We were immediately all on the same page about wanting to run a GMless system and we were also pretty sure we didn’t want to use dice or cards and instead go for something else. We decided to start by picking an item to make into a game and then building the rules and theming around it, but it turned out that most of the things we could think of were already used for a game, and we didn’t want to copy Dread’s or Ten Candles’ gimmicks. We instead then started working on theming. Hunter brought up the idea of running a kingdom, since it’s harder to play specific characters without a GM. Cassie thought it would be interesting if the nonexistent GM was a character we were all influencing, like Everyone is John, and we combined the two ideas into having the characters be the advisors to a mad king (that way randomness could be justified in-universe).
So we basically approached creation from there as a hack of The Quiet Year about running a country, so we had to introduce mechanics that differentiated it. We thought it could be more fun (and less work for us!) to have players make the card prompts rather than having them pre-written. We also wanted there to be different win or lose conditions rather than the inevitable doom of The Quiet Year. Asher suggested giving the kingdom stats and having each decision positively affect one stat and negatively affect another (inspired by the Pigmote Isle minigame in Sunless Seas). We decided on four stats inspired by Sunless Seas and Reigns. We also had to come up with a way for players to roleplay their character in the king’s chamber of advisors, so we had to determine how character creation would work. We ultimately decided on a very streamlined system, with Asher suggesting having every character be defined by an adjective and a noun (also inspired by Sunless Seas), to be determined randomly. We also introduced the execution mechanic to allow for frequent turnover of characters. Both the names and the execution mechanic further increased the role of randomness in the game, so we reluctantly added dice back in. Asher initially suggested having a shared map like in The Quiet Year, but during our first playtest Hunter immediately realized that it made way more sense to write directly on the prompt cards.
During the first playtest, the only real problem we were having was that the changes in stats weren’t enough each time (they kept trending back to the middle), so we increased the changes from 1d4 to 2d4 to make it a bit swingier, and we also reduced the number of starting cards and added the phase where new cards are made, so that we could better play off of the problems introduced in the first cycle. An image of the first game’s results is included.
CHANGELOG:
— Solution success/failure is determined by rolling a d20
— Game now ends at a certain number of successes/failures
— Trial and execution mechanics have been updated to make execution more common, even if there is unanimity
— Dice used in stat changes reduced to 1d4
