Protect Your Skin and Eyes

When a 'shit post' gets out of hand and a rant about why I love lore in my RPG books

So I was just minding my own business the other day and chilling on Blu Sky when I came across a post by Not Writing Games about a kinda scary sounding headline.

I couldn’t help myself and posted this as a response.

And any normal well adjusted person would leave it there. Joke made. Mission accomplished. Move on with your life.

But I’m obviously not well adjusted, so here we are, several pages of notes in and (at the time of this writing) 12 PAGES OF LORE on how the world became so fucked that we can’t even go outside in the sun anymore.

What is this game mate?

It is still early days but I’m thinking Protect Your Skin and Eyes will be a solo survival RPG where you explore a destroyed city, looking from building to building for supplies to stay alive. Been done before, right? Well I have two mechanics I think are kind of fun and somewhat original.

Shade vs Sun

Exploration in the game will be done using something similar to the Carta System (created by Peach Garden Games). In Carta you deal out cards in a pattern and as you flip them you use the card suit and number to create challenges and prompts for your character.

The difference in Protect Your Skin and Eyes will be if you flip a Red card you’ll be exposed to the dangerous rays of the sun and will take damage. But flip a black hard and you’ll be safe in the shade.

Vertical Exploration

Most exploration type games are done on a top down map, including what I did with Queenless *cough, plug plug*.

I need to get better at plugging my stuff…

In Protect Your Skin and Eyes, I want exploration to work in a 2d, vertical setting. So think of viewing a row of buildings from the street.

Imagine something like this. Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

In dealing out the ‘map’ you’ll be exploring, you’ll deal out several columns of cards and proceed to explore all of a building, from a bottom floor to the roof. Each map will be a street your survivor picks over.

It also opens cool mechanics like getting from one building to another by jumping or creating a walkway.

Anything else we should know about?

For the core mechanic, I’ll take from Ironsworn. The D6+stat vs 2D10s system I’m so familiar with and understand quite well.

I’m still working on stats, mechanics and other things. If I could say, I’m about 20% complete for a minimum viable game. Will Protect Your Skin and Eyes ever unfurl its wings and take off into the universe? Hard to say, but I feel it has some good bones.

Lore - A Rant (skip if you’d like)

There seems to be a bit of a backlash against deep lore at the moment. I get it. Nobody wants to have to read a novel’s worth of someone’s bad writing just to play a game. Instead, you can have tables a player can roll on to create their world and be invested in it. All good ideas.

But the thing is… I love that thick lore. I’m currently reading Warhammer Fantasy 4th Edition Army books for fun, and GOD DAMN, they are packed with lore that is “not needed” to play the game. Just go buy some rat dudes and fight them against your friend’s elf dudes.

Why are your rat dudes fighting elf dudes? Some would say, “Who cares?” I say, “I need to know why your rat dudes are fighting her elf dudes.” Is it because the Skaven (rat dudes) have found out the Elves are using a chunk of warpstone to protect their city? And because Skaven are drawn to warpstone like I was drawn to cake as a child, they have no choice but to throw themselves at the Elf battle lines.

This is all to say: I want deep lore in my games. It’s often what I read first in an RPG book. It tells me about the kind of world the game creator intended the game to explore. It tells me what I can expect from the rules. It tells me what the themes of the game are. And it’s fun to read.

Most importantly, lore inspires me to play the game. If I read a book and it’s just tables, I’m not inspired.

So let’s compromise. In Protect Your Skin and Eyes, I’ve already written out 11 or so handwritten pages of lore that explain what happened to the world and why it’s in its current state. I want that to go into the game, but I don’t think I’ll add a novella at the start.

Instead, my plan is to write the lore as newspaper articles. It matches the initial lightbulb of the game concept, and I can keep it to a minimum by sprinkling articles throughout the future game.

I may even write and post a few to Sneak Leaps, if you’d be interested.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

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Well that’s it for this poorly written Sneak Leaps. Stay tuned for more on Protect Your Skin and Eyes. And maybe more rants.

Croaker