Unwritten: System Reference Document/Starting a Game

The explorers in the Cavern have been holding their collective breath for years now. Yeesha’s ploy to draw off the Bahro seems to have worked, but no one has heard from her since. The DRC abandoned the Cavern, and many explorers have followed their lead.

The skeleton of a new society has begun to grow. Those who have remained behind have clustered into small groups; some are happy to cooperate and others just want to be left alone. Those that remain behind have been struggling with the question on everyone’s mind: what now?

Your game is your answer to that.

Discussing the Setting

The first step in putting together an Unwritten game is discussion. The players and the GM sit down and talk about what they want to do with the game. The GM will usually have some ideas about the game they want to run, and the players will have ideas to bring to the table as well. Let’s look at what you should think about as you start your game: the big questions and the key decisions. After that, you will collaborate with each other to fill in the details of your game.

The Big Questions

The future of D’ni, the Ages, and the Art are in front of the characters, and that opens up some serious questions. When you start your game, you should decide which of these questions interest you and your group the most, or if there is some other question you would like to address.

What should the future of D’ni be, and what is the explorers’ place in that future?

What purpose does the cavern serve now? Should D’ni be rebuilt anew? Are the explorers the spiritual successors of the D’ni people, or is this the beginning of humanity’s turn as stewards of the Ages?

What will the explorers do with the power the Art provides them?

What happens when someone has the ability to seemingly create whatever world they want? What will explorers do with such abundance? Will they see themselves as masters of the Ages, like the D’ni? How will they treat the peoples they meet and what will they do with the worlds they find—learn and explore, or exploit and dominate?

How will the Art change the world?

The Art is, if you will excuse the pun, a game-changer. What happens when the rest of humanity finds out about it (if they ever do)? How will it change society? What new societies will develop? What new technologies will we discover because of what we may encounter? Will space travel simply become passé when you can just open a book to go to the next universe over?

What is out there on the Great Tree of Possibilities, and what does it mean?

Just what is out there? What sorts of new things can we find? Are there other civilizations who know the Art and what are they like? What is the possibility that the characters my discover something that fundamentally changes their understanding of the universe?

Key Decisions

Once you have considered those big questions, here are some decisions you need to make about your version of the setting.

The role of D’ni

D’ni is a hub for everything that happens in Unwritten, but you should decide how central will D’ni itself be to your game. Is it just a place to stop over on your way to exploring another Age? Or will the cavern be an important backdrop for your game? What you choose here tells you some of the details you need to think about.

If D’ni is central to your story, then you will need to think about how many people are actually in the cavern at any given time, and what influence the various factions will have over the population in general and your characters in specific. The Ages in the game will be secondary locations and whatever drama happens out there will have effects back in D’ni. However, if D’ni is just a place for quick stops and the occasional interlude, then you won’t have to sweat these details. More of your focus will be the Ages that you will be visiting.

Accessibility of the Art

Explorers have been slowly rediscovering the Art, but how much of that will actually be in the hands of the players?

If the Art is completely inaccessible to the players, then travel to the Ages is entirely dependent on what Books they can find. Getting to a particular Book may be an adventure in itself, whether they are blocked by physical obstacles or unhelpful NPCs. It means that the place in the Age where the Book links to is inherently a key location, since all incoming visitors will end up in the same place. Access to a new Age is a significant event here, and requires discovering a Linking Book.

On the other end of the scale, if the Art is central to your game and some or all of the characters are Writers, you have significantly different possibilities. The availability of new Ages is defined by the skill, vision, and time of the characters (limited by the availability of appropriate books and ink). Solving a problem by Writing an Age that has what you need is a potential option, with all of the ramifications that come with that. Mistakes may literally have cosmic implications.

A middle ground may be that your characters have the ability to create Linking Books, but not Descriptive Books. In this option, new Ages may not be forthcoming, but travel between existing Ages will be more flexible as characters write Linking Books to new places in existing Ages.

Puzzles

You can’t have a Myst game without talking about puzzles, and it’s important to discuss up front how they will fit into your game.

Ask everyone how they feel about puzzles. If not everyone likes the idea of explicit puzzles in the game, then building your game around them is a bad idea. Also, some of your group may dislike particular types of puzzles—that’s another thing to get on the table right away.

Discuss how you want your characters to interact with the puzzles. Will puzzle solving primarily be the purview of players, or will the abilities that your characters have that you do not affect puzzle solving? Answering this question will tell you how often you should bring in game mechanics to provide hints or solve problems.

Also, consider how other elements in the setting will interact with puzzles. Devices like KIs will keep characters in contact with each other and allow them to record information, or they may be able to contact knowledgeable NPCs when they come up against something they can’t decipher. Similarly, Linking Books (especially Relto Books) provide easy ways of bypassing physical obstacles. If those solutions don’t appeal to you and your group, discuss limiting access to them, or removing them from the setting entirely.

Collaborative Game Creation

Now that you have looked at the big picture, it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty. Below we present a structure for filling out your game, designed to give everyone a chance to have a hand in how the game is put together.

While we present the process in order, that’s not a hard and fast rule. If you have a definite idea for, say, how your characters fit together, start there and build the game around that. Or you may wish to start with the type of characters you want to play and then build your setting choices from there. Feel free to move back and forth through the process in a way that seems natural. Just make sure that all of the steps in the process are addressed in some way.

