Intercosmic Bonds

Ahoy! The August was a close call due to the fact that I was visiting my girlfriend in another country for a couple of weeks. Both the travel and the visit were as fine as they could be, I had a fantastic time. For a while, I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to make the 200 word TTRPG for August, but shortly before my return home I talked to an online acquaintance of mine I look up to. Irina, also known as SwordMeow, makes D&D homebrews like I used to. My favorite creations of hers include the Atavist, 10th-level spells, and the Way of One Hundred Blows monk. Her idea was a TTRPG that would begin with a slice-of-life group of friends in modern-time world, but over time it would pivot into a multiverse-spanning story of how friendship bonds can cross the worlds. And while that's not literally what I made, it gave me the kick I needed to be inspired. After the prompt, what began my process was a simple thought: if we are a mosaic of our closest people, … what if the regular stats an in-game character has were replaced by relationships? Well, my thought experiment on that can be seen below. Just a note - it will come with an example listed below, but I don't want to count examples as part of the rules (both for the word limit, but also because they're not rules per se).

Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful day!

It's safe to assume that League of Legends kind of inspired this idea. The default ninja character is displayed in the image above as (left to right): a popstar, a cyber ninja, a sushi chef, a blood moon priestess, a nurse, a soccer player, and a fire djinni.
All of these pictures belong to Riot Games.

Intercosmic Bonds

Each player creates a different

• world (they'll GM),
• character (to play while not GMing),
• stat (their character excels at).

Starting Level equals the number of players. Assign whole numbers to relationships your character has with other characters until their sum equals your Level. These relationships remain identical across the worlds even after changes. Relationships needn't be identical both ways.

Make a version of your character for every other player's world.

Select a GM before each session, different when possible. The GM comes up with a scenario that others' characters undergo as a group in one session. Scenarios combine into greater plots.

If a significant action's outcome is uncertain, the GM picks a relevant stat and asks the player to roll 2d6, adding the relationship with that stat's character.

• 3+ success (your stat only),
• 7+ success for simple challenges, 
• 10+ success.

3 failures in a row cause 1 stress to the character. Eliminate the character from the world if your Level equals the stress.

You can increase your character's relationship with another by 1 when relevant, but you must decrease another by 1.

+1 Level after completing greater plots.

Let's have a look at an example of how a single character might look in a game like this below.
Elementalist Lux, by Citemer Liu.

Since this is a high concept game, let's make an example that involves five players. Their characters are named: Aleez, Bhob, Charcol, Daann, and Elvenoore (initials are ABCDE, for easier tracking). Let's see how these characters might be built based on every player's creations before the first session.

Character	World	Stat	Aleez	Bhob	Charcol	Daann	Elvenoore
Aleez	Corrupted Wonderland	Senses	—	-1	+1	+3	+2
Bhob	Post-apocalypse iron age	Might	+3	—	-1	+0	+3
Charcol	Grand conspiracy renaissance	Intellect	+4	-3	—	+1	+3
Daann	Space opera horror	Spirit	+1	+6	-2	—	+0
Elvenoore	Cyberpunk dystopia	Finesse	-2	+1	+4	+2	—

Let's have a closer look at Aleez. If her player is GMing, the setting the game will take place in is a corrupted version of the Wonderland. According to the above table, one could say that she adds the following bonuses to her rolls:

• Senses +0 (but she succeeds on a roll of 3+)
• Might -1
• Intellect +1
• Spirit +3
• Finesse +2

It might seem counter-productive to track them as relationships, but keep in mind that these can change throughout the sessions, and even across the multiverse. If Bhob helps Aleez out in the grand conspiracy world and Aleez figures it's significant enough, she will increase her relationship with Bhob from -1 to +0 (either by also decreasing her relationship with another character, or the next time the group gets a Level up).

While Aleez' player isn't the one to GM, the character has to be adjusted slightly to fit into other worlds easily. A reminder that Aleez doesn't exist in her own Corrupted Wonderland.

• In Bhob's world, she might be an easy to impress gatherer who's curious about the way the world was before its apocalypse.
• In Charcol's world, she's a nosy handmaiden who smokes and seeks everyone's secrets.
• In Daann's world, she's a janitor equipped with special tech that allows her to shrink down for cleaning hard to reach places. (The ability to shrink down isn't written anywhere in the rules per se, but maybe Daann decided to treat the players by letting them have a gizmo of some kind.)
• In Elvenoore's world, she's a spy working for the criminal underworld, pretending to be but a simple delivery girl.

A final note is that there are no rules on crossing between these worlds, or anything akin to that. If you wish to do that and have a way of pulling it off, be my guest, but the game is only so long and crossing the worlds would take way too many words for me to pull off.

Overall, I think it's a promising concept that I might make into a more fleshed-out game someday. Maybe by mixing in a bit of the rubix cube, maybe by mixing in other games' mechanics I've been coming up with recently. But for now, this is what it is.

Thank you once again for reading! I hope that soon I'll get to write up a blog post on the design of my latest TTRPG I've released on itch.io, but for now that's all. I wish you all a great day!