The Breaking Wheel (or, "How to Eat the Universe")

[SA]

[ic=Defiant]You have not been chosen.  To say otherwise would suggest that your fate was anything other than happenstance, that the God whose heart you now possess had the sense or purpose to stake a wilful claim upon you.

No.

It was a die cast blind, and there is no sense in your exaltation.  This thing, this new light that stirs within has not the wit of a snowflake, nor the compassion of a razor.  It has wormed its way past your very matter and infected the fragile substance of your soul.  It has insinuated its degenerate probabilities into the order of your own pattern; frayed it, distorted it and devoured your truest Nature, so that now the Cosmos in its smallest and greatest fraction will forget you, and all that remains it will abhor.

But this is not your end, and your suffering, though arbitrary, is not without a point.  You matter now.  More than you ever did or could, and more than any other creature under Heaven.  

The sand, the wood, the wind, the fire, the crowded streets, the muttered praises, the Divinities in their multitudes, the disgruntled postal workers'¦ you laugh, you spit, you snarl and they cower.  You turn your gaze to the heavens and comprehend the stars '" the Gates '" and for the first time your mind perceives the sleeping thing beyond.  You offer your challenge and you swear your oath as your blood swells with a wild and alien ambition.

And the Almighty wakes.

The Challenge is met.  The Tides of Reality move against you.[/ic]

The Breaking Wheel

This is an odd little project I thought up recently, and which I've become more enthusiastic about the more I consider it.  The basic premise is as follows:

The Universe is composed of three major parts, Heaven, the Multitude and the Mothers.  The Multitude holds all the Cosmos within it; all the worlds, the dimensions forming and dissolving in perpetual protoplasmic chaos'¦ everything you can imagine.  Earth is there, as is the Narutoverse and Sesame Street (or maybe not).

Then there is Heaven, the cradle of the insensate Almighty, the dreaming overseer whose consciousness observes the Cosmos through the medium of the Stars, which are the windows and the gates to all the worlds there are.

Then there are the Mothers, who are an Existence unto themselves.  Unformed, indeterminate and mindless, they are a loose association of probabilities and primal intentions, drifting across the thresholds between worlds, unnoticed until they chance upon an instrument with which to pursue their one agenda'¦

'¦which is to rape and devour the Almighty, subsuming its infinite essence and birthing a new Overlord.

Each player is put in charge of a Collective, a group of individuals who have each been infected by the same Mother.  They construct the narrative of their Collective, directing the characters in their task of forging alliances and accruing the resources necessary to take down the Lord of Everything.

One player is the Almighty (or the Overlord, or One-Unhappy-Chappie), and he directs the energies of the universe to hinder, divide and destroy the Collectives wherever he can.


Mechanics
I only have the barest idea of the mechanics so far, but they are going to be very broad and very streamlined.  When creating her Collective, a player is given a certain number of points (don't know how many yet) with which to purchase Powers, Resources and Enemies.

Powers
The Powers are things like Violence, Compassion, Normality, Weirdness, Treachery, Intelligence and Resilience (those are the ones I have so far, unless/until I come up with some other equally useful ones).  They indicate how capable a Collective is in a given endeavour, and can be distributed between Collective members as the player sees fit.

Example: Alice takes eighteen points and puts six in Violence, four in Weirdness, four in Resilience and three in Intelligence.  She puts four of her Violence points and one of her Resilience points into Ludwig, a very unassuming brown rabbit with an insatiable lust for slaughter.  But it's no smarter than your average bunny, as it has no Intelligence (you need at least 1 Intelligence to qualify as 'sentient').  Three of her Weirdness points and two of her Intelligence points go into Hector, an amorphous, tentacular Elder-being.  Her last Intelligence and Weirdness points go into Sir Anthony Darling, an aging sophisticate who dabbles in the occult, and she puts the rest of her Violence and Resilience points into Mister Scissors, a hardy and murderous robot from a derelict spaceship.

A group of people can count as a single member for the purposes of powers.  For instance, Luis puts makes a gang with two points in Violence.  Because they have no Intelligence, they're really, really dull and incapable of independent action, but they can cut you up good.  However, he could also have put zero (0) points in Violence, making them a totally free and utterly useless element of his cabal.

