I finished another Jam! After doing the Appendix N jam rather late, I was worried that I didn't have too much time for the One Page RPG Jam. And boy, was I right. The theme this year was "Growth", and while I had a basic idea, rules, design and sample adventure all seemed daunting.
So let me start this with complete honesty: I finished this on the last day, and it shows. Rules and sample adventure would've warranted quite a bit more thought and testing, but here we go, at least it's out. It will be while until I get something really good done, until then I'm trying to learn and sow the seeds for something bigger.
Business Proposition
Looking at the theme, I had my initial idea rather quickly. You see, there's this horrible idea of growth hacking in marketing. It's basically just yet another world salad for "business development", trying to make this sound more fanciful than spreading lies and looking at spreadsheets.
And of course, we role-players are familiar with the "hack & slash" approach to… well, everything. So let's combine those two themes and have Growth Hackers & Slashers (name of the movie!). Future scenarios where guns aren't allowed or useful and everyone is going back to sword-fighting are common enough that they got their own genre name: Swords & Planets. But as you see, this is usually closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter stories, not dystopian future or cyberpunk. But hey, compared to some other One Page RPG submissions, this is still a rather tame combination.
Chief Imagination Officer
To get the creative juices flowing, I opened my trusty DTP app and fiddled around a bit. Both to get a "vibe" going, and to see what I could do with the two sides of a single A4 pages.
I combined two Unsplash images to create this cyberpunk soldier. The glasses are cool, but I wasn't too happy about the gun. Well, I could change the background, maybe swords are only used in certain circumstances?
Another graphical element I liked a lot was a GANTT chart as a kind of "table of contents".
One of my favorite rule sets ever is the Fuzion system. At its core, it's rather simple, it's tested, and so I thought I'd use it as the starting point for my own system–I wasn't too enamored with suggested minimalistic systems like 24XX or Lasers & Feelings. But wait. Fusion + Business = Merger!
Here we go! Of course, such a system would need some business slang and neo-liberal ideas thrown into the mix.
But I was a bit disenchanted by the art. It suited a more militaristic, glitchy, Matrix style, good for camo'd soldiers, but not suitable for business. And the soldier had a gun, not a sword!
The Sword Itself Incites to Graphic Design
I browsed by art packs and bookmarks, and happened upon the Deviantart page of one Fernand0FC, especially this cool dude:
I like that a lot. My graphical design skills would be sufficient to re-color this to whatever I wanted, but I was quite disenchanted with the green-on-black style anyways. And here's one of my graphical design rules:
Get an image. It doesn't even have to be one that you include in your product, just something with an interesting detail. This can be the color composition, or the thickness of brush strokes that leads you towards a heading or body copy font.
In my case, I just took the main gray color and made that my background, took the red of the background moon and used that as an accent color. I would never have picked that alone, as it doesn't evoke either corporation or cyberpunk if the image isn't there to anchor it.
Then I made my small planning chart, and three futuristic PowerPoint slides to match it.
- Human Resources / Recruitment, i.e. character generation
- Asset Management / Corporate Assets, i.e. skills & equipment bonuses
- Growth Hacking, i.e. gameplay
Now all I had to do was fill that out, right?
Crunch Time for the IPO
As I wrote above, I wrote a lot of it on the last day. The structure, as pointed out above, stood before then, and I also had this funky idea of using the Unix permission system for my simple stats, but that left a lot of writing and graphic design to be done. I barely made it, and hope to revise that soon. But I quite liked a few things I did in that final sprint:
The Merger System
Fuzion, the 90s system that arose out of a combination of the HERO system used for the super-hero RPG Champions and the Interlock system used for Cyberpunk 2020 has a very simple core: You add a core ability, a skill and a roll of one or more dice (1d10 or 3d6 is in the core book), and compare that to a target number or an opponent's roll. I wanted to copy that, but add some business lingo flourishes.
The "unix permissions" mentioned above are octal, so they range from 0 to 8. Let's do that for stats, too. Use a d8 to match that. Keep the skill replacement (the corporate assets) in the same range, maybe a bit higher at their maximum.
Now the two innovations here:
- The rich get richer. Stat and skill (or "ChMod" and "Asset") are added, and before the roll is made, they're compared to the opponents value, or something the GM came up with if no NPC is involved. Now the person with the higher total rolls with advantage, meaning they roll two d8 and pick the higher one. Mathematically, this has a bigger impact if you're barely higher than your opponent, so the PCs are encouraged to haggle there.
- Raising the stakes. If you feel comfortable, or just need things to be done quickly, you can call for a raise. You subtract 1 or more from your roll, but add the same amount of d8's to your outcome roll–like damage in a swordfight, or distance gained in a chase. If you've got superior skill, position and enough time, you could whittle away at your opponent with single d8 rolls, but sometimes the risk is worth it.
I also introduced the increasingly popular clocks from Blades in the Dark as a countdown mechanic. There's one always running showing the control the remains of the government have over gun usage. You might have Big Friggin' Guns that have an outcome of +3d8 without requiring a raise, but if you shoot them, the clock advances by one or more sectors. Or there can be a clock for the alarm state of the corporate complex you're invading, or the fragile McGuffin you're supposed to extract.
Graphical Bits & Bobs
I liked the logo I came up with.
…and parts of the default adventure layout
A mix between a flow-chart, a strict sequence and a point-crawl. Suitable for the missions, which are definitely less free-flowing than dungeon exploration, but still allow some leeway. Often with trade-offs, as going to the Corporate HQ makes subsequent parts easier, but takes time and thus advances one of the clocks.
Earnings Report
I'm happy with the result. I would've liked more time to solo-play the sample adventure, maybe create some more complications. But this type of play would require more improvisation than in other games, and explaining that takes time and especially space I didn't have. But I'm planning a short revision, and could use that to add some explanatory paragraphs or pages.
I might turn the Merger system into something more real and universal.
So grab it while it's still hot and cheap, because the market might change at any minute!
