Over a year ago, I discussed and laid out the foundation of what I considered to be my white whale: a true exploration system. Something that wasn't merely about the rote mechanics of getting from one interesting part of the game to the next, but something that was interesting in its own right.
My main inspirations, Breath of the Wild, Arora: Age of Desolation, Morrowind, and Ironsworn, are still very much on the mind, but since that original posting on it a year ago, the system has evolved considerably alongside its host game, Labyrinthian, becoming far more integrated with what its become than I ever expected. While I think the attached write up on the system could still bear with some polish and revision, I do think it captures how the game plays on a mechanical level fairly well, and naturally, I'd like to talk about what it does.
Understanding Adventuring as a System
In Labyrinthian, Adventuring is considered the first and foremost "Pillar" of the game, and apropos given its systems govern game's overall structure. But as I discuss in the original topic, this is distinguished from the typical "Pillar" structure of DND that used "Exploration" to more or less label anything in the game that isn't Combat or Social Interactions. Exploration, as it happens, is a pretty big misnomer for what it covers, and implies the existence of things that just don't actually exist in that game.
Hence, the changeover to Adventuring, which I believe better encapsulates what the Pillar represents, including not just true Exploration and Discovery mechanics, but Traversal and Survival as well. This not only allows the game to better communicate what the play experience is like, but also, handily, helps to avoid the confusing mess that results from haphazardly grouping a bunch of disparate mechanics together.
After all, if one takes the time to understand what the system is doing, you'll find that it isn't a haphazard collection of whatever doesn't fit elsewhere, and is instead built from the ground up to be unified not just with itself, but with the rest of the game its a part of.
The Crawl
To start, the most basic gameplay loop of the Crawl, which essentially unifies Dungeon, City, and Hex Crawling with more typical freeform play into a single, straightforward procedure. This procedure, handily, works on the same base mechanics that govern Combat, which reduces the so-called "Minigame" problem by keeping the mechanics the same across both Pillars.
The interesting thing about the Crawl, and probably the part that would make some antsy, is that is a very "pressured" experience. The Crawl, when the group opts to move as a single Party, pushes you forward, and play becomes about managing this pressure. While the document only vaguely refers to examples of how this can be done (as I'm still defining them and content, generally, isn't my focus at this stage), what I can say is that the options aren't going to be all that unfamiliar.
All the same sorts of things you'd do, and some new ones specific to this game's systems, will be available and they will grant you, and by extension the Party as a group, control over their Pacing. The document leaves the actual conversion rate for Pacing to real distance vague for this reason, as Players should be focusing on what they do, not the specific minutia of every inch they walk over. The Keeper's role would be to monitor their progress, and ensure the World responds when necessary.
As such, while you won't have full control, and thus your Party could still end up walking into a trap or hazard or what have you, what you get in return is a very interesting experience, where strategy has to be balanced with adaptation...the hallmarks of a good adventurer, I'd say.
But even so, you do have the option to split up the Party, and not move as one. But this comes with drawbacks, where people must be suitably skilled as to be self-sufficient if you want to maintain the same benefits. While the Party faces less control over the forward pressure while adventuring, the benefits of teamwork means only one Player needs to be suitably skilled with Guile, the stealth skill, to enable the party to sneak around effectively. Likewise, when its prudent to move fast, while a single rider could out pace a Party, a Party is going to have an easier time of ensuring everyone gets to the destination faster.
But, some Tasks or Activities suit a single person splitting off, if temporarily, and these are good opportunities to reduce your Pacing when your Party doesn't want to push too far. And at any time, the Party can opt to Linger, and stop moving in any major way. But, this can be risky, as the more Time the Party spends lingering, the more Time has something to say about it.
Time is Everything
Once upon a time, Gary Gygax pontificated (ranted?) about the importance of keeping track of Time in the gameworld; I'd like to think the importance of Time in Labyrinthian carrys on in that spirit, though the implementation is quite a bit different.
I've often spoken about how the Tension Pool is easily my favorite mechanic of all time, and that should be obvious given the direct implementation of its Time Pool variant as a central mechanic of the game, arguably second only to Improvisation.
