conworlds.info

[Fetus Commander]

I’ve incorporated my setting into various games that I've run, but I want to drill down focus onto one very particular part of the setting because in most of the games I've run, it really gets pushed to the side due to the focus being on other things. For those of you familiar with melkrin, the part in question is Cooperative Logic.

For those not familiar, let me try to explain.

Picture a world where the laws of physical reality are held in place by the labors of very tired, overworked angels instead of the real-life particles, interactions, etc. So every time you flick a light switch on, there's some guy (or, more likely, a whole team) that's in charge of filling the room with light. Every so often, something goes wrong with this, usually as a result of "human error" within the system.

Maybe somebody's having a bad day. Maybe an angel is asleep at the switch, quite literally. Maybe someone's trying to make a statement. When this kind of thing happens, you don't get your light. Or maybe you don't get as much light as you should. Or maybe you get the wrong color light.

Now let's add another variable to this. The angelic workers in question are currently without a God directing them, watching over them, and correcting their mistakes, due to a kind of cosmic accident that's happened. So when stuff goes wrong, it's up to someone to fix it. Because of the lack of divine help, Heaven has tapped human governments for aid in cleaning up their affairs.

The game I'd like to design would put players into the center of all this. Players play people from the Department of Cooperative Logic, a government agency assisting the angels in locating, cataloging, and eventually fixing fuck ups like the above.

But the governments responsible for this aren't always honest. Sometimes, slip ups are in their best interest. One of the conflicts I want to exist in play is one of, "who do you work for, first and foremost?" Is your duty holding the world in some kind of consistent state, skewing it towards the state your government wants it in, or molding it into the way you want it for personal reasons?

I'd like it if this conflict spilled over into active conflict between player characters, as players make different choices about their ultimate goals.

I want the game to be structured around investigation. Players should spend their time dealing with people and things in the areas where strange activity is reported, and eventually unlock the cause of it. I want the process of the investigation to humanize the angels that are responsible for the problem, as much as, or even more so than the NPCs encountered along the way.

Do you think that this is a compelling premise to carve out of the setting for a game? I have some ideas on mechanics, but I'll hold off posting them until I get some feedback on the initial idea.
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“Learning would forever spoil the best slave in the world…it would forever unfit him to be a slave." -Hugh Auld

[chiarizio]

I really like this!
I'll have to read more carefully, then think about it some, to come up with a more substantive comment.
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The mark of a good citizen is that he doesn't believe anything if he can help it.
-- W.B. Yapp
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I am also eldin raigmore.

[Kade]

Very nice, especially the involvement and responsibility of mankind.

[thedukeofnuke]

Fascinating premise! It's a great idea, although it sounds like making a game would be pretty difficult.
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Live and let fry

[Lyndon]

It depends on what sort of game...
It does sound like a good premise, if your talking about a pen and paper RPG it might not be all that hard to do.
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Giggidy Giggidy Goo

Economic Left/Right: -3.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.08