Resources
This is the expendable stuff.  The cosmic energies, favours and other miscellaneous junk a Collective accrues and exhausts on its way upward (or, more likely, downward, as we shall soon see).  One-use/limited-use magickal items or high-tech devices, grand dark rituals of summoning, crazed suicidal cultists ready to blow themselves up for the cause'¦ all these are Resources.  The Collective travels the Universe looking for the right kind of Resources (and the occasional Power), and the more risks they take the more Resources they find, but they'll also have a greater chance of running into their'¦

Enemies
These are the people/things you've pissed off and who want you dead.  When your Collective goes hunting for Resources, these folks come raining down unholy hell on them.  Thankfully, defeating Enemies gets you more of the good stuff.

But apart from enemies, there are three other main antagonists to a Collective.  They are the Cosmos, other Collectives, and their own Collective.

The Cosmos
Fact is, anyone touched by one of the Mothers is now an enemy of the Universe.  The average person (be they human or otherwise) has no idea just how abhorrent your nature now is, but the Almighty is there, behind the dark starry curtain, manipulating events and sending his warped angelic messengers to awaken the masses to the Collective's repulsiveness and show them, once and for all, what it means to take on the Prime Mover.  The Cosmos is not quite an eager foe as an Enemy, but its sheer scope is terrifyingly tremendous.

Other Collectives
In theory, the players are working together to take down the Almighty.  In practice, they inevitably end up killing each other and gobbling them all up.  The Mothers are motivated by a pure, albeit abstract, Darwinian impulse, and only one of them can birth the New Lord.  Hence, they use each other while they can, then slaughter them in cold blood.  This manifests in the Collectives as a horrid, instinctual contempt for those 'not of their own blood', which only increases as they approach their true power (the more Resources and Power they have, the crazier and more violent they get).

Their Siblings
At some point the same impulse that motivates a Collective to kill its rivals causes its own members to grow paranoid and resentful of each other.  Even if they've bested all their competitors, slain their enemies and achieved penultimate power, the animal madness of the Mother can take them beyond the brink of madness, undoing everything the Collective had heretofore achieved.


Miscellaneous
This game is very dependent on the narrative concocted by the players, and within the framework of the rules there is a great deal of room for each player to make the story they want.  I envision mechanics for the relationships between Collective members: how they fall out, if (that is, when) they go crazy, how they supplement each other's abilities, and so on.

I also see players being able to veto and manipulate the actions of other players, introducing new elements to the plot.

Example of play
Alice: I need someone really Treacherous in order to pull off the trick I'm planning for Lu's Collective, so we're going to a really high-Treachery world.
Luis: Uh oh.  Well, I'll spend [some kind of resource] to establish it as a really low-Violence world.  I'm not gonna make this easy for you.
Hank (Overlord): Okay, then.  Alice, you can't take Mr. Scissors or Ludwig with you without causing some serious upset.
Alice: Darn.  Well, then, I'll amp up my search.  I'm willing to risk an Enemy appearance to get this guy.  So, it's a real seedy Carnival dimension, and Sir Anthony goes to one of those ring-toss booths, stands around idly, looking seriously out of place.  The carnie gets all chummy.  'Hey, friend, three throws for a dollar.'  'I'm not here for your petty prizes', says Anthony, with his typical smug look.  He does a little magical flourish to impress the carnie and'¦
Hank: (rolls a dice) Wham!  Anthony's old nemesis Baron Von Krum appears out of nowhere and hurls a blast of magical force at him!
Alice: Aww crap.
Hank: 'You thought it was that easy, Anthony?  The Purple Goddess does not forgive so readily.  Now face your comeuppance!'

Wraiths
When a Collective is totally obliterated, a player's participation doesn't end there.  They now control a Wraith, the disembodied essence of the defeated Mother.  Wraiths have only one Power: Wrath, and a helluva lot of Resources.   Now the remaining Collectives have a different kind of enemy, and this one doesn't give a damn about anything but retributive destruction.

Endgame
The Final Battle pits whatever remains of the last Collective (or Collectives, in the absurdly rare instance of a successful alliance) against the unbridled, infinite majesty of the Overlord, while the Wraiths claw, bite and tear at their ankles.  I have no idea how this will work, but it'll be as crazy as hell.

That's the idea so far, but it's really, really bare-bones at the moment.  I don't know how I'll be implementing task resolution (though I have a basic framework); what make good point values, attributes and statistics; or even what could conceivably work; so your input would be appreciated.

EDIT: There's one more Power, called Hubris.  That measures how proud, irrational and paranoid a Collective gets, and as it is accrued it's divided like any other Power.  You can start off with as many Hubris points as you like.