The reason I adore it so is because it hits this crucial dichotomy where metagaming and roleplaying are effectively indistinguishable in their effect on the gamestate, where the optimal choice invariably is the interesting narrative choice and vice versa.
But over time, the Time Pool emerged as an enabling system for something far greater, a genuine, systemic living world system. The thing about such systems, especially in the tabletop world where any notion of these are usually just GM fiat moreso than any genuine system, is that finding ways to make the living world visible in play is a challenge.
The Living World
Unlike a video game like, say, Bannerlord, which gives players an eagle eye view of everything thats happening in Calradia, with whats essentially news feed constantly updating with major events, in a game like Labyrinthian, where even Alliance play doesn't have such a viewpoint, this doesn't quite work.
Fortunately, the nature of the Time Pool solves this problem, at least in part, by giving a semi-automated means of not just allowing the world to express itself, to move and act on its own independently, but also to make itself visible to the Players.
How it does this is rather indepth, but one can think of it as the butterfly effect, gamified.
Essentially, by taking the base Complication roll of the Tension Pool, and elaborating it to cover Encounters and Boons (an opposite to Complications), we increase the diversity of whats essentially a random encounter mechanic, and through these not only can bespoke, predefined things happen, but so too can improvised ones, as well as those injected by the Living World mechanics.
For example, your party might trigger an Encounter with the Orcs that inhabit Moria, or worse the Balrog. But then you also have this NPC, Gollum, whose taken up a Quest in the living world, and is pursuing the Ring. An encounter with them is just as possible.
But, this system can go even farther. As I spoke to in the Appendix of the document, the Keeper has a World Sheet available to them, which gives them that birds eye view of the gameworld, breaking down the broad state of the world into easily interpreted Stats.
When any given C.E.B is triggered, it can pass along changes to these stats, and, thus the World changes with it, and these Stats can start to affect the CEBs that are generated. For example, a Boon that grants the Party a small horde of Dwarvish Mead might be diminished, if the state of the world has trended towards Famine. And when the Party begins to explore more of the world, the state of it becomes more apparent and widespread, as Famine begins to touch on how everything from the roads to the cities, the people to the monsters, are described.
These then integrate with the other big tools the Keeper will have available to them, Quest Blocks and Questlines, which not only give anybody the easy means of improvising any kind of story on the fly (greatly demystifying the effort required for the Role, something I think it isn't controversial say most games still struggle with), but also provide the critical structure that allows the world to live on its own, even if you want to integrate more classical storytelling.
Certainly, there's nothing stoping a GM just making all this stuff up on the fly, but then one has to ask why so many complain about having far too much to make up on the fly, and then we must also consider to interconnectivity at play, which goes beyond what any given GM can just make up on the fly, session after session. Its an awful lot, but a system designed to support them can bear that burden much better, so long as the Keeper, just as the Players must, learns to trust the game.
Trust
Trust is a rather important aspect of the game and understanding how it works. Too often, I think, people are distrustful of the games they play, and as a result they often block an awful lot of the fun they could be having.
Its not too dissimilar from the effect cheating has in video games; what was once fun and engaging easily becomes irrevocably tedious when the constraints and friction of the game are removed, especially when said constraints and frictions weren't hampering fun to begin with.
Trust in Labyrinthian is embodied in the point of the game, which this text goes to great lengths to say is not about telling stories. I've spoken to my opinion before about the hobby as a whole being over obsessed with storytelling, and thats born out with how my ideas tend to be judged, where they can be looked at through the lens of telling stories when that isn't the point, even with Questlines, which, while explicitly intended to be inclusive to those who want to tell stories, are by design integrated into the dynamic of trust.
Instead, the point is to simply be Present for the experience of playing; to be immersed, in other words. The Stories that then emerge from doing so then become that much more special, because they're inherently Stories that only a game could have told. The systemic design in Labyrinthian exists not as rote, traditional minutia, but as the core of the experience. Hence, the inclusion of and integration of Survival.
Survival Required
Once upon a time, I ranted myself about the issue of Survival being hamfisted into 5e's overall gameplay loop, despite the fact that, aside from having to Sleep or otherwise rest up, survival is near entirely vestigial to the game, with shallow mechanics that at best, are just rote minutia.
