Entities
Ghosts, demons, legendary creatures, and monsters.
Playground / In development / Game system
Card Game
What happens when folklore becomes a system you can play?
Working title. The rules below are exploratory, not final.
Current system map
The system should remember the story.
Lore or creature trait
Card family
Mechanic
Resource cost
Control difficulty
Player decision
Consequence
Board state
Lore informs the mechanic; the mechanic changes a decision. This is a working model, not a finished card or balancing system.
The idea
The system should remember the story.
I wanted to build a game where the creatures were not only illustrations and the exorcists were not only character archetypes. The interesting part was deciding what each thing could do, what it should cost, what could control it, and what happened when the rules of the world became rules at the table.
The concept includes ghosts, demons, legendary monsters, exorcists, protective items, and locations that can affect play.
Card families
Four parts of the world.
Exorcists
Characters with different ways to interact with or control entities.
Items
Protective objects, ritual tools, weapons, and charms.
Locations
Places that change the conditions of an encounter.
What I am testing
Making danger playable.
Exploratory mechanics include resources that accumulate across turns, stronger entities with higher costs, control and sealing, backlash from unstable entities, temporary suppression, and cards that change the conditions of an encounter. None of these has final values or balancing yet.
I am less interested in collecting monsters than in making the lore affect how the game behaves. If a creature is dangerous or difficult to control in its story, that quality should survive translation into the rules.
What I want to learn
When narrative becomes a rule.
A character can feel dangerous in a story because the writer says so. In a game, the rules have to make the player feel it. I want to learn how much narrative can survive inside a rule system.