Numb3r Stations Design Diary - Theme and Mechanics

The idea for Numb3r Stations, mine and Craig's solo spy rpg, came from a very simple question: are there ways of selecting prompts in solo rpgs that are also thematic?

Cards and dice work fine, but the mechanism is often divorced from the game - roll the dice to see what landmark the cartographer chooses, draw a card to see what omen takes place in your village. There is a disconnect between the mechanic and the theme of the game, and to be honest that's perfectly fine, but what if I wanted for the mechanic to be immersive?

Dice and cards lend themselves to a casino/gambling ambiance, which isn't really my jam, and tarot is *perfect* for esoteric/supernatural themed games, but I wanted to try something different. 

After thinking of various random number generators, I remembered number stations!

Number stations have been in the back of my mind for a long time as "something cool that exists". For those unfamiliar, number stations are broadcast sequences of numbers on shortwave radio - which means everybody can listen in on them, but only the person *meant* to receive the code, armed with a decoding one-time-pad, can get to the message. Try listening in one now on Priyom.org.

They flourished during the cold war because they are hard to pinpoint, easy to listen in on, and impossible to crack unless you have the one time pad. But you can always use their numbers to pick a prompt! As an added bonus, it is SUPER immersive for a spy game to listen in on real-life spy radio broadcasts, knowing that somewhere out there an agent is listening to the same to receive orders from their organization.

And the theme of an rpg that uses number stations to pick prompts - spies and coded messages? That's much more my wheelhouse!

Once I'd landed on a mechanic and a theme that meshed together, I immediately thought of Craig (Lunar Shadow Design) as a co-designer. He has tackled themes of cold war spies with Project Cassandra, and Signal to Noise is one of my favourite games, with its particular attention to the peculiarities of communication and messaging. It's a duet game but I liked it so much I played it solo, and I strongly recommend you read and/or play it to see what it was that made me think Craig was a perfect fit for the project. 

And boy was I right - turns out Craig has a penchant for elegant mechanics too, which was instrumental in developing the game. Though that will be in the next entry! Thanks for reading and I hope you decide to try Numb3r Stations! It's only a prototype for now, so any and all feedback is welcome!