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Miserable Secrets
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February 11, 2022Part of a Bundle of Holding Indie Cornucopia purchase, all of which I'll be reviewing separately because they are very different. (Though for end of year book numbers, I'm counting all of these as one item.)
I'm going to start discussing Rose Bailey et al.'s "Miserable Secrets" from the end, where Bailey does the classic Appendix N move of putting your inspirations in at the back; and here, her inspirations were, among other things, a Castlevania game and the Philip Marlowe hard-boiled novels. Now this is, I think, where indie and small games shine, where someone can come in and say, "I don't know if anyone else cares, but here's a Gothic hard-boiled mystery game where the detective uncovers the solution, but at cost their own hope and humanity."
Backing up a little more, one of my favorite grad school literary studies term is "unmotivated" in the sense of something that doesn't really need to be done the way it's done: for example, for plot reasons, Jane Austen needs this heroine's dad to get out of town, but it doesn't really matter how she does that, so Austen's choice about how she engineers that is "unmotivated." So unmotivated choices are inessential -- they could have been done differently -- which is why they are so interesting.
So when I say "Rose Bailey wanted a hard-boiled Gothic game," there's still a lot of decisions to be made. Do you set it in 1940s California, but with the saturation/passion turned way up? Do you set it in a medieval-esque Gothic France with some Dupin type who cannot solve things through pure ratiocination and has to make decisions about how dirty to get his hands?
Well, if you're Rose Bailey, you set this in a post-apocalyptic (post-nuclear war) world where vampires rule quasi-benevolently with the aid of a Christian-esque church, after they have defeated the Thinking Machines that enslaved mankind, oh, and also there's a plant kingdom to the East with dangerous plant-men.
In other words, there is so much here that is unmotivated by the central idea of "you play investigators where the investigation feels like combat and where what you turn up may damage the fragile ecosystem of the human lives around you or your own." I kind of love it, it's wild, very Numenera like -- characters are even developed in the "I'm an who " format of Numenera -- with numerical monks and alchemists with living machine blood and half-vampires. There is also a whole random town generation system that feels so inspiring that I'm honestly tempted to buy the smart PDF that will auto-generate towns for you.
Other smart things: your character skills have both investigation and battle uses -- because there is an assumption that any adventure will have both. Your hit points are, as near as I can tell, your hope, while monsters are measured in dread. If you get hit in combat, you might lose hope, but you also might lose hope by being made fun of in front of the village. Everything feels laser-focused in that way.
And so when Bailey says that combat should feel like a platformer video game, I understand why the monster illustrations look like something out of Castlevania, even though that's not the art style of the rest of the book. Is that a good choice? Well, honestly, I understand the reason there, but consistency in art goes a long way to maintaining tone.
And that brings me to the mechanics, which are based on cards and memory, essentially: you have some cards in your hands, you have a spread in front of you -- a square rather than a cross, which feels like a tonal missed opportunity -- and you want to match cards by turning them over. Certain suits are matched to certain feelings, so give bonuses (I think?); and also cards turned over to solve mysteries also might implicate omens, I guess? Turning over cards makes sense for an investigation game, even though making it Memory means it's a game for the player rather than the character, and yet --
Bailey is clear about the thematics of the PCs going to town, investigating a monster, and ending up uncovering secret wounds in the town; but I need some guidance as to how this is put into practice, and two ways I can think to do that are
(1) an extended play example (great for showing people how the mechanics work with the story) and
(2) a sample adventure (to show what a prototypical story in this game looks like).
There's a little chapter about GM advice, but honestly, without one or preferably both of those, I wouldn't feel too confident running this.
I'm going to start discussing Rose Bailey et al.'s "Miserable Secrets" from the end, where Bailey does the classic Appendix N move of putting your inspirations in at the back; and here, her inspirations were, among other things, a Castlevania game and the Philip Marlowe hard-boiled novels. Now this is, I think, where indie and small games shine, where someone can come in and say, "I don't know if anyone else cares, but here's a Gothic hard-boiled mystery game where the detective uncovers the solution, but at cost their own hope and humanity."
Backing up a little more, one of my favorite grad school literary studies term is "unmotivated" in the sense of something that doesn't really need to be done the way it's done: for example, for plot reasons, Jane Austen needs this heroine's dad to get out of town, but it doesn't really matter how she does that, so Austen's choice about how she engineers that is "unmotivated." So unmotivated choices are inessential -- they could have been done differently -- which is why they are so interesting.
So when I say "Rose Bailey wanted a hard-boiled Gothic game," there's still a lot of decisions to be made. Do you set it in 1940s California, but with the saturation/passion turned way up? Do you set it in a medieval-esque Gothic France with some Dupin type who cannot solve things through pure ratiocination and has to make decisions about how dirty to get his hands?
Well, if you're Rose Bailey, you set this in a post-apocalyptic (post-nuclear war) world where vampires rule quasi-benevolently with the aid of a Christian-esque church, after they have defeated the Thinking Machines that enslaved mankind, oh, and also there's a plant kingdom to the East with dangerous plant-men.
In other words, there is so much here that is unmotivated by the central idea of "you play investigators where the investigation feels like combat and where what you turn up may damage the fragile ecosystem of the human lives around you or your own." I kind of love it, it's wild, very Numenera like -- characters are even developed in the "I'm an who " format of Numenera -- with numerical monks and alchemists with living machine blood and half-vampires. There is also a whole random town generation system that feels so inspiring that I'm honestly tempted to buy the smart PDF that will auto-generate towns for you.
Other smart things: your character skills have both investigation and battle uses -- because there is an assumption that any adventure will have both. Your hit points are, as near as I can tell, your hope, while monsters are measured in dread. If you get hit in combat, you might lose hope, but you also might lose hope by being made fun of in front of the village. Everything feels laser-focused in that way.
And so when Bailey says that combat should feel like a platformer video game, I understand why the monster illustrations look like something out of Castlevania, even though that's not the art style of the rest of the book. Is that a good choice? Well, honestly, I understand the reason there, but consistency in art goes a long way to maintaining tone.
And that brings me to the mechanics, which are based on cards and memory, essentially: you have some cards in your hands, you have a spread in front of you -- a square rather than a cross, which feels like a tonal missed opportunity -- and you want to match cards by turning them over. Certain suits are matched to certain feelings, so give bonuses (I think?); and also cards turned over to solve mysteries also might implicate omens, I guess? Turning over cards makes sense for an investigation game, even though making it Memory means it's a game for the player rather than the character, and yet --
Bailey is clear about the thematics of the PCs going to town, investigating a monster, and ending up uncovering secret wounds in the town; but I need some guidance as to how this is put into practice, and two ways I can think to do that are
(1) an extended play example (great for showing people how the mechanics work with the story) and
(2) a sample adventure (to show what a prototypical story in this game looks like).
There's a little chapter about GM advice, but honestly, without one or preferably both of those, I wouldn't feel too confident running this.
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