Back to the Lab

Hello! I've been doing quite a bit of tinkering over the past couple of months, as The Firmament has been moving through playtesting. More on that in a minute. First...

What's New?

Two more of my games have made it to print for the first time! DO/OMED and Decomposer are now in stock at foresight-studio.com. Here's a quick summary of these two games:

DO/OMED is a game of existential exploration built on the Breathless system by RP Deshaies of Fari RPGs. Players take the role of inductees of the Namesake program, selected to venture outside their dome-covered utopia into the dangerous, crumbling outside world in pursuit of a mysterious signal to the south. When they can no longer go on, their name is passed to another—and with it, their consciousness. It's a 24-page zine with core rules, guidance for the GM, and tables of locations, events, scraps, and NPCs players might encounter out there. Plus, I think it looks pretty cool.

Decomposer is a GM-less worldbuilding game about breaking down the remains of a great creature and transforming them into features of a new world. Players take the role of a spore, a larva, a worm, or some other decomposer, and roll dice to match the pieces of the Thing that Came Before so they can be eaten. You'll illustrate bits and pieces of the colossal beast as you consume them. When each piece is digested, you'll draw the piece of the World After that it becomes: a river, a forest, a mountain, a sun. It's a bifold letter-sized game, and it comes with two character sheets.

What's Next?

The Firmament is coming along nicely. After a handful of very informative playtests, I'm proud to say this game is already a lot of fun... but it can be even better! That means I'm currently working through some medium-sized rules changes that will get the experience to a place where the narrative momentum rises to meet the vibes.

Should we talk about the vibes? Let's talk about the vibes, briefly. First, though: the game of The Firmament I'm running at Gen Con at the end of the month is full! If you're interested in experiencing The Firmament and will be at Gen Con, but didn't make it into that game, let me know (here or here) and I'll see if we can set something up.

Now, vibes.

The Firmament draws direct inspiration from many many sources, but especially dark fantasy media of the 90s and early 2000s (that date range is a little bendy, as one major touchstone is the beautiful 1985 movie Angel's Egg). I owe the biggest vibe debt to Baroque.

Baroque is a deliciously strange dungeon crawler that I experienced in the form of its 2007 Wii remake, but was originally a (reportedly, better) 1998 game for the Sega Saturn. It was accompanied by a visual novel I have not played, and it spawned some truly bizarre spin-offs (including a Frogger-like where you play as one of the monsters from the original). If you want to peel back the surface on Baroque, I recommend this website.

Baroque's lore borders on nonsensical. It involves an environmental/metaphysical cataclysm, the twisting of the concept of self, a fractured order of angels, an insane god, a guy with a very long neck who wants to bury himself in the ground, a guy who gives you a big gun, a guy with a box. In fact, it's mostly just a collection of weird guys.

Baroque calls on Judeo-Christian mythology (and obliquely draws a few concepts from kabbalah and tarot), and it just barely holds together thanks to the glue of Vibes. Its got an omnipresent vaguely biomechanical cyber-grime about it that makes the entire experience feel a little bit wrong, amplified by the poetic dialogue and difficult-to-parse lore. And that's exactly what I love in just about any game. The general vibe puts you in a place where, even if you can't parse everything, you still understand it on an emotional level.

For the playtest edition of The Firmament, I've quoted a few aesthetic details from the beautifully cursed Baroque World Guidance book (also the source of the above image).

Still, The Firmament is not Baroque: the TTRPG. (The layout is also going to change quite a bit over the next few versions.) My hope in designing this game is not just to share a few aesthetic details with Baroque, but to draw on its cursed core. To make sure players get a sip of that tasty cocktail of metaphysics and the uncanny, and to let the vibe fill in the gaps that come with trying to comprehend the divine.

Next time, let's talk about how you actually play this thing.

Looking to the future,

Ben @ Foresight Studio

Come find me on bluesky or the Foresight Studio discord server.