Pillars of Creation (Patreon)

BEHOLD!

My name is Djordi, a Senior Designer here at MCDM. This is my first Patreon post and possibly the second time you have encountered me in an official capacity, if you watched the Patreon Q&A last month.

Treasure Type DJ

If encountered in his lair, a Djordi will cook good food for you and play board games with you from his horde of games. Other treasures in his lair include way too many programmable LED lights. Also a surprising amount of dice. Like surprising.

I have been at MCDM for just over a month and it both feels like no time at all and that I have been at a new home for years. I’ve worked in some capacity as a game developer for almost thirty years and have been a player of TTRPGs for most of my life, but this is my first foray into working in the TTRPG industry.

The principles are largely the same in the two industries, so I wanted to share with you my design process for ideation and iteration. One of the great things about working at MCDM is we have a talented and creative team of developers, including four horsemen of the design apocalypse.

An important benefit of having a full design team like this is we can push limits while ideating and iterating. The key to successful iteration is to fail repeatedly until you hone in on the right execution of an idea. If you are working by yourself, you often have to self censor which limits the ideas you can try.

There’s a saying in brainstorming that there are “no bad ideas.” That’s actually false. There are plenty of bad ideas, but the point of saying that is to be comfortable presenting bad ideas so you can ideate to the good ideas.

But even in that freeform context, it’s important to think about what your goals are and how the designs you are creating are in service to those goals. You have to eat your vegetables before you can have your dessert. A good tool for that vegetable process are pillars, key aspects of your design that you constantly refer to and use to filter your ideas. We have four pillars in the RPG, with my technical definition.

• Tactical - The Director and players move little figures on a grid and feel cool when they coordinate those little figures into doing dope stuff.

• Heroic - We presume the players will play along with the goals of being a hero and don’t have to micromanage little aspects of their character.

• Cinematic - There is resonance in how the mechanics work in the game and how they are expressed narratively, so it’s easy for people to picture what’s going on and add their own stamp to things. Plus just having cool narrative beats while you play!

• Fantasy - Dragons & psionic powers & flying castles, oh my!

You can start with a cool idea, but you have to make sure it does the work to fit the pillars of the game. And fulfill other requirements from business, art, and production. It’s also useful to think of the people who play your game as personas, archetypes of players that are useful shorthand for audience needs. But personas are a topic for another post.

So I’m going to walk you through the ideation process for some of the cool work we’ve been doing on monster design this… wait? What’s that, James?

I will instead walk you through the ideation process I took with the writing test I did to get the job here at MCDM! The writing test had three parts:

• Town - Write up the description of a “typical” starting town.

• Adventure - Write an outline for a short adventure.

• Class - Pick a class from a provided list and write up an example first level character from that class based on the prompt. 

The test was ultimately delivered as a word document with all identifying information stripped so it could be judged solely on the contents. But before I created the work documents I used my preferred ideation tool, Miro, because my brain works like this:

Matt has often described his primary design tool as Excel, but I’m more of a visual thinker and Miro helps me organize those chaotic thoughts. And so, as a treat, dear Patreon readers I am presenting to you the unedited original Miro board that I used to create my writing test:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVNpetp6M=/?share_link_id=770802332507

I started the whole process with a hook that then drove the design for the adventure and the town. I had an image in my head of a slumbering or dead character seated in a throne, preserved from an ancient time. “What if the ‘reveal’ of The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, with the slumbering woman, was a character with more agency.” 

I started thinking about that dramatic Bo Katan pose in the throne pose from The Mandalorian or the post-battle shot of Buliwyf from the 13th Warrior, when he finally succumbs to his wounds. And rather than a vampire I started thinking about someone kept “alive” for ages, which made me think of Khan or the Grail Knight from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. 

And that became the hook for the character and ultimate villain of the adventure, Kolgrima the Vanigarian. A personal bodyguard to one of the Emperors of the Caelian Empire, betrayed by her men, and left dying and sealed in an ancient keep. Her sense of duty and vengeance turned her into a revenant, hell bent on revenge against those who betrayed her. But centuries have passed, so now her vengeance targets the innocent descendants. A kobold legion discovers the keep and becomes bound by an ancient oath to the Empire, becoming Kolgrima’s army of vengeance against the local townsfolk. 

Ok, so how does that work with the pillars of the game?

• Tactical - The kobold army raids the town repeatedly with the heroes having to organize them into a defense in the style of The Magnificent Seven or Seven Samurai? ✅

• Heroic - We have innocent villagers under the threat of revenge from a revenant who has a tragic motivation with some depth? ✅

• Cinematic - Defending the town as a resonant mechanical and narrative beat? ✅

• Fantasy - Kobolds and an ancient undead revenant? Oh and a flying keep? Did I mention the flying keep? ✅

With the hook in place I then went to build out the town. The town is meant to be a starter town, so not too cray-cray like a lot of fantasy fiction gets. This is supposed to be the baseline for a dark ages-ish town in Vasloria. So I started with a theme of a quarry town and some core characters. Because the key to a town is a group of characters that feel like they live there.

The town is pretty bog standard with very little fantastical stuff going on, except for the fact that some people in town have a special form of heterochromia that gives them one almost supernatural blue eye and, unknown to them, marks them as descendents of the legion that betrayed Kolgrima. Setting aside that element the town can work for any situation the Director plausibly needs for a starting town.  

Now that I had context for the town I went back and built out the adventure outline, focusing on a flowchart.

I went back and forth between the town and the adventure to create more links, including a fun idea of a wode elf living in town who personally witnessed the events of the past, but because she’s been disconnected from the wode her memories are all jumbled. Time is weird for elves.

There’s a lot more on the board for the town and the adventure, so feel free to peruse at your leisure. Also there’s my take on a first level Troubadour, which isn’t necessarily anything like the actual MCDM version.

That brings me to my final caveat on this. Like all good ideation there is a chance that nothing you do during a step will survive, but the act of ideation helps you find the next ideas. Nothing in the test I submitted is guaranteed to be in the game, but it helps me understand the game better. Now that I’ve been here for a month I can still use this test as a reference to help me think through ideas.

Djordi