From Concept To Completion: The Miri - Part 2

This is the second installment in a multi-part journey into the creation of our game, The Miri. This part goes into the designing of the deck that drives the entire game!
-Ian Reed, Co-Founder

"Once upon a time, there was a ______." Stories begin with Characters. 

Not every story introduces the characters as readily as that first traditional opening, yet every story (aside from SYFY specials on aliens and Loch Ness) tries to deliver the 5 questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why. Curiously enough, the first question on that list is always "Who."

Looking back at our Tarot deck example, there are 2 main sections of cards:

• 18 Named cards, or "Major Arcana"(The Magician, The Hermit, etc.)
• 60 Numbered cards, or "Minor Arcana" (Two of Wands, Four of Cups, etc.)

Unless you're really creative, you're probably not going to roleplay as two rods or four cups, however you could definitely assume the role of the Magician! The Miri's deck was inspired by this structure within the Tarot deck, containing 18 characters to 60 other cards.

Who were our characters, or as we decided to call them, Aspects? We knew we needed to cover a lot of bases to fit whatever characters our players would want to add to their stories.
Time to brainstorm what we could build into the deck.

Josh and I started writing down some character aspects, luckily writing in pencil. After a few exploratory erases, we decided that while 18 interesting story characters were what we needed to reach, this was a game as well. This meant mechanics were needed to be applied in some way. Most RPG's do this by identifying that some character classes are better suited to certain attributes, and card games do this by having suits.

Initially, we noticed our numbers were divisible by 6, the same number of attributes from Dungeons & Dragons, and we tried that. We soon realized that with a card based system, you probably weren't going to draw into attribute suits you wanted. You could draw them with 3 attributes though, and we landed on Mind, Body, and Spirit. Suddenly, coming up with 6 solid character aspects for each of the 3 attributes was infinitely easier to see what we had, and what was missing.

Character Aspects

"Once upon a time, there was an Acrobat, and they felt the need to _____." Ah yes, the other 60 cards!

The remaining cards in Tarot (and the contemporary game "Weave") are abstracted with suits and numbers, yet deeper meanings are able to be derived from them. But there is a big design hurdle in that, Accessibility. 

Imagine this:
The Storyteller - "A monster blocks your way, what do you do?"
The Player - "Uhhh.... Five of Wands?"

Doesn't work. Or at least, not for what we were doing. Any true mystic doing a Tarot reading would be able to interpret what the 5 of Wands would mean, but not everyone. We needed the imagery on the other 60 cards to quickly give useable prompts, while still giving the same interpretive feel.

This is where our deck of cards got really interesting. We let our Aspect cards tell us what THEY wanted to have in the deck. This was done in the form of looking at any Aspect, and assigning them a Calling (or Crisis), and a Catalyst. For example: The Acrobat has a calling to perform as an influence on their being. Therefore, "Perform" was included in the 60 cards we refer to as Influences. 

Now imagine this:
The Storyteller - "A monster blocks your way, what do you do?"
The Player - "I am the Acrobat. I juggle knives (perform) while walking toward them and say if they get hit, it's their own fault!"
The Storyteller - "Haha, OK! Roll the die with a bonus!"

The rest of the Aspects got theirs as well. For example, the Merchant wishes to acquire wealth, so "Acquisition" and "Wealth" were also Influence cards. Not all of the Aspects had Influences that matched their attribute suit either, so some really cool overlaps happened. 

The result of us letting the cards drive themselves was almost magical. When cards were revealed during play, the relevance of the image prompt to what is happening in the story is often so close, it's spooky. This spookiness is where we came up with our theme. Stories are magic, and dark forces try to cover that magic like ichor.

Ichor... that sounds awesomely dark. What does this Ichor look like?
For that matter, what do the Aspects look like? 

Next to do: Search for artists to do illustration tests, and compare their work with the feel of the gameplay. (Spoiler: The winner was Nick Nazzaro)