One of the strongest aspects of the campaign I’m starting up to run in place of The Magical Millennium (which I wrote about yesterday) is the feeling of it I had in my head. Sure, I could talk about the core themes and how I imagined the general story of such a game might play out, but it’s a lot easier to build a set of touchstones I can refer to in order to indicate specific things about the game. These often come up in tabletop games, at the individual campaign level or at the ruleset level for games that are seeking to convey a particular feeling no matter the specifics of the game. For instance, one of my favorite games that I’ve never played (though I hope to change that eventually) is Beam Saber and the rulebook starts out with a bunch of references to various mecha anime to use as a touchstone. The general purpose of a list of touchstones like this is to get as many people as possible some idea of what the game being played should feel like. Beam Saber is a game about struggling to live during a massive galactic war that you can’t hope to influence, with an emphasis on either coming together or doing what you must to eventually get out alive, so all of the anime the referenced point in that general direction. It’s a good way for specific genre games to indicate what part of the genre the game is emulating. At the campaign level, it tends to get more specific about aspects of the particular continuity of a game that you’re playing through. Typically, I tend to start out with strong ideas that don’t necessarily need touchstones, images to help paint a picture of the world, some music if I’ve had the time to figure it out, and also some of my own writing if I’ve had the time and energy to put towards it.

This time around, since I finally pulled the entire campaign idea together just a few days ago, I don’t really have most of that stuff built out yet. I’ve got a song, sure, but that’s just specific lines here or there that I can’t really share without giving specific ideas away. Instead, as I talked with my players about what we’d be doing, we built a small list of touchstones collaboratively, some of which I’d have never thought of on my own. For instance, I know nothing about the Percy Jackson series and yet that was at the tip of everyone elses’ tongues the instant I explained my idea, which means I’m not going to be reading the Percy Jackson books, or at least some specific five of them, so I can develop a sense of the touchstone that all of my players had and either lean into it if it rings true or specifically avoid it if it rings false. It also means I talked enough to realize the way I wanted the world to feel for the mortals and normal folks living in it was akin to the way the world must feel to the normal folks living in the Witcher 3 game. Everything has the potential to be extremely hostile and unless you’ve got a tried-and-true folk rememdy you can call on, you’re stuck waiting around for someone else to show up and fix your problem since you need your barn back but can’t do shit about it being haunted.

It also leads to moments of inspiration where I’m trying to explain an idea and struggling, but the one of my players asks a question of something we’ve talked about, referencing something they know I’ve read, and I can instantly start snapping pieces into the explanation puzzle I’ve been struggling with now that I’ve got that to lean on. Like how all the player characters in this game are basically the kind of legendary, semi-mythical figures that the Lyctors are in the Locked Tomb series, given that most people haven’t met them and likely never will, so it wouldn’t be uncommon for people to not only make up wild stories about them and what they might look like, but also maybe not believe they exist at all, creating the opportunity for people to doubt the existence of a powerful player character right to their face. After all, the world is full of horrors that have become mundane because of how commmonplace they are, so why would someone who looks like just another guy be the mythical, legendary figure you’ve been led to believe will come save your town from rampaging lions or a hungry dragon or whatever. It just stands to reason that surely such a figure would leave either just as monstrous or some form of ethereally beautiful. You know normal people, after all, and they’re just not like that.

It was fun to develop the touchstones collectively. I might build some of that into my session 0 plans in the future, just to see if this was a one-off thing because of the general closeness built through this group’s year of heavy roleplaying and well-built trust, but it might only be appropriate if I wind up having some kind of pre-session 0 since I probably want the touchstones a bit more figured out before my players start to build their characters. These touchstones are supposed to ground them, after all. To provide guidance and some indication of the direction they should be headed. It’d be too late if I only figured that stuff out after all the characters were created. Plus, some players need that kind of information to build their characters at all. Regardless of how it works out in the future, I had a great time doing it this time around and it has me all fired up to think about what else could be a good touchstone for this game, let along what beloved media I might be able to assign my players as homework as a result. I should really do that more often: give my players reading or watching lists. I’m sure it’d be a lot of fun.