Wizard Dad's Workshop: A Pocket Game with the Mythic GME Mobile (for Android) , Part 1; The Inspiration

A few days ago I, that is me and the elves here at the workshop,  have announced a New Years project.

 Wizard Dad's Workshop: The New Years Project. (At the bottom of that article you will also find the index to all the articles in this project.) 

A quick review of that post coverers the mission statement pretty well, and it gave a list of design goals.

"It will cover concepts like character creation, hierarchy of abilities, character advancement, keeping NPC simple (because who doesn't like monsters and sidekicks), organizing Lists, ways to build special abilities that feel special, how to start the game at various power levels, and I am sure a host of other topics. 

The goal is to use the app, and a simple notebook function found on almost all portable devices, to play the entire game, but to have enough crunch to satisfy a feeling of an organized system, even on the go"

Before I go much further, lets have a look at the tools that I plan to work with. 

The first is actually a magazine article, from Mythic Magazine #31, pg.12, titled, "Mythic RPG as a Rules Lite RPG". I highly recommend reading this article, as it will give you the core concepts to toss this project aside and jump right in, today, with using MGME2 as your core game engine for strongly narrative games. I admit, that long before considering this project and right up until yesterday, I have been using the article, as it, to play some pretty sweeping campaigns to full satisfaction. The second tool is Mythic GME Mobile for Android, but lets focus on the magazine article for now. 

I am not going to recap the full article here, because that would be an injustice to the author, who put in so much work. I would neither pick her pocket nor butcher her prose, but I will focus in on some parts that are important to my current endeavor.

• Character creation: two options are given for character creation. 
• The first is for the play who already has a character in mind. Let's say for example you are a fan of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion series, and want to make a character of that sort, but your own version. This will give you some strong ideas of how to start. Stick to a few key points and describe the character in wide brush strokes focusing on the qualities you want to see come to the surface in the first few sessions. You can always build on that later. I know from reading many of these novels over they years that most of the "Champions" have some common qualities.
• They are outsiders
• They are masterful warriors
• They live with a depressing sense doom
• They wield some terrible weapon
• They have at talent for leadership
• They tend to lose friends and loved ones with a disturbing frequency
• With this level of description alone you can go on to design a character.
• The second method involves using the myriad of descriptive tables available in the Mythic GME2,or any other source you like to come up with inspirational word pairs and the expand in to simple sentences that give the same levels of description found above. 
• Escape Legal
• The Character is on the run from the law
• Deliberately Reassuring
• The character is a silver tongue con man
• Professional passive
• The character has retired from a life of conning (though he still has those skills)
• Domestic Strange
• The Character is hiding in a pleasant but very strange town
• Cute New
• For reasons to be ascertained later the character owns a puppy
• The details above give us a pretty good idea who we are dealing with. It covers some central skills, a difficult situation, and a puppy (what story isn't made better with a puppy).

Also keep in mind that you can use both methods. If you know you want to play a weird reincarnating warrior, but also want a few surprises going in, first jot down all you know then roll on a few tables to get some inspiration into other aspects of the characters life.

I caution against making the lists to long in the beginning, as you play you will be put in circumstances that you didn't' cover in character creation, and what you either instinctively know, can extrapolate from your earlier descriptions, or randomly determine on the spot, can fill in those holes. The goal here at the beginning is to know who the character is, a central idea of what they can do, and perhaps as a bonus some sort of situation they are in. 

In Part 2 we will will take the inspiration found here and turn it into gameable elements.

W.D.

P.S.
Right now I am going over the tools as written. I will end up tinkering with them, as I go.
I hope to done with the project by Christmas time next year. There will be a lot of trying out variations before I feel I get it right, but by the end I am hoping that there will be a fun product with an instructions only a couple pages long that will make it easy to game on the go. 

W.D.