storygames-tomfoolery-4444

[storygames-tomfoolery-4444]

Concept: Warriors + Catan

Idea spaghetti I just had this NO idea where it's gonna go

Ideas

Resources: prey, herbs, moss, wood, moonstone

Moonstone is a currency that enables you to talk to StarClan and do higher-energy growth things

Aim is to expand your territory and win VP w/ Clan milestones

Rather than building roads, cats patrol farther out

Actions cost food; more food means you can do more stuff

Moonstone enables you to get guidance from StarClan, occasional character gets magic powers, get permanent rank upgrades, and keep food fresh (moonstone is like super-ice that doesn't melt)

"Bandit" is the various threats against the Clans

Make sharing tongues a mechanic somehow

Monthly Gatherings where you can trade resources with the other Clans (usually only trade with the bank)

Events like Forbidden Romance, new Warrior Code rule

Something to differentiate the different biomes & cat strengths -- every team has some advantage

Possible secret/extra objectives for additional VP

Ways to earn VP or whatever the thing is

Having moonstone -- e.g. 1 VP per 5 MS

Building outposts (like mini camps for far ranging)

Herb collections -- dev cards have different herbs

Longest patrol path

"Biggest army" i.e. most passive action points per turn

Upgrading existing camps to "cities" -- but what do these high-productivity camps do? Fortified? Tunnels to make resource gathering twice as fruitful? Different every Clan?

Oh here's an idea. Decide on sensemaking upgrades and pay 1 of the target adjacent resource type + 1 moonstone to make the camp a "city" for that resource (or lump 1 each + 2 MS)

Outposts can upgrade the same way (just like settlements)

Dev cards with things like tunnels, Twoleg herb gardens, shortcuts to the Moonpool

Territory size -- and mechanics for quantifying, expanding it

Combine with ClanGen? CatanGen?

Actually I love that. Let clangen's events turn the game into a pseudo-roleplay, and influence the decisions I make

I'll make a bigger board so there's room for 3-4 clans, and randomly generate numbers & colors for resources

Gathering tile in the middle

ClanGen run ends when someone either gets TBD# VP or some specified event happens (then we count up VP)

I really like this. I'm gonna start a blog for it.

[storygames-tomfoolery-4444]

The Catan Roleplay Post

I have wanted for YEARS to find a satisfying way to do roleplay within the bounds of a Catan game. In the year 2025, we are finally tackling that. This post is basically gonna be a series of thoughts on that until, hopefully, I have a fleshed out Catan RPG I can play.

Random disorganized thoughts I want to note down

Might be able to bring in wb ttrpgs like Microcosm or Quiet Year

Need to figure out roughly how much IC time one turn takes. I think it's on the order of weeks or months.

What does a roll mean? Like, you harvested enough of the resource to count it as a unit? In that case, I think roll timing's gonna have to be driven by crop yields

Hey what do ants need to build their hills? Could we have an insect version of Catan? CATANT. Aphids as sheep, fungus "wheat"...

Honey and other valuables that appear randomly

Do ants make anything like roads?

Mmmm. Catan plus Microlife

Babies mine lava for metal, clay for stone. Catchers like bandits, steal a baby and occasionally decimate area.

Alternately, rolls rather than setting babies there determine the rate of things being built, soldier training, hospital

Characters that could be in the Catan universe

Merchants/transporters of the 5 resources

Lumberjacks, miners, farmers, shepherds, bandits

Port workers, people living outside the hexagon

Desert dwellers

King -- actual Catan players are probably this

Soldiers going for Biggest Army

Specialists for institutions in the development cards

Sheep! 🐏🐑 Xenofiction society of sheep :)

Stories that engage with the mechanics

Building/maintaining a castle/village with resources, microcosm

Building a road & the grow-cooperative thinking that goes with it

Values that derive from the resources you handle most

Different kingdoms w/ different values

Primer-esque life sim

Military life in a game that only uses them as bandits. ASAB.

Ocean dweller or outsider watching it from outside

Collaborative game where we eventually get to space

The effect having only 5 jobs has on pych & soc

Research: Does a Catan RPG already exist?

(Man I wish there were collapsible toggles on Tumblr precisely for posts like this)

Reddit: Catan-themed birthday party ideas

Points of interest

"Maybe yes LARP, and you just described the perfect game space to do it in! To LARP it, all you need to do is help the players create "characters" that represent their nations. Maybe a set of cards that have traits like "we love our sheep!", "always looking to make a deal" "desperate for roads", stuff like that, can give the players what they need to do some roleplaying. Then, they take their respective positions in the massive game space you've created, and people take their turns and announce trades and the like in this huge room. It actually sounds like a lot of fun!"

