Hello folks,

First off I want to thank everyone who downloaded this game from the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. As a hobbyist creator who saw their download count increase 1000 fold it was pretty overwhelming  and I appreciate the opportunity to be part of something like that. That said, my little projects were never the focus of that bundle and there are still tons of bail funds and other sorts of crowd funding endeavors that need support out there. If you have the means, please consider sending some money there way. I recommend the Black Hills Bail and Legal Defense Fund. I also urge you to support and get involve with your local prison industrial complex (PIC) and military abolition movements, and in general be anti-capitalist as capitalism is the influence of all modern problems.

So what I wanted to discuss today was making about world-building in our current, y'know, "situation."

In the passed few weeks since the bundle, I have felt motivated to work on Our Pantheon. I am not super happy with the version that is out there and have been working on an update off and on for a few months. Since this game is all about creating a fantastical fictional world you may think that the game's design is not influenced too heavily by our own, but that couldn't be further from the truth. While I do draw on stuff from mythology, fantasy, sci-fi, etc, you cannot mistake the influence of real world events had on those things and on this game.

In the current in-development version of Our Pantheon, there is a "Chaos card" mechanic which replaces the dice tables of the currently released version. These card have various events on them that allow players to define some things they may not have otherwise thought of. However, there are some topics that I'm erring on the side of a caution about. For example, there probably should be a card about a pandemic considering how historically significant pandemics have been, but do I really want to write one? Do players really want to have that experience right now? Similarly, I could (probably should?) have cards about protests, riots, abuse of authority, colonization, etc, but as of this moment I do not. (There is one about revolution, but I feel that's currently in a more positive light.)

Now players could always just ban cards they are uncomfortable with from play, and that is already part of the rules anyway. But I wonder what is more responsible of me as the designer toward player safety? I trust players to be mature enough to deal with tough issues, but I wonder if that is enough. I think the framing of such events would be important. Each Chaos card has a series of suggested questions. These questions are often very intentionally leading. Things like "Which deity is accidentally responsible and why?" and "How is it discovered that they are immortal?" Maybe that is the answer here. If the questions help nudge players to frame things a certain way. That way they get stuff like "the riots lead to the emperor dead in their throne room and the establishment of an anarchist collective" instead of "the authorities put down the riot and murdered all the rioters." Though maybe I'm overthinking things.

Thank you for reading and what are your thoughts on the matter?