Robot Park
Latest Reading Draft
To celebrate the finale of Westworld last Sunday, I put the last touches on this very cursory design I started doodling several weeks ago. This is reading alpha 5, with quite a bit of new material and some reorganization for the folks who were reading previous drafts.
Now I’m not sure how to proceed with it!
* Designing it to be visually appealing would increase interest a hundredfold, I’m sure, but that’s a good bit of time. Which leads me to the next point…
* I’m not really sure this is even something I could sell. I mean, I haven’t really scrubbed the serial numbers off very hard but it seems like I’d need to do a lot to differentiate it from Westworld itself.
* As a design project, it’s fulfilled my goal of letting me experiment with a form of gmless PbtA that I’ve been thinking about for a year now. So at the very least, yay, I think the bones of the thing would work for some other premise.
Anyway, enjoy. I think the next version would be Beta 1 and would need layout.
Taking ideas and advice on how to proceed. Until then, on to the next project!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxZk7ypnJt47MTdqNmt6U296cHc/view?usp=sharing
Bret Gillan Paul Taliesin Christian Griffen Mark Delsing Aaron Griffin Paul Czege I think was everyone reading it the last time.
Making the basic setting something other than the wild west sound be enough to get rid of the serial numbers. And might give you an opportunity to put your own spin on it.
oh man i must have missed alpha4 🙂
Will read throughout the work day
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What +Christian Griffen said. Don’t use Japan, though 😉
Victorian England? Colonial America?
Ooh, a Colonial America / War of Independence (or Civil War) re-enactment world sounds pretty cool.
Or an interesting section of your ‘Dirty West’ historical research.
I suppose the metasetting could really be anything, as long as it’s escapist and tropey.
IMO it should provide exciting opportunit ies for White Hats and Black Hats, while also being romanticized and providing opportunity for excessive revelry.
Stuff like Prohibition America.
Well, you could make it a framework to work with any other AW hack? Like, you could play Bootleggers World or Apocalypse World World? I mean, I’d love to play with AW as the fictional park setting.
A cheeky cover image would be that stock photo they used as a key prop.
J. Walton: In terms of getting eyeballs to look at this project, I think that’s probably a very smart way to go. Maybe curate a few settings, identify a few settings that work well together (Monsterhearts of the Week of Urban Shadows) and also mix up playbooks from related hacks / games.
Disney World World would be some next-level meta, or World Wide Wrestling World.
J. Walton I just mentioned this to one of my players. He said that guests could make horrible characters, something he himself did in our last play of AW. I think pit could be brilliantly meta.
I dunno…the point of the thing is the interplay between the three perspectives. So like…now you’re a guest attending Apocalypse World (World)? Your AW playbook, totally irrelevant, right? You’d get decked out however you wanted, the world would be inhabited by various colorful hosts, and staff is watching through hidden cameras while they play out their own schemes.
Honestly, eyeballs just means getting it laid out at this point.
Is it limited to only three perspectives? Seems like a government influence would interplay well, or would that fall under “Staff”
There are no government characters in Westworld. In fact the total corporate control over the facility is, I think, part of the libertarian appeal/horror of the show.
We just call that “cyberpunk” 😉
The show may very well be more cp than we imagined.
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Paul, are you still looking for feedback on this version? I totally suck!
Mark Delsing yeah!
I have also finished the season so am more versed in what this is trying to emulate. Before seeing it, I had thought “staff” were like hiding in bushes with datapads. Now it’s clearer.
I’ll try a re-read of v5