The Court of Alphame
Project Type
TTRPG System
Skills/Tools
- RPG Design
- Worldbuilding
- Technical Writing
- The Homebrewery
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Project Overview
The Court of Alphame is a complete TTRPG system that focuses on political intrigue and social combat. I wrote and designed the entire system myself for a class, then updated and refined it later. TTRPGs were an entry-point to game design for me, so being able to make a whole system from scratch was a ton of fun. The Court of Alphame showcases my aptitude for designing elegant and engaging game systems, as well as my skills with worldbuilding and designing settings that are custom-made for a specific game experience. Scroll down to read more about this system and world!
Worldbuilding
I built an entire custom fantasy setting from scratch for this project. While not expansive, I designed the world to provide the players with everything they needed to fulfill that "political mastermind" fantasy they are looking for. I focused on the elements that players would interact with most, and fleshed out more minor details to make it feel more detailed and internally consistent. In the end, I got an interesting and unique setting with great political roleplay!
The Political System
Being a game about political intrigue, one of the first things I built when developing the setting was the political system; the entire gameplay experience was contingent on this element of the world. I made a simple, semi-democratic system that would be easy for the players to engage with at earlier levels, while still allowing room for big challenges and potential power-plays later in a campaign.
The Conflict
Good settings need some kind of force to drive conflict. For this project, I chose to have the nation that the game took place in be in active war with another neighboring nation and losing. Because the effects of war on a nation are so expansive, it made it easier for players could find a driving force their PC's personal conflict and backstory. I also added, a supernatural source of conflict that would upset the political ecosystem of Alphame in an interesting way.
The Hook
An enticing fictional setting has some kind of unique, gripping element to get people interested. For this project, I developed a soft magic-system based around Curses, where 1 in 4 Alphamian citizens was born with the ability to cast one terrible curse during their life. This makes the setting distinct from other similar settings like A Song of Ice and Fire or Dune, and has major ramifications on the most important aspects of the world: the political game.
RPG Design
The Court of Alphame was developed to be a rules-light system, striving to serve more as a storytelling mechanism than a game. So, I tried to make the mechanics simple and largely open-ended, providing players with the tools to tell really cool political dramas without bogging them down in mountains of specificity and edge-cases.
The Core Mechanic
For the core mechanic on this project, I made a simple dice-system with bonuses and penalties, and dynamic thresholds to determine success or failure. By leaving it open-ended, and explaining why the dice and modifications work the way they do, players and GMs can easily use it to quickly resolve any conflict that could present itself during play while remaining simple.
Codifying human interaction is not easy, but I developed a system to handle Social Encounters that fulfilled the need for an extended form of conflict that the players had to handle collaboratively, while still feeling realistic and being diverse enough in its application to handle all forms of extended confrontation.
Social "Combat"
The Organization System
The most important and unique secondary mechanic that I made for this project was the Organization System. It is a set of rules for how the political group formed by the players interacts with the world, gains or loses resources, and progresses alongside them. What started as a way to explain why anyone would work together in this setting quickly became on the game's coolest features.