. To represent this mechanically and thematically, I started with a -10 to the “effects when using ASH” table in the Pirate Borg book (which has good stuff happen north of 11), but ultimately reduced this to a flat -5 to keep from getting the free “+1 Presence” type benefits, but not raise the chance of death so much. (I received feedback that the odds of death became 55% each time you had to roll the original table :P)
Once I felt pretty good about the ruleset and it fit on a single page, I was ready to come up with tattoo effects and imagery to fill out the design.
I saw an n66 table for pirate names and thought that a good number of effects that would take some serious consideration (weeks) and enough variety to where a GM could roll up a number to offer the players, or a single segment could be offered with smattering of 1-3 slot effects and so on and so forth.
Coming up with the imagery was just as hard as coming up with the mechanical in-game effects. I checked both against the default PC classes and the basic ASH effects table in the main book to generate what I think is a combination of new effects with variations of old effects that you may only see if you played a specific class. I did not want to reduce the importance of the choice of choosing your PCs class, but I also love having the ability to bolt on pieces from other classes in any game - even if they aren’t’ as effective as being that class you still get to taste it in a hybrid fashion. My favorite class in Final Fantasy 1 was Red mage because they used white and black magic AND could attack with a sword.
Conclusion
At time of writing this, the number of entries into the Cabin Fever game jam has exploded to 86 entries. My entry is a set or rules with a supplementary roll table so I have chosen to enter it into the “Miscellaneous” category. I’ve had a fair bit of fun and learned a lot making this submission. Almost everything I see being submitted is quite good, so it’s going to be competitive, but I’m happy to have a complete entry in the running.
Wish me luck. If you take a look at the project page on Itch.IO through the links in this newsletter and leave a review it would be most helpful!
Thanks for reading.
What I Am Up To
TTRPG Reading: Tome of Adventure Design, Knave 2E
Other Learning: Various Digital Drawing Courses - 21-draw.com
Audiobook: Iron Gold
Useful Things For Your Games
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