#or is mai'q a red joker?

[theaudiovore]

For more than a year now I’ve had a concept for a single player TTRPG orbiting in the depths of my mind, slowly accumulating mass and occasionally passing into the Observable Universe that is my conscious mind.

A concept for an Elder Scrolls single player tabletop RPG.

In its present conception I imagine it to be played with some rules, paper and pencil, and a deck of playing cards.

In this game the player will start as a Prisoner, and through their own actions, divine intervention, and the weight of prophecy they will become a Hero.

They will meet their Doom and enter the Tower.

The Wheel turns.

The structure of play will be meant to resemble an Enantiomorphic Event, as all Elder Scrolls stories do.

The Three necessary elements are of course, a Prisoner, a King, and a Tower.

The Prisoner is the player, a person who by destiny or circumstance will rise to fullfill the role of Hero. The Eternal Champion, the Imperial Agent, the Nerevarine, the Hero of Kvatch and Champion of Cyrodiil, the Last Dragonborn, the Vestige. They are noone and come from nowhere, and so they can be anyone and go anywhere. They are Free in ways others are not, while simultaneously being shackled by their prophesied Doom.

The King is the antagonist, the threat to the wellbeing of the world and the people within it. Their power shakes the stones of the Tower and threatens to end the dream that is the Aurbis. Jagar Tharn, Zurin Arctus, Dagoth Ur, Mankar Camoran and Mehrunes Dagon, AL-DU-IN. They enter the story at the height of their power, and so they have nowhere to go but down. They see themselves as the Hero because their pride blinds them to the truth.

The Tower is the prison you must escape, the fortress you must siege, the secret you must learn. It is embodied in every obstacle, it is where you will always return, it is where Doom unfolds. The Staff of Chaos, NUMIDIUM, White Gold, Red Mountain, Snow Throat. It is both obstacle and objective, prison and protection.

I imagine the player character as a collection of Tags that grows as the game progresses. You’ll start by picking some Tags that represent your background, skill set, and Sign. Something like "Dunmer, Thief, Marksman, Charming, The Serpent” or “Nord, Warrior, Axe, Endurance, The Steed”.

Play proceeds by drawing cards from a deck of standard playing cards, 54 cards total with the Jokers included. Each suit would represent a type of encounter. You decide based on your tags and the story so far how the encounter goes, and sometimes you advance a clock. The Doom Clock.

Red suits represent opportunities and advantages. Diamonds for Material (Equipment, Magic, Relics, etc) and Hearts for Living Things (Creatures, Companions, Guilds, etc). Jokers represent divine intervention.

Black suits represent dangers and obstacles. Clubs for Material (Traps, Barriers, Curses, etc) and Spades for Living Things (Creatures, Bandits, Guards, etc).

Red Jokers represent Aedric forces like Yffre, Auri-El, and Mara. Black Jokers represent Daedric forces like Namira, Hircine. and Jyggalag.

You Draw a card and think about how your Tags let you resolve the situation it represents. Most of the time, you can choose to skip a card and ignore that encounter. Perhaps you decide that the danger is too great, perhaps your equipment is better than what you’ve found. Some cards cannot be skipped. Some events advance the Doom clock, bringing you closer to the final confrontation. Some cards advance the Doom Clock even if you skip them.

The Doom Clock represents the passage of time, your steady march to the finale. The Prisoner always confronts the King eventually. It always happens that way. Time is a living being, and while AKA is patient he cannot stay still for long. While the world waits for you, it does not wait forever.

I don’t have much beyond these concepts yet, but I have been thinking about this a lot. I know I want to explore things like Fate, the Aurbic Pattern, Duality, and the Cyclical Nature of Time. I know I want to include elements of the strange deep lore and apocryphal texts that make up the internal mythology of The Elder Scrolls. I know I want to reach for the sensation of a lonely exploration, of being burdened by prophecy, of being the one that the whole world waits on, the axle that the world turns around.

Something I need to do is play games that may share tonal or mechanical elements with what I want to achieve. In my ~20 years in the tabletop roleplaying hobby I have spent the vast majority of that time with various editions of The Dragon Game and others of its style. It is only in the past 5 years or so I’ve been expanding my breadth of experience, seeking out other styles and modes of play. This thing I want to make is outside my current sphere of competence, so I must increase my reach to match my grasp.