Petty Gods & Playthings – You Are a Petty God – Part I #WIP

Hello! This is another post on a series I am sharing about the development of Petty Gods & Playthings, The Game about Small Gods, Their Great Ambitions, and The Mortals Entangled in Them! Wow, that’s a mouthful, but it does explain all there’s to it. Well, quite. If you want to understand it a little bit better, I recently made this post with the introduction of the game. I meant, the currently written introduction. Who the hell knows how it’s going to be in the final thing.

Today’s post is the first in a series I will share about the creation of your Petty God, which I tried to turn into a kind of narrative game on it’s on. It’s all randomly generated, but there’s no real imbalance in the process, as the results are not numerical, but subjective. They define the player in qualitative terms, and asks them to participate in the world building. That detail might not be so clear right now, but it will become an integral part of the process as you will see.

My idea is also to play with solving a lot of the prep procedures with a single roll of a set of polyhedral dice. This is me trying to approach this mechanic as a toy. We rarely get to roll all those weird dice at once, so I am creating instance when this is possible and is fun in the game.

Again, this is a work in progress. So if you say it’s bad I will pretend I am gonna fix it!

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Petty Gods & Playthings – Introduction #WIP

I’ve been working on a thing between the various work I do on various other things, and guess what? It’s another TTRPG! Yeah, I just can’t help it. But to be fair, I’ve actually start working on this game around September of 2022, and I even playtested it couple of times. It worked all good and well, but it felt it was missing something. I don’t know. I even commissioned a cover but the talented Łukasz Piwiński, so I would be motivated to finish writing it, but things got in the way. Thankfully.

During my trip to Gen Con I played a game in development by my dear friend Steve Albertson, from Mad Dungeons podcast, and Epic Levels, which inspired me in a way that made everything click. We were playing this very cool and very well thought Horror Game with a well known mechanic used in a very singular way. That made me immediately start thinking into all the things I could explore with that mechanic, and in a few minutes, I wasn’t really at the game anymore. Fortunately/Unfortunately I was having idea, after idea on how to explore this, how this could work with Petty Gods, and I haven’t stepped writing since them. Notes, paragraphs, some fiction, some possibilities, planning, adventure ideas. Anyway. I am living through a phase of high inspiration and creativity, so I intend on taking advantage of it.

Petty Gods & Playthings is a game about small gods with great ambitions and the mortals entangled in their machinations. It’s a game I intend on exploring some new avenues in game design, exploring the limits of the magic circle and the limits of representation in the game. It is also a game that is heavily inspired by Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories, and the marvelous world and humor of Terry Pratchet’s Discworld Series. There’s also touches of Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, and a lot o other stuff. The point is, it’s a game I am exploring another passion of mine. Comedy. And, to complete the mix, it’s a game about gods, religions, beliefs, and the construction of these elements while playing. So it will explore some very interesting things.

I hope you stick with me while I post here on the blog the development of the game, and discover it with me as I create Petty Gods & Playthings!

Today, the Introduction! Or part of it!

Continue reading “Petty Gods & Playthings – Introduction #WIP”