Preface

This post, as with the however many are created in the following months, will be concerning the table-top roleplaying game ATONE, which I have made. At the time of creating this post, as well as, presumably, most of the posts which follow it, ATONE is not yet fully complete. It is mostly done, however, and the purpose of these posts is to give individuals who are interested in this game a bit of history and a glimpse into the design process behind it once it comes out. This post in particular will focus on the very beginning of ATONE's design process.

History of the Creator

I'll keep this segment brief and relevant to the game except for one quick note, and that is that I'm not very religious. I wanted to note that because ATONE had very religious themes early on (some of which it still carries mostly for their tones and the game's theme), and that was due primarily to a scholastic interest in various mythologies and the theologies of prominent religions.

Firstly, at the time of creating ATONE, I have done no professional game design work--though I did attend a game design course at a vocational tech school for a year and have made five other games, two of which were complete but not very good. Part of the goal of this game is to see if I am capable as an independent and new designer to create an enjoyable experience.

Secondly, I have similarly done no professional illustrative, layout, or editing work, this game is my first foray into all four of the thus far listed fields. Another goal of this game is to test my skill in the above fields, especially illustration.

Lastly, I have played TTRPGs and read their rulebooks for about six years now, and have drawn upon a number of the games I have enjoyed for inspiration in the creation of ATONE. The chief, though not sole, sources of inspiration are: Feng Shui 2e, The Forbidden Lands, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine, Knave, and The Cypher System. There are also YouTube channels which I draw inspiration from (namely Questing Beast, Seth Skorkowsky and Matt Colville) as well as blogs I've looked at (primarily The Alexandrian).

History of the Game: What was First, and What Came Before It

The first piece of ATONE I ever devised was character growth through interaction with sin. You can see that now in the Sin Arc, which focuses on replicating character arcs from books, shows, and movies, but it was initially much more closely tied to the word atone itself. Originally, ATONE--called Gunsmoke in the Badlands at the time--was actually about characters atoning for literal sins. As you can guess, the example setting for ATONE, The Badlands, comes from this previous game, though it was much more bizarre and fluid.

The core mechanic centered around that literal atonement. In the beginning of character creation, each player picked a sin for a character to atone for, with atonement being tied to a track. The GM could applies penalties when the character's sin was relevant, and that would grant a small amount of atonement (with the goal being to represent a sort of karma), but in order to entirely fill the track the PC would have to take independent action and atone for the sin themselves. Over time, picking a sin became a whole system where characters could choose between different types of sin (venial and mortal, with a unique definition of original sins) and where sins broke down over time. Then I paused and thought about how fucked up a lot of sins actually are, and how difficult it would be to run the type of game I like to in a system like that, with the games I run tending to be somewhere between a Monty Python film and Johnny Mnemonic. I also noted that atoning for a sin through a track felt very artificial, and that this system didn't focus on the part about sins and atonement that I was interested in, which was developing as a person. So I scrapped everything and started over.

The New Foundation

I figured, after I scrapped everything, that I needed to do a bit more research into how exactly games are made before I could continue, so I spent a lot of time picking up games that I thought had interesting mechanics and reading books and articles on game design.

After I read a bit on game design, specifically The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, I began to think about what the core experience I was interested in delivering was. Eventually, I settled on recreating positive and negative character arcs where the individual grows though some kind of dramatic change which would be analogous to atoning for a major sin or committing a major sin, with Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine and The Cypher System being some of the core pieces of inspiration in how this system would eventually turn out. Fate holds an honorable mention here as well. 

After deciding on that core experience, I wanted something to wrap it up in to make the game both a little easier to create and to make it a little more marketable by giving it something more understandable to latch onto. I'm personally not big on narrative games which focus around very specific characters or stories (a la Lady Blackbird or something like Masks) so I decided to wrap a rather large genre around that experience, that genre being action-adventure. These decisions give us the foundation for ATONE, the dramatic action-adventure TTRPG, which most of its systems were some how built for or around.

What's Next

After I had that core idea down, I began to actually formulate the basis for the mechanics you can see in the rulebook. I won't cover those here, however,--I want to go much further in depth on them--and will instead save them for future posts. This marks the end of this post for now.