Kevin's Watch

These are cut and pasted from a general discussion forum on a game site I ran previously. These were all ideas I thought of about games to run. I won't include the New World one I listed, since Dorian has listed his own similar idea.

Someone could easily run one of these:

RESISTANCE: An alternate pulp-history, where aliens invade the earth. The game is set in a shattered 1960s London and/or surrounding countryside, where alien invaders have conquered earth. They are busy brainwashing the few healthy survivors into a mindless army, while working the rest of the population to death to exploit the resources (or perhaps some other goal).

The players each lead a small resistance cell. They must scrounge for supplies, and try and gather as many survivors to their cause as possible. They can work together - but there simply isn't enough to go around, and they may have to compete with each other, while avoiding alien patrols and trying to fight back.

FEUDALISM: Set in a small medieval kingdom, each player takes the role of a Lord, Duke etc below a king (or Baron, or whatever). The ultimate aim is to usurp the feudal overlord, or be granted the greater share of land than the other players. All the while, players must compete for the king's favour, hold tournaments, assasinate, tax peasants, flog peasants, send troops on crusade, plot to overthrow the king, plot to make another lord fall into disfavour, etc etc.

Sengoku-Jidai: Set in 16th century Japan. The civil war rages as the heads of powerful samurai clans compete for the title and power of Shogun. Players take the role of one of these samurai clans, and must defeat their rivals through a combination of war, assasination, diplomacy, trade etc. All the while, they mst deal with the ever-powerful peasant uprisings, and the rebellious warrior monks. Foreign trade with the Dutch and the Portuguese can be established to gain access to new weapons and goods. Christianity, Buddhism, Shintoism, and Neo-Confucianism would all be factors.

The game would be either on a large-scale abstracted map of Japan, or simply be played on a smaller section of the main island. I would probably institute inner-clan as well as inter-clan politics, and players would have to safeguard themselves from rebellion and betrayal.

Kingdoms: Essentially the same kind of game as above, though in a medieval setting. Like feudalism, except that players don't have an overlord to pander to - they are that overlord. More of a traditional style for one of these games, including all the usual trappings, such as conquest, diplomacy, trade, religion etc.

THE CHARTER: Players assume the role of either a nobleman or merchant in a burgeoning medieval town. They can pursue different businesses and careers, and even operate against the law. The game has a set amount of turns - whoever has the most money by the end, wins. In the meantime, players compete for business, try to blackmail each other, have each other thrown in prion, compete for cushy jobs and appointments, and perhaps even run for Mayor. Kind of like a medieval version of Junta, for those who are familiar with that game.

IMPERIALISM: Set in a Asia-Pacific style setting in a period rougly equivalent to earth during the 1890s-1910. Players take one of a number of different empires, compete for resources, take, hold and develop colonies; try to avoid the rumblings of colonial nationalism and dissatisfaction; trade; pursue gunboat diplomacy; deal opium; etc etc. I would have loved to have just set this on earth during the 1890s, but if I did that Britain and Russia would just savagely dominate everyone else in the region.

Porn Empires: Players take the role of a pornographer. They start with a burgeoning black and white print swingers mag, then gradually move into glossy print, and film. They can branch out into fetishism though, if they are not careful, they will attract the attentions of morals campaigners, the FBI, and the resurrectd corpse of Joseph Stalin.

By the way, one of the above wasn't a serious suggestion...

...someone's history degree is showing...

Indeed. The History of Pornography 101 was a major influence on my undergrad years.

Montresor wrote:Indeed. The History of Pornography 101 was a major influence on my undergrad years.

I love the idea, Dorian. I'll play.

As the other historian of the group, I love the medieval ideas, Montressor. I like Kingdom better than feudalism, though, and I really like the idea of Charter.

I might be able to interest Hyperception in one of these. But, his focus is Early Modern/Late Renaissance, and scientific to boot, so most likely not.

Neat looking map. I like it. But you should keep some of the details hidden from the players in a colonization game. Maps from that era were filled with blank space just beyond the coastline.

The one thing with founding colonies, particularly with the Spanish but also with the others, was that they were looking for what they hoped was gold over the next hill. Often they found just swamp, but they got information on where to plant a colony often from the coastline natives because they thought gold was just over the hill. It would be a neat game action to have the players send expeditions into the interior, and maybe not come back, or have one crazed survivor come back with a tale. Here's an interesting, journal from that era about a survivor of a shipwreck.

That's shaping up nicely. I wish I was able to play a second game...pretty stretched at the moment as it is. But I'm interested in the design of a game like this.

I prefer to steer play toward storytelling and interesting interaction between players more than power stat rankings and order of finish.

Yeah that map probably isnt the final map, just an idea. Ive updated it so the grids look more like the grids on a globe rather than a gridded map.

Yeah, I will probably put alot less details on the map. That one was just me playing with the software to see what I can and cant do.

the island will be mapped to a degree though, Ive decided, for stories sake, that the island has only just been colonized, despit ehaving been discovered for some years.

It was discovered several years prior to the game start by an explorer. It lies on the opposite side of a great landmass to the continent of everyones homelands. Previously, one would have to travel around the great landmass, a dangerous and long journey that would take well over a year, in some of the roughest waters in the world. As such, while exploration vessels were sent, the trip was too long and perilous to risk sending settlers on.

