Let me tell you, I’ve been playing a lot of RimWorld over the last month. The new Odyssey DLC adds a whole dimension to the game that was previously fairly difficult to access: Exploration. With a gravship, it’s possible to go to so many more places on the map, and thankfully they added more things to see on that map as well. Odyssey adds to and enhances the gameplay loop of RimWorld, but thanks to the gravship’s function as a mobile base, that gameplay loop is largely maintained even with the changes.

Thinking about how the gameplay changes and doesn’t change with the addition of the gravship proved to be a good way to start thinking about the gameplay loop of this System Hack. When I’m playing RimWorld, what are elements I want more of that the game isn’t really going to provide? What pieces of the game, on the other hand, are best left to a computer? The trouble with developing an approach to a colony sim RPG is that the genre and its best examples are fairly broad, and you need to make some narrowing decisions very early on.

As I said earlier when discussing my design goals, I’m not trying to emulate RimWorld. Rather, the goal of the game is to provide a similar conceit that leads to storytelling. We are going to be using a few setting concepts from RimWorld to ground the setting of the game, and we are going to be focusing at least notionally on the idea of a colony, a homestead of a handful of people who are trying to make their way on a new world. There are going to be things we want to lean into, like relationships, that can be given significantly more depth at a game table than on a computer. There will be others, like tile-by-tile building layout, that are probably best left on the PC. Ultimately the three elements we want to build from are going to be creating characters, building the settlement, and exploring the world.

Creating characters

There’s more to literal character creation when it comes to the characters for a colony sim. For one thing, in RimWorld the number of colonists ebbs and flows, and the changes to how the game is focused depending on how many colonists you have are taken up relatively easily by the robust software simulation. In a role-playing game, that’s going to be less true. The way I see it, settlement populations have three different tiers: Tier one, the TTRPG tier, is where each player has exactly one character. This is easy, this is how the medium has worked forever. The next tier, Tier two, is where each player is managing somewhere between one and three characters. This is troupe play, and it’s been done before in a number of games with the arguable trope namer being Ars Magica. This is not difficult, but you have to define at least some procedures which align players to characters; in a colony sim sort of game this would need to be fairly fluid. Tier three is where each player is managing five or more characters. At this point, we’ve kind of left the traditional confines of an RPG, and if we want to continue having more commonplace ‘scenes’ where each player is playing one character, then there needs to be more management of characters going on in the background. RimWorld as a game can support colonist counts in the low hundreds, though actually playing a game with that many colonists is incredibly difficult; typical (and unmodded) RimWorld colonies hover around 10-15 colonists. The obvious question is if we actually want this game to be like RimWorld in that respect. Even so, the frame of a settlement working with around a dozen settlers is a good place to start; expanding the number much beyond that will require a deeper look into some bigger social dynamics.

The other important thing to define before literal character creation is how these characters come to be part of the settlement. RimWorld has you (typically) start with three, and then that number expands through any number of approaches, from the noble (helping people flee their captors, having children) to the unsavory (forcibly recruiting prisoners, the slave trade). We don’t necessarily want to include the whole breadth of what RimWorld does, but having people join your colony after the start will practically be a requirement if we’re going to aim for even a modest population in excess of the player count.

Building the settlement

Strongholds have been part of TTRPGs for a very long time, and recently games from Free League and others have made base building an accessible part of the hobby. If the game is to be a ‘colony sim’, though, we may want to go for more. The sort of stronghold and base building seen in games like Forbidden Lands, where the stronghold is mostly a list of buildings and employees, can serve as a start to what we want to achieve in this game, but there’s likely more robustness needed. At the very least, in-game projects and utilization of in-base tools should get a fair amount of focus. We don’t need an entire maintenance system running behind the scenes, but something for upkeep akin to what’s seen in Twilight:2000 could do the trick nicely.

For more detail, I think it’s an open question how much we want to borrow from worldbuilding or mapmaking games when it comes to what the settlement actually looks like. The assumptions of RimWorld at a macro level do not put space or available land on the list of constraints, so it’s not necessarily all that important to have a real map. That said, people love maps, and some way to turn your base into a fun floorplan will increase engagement with the game. This will require some more investigation.Some things about the surrounding area will need to be mapped a bit more. The local area should have key features, and elements that interact with people that come into your settlement, like paths and roads for the friendly and defensive positions for the not-so-friendly, should at a minimum get an assignment on a compass rose. Once again detailing a local map could be fun, if not entirely necessary, so there may be some value in sketching out what the area looks like in more detail than is strictly needed to be gameable. A lot of this may depart from the technical scope of RimWorld as we’re not really looking for a tiled map, more some key elements of the area that provide opportunities for interaction.

