This is the first installment in a multi-part journey into the creation of our game, The Miri. The fun part is that at this moment we have yet to go to kickstarter, and the "Completion" chapter of this story has yet to be written.
-Ian Reed, Co-Founder
Role Playing Games are awesome. The escape into a fantasy setting is often something we all crave. Sometimes we take intricate care in these escapes, planning sweeping campaigns with a Game Master, involving swords to swing at dragons, or being in noir bar rooms to spy past the rim of our martinis.
"Real life incoming! Duck and cover soldiers!" exclaimed General Reality.
Yeah... Reality. Schedules and such.
During our -Every Sunday- Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, we'd often run into the situation where one of us couldn't make it. While we always had the excuse of so-and-so being "carried off by rats" (and then being carried back the following week), it was evident that one-shot campaigns were something that we were probably going to want. We'd also run into the situation of only being able to play for a couple hours rather than the 4 or 5 that a roleplaying game might typically need. Character creation would certainly take its chunk of time on those days.
We needed something that would get us playing right away, yet still pack all of the cinematic moments we talk about when we tell other people of our campaigns.
"I plunged my sword into the final boss, and as he died, I whispered to them -Smell ya later!-"
Is a lot better than
"I rolled an 11, and dealt the proper amount of damage to win."
So that was the challenge, to create something that:
- Gave us the full RPG feel
- Played right away
- Focused on the narrative rather than crunchy numbers
- Provided one heck of a one-shot
Having played a lot of other kinds of games, I had many inspirations to draw from including Once Upon a Time, The Fall of Magic, The Quiet Year, and The Plot Thickens.
A few years back, I came up with the initial concept of this card driven system where cards were just mental images, and had different meanings based on location. It started with the basic tropes like fighter, rogue, cleric, etc. and a bunch of typical RPG objects to form a deck. The "leveling up" would be done on character sheets outlining Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey.
I ran the idea past Josh and he liked the idea very much, and took it one step further by telling me that the images in a Tarot deck follows the Hero's Journey. That was where my initial concept took a turn into co-designing with my friend.
I knew very little about Tarot, but I knew a few things:
- Setup was simple
- Card location and orientation mattered
- Card layout was just images and titles
- The Tarot Reader has the similar responsibilities of the Game Master
- The revealing of cards was equal parts exciting and terrifying
Rad.
Next to do: A bit of development work with Josh to figure out how we wanted to build our deck. Also, time to get books on Tarot, so it's a known inspiration, but we don't insult people who take it seriously.
- Ian
Stay tuned for the next part in this series!
**EDIT** Part 2 Here
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