Design Journal: Shadow's Tower

CAVEAT: These are the half-mad rantings of a designer who has not tested these ideas.

I've never played Dread. For those of you who don't know what that means, Dread is a roleplaying game where you play with a Jenga tower. Each time you do something you pull a block from the tower. When the tower falls the person who knocked it over dies. It's a gimmick that either lands or it doesn't. I've always meant to try it.

We'll get back to the tower in a minute. First we need to talk about what inspired Shadow in the first place. 

The very initial designs for Crescendo were Dark Souls level of punishing. It was flat out oppressive. And, while that design proved to be fun, it didn't feel like a fantasy game should. I'd designed a horror game. And one I liked. 

So I started taking my harsher ideas and saving them in a separate document that I named Shadow. By shadow I mean the Jungian definition: everything you're not. And that's what this game was, at least at the beginning: everything Crescendo was not. For that piece of humor alone I wanted to make the game. 

Crescendo's implied setting is very loosely based upon 9th century Britain. So of course I wanted Shadow to be in 19th century Britain, or an analog thereby. I can think of no spiritually worse time to be alive than the 19th century, with its triumphant neutering and enslavement of Western Christianity, along with the large-scale abandonment of its Eastern counterpart. Western Europe had so effectively ruined Christianity that one would be spiritually safer engaging in theistic Satanism. At least Satanists know they offend God.

Anyone who doubts me should try reading The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman. Actually, regardless of who you are, you should try reading that book. My copy is currently gathering dust because of how relentlessly bleak it is. It is Hell on earth. But it is also showing an unvarnished truth about modernity and liberalism in general. And that horror that book communicates? That feeling of an oppressive system beyond our control? It seems unique to our age. Sure, Nature's a fickle bitch but nobody takes Nature shitting in our lives as personal. You can't say that about the age we live in.

And that's horrific. 

Horror is reaction against this virus of self-defined reality that we know as modernity, against the feeling of artificiality. I feel it, know it all the way down. But y'know what intuitions are worth without sources?

Absolutely nothing.

I needed to read Poe and Lovecraft first. I had my suspicions about what the two had written, but besides a negligible exposure when I was in highschool I didn't know much. Instead of reading Poe I got to read Maya Angelou and freaking Great Gatsby. This is what's known as a bad trade, folks. I found Angelou insufferable and Gatsby is not a highschool book in any capacity. Maybe Angelou isn't either.

What I've found in Poe and Lovecraft is far more valuable: all lies are punished. What is hidden is revealed, usually in blood, tears, and screams. And those lies don't have to be personal; you can (and do) pay for others' lies just as often, if not more often, than your own. No sins are private. Each beat in Poe and Lovecraft the characters strip away another lie, getting closer to the truth. It may be a stupid thing to do, but the essence of their protagonists (by and large) are uncompromising truth-seekers. Most people find Lovecraft's protagonists stupid. But all the stories I've read indicate they're fed up with artificiality. Even if it kills them. Before reading The Proud Tower I'd not have understood why.

But my God I do now.

And I probably would have preferred insanity to the horror show that was their world. I mean, the remnants of that world persist on in the very worst aspects of our society today. 

All of this suggests a story about people poking and prodding, knowing they'll probably be destroyed, but they have to know. Must. The world is so bad , so artificial, that any reality, no matter how awful, would be better than what they currently have. But they don't how deep the lies run, do they? They think they can handle it.

At what point does this start sounding a Jenga tower to you? Pulling at the tower because you want to see how much you can pull away, because you don't know how integral it is to you? Once the image entered my mind it wouldn't leave.

I threw out everything I'd come up with and started over.

Here's what I got so far: every player drafts up what are called Isms: beliefs about the world the characters have that the player wants proven false. A stereotypical Judeo-Christian worldview is not just assumed, but is insisted upon

"God loves me"

"The dead stay dead."

"Sex is everything."

These Isms aren't individual to characters; they're what the group wants to subvert and destroy. This can get hairy, being horror: the Isms require a unanimous vote.  Whenever something touching these Isms comes up any action you take requires you pull a plank from the tower. If you succeed you have to say why you did. Whatever you say, it's a lie. 

"I succeeded in getting away because God has a plan for me."

"I avoided... Whatever that was,, because it was just my mind playing tricks on me."

At this point I'm toying with the idea of the GM writing down all the lies. You just keep pulling blocks until the tower falls. If that takes multiple sessions so be it. But once the tower falls? The GM brings out that list he's been making of all your lies.

You rebuild the tower.

And then the GM begins to bring your lies back to haunt you. He presents situations that mock your lies, that call out the pettiness of it all. And with each new situation a block must be pulled. No more skating by, it all counts now! 

When the tower falls that character is dead,  or insane, or ruined. That player joins in now, becoming a co-GM. And each player who falls after that gets in on it.

When you're out of lies or characters the game is over.

At least, that's what I got in my notes so far. Kinda needs playtesting. But that to me is a horror game.