Rolling with It

You know what's kind of silly? I keep making these short TTRPGs monthly, and yet I haven't made one that would take place in one of my previously made worlds. It's always something already present in media (such as the zombie apocalypse represented by Double the Zombies), a setting made by someone else (such as the city of Revachol from my first game of 2023, (Almost) Everyone is Harry), or setting agnostic (like most of those games). The time to change that is now, and I'm making a game that takes place in my world of orb-based magical technology, which will be named "Geniorum" for now. I've actually worked out a couple more details behind the scenes and wanted to make an article that would update the orbtech concept for several months but never got around to it. Well, now I have to because the clock is ticking and my November game needs to be published soon.

Have a great time and a greater day!

I've spent too much time learning blender basics just to make this. Can't say I'm truly satisfied with it, but it is good enough.

Rolling with It

Requires 1 GM and 1+ players.

Orbs are magical quartz spheres fueled by alcohol. One can program it by falling asleep while touching it, entering its dreamscape. You were murdered while pondering your orb, transporting your mind into it permanently. Discover your murderer and their motive. If you ever run out of alcohol, you die.

You can:

• see and hear your surroundings,
• roll like a sphere for 4 hours*,
• change your surface's temperature between -50 and 50°C*,
• change your appearance,
• produce sounds heard by anyone touching you,
• absorb alcohol through your surface magically,
• control your dreamscape completely (10x slower time inside),
• send/receive digital funds to/from other orbs through touch,
• create flammable sturdy matter up to double your volume after spending 8 hours away from any starlight*.

* Costs 1 unit of alcohol. Max units equal die size.

Choose your orb's size. Here are sphere size comparisons from our world:

d4	marble
d6	golf
d8	pool
d10	shot put
d12	bowling
d20	boulder

When you need to, roll your die. Example difficulties listed below.

Difficulty	Strength (≥ difficulty)	Speed (≤ difficulty)
4	bottle of water	fraction of a second
10	human weight	seconds
16	a large car	tens of seconds

He who ponders the orbs becomes pondered.
Can't trace the author of this edit, and can't be bothered to spend too much time on this search. Instead, I'll credit the original M. C. Escher's Hand with Reflecting Sphere.

I wanted to say that it's a short game, but then I realized it's exactly 200 words long. Why does it feel so short then? Well, the answer is simple: there are very few mechanics in it. Most of the game just talks about how orbs operate, since they are very different from humans. Not everyone's a fan of details like this, so I don't expect too many to enjoy this game. Then again, I don't expect that of any of my 200-word games, these are prototypes.

Ever since I've heard about Savage Worlds' stats being dice and the difficulty being always 4, I wanted to do something with that. I figured this was a good chance, seeing how differently-sized orbs would be capable of differently-sized things. Well, actually, all of them are capable of movement. But not all of them are capable of pushing around a car-sized thing. Sure I couldn't fit into it stuff like "if you're a boulder, you probably can't enter buildings", but that's something players will hopefully be able to think of on their own.

Here's another tiny detail: all of your actions should in theory cost alcohol. But keeping track of all alcohol spent on such minute actions as making a red dot on your orb's "north pole" would just get too tedious. I opted for restricting the alcohol expenditure only to the actions I figured would be influential and left it there. But if a player does minor actions way too much, the GM has the right to tell them they've spent a unit of alcohol.

With such a word limit, it's quite difficult to fit a pre-established setting into it. Even if Geniorum can hardly be considered a setting yet, it's got a multitude of rules related to the orbs. I feel like it deserves more of my attention in order to be developed, but honestly... I like Runehack a lot more. When I was picking a world to cover with my 200-word game treatment, I had several options. The divtech's world is... well, a starless rogue planet populated only by robots. I have yet to even work out its materials completely before I start doing anything with it. Then there's leytech, which would have been perfect for a TTRPG about warriors but is also quite complicated with all the different kinds of rings that influence the water passing through. I have one more magitech world that I've wanted to write about on this blog for about a year now, but I've been pushing it off the same as an update on Geniorum.

Of course, there are more details I couldn't fit into the ruleset. For example, an inworld name for folks who got trapped in the orbs is "genie". And the creation of matter is due to lumpowder, a substance that manifests in alcohol hidden from all forms of sunlight, including reflected. Then there's the fact that multiple people could get trapped inside the same orb, but only the first one retains complete control over it. Usually, they'd have their minor genies manifest as parts of their body, which is what I nickname "medusa". I could keep going, but the truth is that Geniorum is still vastly underdeveloped. That doesn't change the fact that this was fun to come up with.

Thank you for reading, and have a great day!