Previous entry: Protoplastic Design Diary 1 – The Pitch
With the preamble covered in the last diary, let’s get down to the specifics. Future posts will cover other aspects of the game (I’m particularly excited about the dice system, as someone who has avoided dice for years) but today let’s cover the core gameplay loop as a foundation for everything else.
Because it fits the premise of island-hopping self-made heroes, Protoplastic is going to be an OSR-ish hexcrawl – sort of. On the first count, “OSR-ish” because I’m adhering to the general principles of simple, modular systems and emphasis on player creativity in solving problems, but “vaguely” because I’m not anywhere near dogmatic about Old School principles, and what “OSR” even means that this point is debatable anyways. I actually do like solid rules, not just rulings, and think that you should want to engage with a game’s mechanics. Also, I’m going to fuse in some storygame-adjacent tech: most notably, certain circumstances will grant players narrative authority.
On the second count, I say “hexcrawl” because that’s a recognizable term, but it’s actually going to be squares instead of hexes, both because of the recognizable shape of plastic bricks, and the fact that islands in the setting are in fact composed of clustered cubes. Thus, I’m choosing to call it a “blockcrawl”, the squares of terrain made cubic by taking vertical space of the seas below and skies above into account. It would all look lovely with an isometric map, if that doesn’t end up posing too much of a legibility problem – otherwise it can just be handled by paired horizontal and vertical slice maps. Verticality is something that roleplaying games have implemented in the form of dungeon levels since the earliest days, but I think it could be employed in a more fully-realized fashion.
Setting Out
As inhabitants with a shared interest in saving their home island, that’s the first thing players ought to get involved with. Think of something like the city creation phase from His Majesty The Worm1, which gives everyone at the table the opportunity to collaborate on an island they feel like they belong to and will be motivated to defend.
I’m particularly inspired by the procedural sea generation tables of Wind Wraith2 that create groups of islands linked by trade routes and controlled by regional rulers that can be overthrown – I love idea-dense random tables, so Protoplastic is going to be stuffed full of them. The GM shoulders by far the most burden of making a campaign (here called a “chronicle”, for reasons you can probably guess) work, so I’m going to take absolutely any opportunity to provide tools that put that burden onto me as the designer instead. You’re going to roll some dice and get an entire map ready to explore from the beginning – or, more likely, generated as you go along.
As befits a seafaring game, expect a system for sailing and customizing a ship as the player party’s home base. This isn’t going to be overly complicated (nor will any part of the game, if I can help it) but it will involve managing time and risk to get where you need to go. The ship is your home base of sorts, where you store equipment and can bring on NPCs as crew. Crucially, you can upgrade it with more movement capabilities, letting you visit new parts of the world, Metroidvania-style3. It’s less about tracking how many rations you have on board (which is more tedious than fun) and more about increasing your range of mobility – a faster ship lets you visit islands further out than you could before. This is also where the verticality comes in: much like a Final Fantasy game giving you an airship two-thirds of the way in, once you can fly you open up an entire additional layer of locations to visit. Likewise, sealing and pressure-proofing the hull lets you dive to the bottom of the oil ocean to find what lurks below.
Fulfilling Your Destiny
So what are you actually doing, though? You’re doing what fate failed to do for you. First of all, your island needs resources, and establishing supply chains between islands makes that happen. To accomplish this you need to help out the people of neighboring islands, solving their problems for them (e.g. rampaging monsters, corrupted shrines, and mysterious plagues) to foster good relations and get them on board with the overall project of uniting to save the dying world. Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to travel further afield to find out why everything is in this dire situation. Exactly what that is will vary from chronicle to chronicle, as giving a canonical answer robs the players of surprise, so like everything else there will be tables of possible revelations.
You don’t have unlimited time to find a solution, though. Much like many other games, major threats are systematized with a list of events that progress over time unless you do something to thwart them: tyrants expand their influence, unnatural disasters brew, and catastrophic rituals are completed. Unlike most games, though, those omens are diegetically known to the player characters in the form of prophecies. They are directly aware of how many steps along the doom track the world is, because that sequence of events was revealed to them by the precognitive signals of radio-shamans.
The main threat of a campaign always has a face, decided by the GM at the start of the chronicle. Here I’m drawing on the idea of the Overlord from Fellowship4: the GM has a character they build and play alongside everyone else, albeit using different rules. They want to acquire certain artifacts, and send their subordinates out to collect them, which the player characters try to stop. Their special traits are linked to certain artifacts, so you can weaken them by stealing or destroying their sources of power.
Most powerful of these artifacts are the masks of power, which designate the wearer as possessing authority over an element. Putting on the mask of an absent hero mantles the destiny that hero was supposed to achieve, so not only does it grant you special abilities, it also binds you to a geas that may see you acting against what you as a person actually want. This functions as a personal version of the global track the antagonist progresses down: you advance through the steps of their (your) legend.
Looping Back Around
The core gameplay loop is this: you travel the perilous seas to a new island, solve whatever problems the locals are having, then return home to work on various projects through downtime actions. This advances the doom track, so you don’t have time to linger. In the meantime, you’re advancing your character through the acquisition of useful artifacts and furthering the legend of your mask. Most of the advancement is the former: you won’t consistently achieve bigger numbers, but rather gain horizontal capabilities that let you address situations you couldn’t before.
Mostly horizontal, that is. There’s a way to make a grab for early-game asymmetric power, and it’s the real heart of the game that I’ve only alluded to so far. I’ll cover it in the next post: “Hot Swapping Body Parts”.
Footnotes
Featured Image: Bionicle Comic Issue 11 (2003), Cover
1 https://www.hismajestytheworm.games/
2 https://lazylitch.itch.io/wind-wraith
3 https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2024/01/hexcrawls-kinda-suck.html
4 https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/177662/fellowship-2nd-edition-a-tabletop-adventure-game
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