Phases (Patreon)

adventure journals are how we do experience in this game. They're basically a log of cool things you do in a game as nominated by yourself or other players, creating moments. We want to highlight:

-When a player takes the spotlight and does something heroic, adventurous, or useful in a clutch.
-when a player has a meaningful human connection or experiences something new
-Expressions of their own culture
-living up to the pact that all Memento agents work under
-interesting roleplay

A player can have 10 of these active at a time. When you come across or try to do something similar to the experience that created that moment, two things happen. Once is that it grows in value. The other is these give you a key dice on any dangerous roll.  The more you do a thing, the more experience it's worth.
planning to do, but it's things that feel necessary. More categories of enemy types and how to build them,  non-violent conflict, turn order rules for conflict. Infiltration has me currently working on different types of dungeon like structures (their rules), how to do things like traps and puzzles, and challenging the heart.

Protect the sacred is a pulp adventure game that seeks to capture the pulse pounding action of the genre, specifically leaning into things like indiana jones. But how do you present a player with an existence of big adventure dungeon from a variety of world cultures in a modern world where archeologist are using satellite images to survey jungles?

The answer I came up with is that there are types of big adventure dungeons that can exist anywhere. There are secret passageways and doors to magic worlds. There are hidden things buried or lost. But there are also DUNGEONS, twisted manifestations representative a spiritual sickness. Distorted desires, cries for help, or sometimes both. They're unstable, one-sided, and signal ruin that draw in the things that feed into them and twist, even drawing in magic and monsters against their will to defend it.

To take these down you must claim it's heart, a symbolic representation of the struggle in the form of an object or person. And to that you must challenge it. And these challenges can be anything. Boss battles sure. But they could be arguing a court case. Racing giant birds through a mountain. Deadly Lip Sync Battles. Shogi at a grand scale. Anything. But I've been building the framework for that too (and will probably be what I work on this month). I want to give you options and not just leave you with "it can be anything".

One of the big goals of design was to offer support for noncombat in an attempt to reframe and restructure the idea of a dungeon. As such I need to support that. If I didn't how would that be any different than dnd? Contest, races, debates, puzzle, challenges...

Here some stuff I did last month though

Touchstone

A touchstone is a fundamental experience, person, or place that helped shaped who you are as a person. Good or bad, they are connections. another connection to culture. They should be relationships you want to explore. You start with 4

When touchstones are relevant, they reduce the cost of narrative beats by half.

The first time a touchstone is evoked in an adventure you gain a burst of verve (your do cool shit meter that allows you to take control of your story)

I have about 5 example questions each to get you thinking about these touchstones for person/place/thing. Though you are not bound by these things alone. These are a combination of contacts, backgrounds, and origins and give you things you can draw on to color your flashbacks and clutch assist.

Adventure Journal

adventure journals are how we do experience in this game. They're basically a log of cool things you do in a game as nominated by yourself or other players, creating moments. We want to highlight:

-When a player takes the spotlight and does something heroic, adventurous, or useful in a clutch.
-when a player has a meaningful human connection or experiences something new
-Expressions of their own culture
-living up to the pact that all Memento agents work under
-interesting roleplay

A player can have 10 of these active at a time. When you come across or try to do something similar to the experience that created that moment, two things happen. Once is that it grows in value. The other is these give you a key dice on any dangerous roll.  The more you do a thing, the more experience it's worth.

Between adventures you can cash any number of these in for improvements in self (gear, magical ability, self) , or to grow your shared base, a floor of a tardis-like living extradimensional magical hotel that can operate like a  safe haven. (even though, much like a tardis, there can be a challenge to getting to it in the first place)