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🗣 Foreword for Readers
Hello!
First off of the bat; Thank you so much for coming on board to help me get this game together, I really appreciate it!
If you are reading this it means that I've gotten to the point where I am comfortable sharing this all mighty mess of a game.
The mission here is to wrangle this titanic mess into something that represents an approachable scale and streamlined finish for an actual game to be run. The game is designed to be run for fifty Players foremost, but I have a heavy interest in, once those rules are in place, to provide an easy rubric for scaling the game up and down as needed. If you are this far into the process, I'm going to assume that you know what a megagame is and have some ideas about what is important for a game to be run as an experience as well as/or an interesting game design.
The key idea that I have tried to evoke in this game is a type of controlled decent into chaos, where at the start of the game, the players are offered a functioning and complex machine to interact with and discover the details of. Then I'm hoping to guide them into an understanding that everything is malleable and that by understanding the systems, they can use the least amount of leverage to make subtle, winning changes without the temptation to go nuclear. That, or they can try to gather enough resources to hammer that machine into fragments and suffer the benefits or consequences for that choice. There is always 'another side' in Arch Magus and my goal is to make players question both their position and their loyalties constantly.
Additionally; My goal for this game is to retire the player's attachment to 'their character' and play the game, at whatever stakes. The game (I'm hoping) is designed to reward an abstract view while lightly punishing those who cling too tightly to any one identity.
The design for this game lives a little abstractly, in that certain information is only going to end up being presented to certain participants. Contained in the next section you will find the "Main Handbook." This book is the main editing copy and will form the final prose for each of the rule books once formatted. You will also see below that some sections for the; Showrunner, Control and Player copies of the books - Please ignore these for now. They will be part of the next round of reading once I've split the Main Handbook into the sub-rulebooks for the concealment of non-player facing material.
The reason for this division is that I haven't as yet found a good way to link changes from one to the other and keep each version up to date without manually editing the same paragraphs in each. In the mean time, at the top of each section you will see a set of letters, either; SR, C, P, or V referring to "ShowRunner," "Control," "Player," or "Void" respectively. This will indicate which sections are to appear in each version of the handbook. (Some of these have been cut off in the Static version, so if you're unsure and want to know, check out the 'Gitbook' copy in the 'description' below the title of each page.)
There may also be tab boxes in certain places that indicate where the same prose may be altered slightly, to appear in a different version of the book. There is an example of this on the next page.
Eventually these will all be separated out into their own documents but are kept consolidated for now in order to make editing easier. If you would like to focus more on the game itself and less on the additional context given in the Showrunner version of the Handbook, simply skip over any section marked 'SR Only,' though, any help with these sections will be very much appreciated.
As a point of order before we continue;
At this point in the design's lifecycle I would like to focus attention on a few things that I am looking for that are specifically being targeted for adjustment/editing. That is not to say that I am closed to suggestions for bigger and/or overall content changes but to get a completed draft together on time, at this point I'm having to do a bit of 'it is what it is' and move forward. I'm calling this stage the "Alpha Reader' phase, and I'll enumerate the areas that I'm most interested infor this pass below:
- Spelling mistakes and non-sequiturs -
I have been whistle-stop, spot fixing the rules to update older ideas to the latest 'meta' this means I've been finding a lot of partial sentences and orphans which don't make sense in context anymore. I'm hoping to fix that before I go back in and start tuning the rules for balance and sanity. - Counter intuitive explanations -
In chasing those old sentences, in some cases I have lost the meaning of the paragraphs in the attempt to fix grammar and old terms - please flag these with a fix if possible. - The big one: Order of information -
I have been moving sections of the book around quite a bit to try and present the order of information to the target reader in a fashion that leads nicely from topic to topic. The aim is to minimise the times a reader has to think; "Wait, what?" Or, "I guess I don't know that yet." - I've tried to do this by introducing light versions of each concept when they become relevant and then delving deeper into each point later as they get fleshed out. In doing this I believe I may have repeated myself more than necessary on a few points so please keep an eye out for that. - Anything that just straight up doesn't make sense or seems like it won't work.
Up until now this game has been living exclusively in my head and I may have lost the thread on some of this stuff. Please ask about anything that seems a bit dubious or wobbly.
Things to ignore for now:
Specific game rules and edge cases -
I know it's the fun bit, haha, but for now this is the step where I'm trying to explain the game, as it is. That way when we do move into beta testing the game itself I'll have a good idea where the rules are ambiguous in their description or where the mechanics may just not be working - we will get there, trust me!Anything around formatting and layout that doesn't have to do with information order.
I have a draft layout being developed along side this test but until I know the size and length of the rules themselves I can't move beyond a template. For now, as long as it is in some form of; Heading, Sub-Heading, Information/Data, we're going okay.Pictures and diagrams.
I am having to focus on component design first and graphic design later. There are some diagrams missing and areas that could do with visual explanation. I've tried my best to flag where these will fit but they are not the top priority for now. I may not even have these ready for the first run of the game.
Thank you for your time and attention!
- Kris