However, recently a great canal (Think Suez canal) was completed through a narrow land bridge in the great continent that has allowed almost direct travel to the island. what used to take years now takes mere months, and friendly ports are even closer still.

As you can imagine, this would lead to a great race to colonize and claim the island as soon as possible. being obviously rich and fertile, plus home to new cultures, it is a quite desirable place to settle.

The game will be a balancing act between keeping your settlers happy as well as keeping your homeland pleased. ON top of this there will be plenty of encounters, events etc to keep you all occupied.

anyway, heres the map with the new grid system. each grid is around 80-100 miles side to side. If a road was built from east to west, it would take around 3 months to travel from one coast to the other by wagon.

Damelon makes a good point about the map. Depending on which period you want to make the game analogous to, certain areas of the map would be rather vague, others would be heavily detailed. On the other hand, it can be frustrating, as the GM, to have to constantly update map details every turn.

All this talk of conquistadores and interior voyages has gotten me in the mood for one of my favourite films:

Aguirre, Wrath of God

The opening scene there does an excellent job of portraying the absurdly challenging logistics of exploring much of the New World; as well as conveying the surreal, majestic, and hostile nature of a seemingly placid environment.

A game like this would be fantastic, and I'd be happy to give comments and suggestions on rules and so forth.

Has a few ideas

Been thinking i may limit starting locations to points along the north and western coasts

or may even just have art of a far bigger land, so you see one coast and lost of inland, rather than a while island.

what do you all think? could make it easier to explain the game becoming progressively more difficult to run level to the growing players etc

I like those ideas.

How long would a game turn in terms of time? A season, like Pantheon or a year?

Thinking about it, it's probably easier for you if a turn takes up a year. A lot of actions can happen and be completed in that time frame, sending expeditions and getting results, requesting and receiving supplies from the mother country etc. The good point for you being that it's one and done in the same turn - you don't have to keep track of as many things that happened two turns ago.

I like the north & west coast only idea. ----- Damelon's reasoning for one turn = one year is good, but... It just seems so long to me! Heh. How many people will die in this kind of setting in a year? Will plans fall apart when an important character dies early in the year? Well, I suppose you'd work it out somehow.

Dorian and I chatted about it earlier this morning. He's looking at a turn equaling a week. Which makes it a more detailed game at least regarding individuals, IMO. Which answers your question, Z.

He's got some cool ideas for encounters. It sounds fun.

A week?!?! Wow! That's wild!

well the reasoning for that, and it may change out to a month yet, is that every four turns or so, a your ship would arrive from the homeland (or not, depending on storms, conditions, season, pirates etc). That all important ship would play a big part in the game, as it brings with it new supplies, settlers, news etc and also takes home with it the tithe that you, as a good widdle governor, have been saving up to send home.

So this would work either once every 4 turns in a week based game, or once every 3 in a month based game. Currently leaning towards a week, cause alot can happen in that period of time, especially when it comes to dealing with natives etc

I guess the time frame depends mostly on how far the "New World" is from the "Old". If it's like our own, it took six weeks to sail from one to the other. Nevertheless, it's not like they sent them all the time, as news travelled quite slowly (even as late as the Victorian period).

There is also the consideration of how long it takes to build a structure. Take a look at the initial construction of Edward Braddock's road during the Seven Years War at the time and difficulty it took to make just a simple dirt roadway. Basic forts could sometimes be erected quickly, though more ambitious structures took considerable time, men, and resources. Representing this too accurately, and keeping a weekly time scale, would make things pretty tedious.

A year, however, is much too long. It's too abstract to allow for any strategic realism. No-one would lose a town and wait all year to unleash their superior forces to reclaim it, for instance. I think a month is a good turn scale for this kind of thing.

With Dorian's concept of a canal to ease distance and time between old and new worlds, a week per turn can still allow a month between supply ships. But I have no idea how true to the basic setting that would be.

(How did you all find this topic to discuss all this? I had no idea it was here until now.)


Once a month does seem like a very short timeframe for shipments to the colonies. Three to six months would seem more reasonable, IMO.
And Montressor has a point about construction times. Realistically, I don't think it would be a stretch to think a town could still be rudimentary a year or more (perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration) after the colonists first started building.
It depends really what aspects you want to emphasise--a short scale so that the development is slow but events come on a realistic pace, or a long one that speeds development (so that it doesn't feel stagnated) but loses a lot of detail in the events that happen during that time.

I was going to leave basic development etc up to the settlers them selves. Your governor so you dont need to micromanage the settlement.

Id rather have the player do things like make decisions as to weather or not to allow that whaling company use your docks in return for a cut of profits, or weather or not to allow those preachers to head off into the highlands on their mission of pilgrimage etc.

The only actual construction the governor will be called upon to choose to do are larger more important things like weather that new settlement should have its own dock, weather your now packed main settlement should increase the size of the stockade to accommodate more expansion and a big one is roads, especially in the forested and mountainous areas. Otherwise its just things of significance like my examples I want you to worry about really.

Im leaning more towards the month long turns. Only problem is, if an event happens early in a turn, it wont feel right to report it the end of the month. I dunno, part of me doesnt feel comfortable with this idea