Dawn of the Lead

This year, I’ve gotten started on a miniatures game of my own and it’s been a fun project so far! This post is an introduction to what I’m doing, and might even develop into a series – although with my waxing and waning blogging enthusiasm, I’m making no promises. Anyway, it’s nice to get some ideas into writing and to an audience, no matter how small (quality over quantity etc). I’ll start with some key questions, maybe to prompt myself to some reflection as well.

What’s the game about?

Tying together a bunch of my interests, Containment (working title) is a solo game about private military contractors – mercenaries – clearing out space colonies after a disastrous rage zombie virus outbreak, inspired by films like Aliens and 28 Weeks Later, the comic Planet of the Living Dead, digital games like Jagged Alliance, XCOM, and Aliens: Dark Descent as well as (mechanics-wise) tabletop games like Five Parsecs from Home and FREAKZ!

It’s these guys vs. mercenaries, essentially.

The tone I’m looking for is kind of a darkly humorous anti-corporate satire: cleaning up the colonies has been outsourced to a bunch of more or less shady market operators that are in it mainly for lucrative government contracts and PR. The job is high-risk and pays well, and mostly attracts either the kind of person interested in killing for profit or those just desperate enough to sign up.

“I work for the company. But don’t let that fool you. I’m really an okay guy.”

The game is designed with emergent narrative in mind. The characters have names, personalities, and some background – not a lot, but enough to maybe latch on to if you’re that sort of player – which influence things that happen both during and between missions. There are tables that hopefully bring up interesting and relevant things and nudge the player towards constructing some kind of coherent-ish narrative of the game events.

There might be a light company management element in there as well, but for now the emphasis is on developing solid and entertaining mechanics for the core gameplay.

Why make a game?

There are a couple of reasons and a fair few other things that have fed into this.

First of all, there isn’t a game out there that’s currently doing what I want, but there are many games that do a part of it. Five Parsecs from Home does a wonderful job of emergent narrative, and is a huge inspiration, but doesn’t quite capture what I’m trying to do here. The game’s Bug Hunt alternative/expansion, in turn, is similar to what I’m doing (smaller teams vs. horde), but I’ve found the narrative part too thin compared to the main game. In fact, this whole game creation process started from an attempt to expand on Bug Hunt. First and foremost, I wanted a game for me. I’ve written on the blog a couple of times (here and here) on the topic RPG elements in wargames, and a lot of that thinking is going into this game as well.

What do I want then? A fast playing, light solo game that is quick to pick up a play a few missions of, with light cognitive load: I hate memorising a million special rules and exceptions to those special rules, combined with a ton of variables based on, for example, different weapons and skills. This said, it’s a balancing act! The first version of Containment was essentially a game of luck with very few tactical elements. Boring, in other words.

Second, designing and developing a game is pretty fun in itself. I know several professional and semi-professional game designers, and we’ve often had a lot of interesting talks.  Having played games for a long time now, I definitely have my own particular likes and dislikes when it comes to game mechanics, and being a game scholar, I do spend quite a bit of time thinking why people enjoy playing games. Through both my work and 30+ years experience of RPGs, I’m not a stranger to the creative process either. So…why not try my hand at creating a game?

Third, as an adult, I’ve realised that it’s possibly to just…do things. There’s no magic to it, no-one you need to ask for permission, and so on. If you feel like creating a game, you can just create a game! Furthermore, it doesn’t have to be just a document in a cloud somewhere, but it can be an actual thing with a professional layout, illustrations, even dedicated miniatures. It might even be published, who knows! Sure, these things are not free, but in the grand scheme of things and compared with stuff like house renovation, they’re not crazy expensive either.

What’s going on at the moment?

The game’s rules are currently at a stage where I can play a pretty fun session or two. That said, there’s only a single mission at the moment, a traditional “you need to search these bodies for intel” thing or creeping in the midst of dormant infected who are waking up – slowly, unless you start shooting. New ideas for rules tend to pop up during gameplay, and they need to be tested, modified, and then accepted or discarded while trying to avoid a complexity creep. There are rules for dormant infected and when they wake up, evacuations (for ending missions), flashbangs (to momentarily distract and slow down the infected), and first aid injections (to give your poor bitten operative a few more rounds before they turn).

I’ll do some playtesting next week with a few regular gaming friends to see what they think of it, and I’m assuming there are more changes incoming after that. That’s really welcome though, as at some point you just become blind to your own work. I’m looking to release a version of the rules for playtesting “sometime in the future”, so drop a comment if you’re interested!