Exploring the world

Exploration is another area where we’re going to be departing from RimWorld, as a generated and populated planetary map is significantly beyond the scope of typical paper-driven random generation (and a pre-written map goes against the spirit of what we’re aiming for). As we’ve seen in other exploration-driven games, scale matters a lot when determining how to populate a map, and unfortunately we’re aiming for multiple scales all being observed simultaneously. And although RimWorld itself took a more-is-more approach when adding geographic detail and the whole orbital layer with Odyssey, the exploration tools for a tabletop colony sim will need to strike a balance between fun, thought-provoking maps and actually being reasonable for a person or people to generate with a few dice rolls. As much as RimWorld benefits from expanding the options for overland and orbital exploration, a tabletop game should ground the choices around wandering further afield with both motivations and consequences for doing so.

Of course, there’s no reason we must be restricted to the decisions made in RimWorld. Is the whole star system open for exploration? Who’s there? What’s there? And how did people get here? The people aspect of this potential game is a key part of exploration as well. RimWorld assumes a world with sparse, poorly organized populations. Is that necessarily the case in our game? And if not, how does a player-settlement factor into the world’s organization? Fellow humans are an aspect of RimWorld that is kept very simple, with only allusions towards organizations of fiefdoms and nothing resembling cities, states, or nations. The story of a game’s planet may be grounded in how its population comes together, and while RimWorld demurs from showing more sophisticated political organizations, that need not be the choice we need to make in our System Hack.

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So in thinking about our characters, our settlement, and our world, what is the actual vision for this game? As weird as it sounds, one parallel I keep coming back to is, actually, Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast. It’s not so much about each specific character, it’s about the cast of characters who pass through the settlement and turn it into what it is. It’s about tracking those stories even as they change. Considering all that, I have a duality of scopes, neither of which neatly fit into RimWorld. On one hand, character interactions, character development, and relationship development are going to best happen at an intimate level. Regardless of how many characters are in the settlement in total, we’re going to be aiming for each player to have control of one, two, or maybe three. That leads us into the unstated norm of an 8-12 person settlement, at least in terms of focus. Does the settlement need to stay that size? Maybe not, but if it doesn’t, the focus needs to adjust as the settlement changes.

The other half of the duality of scopes is a much more ambitious vision for portraying the planet and everything going on there. Neighboring settlements and groups are going to be more dynamic, play a bigger role in the world. This may mean that the settlement grows alongside them, or it may mean that the settlement stays narrower in scope, a roadhouse along a trade route or a single farm in a patchwork held loosely around a city-state. Those political organizations matter, and while the RimWorld vision of loose confederations and standalone colonies can be part of what happens on one of these planets, it shouldn’t be the only part.

As I write, the ‘story’ of the game comes together. There’s unsurprisingly a space western flavor here, contrasting the danger and opportunity of an open frontier with the continual evolution of human settlement and civilization on the planet. Science fiction gets us to the conceit and some of the specific story beats, but underneath it all we’re talking about the fantasy of the open frontier, new land that’s ripe for exploration as well as settling down. That theme is going to be front and center in the game, and it means that the eventual encroachment of ‘civilization’, especially in a futuristic world where maybe that level of organization isn’t necessarily needed or wanted, is going to be a core conflict.

As we established, the key elements of the game are characters, settlement, and world. Each of those is going to have its own set of mechanics, and as we get bigger in scope we’ll necessarily move further away from the scaffolding given to us by existing TTRPG rules. Still, with Cortex Prime as a baseline I think we’ll come up with something good. When we dive into characters, we’ll first need to tune Cortex Prime to our liking, choosing the best Prime Sets for this sort of setting and generally determining what we’re going to use inside of those Prime Sets. After that, we’re going to transition into the settlement at large, defining how we play when zoomed in to specific characters and how we play when zoomed out to the settlement as a whole. From there, the settlement rules will define how we build the settlement and what those potential buildings mean, how people work, play, and live within that settlement, and what challenges about characters working, living, and playing together are going to be gamified. And once we know how the settlement will be built and operated, it’s time to look at the world. How will other denizens evolve, how will political structures evolve, and in what ways will those evolutions (and probably a whole bunch of other random events) come to the settlement’s doorstep.

There will be more. Between characters and the settlement, we need to look at if we concern ourselves with gear and what that looks like. Between settlement and the world are likely multiple different systems for random encounters, from NPCs across the spectrum of friendly and hostile to strange weather, rabid animals, and maybe even a meteor strike. And between the world and the characters we need to think about what characters come into the settlement from the big broader world, and what sort of relationships all of our characters carry with them from other places they’ve been.

So we’ve got ourselves a foundation. Inspired by RimWorld, not exactly like RimWorld. The planet is more subject to change and evolution from human settlement, seeing cities and nations instead of a constant cycle of settlements, tribes, and raiders. Your characters are likely more concerned with their own little corner of the planet, though, eking out what existence they can as a farm, trading post, roadhouse, or some other standalone settlement on a planet scarred by attempts and reattempts at civilization. The real difference from RimWorld, though, will be the stories. Who lives there? Who passes through? What are their stories, and what does that mean? To really make this game interesting and its ‘own thing’, it’s going to come down to the characters. And how are we going to make them really sing? That’ll have to be the subject of the entire next System Hack.

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