At the time, my concern was mostly about getting 5e to a place where its problems could be addressed better, as I knew that finding a different approach to the issue, one that integrated Survival as a compelling part of play, wasn't going to happen.
But, as it happens, I found I could build that solution myself into my own game. The Energy Dice system, essentially rethemed Hit Dice, was my neato idea for this, and from there the Survival system blossomed in a big poof of obvious design, providing not just the means to make Survival an integrated part of play, but also Crafting and Gathering, and the interconnectivity of them both lead to lovely solutions for a number of would be design problems.
While I think many will, as is tradition, see these systems and begin to cry "bookkeeping" as they hiss and start crawling up the wall backwards, a lot of effort is being put into ensuring these systems maintain their depth whilst minimizing their intrusion on play.
Much of it won't be apparent without the Content that supports it. For example, the need to eat everyday doesn't strictly require you go out of your way to gather ingredients, cook a meal, and then consume it. Bog standard rations which can not only be consumed on the go, but with minimal time requirements, give players the choice to prioritize the speed of their travel or exploration.
But at the same time, Food, Drink, and Comfort aren't just mechanical nothings that are engaged with because the game says so. Taking direct inspiration from Breath of the Wild, and, as it happens, literally dozens of literary and film narrative examples, all three are going to be a big part of how the Party prepares for their ongoing adventures. Different Foods and Drink will provide different kinds of boosts to the things you do, and the higher the quality, the better and longer lasting these boosts are, especially when it comes to Comfort.
Not only will sleeping in a real bed pay dividends over a bedroll, but better bedrolls will pay dividends over any random bed, and so on and so on.
But whats more is that these systems, Survival and Crafting and Gathering, were designed with an eye for volitional engagement, where they're designed to be compelling enough that it doesn't matter that the system expects or requires you to engage them, you'll be doing it anyway.
The nature of the Exhaustion modifier, or the Scar mechanics, for example, give you interesting choices to make that not only provide meaningful gameplay optimizations, but also align with compelling narrative choices. When Gathering, you're not spending hours repetitively grinding out an obscene amount of widgets, but conversely while Crafting, you're not just sitting around and waiting for an item, you're actively customizing and building something piece by piece, step by step.
And as it relates to Survival, Crafting in particular is an apropos companion. I've spoken before about how just the simple depth of Cooking in Labyrinthian gives way to this organic blend of mechanics driven gameplay thats indistinguishable from a purely narrative moment of coming together to cook and enjoy a meal; that kind of elegance is, I'd argue, only achievable by a system like this, but as said, it requires trust.
If you as a Player or Keeper cannot or will not trust that these systems are in play for a reason, then the whole thing falls apart. But if you do trust it, then it can lead you to something even greater.
The Alliance
Arora: Age of Desolation was a revelation when I read it for a lot of reasons, including the fact that its still the direct inspiration for the Exploration and Discovery system Labyrinthian utilizes.
But its most compelling revelation was how it reasoned Survival as a concept could adapt to a higher level of play, when the characters have grown past things like the Weather or Darkness being significant challenges. The idea that Survival at this level becomes not a matter of how well you, the Adventurer, handles these problems individually, but how you as a regent or ruler of an entire population of people handle these problems affecting that population is highly compelling.
So much so, this simple logic ended up laying the foundation for how play in Labyrinthian evolves over time, as characters develop towards their full potential. In line with Arora, Adventuring largely elaborates into Settlements and Domains, and Combat, following the same logic, elaborates into Warfare.
The actual core mechanics involved largely don't change, and at most simply switch some numbers around (the usual SnD or Warfare Round takes 8 Hours, for example). But with a dearth of new content, the game can transition out of the typical Adventuring experience into something wider in scope, and yet still just as deep and accessible.
When this begins to happen, though, the idea of the adventuring Party must change with it, and so begins the Alliance. As I note in the primer for this in the document, this is a very cool and appropriate change, that clearly denotes what the game has progressed to. While the group is not obligated to transition into this kind of play, every character no matter their choices has the means to participate in it, even if they individually opt out of it.
