Mutant Pizza

Hello Otherworldly Beings,

In a prior journal entry, I chatted about breaking out Existentialitis into two games—one being a card-based RPG and the other sticking to the story-crafting vibe I originally had in mind.

I’m still actively designing the latter, of which I don’t even have a working title for, but in this entry I want to discuss the former concept.

Allow me to introduce you to Pilgrimage, a card-based RPG using tarot-sized cards.

In Pilgrimage, you must travel from the Monastery to the Grand Temple to complete your training as a monk. This game is currently geared towards 1-6 players. It’s possible to play with more, I’m sure, but it may result in a more time-consuming experience.

Pilgrimage is a slice-of-life RPG

During your pilgrimage, you’ll traverse both civilization and the countryside to put your monk training to use, helping people in accordance with your mantra or oath to the god you’ve chosen.

As you travel from town to town, you’ll also travel through the rich landscapes of the countryside. Here you’ll be able to gather the raw materials you’ll need to create the wonderful and useful items for your journey.

You’ll be able to craft things like food and drink using skills like cooking, tea making, and baking. You’ll also be able to craft statues, clothing and jewelry, artworks, and even maps with other skills like wood carving, painting, and cartography.

The stars will guide you

From a purely mechanical sense, one of the elements I’m excited about in the game is the use of lead constellations that you’ll use during each leg of your journey.

Once you reach civilization, a new constellation card will replace the prior one. In the image above, the stars look the same and only have a black-and-white color variation. I plan on developing different types of stars and these cards will serve two functions:

• The number of stars notes the number of countryside cards you’ll need to travel through to reach the next point of civilization
• The type of star (these stars will have different colors and shapes) will add a bit of randomization to different events that occur along your journey

Speaking of events…

The main tension in Pilgrimage will be in how you and your party members help the various beings—natural and supernatural, corporeal and ethereal—during your journey. These are called Karmic Experiences.

The logistics of how these work haven’t been hashed out yet, but the general idea is that you’ll encounter problems that you need to solve. These problems are everything from helping ailing villagers to assisting spirits who need to find new homes that match their needs.

I want to give players a dynamic and comprehensive array of methods to solve such issues. For example, if you’re an experienced tea maker, maybe you can brew something special to help with an illness. Or, you can visit a resident alchemist and buy a salve from them. If you’re a wood carver, you can build a spirit house and place it in a desirable location for a spirit. You might also be able to clean and purify an existing spirit house or buy one in the next town over. There will be many routes to take so you can solve issues your own way.

Helping others through a Karmic Experience will grant you Karma, which you will use to gain new abilities and grow as a monk. (Think of Karma as XP.)

Pilgrimage is a combat-free RPG

You will carry a neat staff, purchased from a local shop or carved by you or a party member, but there won’t be any fighting in Pilgrimage. You’re here to help others on your way to completing your monk training. Once you get to the Grand Temple, you and your party will face what you’ve done, good or bad, along your journey.

As you may have glimpsed from the prototype image depicting the Grand Temple, I don’t quite know what that means yet. I’m toying with the idea of having positive and negative Karma, and potentially giving players the option of becoming a “dark monk” or something along those lines. We’ll see!

What’s next?

Phew, that was a lot of info. I do have more to share but I’ll save it for a future design journal entry. I’m hoping to get a prototype to the table as soon as possible. This is the type of game that requires a good amount of asset development just to get to a minimal playable state. I’m working fast to get cards made and decide how I want some major mechanics to play out.

Until next time, Otherworldly Beings…