Over the course of these little bits of logging Chorus’ development in some kind of dev-log, I’ve mad offhand mention of a variety of mechanics which have, to me, become background noise but which might be of interest for folks curious about how the game’s going and how they might also go about putting something like that together for their own games.
Anyway.
So, the Cursed Weapon mechanic has gone through a number of different names but the purpose has been largely the same: to create a way to engage the players in a little bit of worldbuilding, if only for their own character, while also giving them some unique ways of interacting with the world. Since, of course, the primary mechanical interaction with the world involves using a weapon on someone for the purpose of making them be dead (or putting them well on their way toward being so), that means that everyone’s gonna get their own weird magic THING they can do.
It’s also a mechanic pretty directly inspired by the material Chorus is seeking to emulate. From Drakengard on into the NieR:ReiNcarnation mobile game (warning: it’s a gacha and even if it’s less predatory than others, if you got problems with gachas for completionism’s sake, best avoid), there’s this thing where as you upgrade a weapon, you learn more and more about its past and the world which spawned it. Sometimes the weapons aren’t even directly about the weapon, but instead about its former wielder(s) and the ways in which their lives fell apart because they took part in violence. They’re these three- or four-part stories, maxing out at around 150 words which detail some kind of narrative, be they abstract in their character or very concrete. Weapons matter in these games, but they’re ultimately tools: you can play all of the games and never even glance at the stories. Their provenance and history might not matter, but they’re things you can know and if you read a lot of them, you’ll notice that the happiest endings are the ones where people merely have a great lonely hole inside of themselves that they can’t seem to fill, while the unhappiest have the character of a happy ending because the person’s become a gleeful mass-murderer. Sometimes everyone just dies and the weapon can finally be allowed to rest.
Trying to summarize that many bits of really lovely microfiction is tough. Go looking for ‘em yourself sometime if you don’t mind some weird sorta-spoilers for the Drakengard/NieR games.
ANYWAY.
So we’ve got two reasons for these things to exist (game purpose, callback to inspiration), so let’s get into the design goals of how to make this more than just one more THING for a checklist of things you need for a violence game.
The biggest and most obvious question, at least to me, is: “Why do you even need a weapon?”
And I think it’s an important question, too!
Because of the nature of the game’s combat, being tactics-lite and having lots of things already abstracted and handled in the character’s Playbook (e.g. combat dice, defense rating, special abilities, etc.), there’s not really a need for weapons in the absolute sense. Goodness knows the player characters’ enemies won’t have weapons as a mechanic (even as I won’t ever stop a Narrator from describing them as armed in some way), so why even bother?
There are three answers:
The first is so that we can create situations where the weapons no longer count for whatever reason (they’ve been taken [perhaps as a consequence of a mass failure?], they’ve been lost, their magic has momentarily been disrupted, etc.), which not only makes them feel like the items of tremendous power they are, but also gives opportunity for story outside of the plot skeleton I’m designing the game to have.
The second answer is that it’s a way to further customize your character. There just plain is NOT going to be a ton of time/space for characters to differentiate themselves on a mechanical level. I’m toying with a lot of ways to offer quests (tentatively called ‘Explorations’ in homage to the Drakengard games) and how to use them to give people weirder stuff besides what’s in their playbook. But even with those, just being able to say that you have a named weapon with a backstory? Even if it didn’t have mechanical bonuses (which it DOES), it’s cool to me, at least, to be able to have a specific weapon in mind when you narrate the cool thing your character is doing in this scene.
The third is one we’re going to touch on a little further on in this entry, which is that a weapon being a thing the player and Narrator craft for the character is meant to highlight that violence is your character’s primary tool. Even if the weapon is a crystal through which you focus your magic, the primary way it’s going to be focused is violent. The playbooks might have spaces for you to write about the things people think they know about you and the ways you can exploit that for bonuses (”Qualities”; we’ll get there), but this is not a game with what you might call a robust series of social mechanics. One of the first things you get to have power over in the game (after you pick your Playbook, your name, etc.) is deciding what your signature Cursed Weapon is going to be like.
Now, talking about the Cursed Weapons...
This mechanic has gone through a number of changes in name and theme trying to find a way to both highlight that these are not just little things you’ve got, these are core parts of your character’s whole thing, their primary method of interacting with the world. More, they’re going to grow along with you, becoming more powerful at predictable points as the narrative progresses, so we couldn’t just call it “your weapon”.
For a minute, they were “Magic Weapons” but that was cast off in favor of “Signature Weapon” and that’s what it’s been until about a week ago at time of writing. “Signature Weapon” lasted as long as it did because it conveyed, well, the fact that this weapon was special and that it was the one your character was defined by (or vice-versa, depending on your perspective) and it would have stuck there were it not for the realization that the Falling mechanic (discussed in “Failure” and to be elaborated upon in a later entry as more pieces fall into place on it) meant that I couldn’t use a notion I had for the Narrator to offer devil’s bargains to a Fallen character to get them back in the game.