By this stage, your characters are going to be powerful, and so a single player continuing on as an Adventurer makes perfect sense, and will still be just as fun to play at this stages as it is for anyone who decides to engage in the aspects of the Alliance, and the final emergent story of play, whatever it is, will ultimately be this much more compelling, because the foundation these systems lay, and the depth to which they will go in the end, will produce something truly unique.
Exploration and Discovery
Now, obviously, I've spent a lot of time talking about a while bunch of things that fall under Adventuring, but don't necessarily speak to what my actual White Whale was, a true exploration system.
That is because, happily, I can say that aside from being further refined, the system I devised as hasn't changed much.
The idea is still to encourage players to engage with and interact with the actual Lore, the fiction of the gameworld if you will, and to do so deliberately. The rewards have been simplified from what they were to something far simpler, but still I think just as compelling, and the process by which they're earned is much more concise to explain, a benefit of extensive playtesting if nothing else.
And then we have what I once called Oracles, now more appropriately named to Distractions and Diversions, which funnily enough are, amongst other things that converged at the time, the genesis of why Improv became the core mechanic of the game, and why the game doesn't refer to itself as an RPG anymore.
====
But, this topic isn't really about the nature of Labyrinthian itself and whether or not I'm on the right track distinguishing it from RPGs.
Instead, I'm more interested in thoughts on the system. As said earlier, the draft is rough, as this is the first time I've essentially recompiled the entire system from my playtest notes in over a year, so I wouldn't be surprised if not everything is being communicated as well as I'd like. Please do ask questions and I can to try explain more or hetter. (And please don't just assume the worst)
In general, the idea behind the document as it stands is that it somewhat emulates how I want to eventually organize the proper rulebook. The Basics page is both a reference page for play, and a means of onboarding new people, as they can utilize it to jump into a game and to follow along, and the remaining text is intended to both elaborate on these mechanics, explaining indepth how they're used and why, and to help the player along with immersing into the headspace and the default tone of the game, which I'd describe as a cross between the book Lord of the Rings, and Studio Ghibli, with just a dash of post-John Wick Action Movie.
My main inspirations, Breath of the Wild, Arora: Age of Desolation, Morrowind, and Ironsworn, are still very much on the mind, but since that original posting on it a year ago, the system has evolved considerably alongside its host game, Labyrinthian, becoming far more integrated with what its become than I ever expected. While I think the attached write up on the system could still bear with some polish and revision, I do think it captures how the game plays on a mechanical level fairly well, and naturally, I'd like to talk about what it does.
Understanding Adventuring as a System
In Labyrinthian, Adventuring is considered the first and foremost "Pillar" of the game, and apropos given its systems govern game's overall structure. But as I discuss in the original topic, this is distinguished from the typical "Pillar" structure of DND that used "Exploration" to more or less label anything in the game that isn't Combat or Social Interactions. Exploration, as it happens, is a pretty big misnomer for what it covers, and implies the existence of things that just don't actually exist in that game.
Hence, the changeover to Adventuring, which I believe better encapsulates what the Pillar represents, including not just true Exploration and Discovery mechanics, but Traversal and Survival as well. This not only allows the game to better communicate what the play experience is like, but also, handily, helps to avoid the confusing mess that results from haphazardly grouping a bunch of disparate mechanics together.
After all, if one takes the time to understand what the system is doing, you'll find that it isn't a haphazard collection of whatever doesn't fit elsewhere, and is instead built from the ground up to be unified not just with itself, but with the rest of the game its a part of.
The Crawl
To start, the most basic gameplay loop of the Crawl, which essentially unifies Dungeon, City, and Hex Crawling with more typical freeform play into a single, straightforward procedure. This procedure, handily, works on the same base mechanics that govern Combat, which reduces the so-called "Minigame" problem by keeping the mechanics the same across both Pillars.
The interesting thing about the Crawl, and probably the part that would make some antsy, is that is a very "pressured" experience. The Crawl, when the group opts to move as a single Party, pushes you forward, and play becomes about managing this pressure. While the document only vaguely refers to examples of how this can be done (as I'm still defining them and content, generally, isn't my focus at this stage), what I can say is that the options aren't going to be all that unfamiliar.
