"splintered things" Topic

A game I dreamed last night of playing as part of my strategic campaign system/boardgame:

Card based. Things in sets. Separated, they are generally harmful. Combining them partly reduces the harm, without fully eliminating it, but restoring unity (the whole set in the same hands, or same place) turns them into a benefit.

Example: a broken widget, in three parts. A land (territory in the strategic game, or a country/culture such as Wyldewood) that has one of the three parts hidden within it suffers a -20% Blight effect each turn – as though an enemy had cast that strategic magic spell. The shamans (or Godfearer or pagan priests) will know of the EFFECT but not necessarily of its source – but that can be discovered, through a Scrye spell, or by a hero's quest, or a seer's visions or a prophet's prayers.

Finding and bringing two of the three broken pieces together reduces the harmful effect; each piece alone is a -20% Blight, but bringing two together reduces that to a -10% Blight. Which is actually reducing a -20% Blight to nothing for the territory where one of the pieces was located and from which it has now been removed, while the receiving territory halves its Blight from -20 to -10.

The third piece is still a -20 Blight where it is hidden. But if it is found and recombined, the three pieces brought together (and perhaps repaired), then the effect becomes a +20 Thrive.

There is basis for cooperation among factions and states, as restoring unity reduces harm, and everybody involved is at least somewhat better off. BUT the benefits of unity are uneven; the power that brings all the pieces together gets a significant boost, and an opposing power may want to prevent that even if it also harms them.

The "sets" could be cards, or tokens. Many of the sets would be pieces of something larger, like the full panoply of armor – which might have some small benefit alone, wouldn't have to be harm – or pieces of a puzzle, worthless alone but revealing a great secret if combined.

The "sets" might also be locations, immovable, but with increasingly beneficial effect if united under the authority of the same king.

Whatcha think?

I love the idea, not sure how it would necessarily integrate with the sorts of games I play, but it is certainly intriguing.

I'm thinking that, e.g., it gives the high command something else to do, as well as providing a link to role playing or tactical games -- which I will eventually do for PRIDE. But if the Archdruid of Wyldewood finds out that an important artifact exists, he can send one hero or a team after it -- but loses their services with an army for a time, and risks losing them altogether.

I'm thinking, too, that something like this will perhaps provide an answer to the very good question several posed on an earlier thread, about the relationships among the various ethical monotheists (aka "Godfearers") in the world, and also perhaps with and among pagan pantheons like the Saex worshipping Odin. I'll probably want to use Paul's "put on the whole armor of God" ("panoply" in the Greek) from Ephesians 6, but don't want to fall into a talismanic approach, so the "shield of faith" and the "belt of truth" will probably be ideas, perhaps books, that are metaphorically weapons. A given Godfearer culture might possess some but not all of the concepts, and would need to aquire others from external sources. With maybe an overarching system of integration (the "belt of truth" that holds everything together the way Aquinas used Aristotilian concepts to create the Summa Theologica) without which the separate writings remain disjointed and not mutually reenforcing. I'm thinking the deistic librarians of Wellspring have the belt but nothing else, for example.

This gives a sense of what I'm after in the "world game" for those whose interest transcends fighting tabletop battles and who want to fit those into a wider -- the widest! -- context.

Apart from more disputed matters, there were things in the tradition of Israel which belong to all humanity now, and might have belonged to all humanity then. They had one of the colossal corner-stones of the world: the Book of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting of poetry and philosophy in the mornings of the world. It is a solemn and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say ‘I do not understand,' it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.' And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem remained unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they should have kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly concealed the Great Pyramid.

Chesterton, G K. (2012-03-28). The Everlasting Man (with linked TOC) (Kindle Locations 1382-1392). Ingram Distribution. Kindle Edition.