[storygames-tomfoolery-4444]

Some Magic magic thoughts

Every so often I start thinking about why the land types in Magic: The Gathering are that and not something else. My thoughts today link the colors to important processes with regard to life. Here's what I've come up with (eternally tentative). It's all about energy and life..:

Plains -- Sun -- Sunlight fuels the vast majority of life on the planet. Most easily collected in fairly flat, open spaces with forb-ish plants. Other biomes where you can collect white magic fairly efficiently: Desert, Chaparral, Savanna. Also solar panels and blacktop.

Mountain -- Fire -- Geothermal. The little energy not ultimately derived from sunlight comes from the heat under Earth's crust. Most easily collected in life-scarce areas close to the mantle. Other biomes to collect red magic: Tundra, Taiga. Also at geysers, thermal vents, and volcanic-adjacent regions.

Forest -- Green matter -- Living processes. Lots of energy derives from eating organic material. Most abundant in areas rich in biomass and biodiversity, such as tropical rainforests. Other biomes to collect green magic: Temperate deciduous/evergreen forest, man-made Agrarian. Also whale falls, algal blooms, regions undergoing secondary succession, and high-concentration city centers. Swamps (and other wetlands), to some degree.

Swamp -- Rot matter -- Decomposing processes. Carbon, hidden from the frantic piñata scramble of life, can store plethora patient energy. It builds no-longer-life slowly, in a shadowed mirror of plants' build-growth from will-be-life energy. In the short term, it becomes a precursor for life fuel. In the long-term, it balances energy, sinking it from the realm of magic altogether -- only to be used with knowledge and magic-immiscible metal. Biomes collecting: Swamps, other Wetlands, Caves, and Soil. Also Urban garbage dumps and anywhere there is plenty of dead matter ready to be processed. Autumn.

Island -- Water -- Fluid convection (and water as solvent). Water holds matter and energy between its polar bonds, and its great lung carries life up and over, unliving but making possible life. Water moves. Water facilitates. Places to collect water: Aquatic ecosystems, polar ice, clouds, any water where life is present in rather small quantities proportional to the solvent.

Some notes:

Note: Water is an outlier in this conception (which differs from my associations! Usually I think of Swamp as the odd one out) in that it isn't a direct provider of energy to life. It carries and buoys, but no one uses water currents as food. I think this is neat!

Brings up a possible future rabbit hole of life figuring out how to evolve itself steam power...

LATER

(To be fair, Swamp is also an outlier in another way: None of the Platonic Terrestrial Ecosystems [I split it at trop forest, sub, deciduous, boreal, taiga, tundra, desert, chaparral, grassland, and savanna] are devoted to the type. Wetlands, caves, autumn, and dead things exist in every biome, and you can't really have a thing dedicated to only rot for very long. So Swamp is less its own thing and more of the awkward necessary shadow to everyone else. Is this how Hades felt?)

(Kinda cool it gets to be the transition between magic and metal, life and technology, though!)

(However, by that liminality logic, water outlies as well. Wherever there's cells, there's water. Only two things are certain in life...)

This creates an emergent dynamic of 2 element supergroups: Landholders and Liminals. White, Red, and Green primarily associate with particular areas, where Blue and Black collect in the spaces between. Swamp and Island are simply the terrestrial areas where you can get a decent distillation of the respective type.

Another kind of grouping also arises: Originators and Derivatives. White, Red, and Blue are all their own thing, helping drive life. Green and Black are the life (and death) that give all that stuff reason, direction. They're parents and children.

Relevant earth processes: Radiation, water cycle, carbon cycle, rock cycle, organic nutrient cycles & one-direction energy flow. I was thinking about these as I worked through the post.

Missing but worth considering: Phosphorus and Nitrogen cycles

You may want to associate Swamp with entropy, but that is a different thing. Entropy isn't accounted for in Magic. It would be interesting to come up with worldbuilding, and possibly mechanics, that would do such a thing.

Though this analysis does well accounting for these types and associated ecosystems, it doesn't engage at all with how the magic flavors behave mechanically. I'll be thinking on why those five behavioral classes are what they are.

That autumn bit gave me another idea: Magic types tied to seasons. Gonna reblog with preliminary thoughts on that.