All the same sorts of things you'd do, and some new ones specific to this game's systems, will be available and they will grant you, and by extension the Party as a group, control over their Pacing. The document leaves the actual conversion rate for Pacing to real distance vague for this reason, as Players should be focusing on what they do, not the specific minutia of every inch they walk over. The Keeper's role would be to monitor their progress, and ensure the World responds when necessary.
As such, while you won't have full control, and thus your Party could still end up walking into a trap or hazard or what have you, what you get in return is a very interesting experience, where strategy has to be balanced with adaptation...the hallmarks of a good adventurer, I'd say.
But even so, you do have the option to split up the Party, and not move as one. But this comes with drawbacks, where people must be suitably skilled as to be self-sufficient if you want to maintain the same benefits. While the Party faces less control over the forward pressure while adventuring, the benefits of teamwork means only one Player needs to be suitably skilled with Guile, the stealth skill, to enable the party to sneak around effectively. Likewise, when its prudent to move fast, while a single rider could out pace a Party, a Party is going to have an easier time of ensuring everyone gets to the destination faster.
But, some Tasks or Activities suit a single person splitting off, if temporarily, and these are good opportunities to reduce your Pacing when your Party doesn't want to push too far. And at any time, the Party can opt to Linger, and stop moving in any major way. But, this can be risky, as the more Time the Party spends lingering, the more Time has something to say about it.
Time is Everything
Once upon a time, Gary Gygax pontificated (ranted?) about the importance of keeping track of Time in the gameworld; I'd like to think the importance of Time in Labyrinthian carrys on in that spirit, though the implementation is quite a bit different.
I've often spoken about how the Tension Pool is easily my favorite mechanic of all time, and that should be obvious given the direct implementation of its Time Pool variant as a central mechanic of the game, arguably second only to Improvisation.
The reason I adore it so is because it hits this crucial dichotomy where metagaming and roleplaying are effectively indistinguishable in their effect on the gamestate, where the optimal choice invariably is the interesting narrative choice and vice versa.
But over time, the Time Pool emerged as an enabling system for something far greater, a genuine, systemic living world system. The thing about such systems, especially in the tabletop world where any notion of these are usually just GM fiat moreso than any genuine system, is that finding ways to make the living world visible in play is a challenge.
The Living World
Unlike a video game like, say, Bannerlord, which gives players an eagle eye view of everything thats happening in Calradia, with whats essentially news feed constantly updating with major events, in a game like Labyrinthian, where even Alliance play doesn't have such a viewpoint, this doesn't quite work.
Fortunately, the nature of the Time Pool solves this problem, at least in part, by giving a semi-automated means of not just allowing the world to express itself, to move and act on its own independently, but also to make itself visible to the Players.
How it does this is rather indepth, but one can think of it as the butterfly effect, gamified.
Essentially, by taking the base Complication roll of the Tension Pool, and elaborating it to cover Encounters and Boons (an opposite to Complications), we increase the diversity of whats essentially a random encounter mechanic, and through these not only can bespoke, predefined things happen, but so too can improvised ones, as well as those injected by the Living World mechanics.
For example, your party might trigger an Encounter with the Orcs that inhabit Moria, or worse the Balrog. But then you also have this NPC, Gollum, whose taken up a Quest in the living world, and is pursuing the Ring. An encounter with them is just as possible.
But, this system can go even farther. As I spoke to in the Appendix of the document, the Keeper has a World Sheet available to them, which gives them that birds eye view of the gameworld, breaking down the broad state of the world into easily interpreted Stats.
When any given C.E.B is triggered, it can pass along changes to these stats, and, thus the World changes with it, and these Stats can start to affect the CEBs that are generated. For example, a Boon that grants the Party a small horde of Dwarvish Mead might be diminished, if the state of the world has trended towards Famine. And when the Party begins to explore more of the world, the state of it becomes more apparent and widespread, as Famine begins to touch on how everything from the roads to the cities, the people to the monsters, are described.
