A Shadow World
The World. A great irregular mass of matter and light and life suspended in space. It contains within it the Sun in a colossal spherical chamber constructed for the purpose. At great distance lies the moon, bathing the moonward world in silver light as it progresses through its phases. Yet further orbit the handful of stars, on their erratic but predictable journeys. All else is darkness.
The people of the world are shadows. This makes them uncomfortable both in the light and in the dark, forcing them to cover their shadow-flesh from the light to avoid withering away, and to avoid true darkness lest they return to that from which they came. They do not hold memories in their heads like you or I, but in their possessions. Each item is not only a thing to them, but a symbol of self. They are the sum of their belongings, and a little more besides.
As they age they accumulate things and memories to fill them with, but their shadow-stuff also grows stronger, allowing them to survive just a little more exposure to light, keep their sense of self just a little longer in the dark. Their bodies fill their containers like a gas. A larger body means more room for things, more room to tailor their physical form, but a smaller body means their shadow-stuff is more potent, less fragile and more suited to workings.
Folk come into being when memories are left behind in the twilight, usually by accident, and most do not survive long before succumbing to light or to darkness. Those who do survive find themselves one among many in a world teeming with folk and other life.
They are the creators of their own world. From darkness their workings can sublimate stone, water and ash. With memories they further differentiate that crude matter into myriad forms. Light may be woven into the base patterns, sunlight turning iron to gold to glowing orichalcum which will be used in lanterns far away from the central Sun.
Light comes in many forms. First, sunlight. Golden and tautological. Second, moonlight. The moon is a relative newcomer to the world, appearing in the record only after the Sun was encircled in stone. Then the three invented siblings of firelight, arclight, and luminescence. Firelight was only created with the invention of combustibles, luminescence with the development of biology. Arclight is the newest, created with careful manipulation of the recently devised electric. Finally, elusive starlight touches faintly on the world, drowned out by all the others and barely noticeable in the everpresent dark.
Life resembling that which we know, usually referred to by the folk as flesh or vine to distinguish between plant or animal, was created to unknown ends. Plants were created first, then insects and the small creatures of the world. Bigger and more complex forms were thought up later. The arts of creating life from nothing were lost, now novelty is only created through the recombination of existing traits or careful modification to that which exists. Mushrooms, slimes, and molds (collectively called rot) were created as a mistake, but have found a surprising number of advocates. Each of these things, vine, flesh, and rot, are unrelated. Life was created three times with three different patterns, and it may yet be created again. Microbes are a fantasy, you cannot create what you cannot see.
The creation of complex biology created new developments in embodiment. Folk have always been able to add matter to their persons. It sometimes becomes useful to have extra arms for example. But organs are a new phenomenon, as they have paved the path for new sensations. Shadows are quite capable of sight and hearing, and have been fond of scents since time immemorial but touch and taste were foreign. Other organs such as stomachs, hearts, and nerves originally designed for the maintenance of fleshy appendages have revealed their capacity for the darker sensations of hunger, heartbreak, and pain. Even more concerning are the rumors that some shadows, once embodied for extreme periods of time, lose the ability to remove these extra components, facing death when they inevitably wear out.
The encirclement of the Sun was done long, long ago. The sphere is offset such that some parts of its surface are closer than others, leading to differing temperatures in the eternal day. Its surface is a patchwork of glittering ocean and ancient sands, marred with an expansive lush jungle. The desert landmasses of the encirclement are controlled by various splinterings of the Church Solar, each considering the others heretics for their disagreements on theological questions. What is the Sun? Was it begat by folk, or folk begat by it? What is the nature of its light, and why does it burn the worst of all? These questions are debated with ink and with steel. Here folk are urban, hiding in shaded cities from the damning light which brought them forth. Legends circulate among them of hermits and prophets, the strongest and the oldest, who wander the sands alone. The seas are plied with boats and ships of these cities, but also of itinerant freefolk. With no need of breath, there is nothing stopping underwater settlements, and many folk take on aquatic forms beneath the waves. The jungle was an intrusion of the lifemakers, needing sunlight to fuel their creations. Once expansionist but since tamed by treaty and time, some still work to spread its borders.