It’s easy to draw a blank as a part of this process. That’s fine; if you don’t have an inspiration, skip it for now. You can come back to it later. And if you still don’t have an idea you like, just leave it. Those are good things to focus on as you play.

Declare Preferences

Go around the table and ask each person to describe what they want to do in the game.

Everyone is likely to have something that they want to do. It may be as general as a category of activity (solving puzzles, exploring new places, etc.) or something more specific (exploring the limits of what is possible with the Art of Writing, preventing greedy explorers from exploiting native populations, etc).

GMs, don’t forget that you are a part of this process. Declare the sorts of things that you want the game to be about and what challenges you want to present to the players.

Now, go around the table again and declare what they do not want to do.

This is the place where people at the table can throw up their red flags. There may be elements that particular players find offensive or stressful. Or, there may be things that people just don’t like dealing with, feel have been done too often, or give the game a tone they would rather avoid for this particular game.

What is important to remember here is that no one has to justify what they do not want in the game unless they want to volunteer that information. The purpose of this question is to ensure that everyone has a game that they will enjoy, not put people on the defensive for their preferences.

Build a Framework

It is now time to create the framework, the basic details of your game. This is the scaffolding that functions as the foundation for the rest of the collaboration. There are sample frameworks at the end of this chapter. Mine them for ideas as you like.

Address the features we discussed at the beginning of this chapter.

• What are the big questions of the setting? Choose one of the ones discussed previously in this chapter or use them as a starting place for your own.
• What will the role of D’ni be in the game?
• What is the role of the Art in the game?
• How will you handle puzzles and puzzle solving?

Declare Details and Unknowns

Each player gets an opportunity to declare an additional detail about the setting. Players, if you want to see something specific in the game, this is your chance to point it out.

When you declare a detail about the setting, you have a few options:

• Add a new detail to the setting.
• Declare something specific about one of the details that already exist.
• Change a pre-existing detail to something new.

Potential details can involve any of the following:

• A location
• A person or faction
• A relationship
• A current event
• An important event in the past
• An environmental factor
• A particular item
• A technology

Next, what are the unknowns, the unanswered questions that the characters (and the players) care about? Each player now gets a chance to declare something that is specifically unknown. Phrase this as a question and write it down.

GMs, use these ideas from the players to build your scenarios and mysteries. Try to work them into your existing plans or use them as inspiration.

Establish Issues

Every setting needs to have something going on that the characters care about, often a peril they want to oppose or a mystery they want to solve. These are the setting’s issues.

You’ll come up with two issues as a group and write them down. The issues should reflect the scale of your game and what the characters will face. They’re broad ideas; they don’t just affect your characters, but many people in the world. Issues take two forms:

• Current Issues: These are problems or threats that exist in the world already, possibly for a long time.
• Impending Issues: These are things that have begun to rear their ugly heads, and threaten to make the world worse if they come to pass or achieve a goal.

The default number of issues is two: Either two current issues (for a story solely about trying to make the world a better place), two impending issues (for a story about striving to save people from threats), or one of each. The latter option is common in fiction: think about the stalwart heroes who work against some impending doom while already discontent with the world around them. Additionally, the unknowns defined in the last step can be the basis of an issue.

Establish Game Aspects

Turn the issues you have into aspects that you could conceivably use at different times in the story (often as compels to the protagonists or as invocations for foes, but clever players will always find other uses for aspects). Write them down, and then if you need to add a little bit to remember the context or some details, write those down alongside the aspects.

If you’re new to making aspects, hold off on this for now. You’ll get quite a bit of practice making aspects for your characters. Once you’re done with character creation, turn these issue ideas into aspects.

Build an Age Library

One of the key elements of an Unwritten game is the Ages that the protagonists will find themselves in. Each player will create an Age to add to the setting’s Age library. The GM will use these as backdrops for the game.

For each Age, write the answers to the following questions down:

• What is one distinctive physical characteristic of the Age?
• What is one important fact about the Age’s history/past?
• What is one thing that is unknown about the Age?

Establish the Protagonists

Here is where the GM and players begin to discuss what they want each individual character to be, how the characters know each other, and why they are together. This discussion informs character creation, especially the choice of High Concept.

The characters will be interacting, so it is important for the players to figure out why they are interacting and why they might continue to do so in the future. A lone wolf character might have a neat concept, but if a character ends up spending all of their time away from everyone else, then they are essentially playing their own game on the group’s time. This doesn’t mean that characters can’t split up and don’t get unique moments to shine, but the game is a group activity and the dynamics of the characters should support that.

Also discuss how characters might conflict with each other. Some groups have fun when the characters are at odds; some do not. That should be worked out up front.

Filling out the details of your characters is a part of character creation, covered in the next chapter.

Wrapping it Up

By the end of this process, you have:

• A setting framework
• A list of what the players and GM want to do and not do
• A list of details
• A list of unknowns
• A current issue and an impending issue
• Two game aspects
• A list of Ages
• A reason the characters are interacting

With these in hand, the next step is to design the characters themselves. Move onto the next chapter: Character Creation.