Sunday 23 January 2011

Fundamental laws of a fictional universe (4)

It's been a while since I made up any fictional universe cards, so here are four more, inspired by the amazing response to the list of portals, and the concepts involved, especially time travel and dimensions.

For anyone who missed the earlier instalments (two cards here, two more here and one here), the point is to allow the big events of fiction into your games, to break down the barriers in how we define game types and to identify recurring tropes as the first step to moving beyond them, possibly by making them so familiar we've had all we can take.

To these three I'm adding a fourth, also inspired by talk of other worlds: recognition of us in the game, and of the scope of fiction. The final card in this batch deals with this.

The idea is they work with any game type, but especially with wargames and roleplaying games. I know they're not balanced and the effects can vary dramatically from system to system. The unevenness is part of the fun - think of them like badly-made dice. The definitions are in the first instalment. I'm claiming no copyright on this batch either.

You can have fun guessing the source of the quotes in the titles too.





2 comments:

Loquacious said...

these are so cool... thanks for sharing!

netherwerks said...

These are a lot of fun. They're like the old Whimsy Cards, only updated with a rather nice edginess to them. We might have to print these out for use at conventions...