These then integrate with the other big tools the Keeper will have available to them, Quest Blocks and Questlines, which not only give anybody the easy means of improvising any kind of story on the fly (greatly demystifying the effort required for the Role, something I think it isn't controversial say most games still struggle with), but also provide the critical structure that allows the world to live on its own, even if you want to integrate more classical storytelling.
Certainly, there's nothing stoping a GM just making all this stuff up on the fly, but then one has to ask why so many complain about having far too much to make up on the fly, and then we must also consider to interconnectivity at play, which goes beyond what any given GM can just make up on the fly, session after session. Its an awful lot, but a system designed to support them can bear that burden much better, so long as the Keeper, just as the Players must, learns to trust the game.
Trust
Trust is a rather important aspect of the game and understanding how it works. Too often, I think, people are distrustful of the games they play, and as a result they often block an awful lot of the fun they could be having.
Its not too dissimilar from the effect cheating has in video games; what was once fun and engaging easily becomes irrevocably tedious when the constraints and friction of the game are removed, especially when said constraints and frictions weren't hampering fun to begin with.
Trust in Labyrinthian is embodied in the point of the game, which this text goes to great lengths to say is not about telling stories. I've spoken to my opinion before about the hobby as a whole being over obsessed with storytelling, and thats born out with how my ideas tend to be judged, where they can be looked at through the lens of telling stories when that isn't the point, even with Questlines, which, while explicitly intended to be inclusive to those who want to tell stories, are by design integrated into the dynamic of trust.
Instead, the point is to simply be Present for the experience of playing; to be immersed, in other words. The Stories that then emerge from doing so then become that much more special, because they're inherently Stories that only a game could have told. The systemic design in Labyrinthian exists not as rote, traditional minutia, but as the core of the experience. Hence, the inclusion of and integration of Survival.
Survival Required
Once upon a time, I ranted myself about the issue of Survival being hamfisted into 5e's overall gameplay loop, despite the fact that, aside from having to Sleep or otherwise rest up, survival is near entirely vestigial to the game, with shallow mechanics that at best, are just rote minutia.
At the time, my concern was mostly about getting 5e to a place where its problems could be addressed better, as I knew that finding a different approach to the issue, one that integrated Survival as a compelling part of play, wasn't going to happen.
But, as it happens, I found I could build that solution myself into my own game. The Energy Dice system, essentially rethemed Hit Dice, was my neato idea for this, and from there the Survival system blossomed in a big poof of obvious design, providing not just the means to make Survival an integrated part of play, but also Crafting and Gathering, and the interconnectivity of them both lead to lovely solutions for a number of would be design problems.
While I think many will, as is tradition, see these systems and begin to cry "bookkeeping" as they hiss and start crawling up the wall backwards, a lot of effort is being put into ensuring these systems maintain their depth whilst minimizing their intrusion on play.
Much of it won't be apparent without the Content that supports it. For example, the need to eat everyday doesn't strictly require you go out of your way to gather ingredients, cook a meal, and then consume it. Bog standard rations which can not only be consumed on the go, but with minimal time requirements, give players the choice to prioritize the speed of their travel or exploration.
But at the same time, Food, Drink, and Comfort aren't just mechanical nothings that are engaged with because the game says so. Taking direct inspiration from Breath of the Wild, and, as it happens, literally dozens of literary and film narrative examples, all three are going to be a big part of how the Party prepares for their ongoing adventures. Different Foods and Drink will provide different kinds of boosts to the things you do, and the higher the quality, the better and longer lasting these boosts are, especially when it comes to Comfort.
Not only will sleeping in a real bed pay dividends over a bedroll, but better bedrolls will pay dividends over any random bed, and so on and so on.
But whats more is that these systems, Survival and Crafting and Gathering, were designed with an eye for volitional engagement, where they're designed to be compelling enough that it doesn't matter that the system expects or requires you to engage them, you'll be doing it anyway.
The nature of the Exhaustion modifier, or the Scar mechanics, for example, give you interesting choices to make that not only provide meaningful gameplay optimizations, but also align with compelling narrative choices. When Gathering, you're not spending hours repetitively grinding out an obscene amount of widgets, but conversely while Crafting, you're not just sitting around and waiting for an item, you're actively customizing and building something piece by piece, step by step.
