Yeah, that's fair. The project has started (way, way before the contest) as a DRYH hack, and that's how DRYH does things, but that's because it uses dicepools in unusual ways, and limiting mechanical input to one player at a time with everyone bearing the consequences prevents things from getting weird in undesirable ways.
My game doesn't really have that consideration, so just doing individual rolls always makes more sense, in retrospect. I was just stuck in the old paradigm here.
I've edited the document to reflect the change, if someone is interested in using the game.
Now, a bit of history. I'm kinda using these contests as an impetus to work on ideas I had for awhile but didn't have the energy to actually write up. With the last year's Wizard Van, the end product was pretty close to what I've envisioned for it, just with a bit of mechanical juggling and more concrete setting.
The Sun and the Labyrinth, however, has changed a lot compared to the initial idea (which I think is still viable as a separate game).
So, for awhile now I've been thinking about a game taking place in an enormous house made out of various abandoned rooms haphazardly stitched together. People find themselves there by slipping through the cracks of reality after losing connection with the world around them. Bereft of memory, they traverse the house to regain it, and in the end face the question of whether they want to leave into the world that has rejected them (or one they rejected) or stay.
And when I say "awhile", I meant I wrote this game close to twenty years ago, and it was bad. There was Deep Lore that didn't need to be there because it was just a distraction from the core themes, the mechanics were DRYH stripped of the more interesting parts, there was a part that could make for a neat scene that was stretched to a whole section of the house... It was bad.
Now that I'm more experienced in game design and, like, understanding how to support a theme, though, I do want to revisit it because the core idea still holds an appeal to me.
In my musing I have not yet settled on specific core mechanics, but I do know that I want Echo to play a major part of. In that game, I envision it working close to Dark fate from the Mountain Witch, a way for players to constantly introduce various setting elements reflecting their characters' forgotten lives that by the end should cohere into a solid picture.
When this contest was announced, I figured I'd use that as a basis for my entry, buuuut the issue is that Echo/Dark Fate is a narratively complex mechanic that really needs explaining to shine, especially in how the GM is meant to facilitate its use. If I had ten pages, I'd have managed to do it, most likely, but not with one. Also it would be hard to fit in the theme of the sun there, lol.
So I turned to another long-standing bugbear of mine, the Corners, a place of decay without release where the dead and forgotten fall and try to escape by stealing sparks of life from others before all that's left of them is an echo endlessly repeating "I am I", incapable of doing or thinking anything else yet conscious of its condition.
This one had potential in this contest since I could work in the sun theme pretty naturally as yearning for everything lost in death.
I've written a couple pieces involving them (as Worm fanfics because of course), but never did an actual setting write-up (partly because they were envisioned as a part of a larger setting rather than their own thing). Starting as an urban fantasy, I've changed them to more conventional dark fantasy
to shamelessly capitalize on Dark Souls craze because I think it works better as a standalone thing and requires less explanation and sorta folded the house as a middle piece into it, tweaking its themes a bit for a better fit.
I've also mostly omitted the themes of cannibalism and fluid identity coming from adoption of parts and memories of others to repair your failing self to make the game more thematically straightforward and because that really would require its own subsystem to shine.
So, that's how the vibes came to be. Mechanically, everything is a lot simpler: the game is mostly a reskinned version of
The Dark Below, which is also a lightweight oneshot-oriented game about escaping a nightmarish underground labyrinth (though hopefully my setting is distinct enough to stand on its own).
I've tweaked and streamlined the system*, fit Echo into an existing mechanical niche** (if in significantly simplified version than originally envisioned) and added harm tracker***, but you can find most mechanical elements I use present there. If you can spare $10, it's worth checking out.
I think that's enough ramblings from me.
Thanks to the event organizers, these events really did help me to sit down and actually finish creative projects, which is something I don't always manage on my own.
*The Dark Below uses d12 and variable difficulty. Avoiding danger being far easier than confronting it is still there, but used more as an example. I found it mostly not worth the bother in a vibe-based oneshot, especially since in addition to skill and item, the Dark Below also allows you to gain a bonus to roll by establishing a narrative advantage like high ground... which should probably just factor into difficulty in the first place.
**The Dark Below gives you three matches you can light up for auto-success. They're more of a mechanical construct than something with in-universe presence, which makes it easy to replace them with something more thematically resonant.
***The Dark Below doesn't really have any sort of system for tracking injuries, they're purely narrative. If you spend all your matches, you may die on your next failure, though. I prefer harm to be a separate thing since that allows me to use it as a price for still advancing the game even on a failure, but it's an interesting mechanic.
docs.google.com
