It Takes A Village: Project ZOP

An Introduction

Inspired by conversations prior to and following a recent playthrough of Jay Dragon's Seven Part Pact I want to take the time to explore more the concept of settlement building in RPGs. More and more I appreciate RPGs with subsystems, minigames and additional material that is attached to the main system in a fashion that links the two. Some examples of this beyond Seven Part Pact would be Blades in the Dark's crews, in town socialization in may OSR games, or the layers of hexmap versus dungeon in other OSR games. It also allows me to potentially explore some themes I find appealing in games. 

An example of the crew sheet from blades in the dark, which includes elements of base building.

So therefore the premise of the game is this: The players are young men and women who are in a position to guide the development of their home from humble beginnings to something greater. Rather than growing by their experience, it is by the investment in their community and that communities investment in them that allows them to become more potent¹. If it has a thesis statement it is: "We are all made by our communities and those communities reward our actions unevenly". 

A photo of a group of people at a barn raising. A staggering number of people are sitting or standing on the wooden frame.

It is my hope that this will allow me to explore themes of Personal & Community Growth versus Restriction & Constraint as well as the balance of community desires versus individual needs. In thinking about this position, which could be reframed as desire versus duty, I was put in mind of a system that I like conceptually but have not had a chance to explore as much as I desire. The Fantasy Flight Legend of the Five rings system. From here I will discuss, across separate posts the Underlying Conceptual Model, Initial Setting Concept, Expected Core Activity, and Core Systems (divided between different phases of play).

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1 This actually mirrors some models of OSR advancement where gold extracted from the dungeon becomes XP under conditions - here that condition is reinvestment, but I digress slightly. ^↩