Recently I tweetstormed through Dragonlance: The Fifth Age, a ‘Dramatic Adventure Game’ from the AD&D 2e era. I found a lot of mistrust in its audience and a lot of legacy pulled across from 2e that weighed down a system with a lot of potential. I thought it might be interesting to redesign it here, with commentary. First up, a tension: Do I reproduce the system and ‘fix’ the problems, or do I design something inspired by the system? I think I’ll explore both and weigh my feelings.

To begin with: There is nothing about this system that merits or scaffolds the Dragonlance themes or setting specifically. So I’m going to go generic fantasy. Let’s call it Oracle, because it revolves around this custom deck of 82 oracle cards. Baseline assumptions: Not tactical combat, GMs, PCs, an Oracle Deck instead of dice. If what I come up with is interesting and solid enough, I’ll refine it, polish it a little and release it for free as a system reference document with a Creative Commons license.

The Oracle is 8 suits of 9 cards, and 1 suit of 10, each with a colour palette, an associated character and and associated moon. So a card might be “Lord Knight of the Dark Serpents, Five of Swords, Crimson Blue, White Moon Rising”, which is a HUGE amount of interpretive information at your fingertips. 

With nine suits, we can make our characters more specific if they correspond with skills and not generic abilities. As an interim solution, I’m going to throw some FiTD actions into here for now:

1. Hammers – Wreck
2. Swords – Skirmish
3. Anvils – Tinker
4. Wands – Finesse
5. Eyes – Survey 
6. Moons – Prowl
7. Hearts – Sway
8. Crowns – Command
9. Dragons – Attune

For a colour scheme, relating it to the six emotions of the emotional colour wheel gives us the opportunity to bring specific emotional content to the deck if we choose. This gives us six colours, and thirty emotions to play with, with 21 ‘remaining cards’ cards that I’m sure we can fill from a thesaurus or another emotion wheel. This gives us a flexible way to improvise reactions, demeanours, natures, or relationships.

For the astrology scheme, using it to differentiate positive, uncertain and negative is useful, but a five way differentiation would give us degree: enthusiastic, positive, uncertain, negative and hostile. My favourite option: Simplified moon phases – new, crescent, quarter, gibbous, and full. That way, if we included waxing and waning, we could have a system that allows five or eight phases, as we choose to interpret it, and a little weight if we need it (full and new occur less than crescent, quarter and gibbous). 

I’ll put a pin in that then we’ll come back to creating it once we’ve seen what we need from the rest of the system. Next week I’m re-reading and reviewing the Anti-Sisyphus zines by Jared Sinclair, and after that, we’ll look at action resolution.

How do you feel about Oracle decks as basis for TRPG systems? Have I chosen useful categories or sufficient ones? Are there better ways to utilise the categories than I’ve considered? I’d also like to know if this is content that’s interesting, and if you’d like me to continue this series more often than fortnightly? Please suggest, comment or post any thoughts in the comments, or tag me on Twitter!

14th January 2022,

Idle Cartulary