MARKED - Devlog #1

77 days ago, 7 teens gathered in the woods behind the trailer park, and there they broke the first lock on the cage of The Wastehound.

In the rattling of the world that followed, each of the 7 were Marked - imbued with the ancient magics that made The Wastehound's rusted cage.

So long as any of them live The Wastehound is trapped in the skin of the world... but as the nights grow longer and colder, and summer's end approaches, it's only a matter of time. And hey, none of these kids were ever gonna make it out of this shitty-ass town anyways.

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MARKED (a hopefully very temporary working title for this project) is a short, play-to-lose modern horror game about a fascinatingly boring town, 7 best friends and/or worst enemies about to graduate high school, and the end of the world. It's a game about being young and stupid and beautifully so, making mistakes that only you can make, and surviving against all odds.

For this initial devlog, I want to talk about the core systems that make up this game's experience. I won't get too in-depth on anything, but I hope it'll be able to lay out the core themes and how I'm approaching them.

Each of the 7 kids was marked with an ancient sigil, granting them dangerous power... and sealing their fate.

The Kids and the Web

MARKED is a game designed to be quick to pick up and play, and possible to finish in a single session. To facilitate this, the game is played in a set location, with a set of mostly pre-generated characters.

Most players choose one of the kids to play as - they're given some information about who that character is, their past relationships within the group, and the specific powers that The Wastehound has given them, along with personal fears and certainties. The final player plays as The Wastehound (a kind of antagonistic GM), and works solely to create conflict for the charcters, both between themselves, and against the world.

Interpersonal relationships are a vital part of the game, and so the web of connections between characters is used as a core game mechanic. Players play with the web in the center of the table, and add words to connect characters to each other. Players can choose to burn these relationships at any time, to get an advantage on a future action. By defining all of these relationships as transactional, The Wastehound encourages characters to be mean to each other, building additional tension and drama as the game goes on.

To balance out this tension, resolving major problems throughout the game requires teamwork to be effective: one person might need to spend 6 actions overcoming a conflict, while 2 people working together would only take 3. Players will need to manage both building and destroying their relationships as the game goes on and challenges get harder and harder.

Of course, the key to this is that while the benefits are mechanical, all of the actions taken in the game are narrative. "burning a relationship" for the sake of gaining advantage means lying to a friend, abusing a fear they told you in confidence, or otherwise straining your connection. The inverse goes for rebuilding those connections. Much of the gameplay is about feeling out those narrative tensions, and playing to find out how much your character is willing to take from those around them.

An image from my previous Design Diary, the Two-Deck Game.

Two-Deck

Some people reading this may have already read my previous design article, The Two-Deck Game. The Two-Deck Game is a novel resolution system that was custom-built for this very game (although I'm confident it has other valuable applications, and am planning to make a more detailed primer on it alongside MARKED's development).

For those who don't have time to read that article, here's a quick rundown: The kids, each share one standard deck of playing cards, and do a kind of deck-building minigame as the game goes on. Cards are laid out from the group deck in the center of the table, and PCs can add those cards to their personal deck in various ways. Whenever they want to do something risky — anything from kissing a friend to leaping off of the overlook — they consult what kind of move they're doing, and then shuffle their deck and draw the top card. If the top card matches, they succeed. If it doesn't, they stumble (though always failing forward).

The Wastehound has a separate deck. When things become more uncertain for the PCs, the Wastehound forcefully gives them additional cards. PCs have total knowledge of the cards they've added to their deck, but no knowledge of the Wastehound's contributions. Thus, as the game goes on, the PCs become less and less sure of their ability to succeed on risky actions.

In MARKED, this system is built to represent Uncertainty. Uncertainty is the thesis word of the whole game, really. The kids are uncertain about their futures, both because of The Wastehound, but also because their lives are about to change so rapidly. They're unsure about their relationships with each other, their own capabilities, the fate of the world, and all of these uncertainties grow as the game goes on.

The Wastehound, however, presents the kids with opportunities to be free of this uncertainty — at a cost. The marks upon each kid allow them to tap into The Wastehound's power, removing unwanted cards from their deck entirely, as long as they're willing to be their worst self, and take that energy out on those around them. Inversely, the kids can also choose to take on more uncertainty in order to support their friends in times of need.

The beginning phases of The Killing Game.

The Killing Game

A game of MARKED covers the course of a single fateful night, when the Wastehound makes a final play to kill the last of the Marked kids. Over the course of the game, each time a player would die (either at the Wastehound's hands, or for any other reason), they do a ritual I've tentatively named The Killing Game.

I won't describe the ritual in detail, so as to not spoil the magic of it, but it involves taking a player's deck and dealing it out. Depending on the results of the deal, a character will either survive, or be killed permanently. The game becomes harder and harder to survive the larger a player's deck is, tying in directly with the nature of MARKED as a whole.

At the end of the game, after all final scenes have been completed, The Wastehound gathers up every card in the game and plays The Killing Game one final time to determine the final fate of the world. No matter what they've done in the game, the players can never impact this ritual. While it's not impossible for them to survive, as I mentioned at the beginning, the players are always expecting to lose.

What happens afterwards, in the final scene of the game (live or die), I'll leave to talk about for another day.