And as it relates to Survival, Crafting in particular is an apropos companion. I've spoken before about how just the simple depth of Cooking in Labyrinthian gives way to this organic blend of mechanics driven gameplay thats indistinguishable from a purely narrative moment of coming together to cook and enjoy a meal; that kind of elegance is, I'd argue, only achievable by a system like this, but as said, it requires trust.
If you as a Player or Keeper cannot or will not trust that these systems are in play for a reason, then the whole thing falls apart. But if you do trust it, then it can lead you to something even greater.
The Alliance
Arora: Age of Desolation was a revelation when I read it for a lot of reasons, including the fact that its still the direct inspiration for the Exploration and Discovery system Labyrinthian utilizes.
But its most compelling revelation was how it reasoned Survival as a concept could adapt to a higher level of play, when the characters have grown past things like the Weather or Darkness being significant challenges. The idea that Survival at this level becomes not a matter of how well you, the Adventurer, handles these problems individually, but how you as a regent or ruler of an entire population of people handle these problems affecting that population is highly compelling.
So much so, this simple logic ended up laying the foundation for how play in Labyrinthian evolves over time, as characters develop towards their full potential. In line with Arora, Adventuring largely elaborates into Settlements and Domains, and Combat, following the same logic, elaborates into Warfare.
The actual core mechanics involved largely don't change, and at most simply switch some numbers around (the usual SnD or Warfare Round takes 8 Hours, for example). But with a dearth of new content, the game can transition out of the typical Adventuring experience into something wider in scope, and yet still just as deep and accessible.
When this begins to happen, though, the idea of the adventuring Party must change with it, and so begins the Alliance. As I note in the primer for this in the document, this is a very cool and appropriate change, that clearly denotes what the game has progressed to. While the group is not obligated to transition into this kind of play, every character no matter their choices has the means to participate in it, even if they individually opt out of it.
By this stage, your characters are going to be powerful, and so a single player continuing on as an Adventurer makes perfect sense, and will still be just as fun to play at this stages as it is for anyone who decides to engage in the aspects of the Alliance, and the final emergent story of play, whatever it is, will ultimately be this much more compelling, because the foundation these systems lay, and the depth to which they will go in the end, will produce something truly unique.
Exploration and Discovery
Now, obviously, I've spent a lot of time talking about a while bunch of things that fall under Adventuring, but don't necessarily speak to what my actual White Whale was, a true exploration system.
That is because, happily, I can say that aside from being further refined, the system I devised as hasn't changed much.
The idea is still to encourage players to engage with and interact with the actual Lore, the fiction of the gameworld if you will, and to do so deliberately. The rewards have been simplified from what they were to something far simpler, but still I think just as compelling, and the process by which they're earned is much more concise to explain, a benefit of extensive playtesting if nothing else.
And then we have what I once called Oracles, now more appropriately named to Distractions and Diversions, which funnily enough are, amongst other things that converged at the time, the genesis of why Improv became the core mechanic of the game, and why the game doesn't refer to itself as an RPG anymore.
====
But, this topic isn't really about the nature of Labyrinthian itself and whether or not I'm on the right track distinguishing it from RPGs.
Instead, I'm more interested in thoughts on the system. As said earlier, the draft is rough, as this is the first time I've essentially recompiled the entire system from my playtest notes in over a year, so I wouldn't be surprised if not everything is being communicated as well as I'd like. Please do ask questions and I can to try explain more or hetter. (And please don't just assume the worst)
In general, the idea behind the document as it stands is that it somewhat emulates how I want to eventually organize the proper rulebook. The Basics page is both a reference page for play, and a means of onboarding new people, as they can utilize it to jump into a game and to follow along, and the remaining text is intended to both elaborate on these mechanics, explaining indepth how they're used and why, and to help the player along with immersing into the headspace and the default tone of the game, which I'd describe as a cross between the book Lord of the Rings, and Studio Ghibli, with just a dash of post-John Wick Action Movie.
)