I could have both, but think about it: It makes a unique mechanic which I think could be a LOT of fun and which is meant to drive home that, hey, you should have been taking care of yourself if you want to fight the forces of evil today. And while there’s no crime in having two interesting mechanics, the concept of people accepting curses to pop back to their feet is cool and fun, but in a way that competes with and outshines what we’re now calling The Fallen State (it’s an allusion to “the fallen state of man”, you see, because subtext is for cowards [that’s a joke]) in a way that doesn’t feel cool. So what’s more thematically appropriate? Taking a bad deal to get back on your feet or staying on your back but trying not to let all the awfulness inside of you out?
And then the thought, another one from my partner, who is very good at cutting through the bullshit I build around my oh-so-precious ideas, became “what if the WEAPON is cursed and you play around with cursed swords if you want to play with curses so much?” and... yeah.
Because if you’ve accepted a cursed weapon from the jump, we don’t have to do a lot of narrative justification for what happens when you Fall, do we? Why are you suddenly this horrible albatross around your friends’ necks? Because you accepted a cursed weapon in order to make use of its power. And the worse off you are, the worse you are when you’re at your worst. And as the story goes on, you’ll be able to choose how to further empower your weapon and while we’ll call it narrative, it’s because you--like Elric of Melniboné before you--are feeding it blood, blood and souls for Lord Arioch (not to be confused with Drakengard 1′s Arioch) and that’s, uh, sub-par behavior, let’s say. And in the end, before the big final boss, we’ll have a choice in front of the characters: Accept some yet-to-be-defined final power which will burn away some other part of your character but leave them super well-armed and ready to fight the final boss? Or do they keep the last scraps of their humanity by taking a lesser boon and being only normal levels of damned?
And more than this, I just want there to be something in the final text of the book reading something to the effect of “What is the curse, really, if it only manifests when you’re in trouble already? The curse of these weapons is that you will use them.”
Because, on a thematic level, that’s true. This is a game where you can’t hurt others without hurting yourself. And even if it’s nowhere near “realistic” on that front, we’re not going to worry about that as much as we’re going to drive home the core thing that all this violence is bad. Even if your characters absolutely think it’s necessary to achieve their doubtless-laudable goals, it’s not a good choice. Even if there are no good choices, well,
when all you got’s a hammer...
As alluded to earlier, the Cursed Weapons are customized.
Most of this takes the form of minor and mid-tier mechanical boosts; some of which you can take over and over again as the game goes on, others a bit more limited (like you can only ever have a +1 zone range but you can keep stacking +1 bonuses to combat and defense). I’m not going to get into all those because the low- and mid-grade bonuses are about what you’d expect.
No, the major customization here is why I brought up Weapon Stories. I wanted to make these magic weapons special not only because they define your interaction with the world, but because they’ll all have something pretty unique to them and the way I figured to do it is--while there are certainly ways around this, that’s not my business and I’m not a cop--to make a big ol’ list of common themes or motifs in the kinds of stories we’re dealing with and have the Narrator or the other players (depending on the crew and how I decide to mechanize different ways of doing it all) pick the ones that jump out most to them AND which aren’t also being used by other people and give the ability associated with that theme or motif.
For example:
Not everything’s about environmental effects, of course, but it’s these sorts of thematic links back to the weapon story.
Moreover, having this big ol’ list (currently sitting at 58 entries, bound to get some more, am shooting for a multiple of 12 so if someone wants to just do a roll, we start with a d6 to choose a section followed by a d12 to choose the entry or vice-versa) means that the Weapon Story means something. This little act of creation not more than 150 words IS your superpower. And while this might lead to people writing for the power they want? Fine, y’know? But also, you don’t have to give them the thing they want. As you can see, we’ve got “circumstances of death” and “different kinds of nation”, and those are two massively different things and things which are going to come into any story. No story will have just one element and it’s that thing where it could be a lot of things (and the things themselves will have to get balanced out, naturally) and one element could be more resonant or important to one reader even when they weren’t for the author and other sundry 098-level critical ‘revelations’.
I feel like I should have a better outro for myself here, but mostly it’s just that I like documenting a lot of (but clearly not all) the thinks about what makes this whole project go because on top of everything else, I really hope to demystify the process because, frankly, the process is kinda boring anyway and the thing where designers go on a pedestal suuuuucks for everyone involved. Better to knock over the pedestals altogether and have a healthier sort of admiration.
Also, if everyone’s on the same level as far as how we regard one another, it’s a lot harder for anyone to be a toolbox.