The moon waxes and wanes from its fixed position, defining both time and space. Moonward and Darkward are the two principal directions of the folk, and its cycles inform their long calendars. As the light comes and goes, it shines on a monument to its glory, or to folk’s hubris. The Moonbridge is estimated to be a quarter completed, reaching out from the great uneven mass of the world towards the divine moon. Here the phases are more than an arbitrary tally of passing time, instead a fact of life as workers hurry to build the bridge further before it is once more enveloped in darkness. The greatest stoneworkers of the age are drawn here, embellishing the bridge with sweeping spans and arches. The work is opposed with vigor by secretive star cults among other groups who wander the outside surface of the world, where stone terminates in darkness.
The vast majority of the world between these two extremes is shadowlands, beneath or above the surface of the encirclement, depending on how one orients. Mostly they take the form of long dark corridors of stone, formed and shaped by unknown folk long before the arrival of the moon. Outcast or uncontacted folk wander here with lanterns filled with old sunlight, making their small places in the world among the ancient labyrinths. Innumerable corridors were flooded when the oceans were filled, and abandoned biological creations wander. The largest settlements maintain networks of lenses to pull sunlight down into their domains in order to keep away the dark. These cluster in groups and bands towards common goals or against common enemies. The most notable in recent years is lensless Arctown, where the secret of the electric originated and is kept. It glows blue in its spider’s web of copper cabling in fierce defiance of the Sun.
And so this is where the folk live their half-lit lives, forging memories into form. Those who survive their unlikely creation find comfort with others of their kind, working towards goals material or ideological. They break into innumerable cultures and sects, which split, merge, and re-interpret. All the while they grow older and stranger as they shape themselves and the world around them to suit.
2023-12-21
Against the Universal Skill Check
I have a love-hate relationship with skill systems in RPGs. On the one hand they provide several systemic benefits and allow for more character customization than class-based games. On the other they can often feel underwhelming and don’t always work well as typically implemented. I would like to examine the downsides of skill systems, and hopefully fix such systems for my own use.
While I will touch on the underwhelming nature of skill systems, I am foremost a GM and designer rather than a player and am mostly interested in how they are used in game systems. The role of a game system is, among other things, to answer questions the GM throws at it. Almost all RPG skill systems are designed such that the character possesses a numerical skill which is used to weight the result of a dice roll towards the player’s favor, with the result being a binary success or failure. It’s easy to see where this comes from, at least in D&D. Starting in 3rd edition, skill rolls are an extension of to-hit rolls. You either hit the enemy, or you don’t. You either succeed with your skill roll, or you don’t. Some games focus on the binary result as an issue, but I think the problems they’ve identified are a symptom of the larger problem of using a universal resolution mechanic for all situations.
And to be fair, the standard binary skill system works pretty well all things considered. If the GM isn’t sure whether a character can climb a wall or not, rolling with a binary outcome will answer that question. But I find there are a lot of situations where this simple outcome doesn’t provide enough information to be useful or provides frustrating behavior. One such situation is knowledge checks. A simple numerical score doesn’t tell you what your character does and does not know. You can roll to find out, but this can lead to situations where you succeed a roll to recall deeply obscure information only to turn around and bumble basic facts. Crafting is another pain point. If you are trained in the skill of weaponsmithing, this sort of skill system will tell you whether you successfully craft a given item, but not tell you how long it takes, what materials, or allow for differences in quality of the final item. We are applying a solution designed for resolving attacks to very different questions and unsurprisingly not getting the greatest results.
I suppose my issue is that skill checks tend to be used as a “good enough” replacement for systems which would provide more information. I consider combat in most RPGs to be an example of a fully developed system. It is a system which provides more information and choice than skill rolls, despite having proto-skill rolls baked in. On the other hand, something as common in RPGs as stealth is usually regulated to a single roll determining whether the character is spotted or not, carrying disadvantages for the viability of stealthy characters and for groups of people attempting to sneak as a group. Doing this to combat would likely result in a riot.
