Modern Concepts: Characters and What?
As with last week today’s post is about the upcoming Modern Concept Cards. We’re going to be starting with Characters, as we did with Fantasy Concept Cards, but beyond that the genres are rather different in terms of needs. We could simply do one set of Modern Concept Cards, sticking with Characters only, but that would likely be leaving demand unfilled – so we’ve been planning ahead for what could follow it up.
A deck of modern day Creatures would likely interest no-one, there are only so many different dogs, cats, rats and rabbits one can write about interestingly – and I don’t think we could manage 56.
A deck of modern day Treasures would be odd – modern day campaigns rarely focus on the kind of treasure-gathering adventures often seen in medieval fantasy – but it could be done, and would see some use, with items such as laptops with hidden partitions, diamonds hidden in a matchbox, fake IDs, and suchlike. Still, the expansion sections (Urban Fantasy, Superheroes and Cyberpunk) could all do interesting items, so it might well be worth considering doing in a slightly different split than we have planned for the characters – avoiding the base Modern Day deck entirely.
A deck of Modern Plots would work fine; jobs, heists, assassinations, political events, etc. it would likely be very useful, just as our fantasy Plot Hooks deck is. But it’s also a very hard deck for us to write – we struggled greatly in writing Plot Hooks – and while the end product is probably worth it we’d need to be absolutely certain we were both prepared and had a significant market before we considered going through that again.
Of the fantasy decks that leaves Locations – the first port of call after Characters because they’re something we so often create for our own games and we can fit so much plot potential within such a deck. But somehow when looking at both Modern Locations and Superhero Locations we found that there was something off about them – in most cases only one suit was truly interesting. Clubs as danger sits badly in the Modern Day decks, outside of the subgenres and wartime the modern world is mostly safe – diamonds as wealth worked okay, but it feels flat – spades as structure was too often simply another standard building – hearts was where all the interest lay, the inhabitants of the location, who they worked for and with.
So we talked it over and decided that we were looking at things wrong. For medieval fantasy locations are a key feature of the tale as you travel from place to place encountering difficulties along the way – but in modern stories they’re not that important, they’re more like the backdrop. For the second set of Modern Decks we’re looking at focusing on that one suit in locations that mattered – the hearts – and doing a deck of…
Modern Organisations
As a new deck type this required some significant discussion, but we think we’ve worked out how Organisations will work.
So come back next week to see the structure of an example Character and Organisation from the modern deck – the formatting will be far from final, but we’d certainly appreciate your feedback.
Be Well
-Ste
