"the world is on a clock" · Game Master's Laboratory

"the world is on a clock"

We did Stars and Wishes at the end of the last session. One of the players shared that he enjoys that "the world is on a clock" and how that adds tension, meaningful choices, and a planning element to the game.

The settings has a dangerous eldrich storm roll through every 5-9 days. They need to time their expeditions and projects around these storms. Sometimes the storms leave new problems for them to solve. Sometimes when they are out, something goes wrong, and they are worried about getting back in time. At the moment, this is a need to gather resources several days from shelter.

What I wanted to share is that this world clock is powerfully synergistic with the proactive structure. The decisions of what goals to pursue next turn into a planning not just on sequence of the goals, but on how much time is left and how confident they are in their estimate of the next storm [see code]. It is creating both a player and story need to understand the storm so they can accurately predict time for the next storm. It is creating a motivation to use the hexploration rules to speed travel and make it more predictable.

The player's comment was that it is so much more than wanting to get back to town for a ball two weeks away.

Context: The storm is a cuthulu-ian eldrich being trapped in between planes. The time between storms and the duration of the storms is a tap-code spelling out messages. When the broke the code they had "_are yo" [Who are you?] They had a lot of confidence the next storm was a u [8 days, 10 hours]. Right now they only have "Re_" and have a lot of uncertainty of what is next. It also created a goal of getting access to records from the academy of prior storms.

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"the world is on a clock"