A few games do go the extra mile and design “full” systems for things other than combat, such as the hacking system in Shadowrun or the magic system in Ars Magica. These specialized systems exist alongside typical skill systems which handle other things the game isn’t focused on, providing further evidence for my belief that skill checks are often used as a patch over more developed subsystems.
Of course this is all coming from my taste and predilections as a GM. I have a tendency to want the rules to provide a lot of information, mostly so that the game can be consistent in how it operates and players can plan ahead. Not every GM or game system works that way, nor should they. Not every game can and should have detailed systems for everything. There is something to be said for the basic binary skill system giving a GM more room to improvise what is happening, or for a game to be able to focus on a single aspect it wants to highlight but leave other options open, if less developed. Regardless I am pulled by the allure of what I’ve been mentally calling “the forever game”, a game where players are able to inhabit roles as diverse as active adventurers, savvy merchants, master craftsmen, or scheming politicians and for each of these paths to have their own overlapping spheres to work with.
While running a game where the characters all go off in different directions with different life paths would probably be a mess, having these rules allows for different types of campaigns to be easily run out of the box and allows characters playing in a focused campaign to dip meaningfully into other aspects of the game world. I have more thoughts on what I’m looking for in this “forever game” which will get their own post.
Besides creating a forever game there are other reasons to consider rejecting the universal skill system or at least elaborating further on certain skills. Giving skills their own subsystems allows characters with different skills to feel very different from one another despite being made from similar building blocks. A character based around crafting skills should, in my eyes, be very different to play than a character focused on combat. By developing the crafting skills further we give that character things to do and a solid place in the game. Another reason to consider developing systems for skills would be to help RPGs branch out into different genres where combat isn’t the focus. So many RPGs have bespoke systems for combat despite nominally being focused on something else or claiming to be universal in nature. I’m sure I’m not the first person to ask the question of what these games could be without combat, but to my knowledge this doesn’t seem to be a particularly explored space.
These additional systems have the interesting property of portability. So many games sharing the same universal skill system makes it possible to create bolt-on subsystems which use the skill checks as building blocks. These can then be carried by a GM from game system to game system as they wish.
Circling way back now, the other issue I see with skill systems is their lack of umph. One of the universal skill system’s strengths is also a great weakness: Incrementalism. Small increases in numerical values simply don’t have the same narrative power or draw as gaining a new class ability or feat. Incremental quantitative changes do have a certain appeal, computer RPGs are living proof of that, but qualitative changes are much more engaging besides playing better to the strengths of the medium. I believe a big enough quantitative increase is a qualitative increase, but in general I think character advancement through feats is more fun than skill increases. Feats do a better job of describing who a character is than a +1 to haberdashery. Of course, the issue with feats is that they don’t represent incremental progress very well, which is something nice to have in an RPG system especially as players have been conditioned to expect continuous character improvement. Incremental progress (especially with diminishing returns) strikes a happy medium in my eyes where player characters can progress and character building is rewarded but it doesn’t overtake the campaign itself.
My own untested and theorycrafted solution to this is somewhat inspired by Alexis Smolenk’s sage system. Increases in skills unlock feats at regular intervals, let’s say every three skill levels. Skill levels are used primarily as a counter towards these feat intervals but the intermediate numbers can also be used for skill checks, as inputs to other systems, or for feats depending on the skill. In the style of Alexis’ sage system some feats are granted automatically at reaching a given level of skill. Others must be bought separately with XP but have skill or feat requirements of their own, typically focused on the three level feat intervals. Some feats will need to be found in the world to be learned. I am aware I have essentially just re-invented feat trees, but the idea has a certain shine for me at the moment (especially as it would help banish some of the cracks forming in my current house rules). I think the main thing I like about this skill system is that it provides what I perceive to be the benefits of a skill system without the downsides. Skills allow the advancement system to be incremental, but each skill is used in a different way as the situation demands and qualitative abilities are still provided to the players.
There’s a reason skill systems are one of the cornerstones of modern RPG design. I just think that they need to be broken out of the constraints of the universal skill check in order to reach their full potential.