In Loner, you create story momentum through a repeating loop of prompts:
- Where are you?
- What do you see?
- Who else is there?
- What’s going on?
- What is your response?
Then you can – if you want to – generate random answers to all but the last which, one would hope, you want to decide for yourself.
Loner uses 2d6 in series, which generates values from 1-1 to 6-6, so 36 possibilities, which may seem low, but prompts usually don’t come in isolation, and you are often rolling on more than one table, to get values like “nervous smuggler” or “disgraced soldier”. IDK the math, but combining tables ups the total possibilities.
And it’s in these tables that you can customize the game to pretty much any milieu you want. A “Random Vehicle” table in sci-fi is going to be a lot diff from sword and sorcery.
This is a snapshot of the tables in Kwaidan.
- ADVENTURE SEEDS
- HAUNTED ARTIFACTS
- MYSTICAL LOCATIONS
- RANDOM EVENTS
- SUPERNATURAL OMENS
- CURSED VILLAGES
- WANDERING SPIRITS
- MYSTERIOUS VISITORS
- RITUALS & CEREMONIES
- FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
- SHAPESHIFTERS & ILLUSIONS
- SEALED AWAY
- SPIRITUAL BARGAINS
- ECHOES OF THE PAST
- GHOSTLY PROCESSIONS
- SACRED RELICS.
- YOKAI CONFLICTS
- BLOOD TIES & FAMILY CURSES
- NATURAL DISASTERS & OMENS
- THE WORLD BETWEEN
- INSPIRATION TABLES
Spacer doesn’t have an index of tables, but it has, for instance, tables for Stars, Planets, Moons and Asteroids and so on. Very different from Kwiadan’s tables.
(BTW, “Spells” appearing on the Spacer CS/char sheet appears to be a boo-boo, as that is the only hit on Spells I can find in the rules.)
You can also tweak the character structure a little. Kwaidan adds Chi, Honor and Corruption to the basic Loner character design. My (eventual) Norse adaptation will add Wyrd and Ond to the characters, the latter being kind of the Norse “mana”.
I wonder how much of this design concept came out of OOP. If you step back, it’s like the core rules are the interface, and the various genre modules are the implementations thereof. You can extend the class beyond the interface, but you have to conform to certain loose base requirements.
The number and nature of those tables is not a hard requirement – Kwaidan has many more tables than Spacer, but then esoteric Japanese folklore is not as speculative as sci-fi, there are certain real-world precedents.
Dirge is fun, and Kwaidan is just dripping, potentially, with atmosphere, but eventually I’m probably going to do a Norse-themed mod.