Levels In Search Of A Game

Previously we laid out some mechanics that fit into wedge themes, and now comes the worldbuilding of it all.

The deserts and graveyard themes suggest a wasteland setting, but the artifact/Artificer themes and Manufacture mechanic suggest a strangely high tech level. How can we combine them?

Here's my take: a once-great land had a horrific catastrophe decades ago, with two remaining power centers dominating the wasteland. The Citadel of Artifex Academia (URW) preserves and teaches all things mechanical. Their original mandate, to rebuild and uplift the world, has slid into an obsessively inward focus as they sneer at the ignorant outsiders.

Their main rival is the Weaver Circle (RWB), who seeks to bind the world in stringent laws and mercilessly punish rulebreakers. They only control disparate zones outside of their main stronghold, but they are often welcomed as a relief from bandits.

The other wedges are much less organized – maybe they're more like geographical regions rather than formal factions.

Potions (GUR) – Marshy mangrove forests and geothermal craters with communities of brewers. Maybe it's for combat strength, religious ritual, recreation, or all at once.

Deserts (WBG) – A vast plain of exiles and hermits with some very strange metaphysics. They respect and revere the desert, while being acutely aware that it is murderously indifferent to them.

Reclaim/Self-Mill (BGU) – A malarial fen with a maze of covert supply lines. Anything can be traded for anything, but you might not like the exchange rate. People caught running scams are often banished to the desert, or turned over to a Weaver officer.

#MTG #Hypothetical #Kharkassakh

Potions (Artifact tokens with “2, T, Sacrifice this artifact: Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature. Activate this only as a sorcery.” In green, blue, and red.)

Manufacture (“Create a token that's a copy of an artifact token you control.” In blue, red, and white, which are also the colors of artifact/Artificer tribal.)

Reclaim (”[Cost], Exile this card from your graveyard: Draw a card.” In all colors, but weighted toward green, blue, and black.)

Curses (and punitive Auras in general) (Primarily in red, white, and black but with a tiny bit in blue.)

Deserts/lands in graveyards (Primarily in black and green, secondarily in white.)

There we go: five mechanics/themes, each more-or-less in a different wedge. But since this set doesn't have strict factions like Tarkir or isolated sub-planes like Alara, we can mix them right off the bat.

Reprocessed Brew 1 Artifact – Potion (Common) [Potion ability] Reclaim 3

I loved Eldraine's nontoken Foods and economy of uses for them, which I want to replicate here. There's also a mini-cycle of colored nontoken Potions, 1-drops with ETB effects: gaining 3 life for green, scrying 2 for blue, dealing 2 to each opponent for red.

Chemistry Technician 1U Creature – Vedalken Artificer (Uncommon) When ~ enters the battlefield, choose one- -Create a Potion token. -Manufacture. Plenty of Citadel students discreetly study the strange brews of the wilderness. 1/3

Iterated Upgrade 3U Sorcery (Uncommon) Create a 3/3 colorless Golem artifact creature token. Reclaim 4U When you reclaim ~, manufacture.

A cycle of common monocolor deserts: they enter tapped and have Reclaim 3.

Some strategic reprints help too: Desert's Hold is a great crossover, and Curse of Oblivion is some graveyard hate that most non-Curse drafters won't want.

#mtg #hypothetical #Kharkassakh

Five planets orbit a mana-rich sun, developing their own cultures and ecology in isolation. Recently, they have achieved spaceflight to cross the perilous aether and begin exchanging culture.

(In ascending order of distance from the sun: Red, Green, White, Blue, Black)

White: The bold, beautiful space program of a distant, dying homeworld. Gleaming lunar bases, with a midcentury American/Soviet Futurism hybrid style. (Maybe it's literally a collaboration between the homeworld's two biggest nations?)

Blue: Giant, sharply-angled monolithic structures hovering unperturbed in a gas giant's atmosphere. The stones can “live” and “think” on an immense timescale, and obsessively archive the solar system's history for clues to their own existence.

Black: A shattered world that accretes scrap and debris from nearby, with rings of destroyed ships and satellites. A jagged, precarious space pirate aesthetic.

Red: A very “John Carter of Mars” aesthetic. Craggy canyons and mountains on a staggering scale, with an elaborate ascension-by-combat warrior hierarchy.

