If you’re reading these words without having read the story mentioned in the title, don’t be a fucking moronski; read it first.

I assume you’ve read some of my previous posts on my ongoing fantasy cycle, so you may remember that I’m producing these stories in tandem with improvements to my app, named Living Narrative Engine. It’s a browser-based system for playing scenarios like immersive sims, RPGs, etc. I’m compelled by the mutual pulls of adding more features to my engine and experiencing new scenarios; sometimes I come up with the scenario first, sometimes with the mechanics. That has my brain on a constant “solve this puzzle” mode, which is the ideal way to live for me.

Anyway, the following scenarios involving a brave bunch of dredgers in a fantasy world, tasked with extracting a dangerous arcane artifact from some gods-forsaken hole, will require me to develop the following new mechanics:

1. Lighting mechanics. Currently, every location is considered constantly lit. Given that we’re going underground and that the narrative itself requires using lanterns, I have to implement mechanics for recognizing when a location is naturally dark, and whether there are light sources active. There are other mechanics providing information about the location and actors in it, so from now on, when a location is naturally dark and nobody has switched on a flashlight, we have to block offering descriptions of the location and other actors in it, and instead display text like “You can’t see shit.”
2. Once lighting mechanics exist, we need actions for lighting up and snuffing out lanterns and lantern-like entities. By far the easiest part.
3. Currently, when an actor speaks in a location, the speech is only received by actors in that location. At the same time, I consider an entity a location when it has defined exits. Now we find ourselves in a situation in which we have a thirty-feet-long underground corridor separated by grates. That would make each segment between grates a location (which would be correct, given the boundary), but an actor could step from a boundary into the next and suddenly not hear a character on the other side of a grate’s bars. Obviously idiotic. So I need to implement a mechanical system for declaring “if an actor speaks here, the voice will be heard in these other places too.” That will need to extent to actions too: if you have eyes, you can see someone scratching his ass on the other side of bars.
4. No other scenario has featured water sources that could play a part. And by play a part I mean that actors could get in or fall in, exit them, struggle in the water, and drown. I really don’t want to see my characters drowning, but that’s part of the stakes, so the mechanics need to exist. Given that water sources tend to be connected to other locations and not through the regular exits, I will need some way of allowing “I’m in the water, so I want to swim upstream or downstream to a connected stretch of this water source.” This whole water system will be arduous.
5. Line-tending mechanics. Until I started researching matters for this story, I doubt that the notion of line-tending had ever entered my mind. Now we need mechanics for: 1) making an owned rope available to others. 2) Clipping and unclipping oneself from the available rope. 3) pulling on the rope to draw back someone clipped that’s wandering away. 4) possibly other cool line-tending-related mechanics. I can see line-tending reappearing in future scenarios such as traditional dungeon delves (for example, to avoid falling in Moria-like environments). Admittedly, though, this whole thing is quite niche.
6. Blocker-breaking mechanics. Basically: this door is bar-based, so this allows a hacksaw to hack through the bars. I don’t want to make it a single action, but a progressive one (e.g. if you succeed once, it only progresses a step toward completion).
7. Mechanics related to mind control. To even use those actions, I will need to create a new type of actor for the scenarios: a dungeon master of sorts. Basically a human player that’s not accessible to others, as if it were invisible, but that can act on present actors. I would give that dungeon master for this run the can_mind_control component, then allow actions such as putting people into trances, making them walk off, dive into water, etc. This means that there would need to be opposite actions, with the victims fighting to snap out of the trance. It will be fun to find out what happens when the scenario plays out. In the future, this dungeon master could be controlled by a large language model without excessive difficulty: for example, feeding it what’s happened in the story so far, what are the general notions about what should happen, and giving it actions such as “spawn a hundred murder dragons.”

That’s all that comes to mind now regarding the mechanics to add.

About the story: so far, it seems I want magic to be treated in this fantasy world as if it were toxic material. That’s not a decision I’ve made about worldbuilding, but a natural consequence of the stories I’ve felt like telling. I actually don’t believe in the kind of worldbuilding in which you come up with imaginary words for the warts on an invented race’s ass. I’m all about use and tools. My mind always goes for “what can I build with this.” I’m very rarely interested in a subject if I can’t see myself creating a system out of it. It also doesn’t help that due to autism, abstractions tend to slip through my fingers, so I need to feel like I’m sensing something to understand it.

In a way, I wanted to create a story about specialists working through a problem that needs to be solved. Jorren Weir, Kestrel Brune, Saffi Two-Tides, Pitch… these people don’t have superpowers. Most of them are glad they can keep a job. There is no grand evil here, just people’s self-interest. I want them to do well so that they can return home at the end of the ordeal. But given that we’re dealing with chance-based tests, that’s not a guarantee. And that tension alone makes it exciting for me to experience these scenarios.

As usual, if you’re enjoying these stories, then great. Otherwise, fuck off.