Threadless
Derby of the Damned – a kind of game
So a couple of years ago I bought a t-shirt from Threadless called “Derby of the Damned”. A few months later I went to my first KapCon and came away flush with ideas and concepts for new adventures using many and varied different game systems. One of those ideas was based on the t-shirt, partly because I thought it would be cool to play a Roller Derby girl and partly because I thought Derby of the Damned would be a great name for a scenario.
This idea bounced around in my head for months, every now and then I would try to make it work with an existing system. I tired All Flesh Must Be Eaten (the Unisystem zombie game from Eden Studios), Savage Worlds, True 20 and even Best Friends. But none of them quite seemed to fit with my idea with how this should play out.
It was around about this time that I was introduced to shared narrative games, most specifically 3: 16 Carnage Amongst the Stars. Something about the extremely quick character creation, low-fi stat/ability system and free for all nature of the game totally clicked with my idea of what I wanted Derby of the Damned to be. This minor epiphany also made me think that Derby didn’t need to just be a one off scenario, but possibly a shared narrative game in it’s own right.
I worked pretty hard on it after this change in direction, getting a set of rules I thought I could work with together with the intention of Derby making its debut at Kapcon 18. However I totally chickened out at the play test stage and decided against it in the end. Since then I’ve pretty much shelved the project, and I think it might be time to pull it back off the shelf.
So I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts on the different elements that I’ve thought about during this design process to try and kick start it again. They will be around:
- Character creation
- How the dice roll
- Creating stories
Hopefully by the end I’ll be back in the head space to finish this off and actually get a game going.
The first post will show up sometime next week, so check back soon if you’re interested to see my somewhat bunny hopping creative process unfold.