Thursday 19 November 2015

Psychic visions made simple

I was listening to Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff's discussion of introducing prophecies and prophetic visions into roleplaying games today and was reminded of a game I played recently. 

Mysterium is a board game which is basically like a hybrid between Dixit and Cluedo. All but one of the players play psychic investigators who are investigating a house where a murder took place. The remaining player plays a ghost, who communicates with the detectives through spooky psychic visions but can't otherwise talk to them. The ghost's task is to use these visions to indicate which of a range of possible suspects, murder weapons and locations is correct. 

So far, so Cluedo. The Dixit element comes from the visions themselves -- the ghost player gets a hand of cool atmospheric art cards to use to provide the visions. There's more to the game than that, but to be honest it was the combination of the gimmick and the cards that really worked for me. I think you could do that with prophetic visions in games. 

You could do it either way -- either just throw down some images, let the player decide what they mean and then have that be true, or actually pick a vision, deal yourself a hand of cards and go for it. I would probably use the latter concept with Everway cards, just because I got a complete copy of the game for £2 and there is basically no way in hell I'm ever going to actually play it. And there's some cool Ian Miller cards in there. 

I don't mean a system with a card-based fortune-telling system like the Emperor's Tarot or whatever; I mean some kind of vision-type system a la Changeling: the Lost or the type of visions you might get in any old game. 

In fact, I've got a couple of characters in D&D that could be affected by this. Yeah ... yeah. 

Well, all right. Plan. 

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