Green: The vintage sci-fi conception of Venus as a lush, overgrown land of dinosaur beasts. Jungle valleys are separated by miles of earthquake-prone wastelands. Each ecosystem has developed almost entirely in isolation.

Top-down tropes, ideas, and card names: UFO abduction First Contact We Come In Peace Spaceport Space Elevator Spacewalk Voyager/Hubble/Curiosity Space Pirates Warp Drive Terraforming Invasive species/diseases Planetary annihilation Liftoff Cryptic Monolith Mission Control Dyson sphere Space race

Card Ideas:

Probing Vessel 5 Artifact – Vehicle (Uncommon) Flying When ~ enters the battlefield, exile target creature until ~ leaves the battlefield. Crew 2 3/3

Warp Launcher 1UR Artifact (Rare) Whenever a creature you control enters the battle from exile, you may draw a card. If you do, discard a card. 2, T: Exile target creature you control. Return it to the battlefield under your control tapped and attacking at the beginning of your next declare attackers step.

#mtg #hypothetical

The official Ravnica D&D book is wonderful, and I hope we can get future volumes for planes like Innistrad and Dominaria. I've spent a while thinking about how to run a campaign within it, but first I'd have to learn a lot more about both playing and running D&D games.

I also love the idea of deckbuilding-based RPGs, and have sketched out ideas for my own system before realizing, “why not use a card system proven to be great?”

And from there, why not combine the two ideas?

The basic premise is this: You start off with a 20-card deck from the guild of your choice. You fight encounters of escalating difficulty, increase your deck size and starting health, find new loot and cards, and explore entwining plotlines.

My main hurdle so far is, how to handle everything outside of card-based combat? A string of Magic matchups might work as the main gameplay throughline, but half the fun of Ravnica is all the intrigue and politicking. D&D stats might work, but then there's not much of a way to elegantly merge it with the Magic half. Freeform roleplaying feels a bit too thin and ad-hoc, too.

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All that aside, here's a first draft of the game's structure:

The player's starting decks: http://tappedout.net/mtg-deck-folders/player-decks/

The encounters: http://tappedout.net/mtg-deck-folders/encounter-decks-1/

• Start with a 20-card deck size, a 5-card opening hand, and 10 life. Each of those stats will rise as you level up and explore.

• After winning an encounter, the player takes up to three of the enemy's cards for their collection, five if it's a boss. (Maybe 2 and 4 if there's more than one player in a party.) They also get some amount of gold and XP.

• Boss encounters are singleton decks at a higher power level, with the boss themself in the command zone.

• Gold can be spent at various vendors, who sell thematically relevant cards. (eg Seller of Songbirds sells Healer's Hawk, Runewing, Judge's Familiar, and Birds of Paradise.) Vendors may also have sidequests with unique rewards.

• Undesired cards can be converted into gold at a rate of 1 for a common, 2 for an uncommon, 5 for a rare, and 10 for a mythic.

• Every card is either from a Ravnica set or is canonically from Ravnica (eg Krenko, Shattergang Brothers), except for cards used by planeswalker characters.

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Some plotline ideas:

• An Orzhov pontiff asks for your help in neutralizing The Cozen, a debt collector gone rogue.

• Protests erupt over a proposed broad law against Simic biomancy.

• A mysterious ancient cult is making waves in the undercity.

• The Gruul clans have liberated a cyclops from an Izzet laboratory.

If there's ever a third visit to Innistrad, one possible story hook is all the religious schisms in the wake of Avacyn's death, learning the truth of her creation, and the Eldrazi incursion. No single faction is strong enough to win outright, and strange alliances form and dissolve every day.

The set's factions are enemy-colored, an inversion of Innistrad's usual ally-colored creature tribes, to reflect the dissonance and upending of all the usual alliances. There's a lot of untapped potential in this- the only specifically enemy-color set so far has been Apocalypse, all the way back in 2001.

The overall mechanic identity of the set features a lot of choice, whether in modal cards or designs that are useful in multiple archetypes. Perhaps there is a cycle of “schism” enchantments, like the Sieges from Fate Reforged, representing the two factions associated with each color.