Dawn of the Orcs Development Log 1: The Recap
If I was a smarter, more energetic person, I would chronicle the development of my games stage by stage on social media, building up a following along the way. But I am not. I did all the actual game design, playtesting, writing, editing, and layout without documentation. Hereās my best attempt at a recap! Maybe Iāll do future dev logs about the process of kickstarting and fulfilling purchases, or about a revised edition.
The Idea Bank
Dawn of the Orcs combines a lot of game design ideas Iāve had for a while. I really enjoyed listening to the Ragnerdrok Actual Play of Juggernaut by Jason Morningstar, a LARP about a group of scientists in the early Cold War who switch on a supercomputer that makes disturbing predictions. Iāve wanted to do something in that vein for a while; I absolutely love the scenes in movies like Dr. Strangelove or Them where you see experts and leaders gathered around a table, getting verbal reports of dramatic developments, heatedly discussing options and finally making tense calls with high stakes. Thereās a real frugality in counting on the performances of a small group of actors instead of epic battle scenes to show the unfolding of world events, and I think it translates very well to roleplaying games.
Why Orcs? Iāve been working on a traditional fantasy RPG about playing Orcs. Iāll get into why I love Orcs later, but as part of working on this game, I already had a long list of possible traits and interesting abilities that an Orc PC might have after going through some crunchy character creation. I had also been tinkering around with a PBtA āprequelā to the trad Orc game, which would lean more into the concepts, and include custom rules for creating a unique Dark Lord to serve, and a unique origin story for the Orcs. At some point in tinkering around with these, I remembered my time with the WH40K RPGs.
Only War is an RPG previously published by Fantasy Flight Games that puts players in the shoes of the regular human grunts in the Astra Militarum of Warhammer 40K. At the start of each campaign, thereās an elaborate process for creating a unique homeworld and regiment of soldiers with distinct mechanical consequences for each player character. It takes a couple hours, is a lot of fun, and really comes alive when spliced with Microscope, as I did before one campaign. And then ā the group never does it again; after making their regiment, they play ordinary soldiers in a trad RPG style, which is also fun.
I got to play in a very fun Only War campaign run by Fortuitous, a regular member of my weekly RPG group. A memorable moment was when he covered a long time-skip by doing a choose-your-own-adventure style series of choices about how our regiment was deployed and the tactics we chose, with each choice having a distinct benefit and drawback, and some options having more elements of risk than others. It wasnāt a branching narrative, but since the impact of each decision accumulated into a holistic picture of how our regiment operated and the resources we had, there were still many possible outcomes and a feeling of free choice and impactful decisions. I think this was the key element of game design that I stole for Dawn of the Orcs.
A couple years later, I played in a couple Black Crusade campaigns ā another FFG game, this one giving the players the roles of Chaos-magic wielding warlords in WH40K. I noticed that a lot of players wanted to create their own army of minions ā which makes sense; the science fantasy setting of WH40K is chock full of clone armies, engineered super-soldiers, living weapons, cybernetic legions, mind-controlled populations, daemonic hordes, and the like. Black Crusade really doesnāt have rules for doing that, although it has some neat rules for creating unique individual minions that we abused the heck out of.
At some point, all these ideas clicked together: I could turn unique Orc creation into its own game, using a non-branching but decision-focused narrative, told through the frame of the creatorsā council meetings where they discussed ways to modify and improve the Orcs.
The Design
After the ideas Iād been kicking around for years clicked together, I wrote most of Dawn overnight. Literally ā the next day at work was not fun.
I originally imagined Dawn as a one-shot worldbuilding game, in the vein of The Quiet Year or Microscope, but more narrowly focused. That also meant a short game, playable in a couple hours. I knew I wanted the tone of the writing to evoke a ritual retelling of an origin story, but also a sense of grandiose self-importance that fit the story of forging orcs. Thereās a reason players in one of the Black Crusade games loved shouting āThe Age of Men is over!ā and I wanted to bring in that same energy. Since it was going to be a short game, I had the luxury of writing in that tone from the start.
I knew I wanted low stats and ideally a single d6. Brute and Clever are a traditional dichotomy of Orcs, hobgoblins, goblins, and the like. Numbers and Loyalty are used all the time in strategy games; I remember them as two hit point tracks from the mass combat rules in Matt Colville's Strongholds & Followers. Those became the four stats that describe the Orcs. Come to think of it, I encountered the Strongholds & Followers rules in another Fortuitous campaign where he rolled them out for a climactic final battle.
