(Re)building A Game

 

The process of teaching an old game new tricks.

Periodically, copies of Rivers, Roads & Rails drift onto thrift store shelves and cross my path. They're not common, but there have been a lot of copies I've almost bought. The cover art just appeals to the gamer in me. The cover art makes me think hey, this could make a killer map.

Four bucks at Goodwill and a project I can tackle while I'm between jobs? Sounds good to me. Sign me up. Let's make a game out of a game and all that.

Immediately, some considerations arise. This is already a board game and I'm not looking to make it unplayable in its original form. What I'm looking to do is add to it, make it something more. I want it to be the kind of game you can play as intended and also as not intended.

"We put a game in your game so you can game while you game," etc.

So, the first necessary question: Is this a good map builder for TTPRG use?

Turns out, no, probably not, especially if you follow the rules for tile placement.

The tiles are beautifully illustrated and every one of them has a lot of stuff going on. Also, with three courses of rivers, roads and rails starting, turning and dead-ending at regular intervals, the modularity of this set is really limited. There are only so many combinations, so you're going to end up with a similar looking map every time.

Also, many of the river, road and rail tiles are made more interesting by having little travelers on them. In a TTRPG, this could be interesting, but it might also be overkill.

So, in order to (re)build a game out of Rivers, Roads & Rails, we'll need to take a closer look at these tiles and organize them into types.

The first type I noticed, I referred to as Towns. These are urban centers that often (but not always) cluster at a dead-end. In a TTRPG map or in a game, these should be places of trade and safety where you can cultivate benefits that help you along the next type of tile, Paths.

Paths are quite self explanatory. They're ways characters can travel to get to destinations. They separate goals. Every game should have big goals and little goals. In this (re)build, Towns will be our big goals and the next type of tiles will be our little goals.

Let's call these tiles Farms. Each of the tiles of this type has a strong agricultural or livestock element to it. These can be pit stops on the way to larger goals, places to rest or get small benefits.

(Though that dude with the sheep looks wise and ominous, like he should have his own d20 rumors table.)

The last general type of tile in this set is one I'm calling Travelers. These are the littlest rewards, the tiny pit-stops, or maybe the points where we roll for outcomes that could be good or bad depending on the luck of the dice. In a TTRPG, these would be the NPCs you meet along the way, but one could fill an entire book with tables and paragraphs for them if one was crazy enough. . .

With all the tiles divided into rough categories, I decided it was time to hash out some rules and make a game. At first, I was thinking post-apocalyptic, but the art was so bucolic (and Organ Trail already did the zombie road trip in an awesome way) so I decided to go in a different direction. I call this game Ramblin' Band and it is the roughest of rough drafts. I might even go so far as to call it unplayable, but isn't that how first drafts always are?

My "rulebook" is screencapped below.

(Click image for full-size)

With the basic rules outlined, it was now time to assemble the additional parts I'd need for an initial playtest. To this end, I dug out four "performance dice" (glow in the dark) a mess of tokens, four dice representing the members of the band (purple for the vocalist, red for the guitarist, black for the drummer and green for the keyboardist) and, for giggles, four standees I took from an old Dragonology game.

I drew a random tile to start and our band formed in a cute little town by a river.

At first, there was no reason to perform in the starting town (band morale was full) but as tile after tile was drawn that was unplayable with the starting tile, the band had to start working their home town just to keep going.

Maybe we're just off to a bad start, I thought.

How wrong I was.

The pile of unmatched tiles grew and the band played their home town until they were so played out they couldn't boost their morale anymore. Some poor stranger finally manifested on the road into town and the band descended upon them like locusts, desperate for a new audience.

Except the drummer. The drummer decided that he'd had enough. He packed up his gear and decided to try his luck somewhere else.

In the end, everyone in the band gave up except the keyboardist. Playing a couple of gigs in a town that appeared down the way, he managed to keep his morale up for a bit, but in the end even he gave up. The game was lost, but truth be told, it was probably lost before it even started.

So what went wrong?

A lot of things. The nature of the board provided a steep difficulty curve the way I was playing it. The dice mechanics were swingy and didn't provide enough opportunity to replenish morale, which is the currency in this game. Some elements felt redundant (why have four band members when you can have one central pool of morale?) and in the end, even though it told an interesting story, it was too difficult to function or be fun.

So, how to re-work it? Do we throw out the game mechanics entirely or do we try to refine them?

A few more playtests proved my worst fears. Even with tweaks like "performances always boost morale by +1 unless a 1 is rolled" or with a group-shared morale pool, the game ended quickly and bitterly. In the end, there would always be one member of the band left, desperately trying to boost their morale while the map tiles kept piling up in the discard pile. It just wasn't working.

So I decided to scrap the whole concept and go back to my roots. I would re-envision this project as a map builder for a TTRPG.

This, of course, presented its own challenges. Single tile placement does not work with the configurations of the tiles in this game. To make tile placement work, one has to go back to the basics: draw 10 tiles and place the ones that work, building out a map from there.

To experiment with this, I drew ten tiles and played the four I could. I picked the village as my starting point, then put a little car there. Now I just had to come up with some lore and some rules.

Instead of going all nuts and building a system and a setting from scratch for a blog article, I'm going to use Cairn 2e, as I've been doing a lot of work with that system and getting to know it quite well. I'm also going to take some inspiration from Ultraviolet Grasslands and The Painted Wasteland, as I love that general vibe.

Instead of calling this Rivers, Roads & Rails, let's call this Redoubts, Revisits and Redirections, haha.

First, we start at a Town.

Looks like a nice place. Let's give it a generic name.

Kirksport (It's got a steeple and it's a port)

So what can our PCs find in Kirksport?

1. Ferryman: Take a boat down the river for 10gp per 10 miles (1 tile) moved. This fee moves your entire caravan (PCs and any vehicles.)

2. Academy: Spend one week and 500gp training. You may increase your STR, DEX or WIL by one point (Maximum 15 in a single stat.) 

3. Rail Station: Hop on the atomic train! 10gp per person and 50gp per vehicle to get to the next station.

4. Wave and Washer Tavern: 5gp per night to stay, 5gp for a good meal, 1gp for church chowder. Listen for rumors or get quests to go and fetch things from a nearby town.

This time, I built out the map just by drawing tiles and placing them as I could. In the end, the map I built out had quite a few destinations on it!

Taking the train out of Kirksport, our little caravan rode over a bridge, passed a mile marker and ended up at a little town I'm going to arbitrarily name Cornflower (the blue color of the building.) Without hashing too much out from scratch, I think we could easily posit some things:

1. Cornflower should have basic services, and some more advanced options of a more industrial nature. Maybe on the other side of that yellow van is a dungeon in the basement of the railway station?

2. Backtracking to the mile marker could provide the opportunity to pick whatever those yellow flowers are. 

3. Maybe under the bridge there is another dungeon area?

Then, of course, if you keep going down the road far enough, you're going to run into this guy. 

Maybe it's just me, but he looks like he's harboring some kind of dark secret. Maybe he's an exiled wizard and the sheep with him are all of the people who have wronged him, polymorphed and added to his herd. Maybe he himself can turn into a sheep, and the black lamb behind him is his alternate form. What does he keep in that little wagon? Can that dog speak English?

All in all, there's definitely potential in this game. If you found this interesting and you want to see me dig into this more and flesh it out in new ways, leave a comment. Could be fun! There's a lot of this world still that could be explored.

"All tiles sorted into similar types (note the large variety of different tiles)" 

by Matt S. on Board Game Geek.

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