But why would you?

[Epic Meepo]

Well, that's definitely the most imaginative premise for a new game that I've seen in a long while.

On the other hand, I have to admit that I'm rather confused. At first, this sounded like a competitive game, where each player is a faction trying to bring the others down. But halfway through the description, it morphs into a cooperative storytelling game where the Overlord is a GM/Storyteller instead of a competing faction.

If this is a cooperative storytelling game, I'm not sure I understand why there are points at all. Why impose limits and victory conditions on the players? Certainly, players interested in a cooperative storytelling game would be willing to have their own forces suffer defeat when it makes sense from a storytelling perspective. They don't need points to quantify their characters' limits.

On the other hand, if this is meant to be a competitive game where players are trying to win quantifiable rewards using measurable resources, then the cooperative storytelling elements seem rather contrary to the objective. At least for me, it's hard to be in "cooperative storytelling" mode and "crush the other players" mode at the same time.

But then again, maybe I'm just not looking at it right. As I said, my comments stem largely from the fact that I'm confused.

[Numinous]

I love it.

I have no idea of how it would work, but I love it.  Count me in if you ever do play-testing.  Just the idea of such a crazy game, the effort to destroy the universe, it's so awesome.

[Raelifin]

Amazing. Simply awesome. I'd suggest you model it after half-RPGs where there is a narrative aspect, but it's unrelated to gameplay.

What you really need is conflict resolution and limits on power. Since the overlord is closer to a player than a GM, I'd impose a mechanic where the overlord's power is very, very weak to start and grows over time, this puts the players into the dilemma of having to accrue power quickly and it keeps the game from going on too long. I'd also make it so that subtlety reduces the power the overlord can muster against a player, so the more "gunz blazin'" a player is, the faster the overlord can take them down.


For conflict resolution and action, I'd suggest implementing a currency which is similar to divine power. The currency would let you pull crazy stuff like changing the nature of a world, or causing monsters to spawn.

I'm curious as to where you're going with the powers.

Oh, and wraiths could simply be given (divine power) currency and be allowed to only use it for violent effects.

[Stargate525]

This reminds me alot of a setting idea that (I think) LC had, with Gods using mortals to kick each others asses.

[Atlantis]

also seems a bit like a forum game that ElDo started THe New World where your a bunch of gods killing eachother and eachothers creations

[SA]

Well, that's definitely the most imaginative premise for a new game that I've seen in a long while.

Well, I do try.  I got a lot of my setting inspiration from the Amber RPG, Unknown Armies and Luminous Crayon's Lords of the Meta-Realm.  My eyes were opened to the mechanical possibilities when I was surfing the boards over at indie-rpgs.net.

For conflict resolution and action, I'd suggest implementing a currency which is similar to divine power. The currency would let you pull crazy stuff like changing the nature of a world, or causing monsters to spawn.

I have no idea of how it would work, but I love it. Count me in if you ever do play-testing. Just the idea of such a crazy game, the effort to destroy the universe, it's so awesome.[/quote]But it's not just destroying it, it's making it again.  It's elementary, it's biological, it's the base, chaotic and unrefined reproductive cycle of the entire Cosmos.  It's like Reality has not yet fully made sense of itself - kind of an analogue to the first aeon of our evolutionary struggle.  Copulation, reproduction, predation, all these things are spastic, random, and prone to catastrophic failure.  Maybe with successive iterations the Cosmos will come to some kind of order, but for now its just Helter Skelter, man, Helter Skelter.

[SA]

This reminds me alot of a setting idea that (I think) LC had, with Gods using mortals to kick each others asses.

That'd be Meta-Realm, probably my primary inspiration.

[Epic Meepo]

Ah, I think I see how this works. Players invest resources in characters in an effort to win further resources, preferably duping or thwarting other Collectives in the process. Like a game of Diplomacy, but with dice. And freaks. Lots and lots of freaks.

[Stargate525]

If you start a game of this, tell me.

I get dibs on the Black Knight, Tim the Enchanter, The Old Crone from Scene 23, and The Rabbit.

[Epic Meepo]

I get dibs on the Black Knight, Tim the Enchanter, The Old Crone from Scene 23, and The Rabbit.

Bah! Your Collective is puny, and shall fall before my might!

I call dibs on Colonel Sanders, Lord Voldemort, Chuck Norris, and the starting offense of the 1979 Miami Dolphins.

[Atlantis]

i call dibs on Darth Vader and Sith lord Palpatine