Design of Runehack: Fairy Heist

Much like last year, this year I decided to join the One-Page RPG Jam. After a bit more than a week worth of designing and working on it, I've made my submission, a game called Runehack: Fairy Heist. I'd love to share with you some of my processes regarding how I've designed it. Enjoy!

Art provided by my wonderful girlfriend, Arell.

Theme

This year's theme is exploration, so my thoughts started there. I didn't want to hold on too tightly to the theme, as long as it would lead me somewhere interesting since the theme on this game jam is optional anyway.

The first thing that sprung to my mind when I read that word is all the mechanics for exploration in the D&D. Managing your food, traveling through the wilderness, avoiding getting lost, deciding how fast you're going. I tried to think of how to put a spin on that and came up with a concept for a game that I worked on for a bit until I lost interest in it. It would be a game about a religious pilgrimage northwards. It felt less like a roleplaying game and more like a resource-management strategy game. I might publish it nonetheless someday, once I figure out some good ways to weave roleplaying into it.

I tried to think of some interesting unusual spaces that one could explore next. The identity, the outer space, the myriad of worlds,… In the end, I was inspired by a wonderful video that has taught me a couple of interesting things. Among others, the one that caught my attention the most was that a home can tell a lot about a person. Sure I might not have conveyed that in the final product, but that got me thinking: who could be exploring other people's houses a lot? Since they were mentioned in the video, I was reminded of borrowers, but I decided to put a malicious twist on it: fairy burglars. Just regular burglars, but they are fairies.

Mechanics

Making the player characters this tiny has some interesting consequences. In the Timberhaven article, I talk briefly about the biology of the fairies. Their heights vary quite a bit in their terms, going from 6 to 17 centimeters. Curiously, that reminded me of the range of results one can roll on 3d6, from 3 to 18. I believe it's at this moment that I decided to use only d6's in this system. A height difference of 10 cm isn't that significant for humans, but it is very much so for the fairies. Immediately, I remembered the Lasers&Feelings and came to realize that this is the perfect opportunity for using the mechanic. Someone who's extremely tall is, after all, stronger than someone who's shorter. And on the other hand, someone shorter has much greater finesse and agility. Or well, they could in theory, but that's what I'm running with here.

I knew that I'd love to have this game take place in the world of Runehack, so the fairies would be using a couple of abilities with their runetech, most likely the runecards. I came up with a couple, kept tweaking them, and ended up with a total of 6 abilities. Thanks to the adjustments I've made, each of the abilities should be useful to the player even outside of the heists, mostly in social encounters. If I were to add more abilities, I would definitely do my best to make them work in both of these contexts. I'll definitely want to write an article on my thoughts regarding social encounters in the future.

Systemic Design

After some time spent working on the system and the rules behind the heist segment of the game, I came to realize something. I could turn this into a systemic game. I wanted to write an article on how to make systemic games for quite a while, but never really had the focus and motivation needed to do so. Perhaps subconsciously, I made this game systemic once I began using the phrases "can('t) see" and "can('t) hear" everywhere I could. How do the big folk become aware of the fairies? By hearing or seeing them. When can they hear them? When they do something loud, like flying in a neighboring room. I know that fairy flight is usually in media rather silent, but in this context, I decided otherwise to make the game more interesting. It makes sense if you consider these big folk to be highly vigilant of potential burglars, especially in a world in which they can be 10 centimeters tall. Once I started permitting combinations of abilities to work with each other, I knew that I've got on my hands a game that's systemic, and I was actually pleasantly surprised about it.

Action Economy

Let's talk about the big folk and the turns. While a fairy can move twice and perform one act on their turn, the big folk can move four times and perform three acts, to depict the stark difference in scale. In order to make it a little easier for the fairies (pun not intended), I've added a free option for them to retreat to a hiding spot within their current area, making it feel fair once again (... pun intended). The big folk have to first search a hiding spot, then try to catch a fairy, and then either hold it in their hand, or imprison it. Once a fairy is captured, that's it - they can't do anything until someone else does something to free them. Every big folk on the map can hold 3 fairies at most, but there's a trade-off: The Distract ability has a 1/day use, in which it can make someone fall asleep. No rolls involved, it costs 1 credit, and just like that - the big folk is asleep, and all fairies held in their grasp are free.

Enemy Variety

Fitting rules onto a single page is very difficult, but luckily the rules permitted me to add variant rules, GM side rules, and lore on the second page. One of the sections I wrote in there described the variants of the big folk, most of the Runehack's sentient species. While in this case I left the human as an exception with no special abilities (to let the GMs start off easier), the rest each has some way of breaking the players' routine.

• A dwarf can automatically sense the presence of others in the room, as long as they touch the same surface. This means that some of the obstacles can be searched by a dwarf without expending any additional actions on it.
• An elf is immune to the ability that would make him fall asleep, rendering him as both a dangerous foe to be captured and not let go by, but also an ideal opponent for heists which involve only one big folk.
• A goblin is capable of crawling through passages for fairies only. Figured this would be the easiest one to explain for the goblins.
• An orc can either move or perform one extra act on their turn.
• A runebot can detect the presence of other runetech devices (such as the runecards that the fairies use their abilities through), and they can also manipulate them through their access to the Mistweb.
• Finally, while they are not a single sentient race per se, I figured I'd give a bit of a spotlight to the arunic folk, who are by this game's rules immune to all illusions and telekinesis provided by the fairies' abilities.

I'm quite satisfied with the options I provided within my ruleset, and the curious interactions. I feel like I'll keep getting surprised with this system, especially if I continue expanding on its abilities. I hope to publish a supplement that would contain more abilities for the game, as well as several maps that a GM could take wholesale or adjust before using them in their own games.

I've already been shocked a couple of times with the rules interactions that are built into the system, and I want to actually run a campaign in it. In the meantime, thank you all for reading, and have a wonderful day!