A worldbuilding game about an enclave on the edge of civilization in its twilight years. The game requires only a sheet of paper, a pencil, a deck of cards, and some dice.
A Review from a Friend
"I did a solo play of [Lev Working's] 1-5 player worldbuilding TTRPG, The Age Cut Short! For everyone interested in tabletop gaming or storytelling with tight time budgets, I recommend it! After choosing a setting and set of thematic attributes that interest you, you draw cards that will lead you to vague storytelling prompts, which you will narrate in more detail!
The prompts are rife with conflict and sacrifice; they may ask questions or demand circumstances, but never so strictly that you lose the opportunity to improvise something relevant to your storytelling angle! " - Brantly McCord
Inspiration
I have been a longtime player of The Quiet Year, a worldbuilding game that develops a post-apocalyptic community for one year before disaster strikes. Though I enjoyed the game quite a bit, I started feeling the urge to create my own spin on it. I wanted a version of the game that could be retooled to tell specific conflicts and follow more specialized organizations: A library seeking to preserve knowledge in the face of tyranny, a merchant's guild using underhanded methods to sell goods, if for a good cause.
Design Decisions
The design process for The Age Cut Short was much more straightforward than a lot of games I have developed. The mechanics of The Quiet Year were already a solid foundation, so a lot of the design process was figuring out how to hack that game to do what I wanted it to do. For starters, in the Quiet Year, card suits represent different seasons that happen in a predetermined order. This means that every game is going to look quite similar. I also wanted my game to take place over a period of years rather than weeks. So I decided that suits would instead represent different conflicts, both internal and external. Instead of suits being shuffled separately and stacked atop one another, I had them shuffled together.
Themes: Depending on the game, the Spades suit can represent a battle against an autocratic ruler, another culture with conflicting beliefs & practices, dangerous magical artifacts, or a war going badly. This meant that I had to create and playtest a separate list of prompts for each separate suits, constituting the majority of the document's 11,000-word count.
Order Customization: One aspect of The Quiet Year I enjoyed quite a bit was the ability to customize what your settlement looked like in advance. I decided to take this a step further, by creating two lists of structures & features players could populate their order's compound with. I think 'Beloved Goose' is my favorite feature so far.
Legacy Actions: In The Quiet Year, players can perform one of three actions on their turn: Start of Project, Introduce a Situation, and Hold a Discussion. In the Age Cut Short, I added a fourth action unique to the order that players are playing, simply called the legacy action. The Legacy Action is intended to represent the 'So-what?', the 'Why does this matter?'. For the Archivists order, the legacy action is Preserve Knowledge, and the so-what is that without this institution, great works of literature, philosophy, art, and science would have been lost to time. Legacy actions are almost always permanent, positive effects that the order faces.
Playtesting
Playtesting revealed a number of limitations with this formula of the game. Interestingly, the Age Cut Short excels at telling stories about both microscopic and world-spanning conflicts; disagreements about whether to build a new storage shed and the collapse of civilization. But it struggles, to model mid-size conflicts: the battle between the order & folk from a nearby town. This is because the game map as currently setup focuses extensively on the order itself, and worlds-panning conflicts need not be modelled on said map. I am currently testing both shifting away from midsize conflicts, and introducing mechanics to flesh out the neighborhood the order exists within.
Vestigial Mechanics: The Quiet Year contains a mechanic known as resources, which drives conflict as food, water, shelter, or other crucial supplies grow scarce over the course of the game. In the earlier forms of The Age Cut Short, I ported this mechanic over wholesale. I found, however, that resources were not consistently a source of conflict in my game. In some games, it was a huge driver of the plot as The Tyrant revoked the funds of the Great Library. In other playthroughs, it was a boring statistic players had to track. Once I finish working through other parts of the development plan, I will reevaluate whether and how to use resources.
The Full Rulebook
You can see the full game's ruleset here: https://levoid.itch.io/the-age-cut-short
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