Tag Archives: Game Design

Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 2

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Welcome back to our System Hack! We’ve moved into the detail part of this hack, actually nailing down what everything in the game is and how it works. Now that we’ve nailed down what the skills are, it’s time to talk about Resources and Items, how they’re made, and what they do. Later on this leads us to part 3, where we lock down the tech tree and more specific base stations. After that’s all situated, it might be time to prototype this thing as a game.

RimWorld does give a guide in terms of what level of simplification we should go for. Resources like ‘compacted steel’ and ‘compacted machinery’ sidestep massive parts of the metal and machining supply chain, and also end up neatly creating resource constraints at different stages of the RimWorld gameplay loop. We’re not necessarily restricted by the same intent with our designs; this game is still an RPG at its heart and things like trading and finding more resources aren’t necessarily constrained to a single map and random events. With no (or at least much less) dead-ending, it’s okay to make the resources palette a bit broader and a bit more interesting.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Three Tiers of RPG Purchasing

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There’s a wide world of games out there, and from a gamer’s perspective it’s an embarrassment of riches. More games than you could ever play or even read, and altogether too many things to do and places to start. How gamers navigate the hobby is important for game designers, who are all jockeying for the dollars that gamers spend.

Everyone goes about their gaming purchases in different ways, much as they go about buying groceries, appliances, or furniture. In gaming, a hobbyist is likely to make many gaming purchases over time, and how they segment these purchases depends on what they’re trying to do. The assessment of how buyers behave with regards to their purchases is called customer segmentation, and it’s a key element of market research and strategy consulting. When you understand how your customers act, it’s easier to plan for their behavior and make more effective product and marketing decisions.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 1

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It’s time to move from theory to practice. As we move on to the next stage of this System Hack, I’m going to start taking the elements we discussed in the first set of articles and make them into actual game elements. For today, that means character creation. When we discussed characters for this System Hack, we landed on some pretty straightforward prime sets: Attributes, Skills, and Distinctions. As such, we’re going to lock in our Attributes and Skills. For Distinctions, the number I’d want to write is perhaps a bit high to cover comprehensively in one article, but I am going to lock in what the three Distinctions each character has are, what they do mechanically, and how they’ll be roughly categorized.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Around the OSR…Again

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If you go by game release dates, 2026 is the year where Wizards of the Coast becomes the longest-running shepherd of Dungeons and Dragons. The release of 3e serves as an inflection point in how the game was designed, and as a historical note set the stage for the enormous surge in popularity enjoyed by both D&D and the TTRPG hobby as a whole in the following 26 years. This transition of power in the hobby also served as the impetus for the largest movement of D&D revanchism, the OSR. For better or worse, every edition of D&D Wizards put out eventually got its own revanchist movement: for 4e the backlash was harvested by Paizo and turned Pathfinder into the second-largest TTRPG. For 5e, the backlash was a slow burn, coming much later in the product lifecycle and mostly as a result of Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to rug-pull the OGL. It’s here now, though, and has brought us games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart.

The OSR, though, is special, because the grievances that started the movement are about playstyle more than one specific edition. D&D started as a wargame, and was molded over time (and editions) into the character-driven heroic fantasy game we know it as today. Somewhere in the ten year window between the release of original D&D and the release of the Dragonlance setting was something special, as the OSR tells it, a recipe for more grounded gaming. I think there is some merit to that idea; it’s one of the reasons I’ve written about the OSR before and also why I play games like Mothership and Mythic Bastionland. Even so. The era between OD&D and Dragonlance (the setting that “ruined everything” according to some) was ten years; the time that has passed between the release of OSRIC and now is about twenty. What does it mean to be part of a “revival” or “renaissance” that has been around for twice as much time as the thing that’s being revived or reborn?

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Articles, Editorial

Nine Years of Cannibal Halflings

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Well, we’re leaving our enneadic era behind and heading into our tenth year. If you take OD&D as the starting point of the ‘modern TTRPG’ (although I’d recommend taking a deeper dive), that means we’ve been doing this for… ~17% of the medium’s lifespan? Which also means CHG has been active for longer than some editions of D&D?

Oh gods.

