Islands: The calm before the storm
February 26th, 2008 by Saif AnsariIslands had a fairly long gestation process which gave me plenty of ideas to work from but despite the abundance of ideas, I was not able to pull a game together. When the ISS people began to solicit games to Playstorm, I threw this idea into their laps.
We met a week before the actual Playstorm to discuss a system since I was at a complete loss. The first thing we tackled was the problem of the mystery - how do you construct a game around a mystery, with a system tied to the solving of that mystery, without having the players dismantle the mystery ad-hoc?
Jason suggested that rather than have the mystery spelled out before hand, have the players add facts about the mystery as the game goes on. It tied in very nicely with my desire to give players as much narrative power as I could. They would be creating the island along with the GM so it seemed natural that they would also be writing the mystery along with the GM.
We also talked about having a central Trait - Addiction - that the game would revolve around, and having all the characters belong to an addiction support group or have them all in group therapy as a way to start off on a common ground. From there, we began to talk about how a game session might go - How to start? As the world reached the point of disintegration, what happens? And just how important would the real world be to the game?
Incorporating the bag and tokens idea was easy. I knew I had to do something with the central trait of the island that would descend as the players acted against it, and when it hit zero, the whole space would fall apart. The tokens would be an easy way to track that descent and different colors would add in some randomness. What then?
We began to discuss the idea of what the players could take out of this, and since they were competing to get these tokens in game, how would they effect the end game? This was when the session really jelled and the idea of taking away something from this island began to take focus. In this stage of the game, we saw the possibility of taking some small part of the island with us, learning something about the character or the character’s addiction, that the dream world exposed and writing it down on the sheet as a permanent way of marking the encounter.
We knew the structure of the game, we had a rough system, and we set a date a week later to run an actual Playstorm(tm). In the week’s time, I wrote up some notes and added a second central trait to the system (the first being Addiction, the second being its inverse, Resonance.) I began to play with the idea of these two traits being a sum of ten, and whenever one goes up, the other goes down.
Addiction in general is a bad thing, and Resonance in general is a good thing. In some way, Addiction is the character’s connection to the dream world and Resonance the connection to the real world. For a resolution system, I decided to go with some very basic, general traits (positive or negative) that could be stretched to fit the situation and have a point value. The player would roll the number of dice assigned to the trait against the target number of the dream world’s Resonance rating. A high enough roll would let the player reach into the bag for tokens and when one red or a multiple of five white tokens were on the table, the resonance would drop by one.
It seemed enough to go on, and I was ready to run the Playstorm!







