Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Foreclusions



Temporal distortions in Voivodja very occasionally result in situations where outcomes precede the actions that caused them by several days. For example, a Dragoon Lieutenant may find herself in command of mercenaries that have not yet been hired, or a man may be sick on account of a custard he has not yet eaten. These premature events are known as foreclusions and can be immediately identified as such because they are accompanied by a quick moist crackling sound, as of batter frying.
Once a foreclusion occurs the foreclusion itself cannot usually be undone, but the presumed cause of the foreclusion (which will not yet have happened) can be prevented by making it impossible for the original presumed cause to occur and organizing a new causal event which would result in the same foreclusion--or at least one matching every observed property of the foreclusion.
  For instance, in the second example above, the gentleman's actual custard could be stolen before he ate it and he could be cursed so that whatever came out of his mouth turned into semidigested custard when exposed to air. If one discovered a foreclusion featuring a child crying over her dead mother, one could prevent the death by ensuring the mother's safety and then simply telling the child her mother died.  If the foreclusion featured the child explaining she'd seen her mother drown, then one could still stymie fate by protecting the mother and then dressing some otherwise unuseful woman convincingly in the mother's clothes and a wig and drowning her after inviting the child to watch.

From the upcoming A Red And Pleasant Land
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3 comments:

Dan Voyce said...

Hi Zak. Are there temporal disruptions in Voivodja, and if so how do they work?

Zak Sabbath said...

Yes. Magic.

Unknown said...

There is nothing schticky about this concept. It is quite honestly one of the most substantial gameplay elements that I have had the opportunity of reading. It is an engaging means by which a DM can employ causal outcomes without forcing their dependence upon a linear series of possible events, but may still be effected by the actions taken by the PCs during the liminal gameplay occurring between the result and it's causation. Which provides something unique, a third fucking result in what might otherwise be a continuing series of binarial outcomes, which are obviously perfectly fine, in view that they happen all the time.

But this could seriously save games.

For some seriously overwhelmed and/or stagnated RPGers.