Foresworn Confessions — Week Seven

It’s been a heck of a week here in my head! I feel more like crowing than confessing today. Nevertheless:

Forgive me, Foresworn, for I am psyched! It’s been one week since my last confession.

My goals for last week were to prep and run the playtest session at Southern Exposure. To prep for that I tried out the mini-scenario I had with Kat & Michele on Monday. It exposed a lot of flaws that needed exposing, as I talk about here. The ever-energetic Luke Crane pointed me in the right direction the very same night and a more concrete, more vibrant game will certainly result. However, I needed more than promising leads and an energetic sense of purpose to run the scheduled game. So I went for a slightly unortodox approach: I ran some of my setting ideas in an established game system to test them out, and help clarify and ground my thinking about the genre.

I chose Sorcerer and wrote up 5 character and 5 demons, set Humanity as Idealism, with demons being forces of pragmatism, including Generals and Diplomats. The PCs were all related by blood, to touch on the family issues that I want to touch on with Foresworn. I want to thank Shawn, Mel, and Rich for the great game! I stretched some of the demon powers to encompass planet-wide events, marching armies and the like. That worked particularly well, added to the feel I want for sweeping space opera epic. My skill at naming things is still really weak. But schizophrenic planet-spanning computers, loyalty brain implants, loyalists in the forest, crises of succession, and family back from the dead make for great, fun, melodramatic awesome! I’m finding out more and more what pleases and excites me about this stuff. There is no substitute for Actual Play!

Camp Nerdly is coming up in two weeks and I’d be a fool not to use it. I’m not sure if I want to test the new mechanics there, but I’ll certainly be running either Foresworn/Sorcerer or Foresworn/something else to get at more goodness. Perhaps I’ll take it on a tour of different systems to pick up a wide range of tricks.

One other thing is sure, though. I need to change the name soon. Working titles can only remain working for so long before they become just plain titles, and I do not want to be stuck with a GURPS or a TORG.

My goals for the coming week:

• Describe, as specifically as possible, the positive aspects of the Foresworn/Sorcerer playtest, as well as the directed writing assignments. This will become the core of my design checklist.
• Brainstorm other possible names.
• Describe, as specifically as possible, the positive potential in the Foresworn mechanics I tested last week, and write up one way I might develop that potential.
• Decide whether I’ll be running nascent-Foresworn at Camp Nerdly. If not, decide on a game system to use. Do the prep work.

The future’s looking bright. See you next week!