Month: August 2020

Continuing to work out what Villanostra‘s facilities should do. Still struggling to understand how corruption should work mechanically. Trying to figure out facilities that cost coins to operate. Hope I can get a playtest in before our Indy Tabletop Game Creators meetup on Saturday.

I feel like corruption is an important mechanism that needs to be added to Villanostra, because it can so easily be caused by Authority and Loyalty and Liberty, while Sanctity and Fairness at least partially exist to act as checks upon it. But I’m not sure how to model corruption in the game. I was thinking of adding corruption counters to the villagers, like the stress counters I already use for them. But that felt too personal. I think corruption needs to feel like a problem for the entire village, and needs to be the entire village’s responsibility, instead of just an inevitable thing that “bad people” do. So for the next playtest corruption tokens will be added to the threat bag, like raids and unrest. When a corruption token is drawn for a facility, every villager not morally aligned with that facility will gain stress. It’s a place to start.

While considering this, I’m also trying to minimize tracking for the villagers. I’ve been using an injury / illness status on the villagers, which makes them more likely to be killed and also reduces their effectiveness when they work. But I’m concerned that could be seen as a criticism of disabled people. So I’m using removing that status and basing its effect on stress instead: for each 3 stress a villager has, their effort is reduced by 1.

Also, when a villager works but generates no effort, the village gains 1 corruption. Hopefully stress and corruption will form a downward spiral that the councilors need to work against together.

Continuing this morning to analyze thematic intersections in Villanostra to come up with ideas for facilities. One thing I realized from my intersection chart is that, even though some of these intersections are strongly conflicted (e.g. fairness + authority, sanctity + liberty), each facility must be something that the players with those values must both want to add to the village. It’s okay to show the downsides of each of the moral values, but they have to be worth what they cost.

Some mechanism themes are starting to emerge:

• The Care moral value provides powerful benefits, but someone will have to pay coins for them.
• The Fairness and Sanctity moral values remove corruption.
• The Loyalty and Authority moral values tend to add corruption as a cost.
• The Liberty moral value adds skill tokens to the villagers.

I’m not exactly sure what corruption does to the village, but it’s not good. It should add stress to the villagers, and lower any overall score for the village at the end of the game.