I already had a nice long list of individual traits for the Orcs from my trad RPG; they were originally intended for a point-buy character creation system. I threw them in a spreadsheet, picked out the best ones, made a couple more, and then sorted them between the stats they would give bonuses to. I made sure they werenāt perfectly divided up ā I find perfectly balanced games a little boring. Itās the weird little irregularities that bring a game to life. I intentionally tossed in one trait thatās just better than the others, and one thatās worse.
Iām particularly proud of the worse trait, which gives the Orcs a powerful innate sense of right and wrong. It has a drawback as well as a bonus, so itās not as good as other traits, which are mostly pure bonus. It always creates a fun moment when the players can turn the tone around and make objectively good Orcs, but so far, in extensive playtesting, they always find a reason not to. I put it in the same chapter as a trait that makes the Orcs intentionally cruel, and Iām a little disappointed nobody has yet to take the bait laid out and make Orcs that have an innate sense of right and wrong but choose always to do wrong. Iām sure itāll happen eventually.
Once I had the traits and their modifiers worked out, I divvied them up between chapters, trying to group them thematically; I thought that worked out pretty well. I also made sure there were more potential bonuses to Loyalty at the start of the game than the end. For the chapters themselves, I started each with a battle to set the mood and resources for the next Council meeting, then had the Council meeting be a simple vote between which traits the Council would add to the Orcs, with the Council always having to leave some on the table and sometimes having to pick between traits that they would rather not add at all. I drew broadly on both history and fantasy tropes for descriptions of the battles; Iāll leave it to the history buffs to call out the parallels they see.
One of my core beliefs as a GM and a designer is that players enjoy games more when they feel their choices have consequences. In games as in life, people often donāt realize when theyāre making a choice or what the consequences were, so a good GM highlights those choices for the player and makes the consequences clear, if sometimes only in hindsight. Dawn of the Orcs follows this design principle. Each chapter presents the players with 2-3 options they can pick from a list of 5; each option has a specific mechanical consequence and a flavorful narrative consequence. There are also four repeated options in each chapter that players can always choose to do or not, allowing them to move stats around without net improvement.
To give extra sense of narrative weight to decisions without a branching narrative, I gave the game a list of āfinal endingsā unlocked by having specific combinations of final stats. This makes each mechanical choice also a choice towards a certain conclusion for the game. I tossed in pure worldbuilding elements, also based on the stats ā hitting certain levels in every stat prompts a distinct worldbuilding question, asking for the players to describe a new custom of the Orcs that sets them apart from the people they defend. I even tossed in some lyric elements, in the form of a size tracker for the Orcs that doesnāt actually do anything mechanical or prompt any worldbuilding, but helps players visualize the Orcs theyāre creating.
Playtesting
Playtesting was a bit of a challenge for a game like Dawn that isnāt designed for the same group to play it week after week. I made it work by hitting up local acquaintances, TTRPG discords like Break My Game, the TTRPG Collective, the RPPR discord server, and a local creativeās group ā it was enough for several months of regular playtesting.
One nice thing about playtesting a short GMless game is that I could do true blind playtests ā toss the book at a group of people, see how they interpreted it, and make revisions at the level of the wording of individual sentences. It wasnāt one of my goals, but doing this lead me to create a book that works really well for new players without roleplaying experience.
Playtesting also lead me to introduce more of a tactical element to the game. Originally, the battle in each chapter required a fixed combination of stats. There was some element of guesswork and intuition to predicting what combination would come next. Multiple playtest groups asked for the ability to choose combinations. At first I felt it was contrary to the spirit of the game ā the players were supposed to be back in the lab building Orcs, not leading the troops in the field! I gave it a try though, and it added a lot to the gameplay. Specifically, no particular combination of stats can be used more than once. Less strategically minded groups can still muddle through ā defeats never end the game, just make the story worse for the Orcs - while more strategically minded groups usually devise a strategy of raising one particular stat at the start of the game and then pivoting midway to a different stat. That decision of when to make the pivot adds some nice tension. Playtesting feedback also lead me to include a table of character motivations and negative consequences for failed battles, both of which sharpened the game experience without adding too much extra length.
The biggest surprise in playtesting was seeing a handful of people ask to play the game multiple times week after week. I found this puzzling at first but extremely encouraging, and ultimately did add a series of alternate battles for replayability.
And thatās the story so far! No, not really ā I also had to work with the brilliant Plasmophage to design the physical product, and I still need to explain why I like Orcs so much. Stay tuned! And if youāre interested in Dawn of the Orcs, you can back it on Kickstarter here.
Sincerely,
Lyme
https://linktr.ee/lymerpg