Genre is Bullshit!

Star Wars is a fantasy setting. 

Hook! Stale take. You either agree with this, think I'm an idiot, or have some centrist-ass shit like 'science fantasy' up your sleeve. 

I don't have it in me to do a super aggro manifesto blog. Genre is bullshit. 

Why do we use it? I call Inkwarren a 'woodland fantasy' game in my hook for it. Other games that I'm working on, like Him & I ('a duet TTRPG') or the Savannah Project (in which I use edgy turn-of-phrase like 'post-punk') also use genre markers. Genres are a useful, flawed tool of communication. When I say 'woodland fantasy' you already have some idea of what Inkwarren is. 

But it's also bullshit. 

Star Wars, as a huge fan of the franchise, is an animist setting centered around a universe filled by and guided by the forces of magic and fate. It relies heavily on fantasy tropes like wizard mentors and dark sorcerers and prophecies, and imagines a world (galaxy) altogether separate from our own. Yet! It has spaceships. So in most circles, it's solidly science-fiction. It's fantasy though, damnit! Those are all fantasy things!

It's fun that Star Wars isn't easily boxable. There are nuances to all forms of communication and compartmentalization that makes this sort of label-defining humans love to do really difficult. Yet, it also means that we can subconsciously design around these incomplete labels, and art suffers for it. 

Here's the point: I like Powered by the Apocalypse a little bit. I also love the OSR, and the 'fantasy tactics' genre that has recently sprung from the D&D 4th Edition design philosophy. All of these things were supposed to define Inkwarren. 

But after almost a year of a weekly campaign in Inkwarren? They didn't. Inkwarren has become very 'trad'. 

I just finished a draft of Inkwarren. It is the most complete that the game has ever, ever been. I finished it, and kind of sat for a bit, and didn't feel anything. I didn't feel proud of this new draft. So I looked at it with a more critical eye. 

Inkwarren aspires to be an adventure game, and I think the feedback focused on that. Mechanics like Bonds or roleplay incentives or the Courage metacurrency pulled the game in a different direction, and as we focused harder on adventure, each of these got cut, downsized, or lost. Inkwarren was now... just an adventure game. Which is fine. It may even be a very good adventure game! 

But this draft of Inkwarren doesn't do anything that you can't do with D&D or Pathfinder. Of course, commercial success is a fool's goal here. Good, unique art, though? Is that foolish to seek? 

Inkwarren doesn't have to follow the genre conventions of a fantasy game. In fact, the best works of art in every realm break from their genre expectations! Inkwarren can be a game that combines the problem-solving focus of OSR design with the story-building focus of storygames. I can take queues from PbtA playbooks as well as design cues from Lancer or 4th Edition. 

Maybe I've been a little too gung ho about killing my darlings. Maybe I needed some of these darlings. Maybe I need to Dr Frankenstein it up and create a darlings-monster for this new draft (and I will). 

But what do I want Inkwarren to be? 

I want a world that you can sink your teeth into without pages of lore. That means deep, engaging exploration rules and tools for the GM to create unique settings. 

I want heart-thumping, challenging boss and miniboss battles, like a Metroidvania game. Maybe we use a Battle subsystem for this, and a simpler mechanic for smaller fights that won't rile us up as much. 

I want to inspire deep, personal characters that grow and change over the course of play. Maybe that means rewarding roleplay or hard choices, and giving characters multiple branching paths to grow depending on their choices. 

This is still going to be an adventure game, but maybe not just an adventure game. Maybe it's an exploration game, and a tactics game, and an intrigue game. It doesn't have to be one thing. I can make a Star Wars. 

Let's do it.