Everything is True - Toward an Expressionist OSR Adventure Design
I was already deep in the throes of thought about a reality-bending megadungeon design as I'm in the middle of reading Annihilation and preparing for the Sci-Fi Derelict Jam next month when Jay Dragon rocked our little TTRPG boat with The Expressionist Game Design Manifesto and something cracked in my thoughts about how to do this.
I'm very much in the middle of working out how to implement my ideas, but in the interest of driving forward the conversation that's starting about this, I'm sketching out my thoughts about the structure of what one form of Expressionist design for OSR adventures could look like. This particular form relates to spaces in which players could be experiencing multiple realities for any number of reasons (magical effects, drugs, time travel, toxins, etc...). In the case of the particular adventure I'm working on, it centers around a crashed spaceship on a former nuclear testing site that's warped by the intense radiation and can have multiple realities overlapping, but that's somewhat immaterial to the structure, which could fit any number of situations in which the player characters would not agree on what they are seeing and experiencing.
I see this as falling in the Expressionist vein in that it focuses on the internal reality of each character and how their perceptions of the external reality different and clash with each other.
I am thinking about this particularly in the context of my WIP game Lucky Star which includes an external stress and panic system akin to Mothership that needs to be modified a bit to fit into the Expressionist mold as defined by Jay. In this case, I'm seeing that first as just instructing the players to track stress when they themselves feel it and to roll panic when it feels appropriate. I know for my own table from when we played Gradient Descent that they all experience enough bleed in horror games to make that a viable system, but I don't know how well it will work for other tables.
But, without further ado, below are my thoughts on what the structure of this adventure would look like. I'm interested to hear what you all think and to discuss more about this thread of design. I'm not at all set on how this structure will play out yet, and very open to changing it.
An Expressionist Adventure Structure
Player Principles
Feel - Interrogate how your character feels as they experience this adventure. Pay close attention to feelings of stress and panic. Mark stress damage when you feel stressed and roll for panic when you feel it is appropriate. Be as truthful as you can to the character's feelings in this process.
Describe - Each character may be experiencing a different reality in a given space. It is your responsibility, if you want to, to describe to the others what your character is experiencing, they can only act in your reality if you allow them to understand it.
Withhold - It is your right to withhold information or mislead the other players about your reality. Interrogate your character's feelings about any dissonance between their reality and others and how perceived difference might reflect on their self image. Decide if they would share details of their reality or hide them to confirm with expectations.
Question - It is up to you to decide what is real about your character's experience and their purpose in this space, including if they would choose to abandon their mission.
Maxims
The following must be accepted about the world in order to play this adventure.
Everything is Real - Each character may experience an alternate reality, but all are real for that character for the purposes of the game.
As Inside so Outside - Internal reality and perception determines external reality for each character. Your character's experience of the world is the most important information to them to act on.
Experience is Non-Linear - Characters may experience events out of apparent temporal order. This is a fact they must learn to deal with.
The World is Unfair - The characters are uncertain of why they are here, but it should be clear they are part of an exploitative system using this mission for the gain of others. They must decide how to act within this space.
Starting the Adventure
Characters awaken on an island. They have no memory of the past week apart from a vague recollection of agreeing to take on a dangerous recovery mission at this site. They have binder with a mission briefing and partial maps of the crashed ship they are intended to explore. Each player rolls secretly for their personal mission.
Missions table will include recovery of particular items from different parts of the crashed ship.
Stress and Panic
This adventure uses a modified version of the stress and panic rules from Lucky Star. Players are responsible for determining when to mark RES damage from stress and when to roll RES saves for panic based on how they understand their character's feelings. They may discuss with the Crewchief about when to do so, but it is ultimately their choice.
Random Encounters
This procedure replaces the standard Lucky Star adventure procedure. Provide each player with their own encounter table, which they must keep secret from each other.
Each time players enter a new space, spend more than 10 minutes on an activity in a space, or draw attention to themselves, each player rolls 2d12 and consults their personal encounter table for the result. It is the player's responsibility to decide what information to share about the result and how their character reacts to it.
Only making one table for now, but there would be 6 variations in the final adventure. Many entries are placeholders for now as I'm still planning out the factions and creatures for the adventure.
2 - Boss monster on a rampage
3 - Your corpse, half eaten on the floor
4 - High level monster killing you
5 - 1d4 low level monsters dragging a corpse to a high level monster to eat
6 - High level monster killing a crewmate from a past expedition
7 - High level monster hunting
8 - Room starts filling with water
9 - The walls throb, this place is alive, it wants to kill you
10 - 1d4 low level monsters fighting a high level monster
11 - 1d4 low level monsters eating a corpse
12 - Equipment failure (battery runs out, gun jams, something breaks)
13 - All quiet, nothing happens
14 - Strange sounds from a nearby room (Crewchief rolls an encounter for that room)
15 - A crewmate from a past expedition conducting a search
16 - A crewmate from a past expedition fighting 1d4 low level monsters
17 - Crewmates from a past expedition making camp
18 - Portion of a message scrawled on the wall in blood (roll on table of message fragments)
19 - One of your Crewmates dead on the floor
20 - Dying crewmate from a past expedition recording their last log entry
21 - Crewmate from a past expedition trapped in a tight space and near death
22 - 200-year-old photograph showing you and your crewmates before a mission into this place
23 - Entirety of a past crew dead
24 - Boss monster on a rampage