Well, let’s see what we did, and then look ahead to the final solar rotation of a decade of CHG.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Overworld

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While the focus in RimWorld is on the stretch of land that you’ve claimed for your base, the entire planet is available to you to explore. You can see the spread of different biomes and factions when you select your landing site at the beginning of the game, but really exploring and interacting with the broader world is dependent on either sending out risky caravans or developing later-game technologies like drop pods and (now with Odyssey) gravships. For our System Hack, the base site is likely to feel a bit smaller, and venturing out onto the world map is something that happens sooner. Luckily, we have decades of wilderness exploration in TTRPGs to help us out. When looking at our overworld map, we want to make sure that exploration and venturing beyond the base site both provides interesting decisions and helps us populate a world with people and places that our players will want to explore.

The overworld is also where we start considering some of the setting assumptions of RimWorld, and deciding where we converge or diverge. RimWorld’s implied setting is fascinating, but the place where all of the setting ideas fail to emulsify is in the overworld. Beyond the dispersion of settlements being a clear game contrivance, the lack of any population buildup or agglomeration is just not how any planet would look after years of colonization. There is a line to be walked here; a ‘RimWorld’ would likely self-select for individualists who may want space and to be left alone, but there’s simply too many personal and economic benefits for larger settlement to assume there wouldn’t be any.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Base Building

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If any one topic is ‘the core’ of this System Hack, this would be it. Base building is the underlying gameplay loop of RimWorld and it is also a topic du jour in RPG circles, with the (admittedly poorly detailed) stronghold building from the D&D days of yore coming back into focus as more gamers want broader storyline opportunities. For our purposes, of course, if we’re making a colony sim we need to make a colony. But what exactly is the best way to do that?

Base building from my perspective is sandwiched between two examples which effectively bracket the space we have to work in. On the heavy end is RimWorld itself, a computer-assisted colony manager where everything is measured out in five foot squares and the player has complete power to place elements as they want them, as long as everything fits. On the light end is the new generation of stronghold building rules, most effectively typified by Free League’s games, notably Forbidden Lands and Twilight:2000. These games add a strong layer atop their roleplay frameworks, but the actual mechanical existence of a Forbidden Lands stronghold is merely a list of buildings with requirements and effects. We know the first item is too much, but we know the second is not enough. So what will base building in our System Hack actually look like?

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Tasks and Work

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When you boil it all the way down, RimWorld is a game where you assign tasks to your colonists and optimize how they get performed. Every time you place down blueprints, place a zone, or add a ‘bill’ to a production structure, you’re effectively communicating a specific task. When it comes to our tabletop colony sim, these sorts of tasks are going to be a cornerstone of the gameplay loop just like how they are in RimWorld. The actual implementation, though, is going to be quite different.

Structured time in RPGs is seen as something to be avoided, at least outside of combat. In most trad games, the passage of time is something either tracked closely in increments no more than a few seconds, or glossed over entirely. We have started to see games, especially games using Free League’s YZE system, paying more attention to the passage of time, while Edge’s new DPS mechanics used in Arkham Horror are assigning a mechanical bounding to the typically loose definition of a ‘scene’ by anchoring characters with a dice pool that exhausts over the span of one scene. It’s useful to consider rules like these for our game, but a Colony Sim is going to require something different. With productive tasks being primary, constant and consistent time tracking is going to be needed to fairly assess what’s going on in the colony.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Characters

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Characters are the key unit of play in any RPG, and our system hack is going to be no different. For a game modeled after RimWorld, though, we’re going to have to strike a balance between emulation and ease of use, especially considering how many characters may be at play.

Cortex Prime allows for a range of different options for modeling characters, collectively called Prime Sets. Different combinations of Prime Sets lend themselves to different genres, and each one has different rules mods that can be attached to it. Only one Prime Set is required, Distinctions, but luckily it works well for certain traits within the RimWorld framework.

After some consideration, the two core Prime Sets we’re going to use outside of Distinctions are basic ones, Attributes and Skills. Attributes may not be directly used in RimWorld, but giving each character a rating in Physical, Mental, and Social can also be used for stress tracks, recreation type preferences, and other underlying RimWorld properties that wouldn’t fit with other Prime Sets. We’re also going to look into Resources and Relationships, Prime Sets that will be important for the game but perhaps limited at character creation.

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