Oz in Ashes
Oz was a glory before the fall. Infused with illogic. Awash in the radiance of plenty. The four lands of this country were peculiar but peaceful. Magic suffused it all. Brought forth by an act of will from the supreme sorceress Ozma. Her powers pinned the darkness to the outside edges and kept the realm a secret from the rest of the world. A secret from us.
But the light that shone with such force created pockets of shadow that none could fathom. The directional witches, each a power in their own right, were pulled out of balance. The North and South, long bastions of good and order, succumbed to clever rivals. Evil crept in, as it does, knife in hand, and when the work was done the four witches were aligned at last. Allies and vileness, evil, with only that in common. It was enough. The cursed four strode from their distant corners, marshalling their hardened minions.
Ozma was overconfident, blinded by the zealotry of her subjects, and the first and last coven overcame her. The Emerald City, at once the soul of Oz and its beating heart, shattered as the magics swelled and tore at the order of things. When the battle was over, Ozma was gone. The magic that had shimmered between the threads of reality had dissolved. Oz was a normal place, almost. And then we arrived.
That was just a segment of something that I wrote to brainstorm an idea I had to make a tabletop role playing game about a post-apocalyptic version of Oz. What happens in a world based on magic and whimsy when the darkness takes over?
Welcome to my design diary for a game that is technically called Oz in Ashes right now. This blog post is adapted directly from my solo podcast, and sharing this process in public is intended to keep me honest and thoughtful. It will make sure that I actually have to think about the decisions that I make instead of just doing whatever is easiest because it is late and I am tired. Justifying them to an audience is the first part of testing the game.
Why Oz?
I kind of fell upon this idea randomly when I was cleaning out books in this attic. I was stacking a bunch of stuff up, and I had a bunch of my role playing game books over on one side and a bunch of my Oz books that I had inherited from my mother on the other. On top of one pile was The Wizard of Oz, and on top of the other was MÖRK BORG. The first thought that I had when I saw those two next to each other was, oh fuck yeah, we need to have an Oz Borg.
I have been spending years and years tweaking every other game that I have played, from first edition D&D all the way up through the OSR stuff that I have been playing with lately. I decided that this was the moment to finally see if I can make something deeply satisfying to play and GM, and to learn about how it all works as I go.
So why Oz? It is kind of the same answer that I would give about Fallout: New Vegas. To me, Oz is a creation of the human imagination that almost feels too ridiculous and too frail to survive. Much like walking down the strip in Vegas, it feels like this is a place where it’s post-apocalyptic version was already in the minds of the people that were building it.
I like the idea of people from our world having to venture into Oz. They are "interlopers." They are from our world circa 1900, and they are going into an alien landscape. How will a professional explorer interact with a place where physics and logic are only just reasserting there elemental dominance? How will they be limited by their tools and procedures?
Mechanics and The Cognitive Burden
I wanted the game to be nimble enough to suit the environment. I didn't want to have lots of giant stat blocks, and I didn't want to carry on with the cognitive burden that I have carried as a Dungeon Master for fifth edition.
Here are the core concepts I am building into the system:
Lightweight but Tactical: I feel like the OSR games offer an extraordinary amount of freedom and reward creativity in a way that more complicated games fundamentally do not. But they also lack a degree of tactical verisimilitude. The characters need to do more than just swing, defend, swing, defend. I want to design something simple that encourages a tactical way of thinking without burying that thought pattern in pages and pages of rules. It feels like there is a sweet spot that I can locate without toppling the rest of the rule structure.
Inventory as Character: What is in your bag is limited, so you have to prioritize. No bag of holding for you to find that will change the way you relate to survival. I have enjoyed watching my players in Shadowdark and Cairn figure out how much of the loot they can carry and still have enough food to survive the trip home. I’m looking to build a game that keeps everything on a page, preferably half.
Fast and Dangerous Fighting: I want to make sure that fighting is quick and interesting. I do not want to have a two and a half hour slog against four orcs in a square room. I am not interested in creating situations where there is a perfect mathematical balance between the players and the opposition. We have been playing that game for so long, it feels like everyone can reverse engineer the whole thing before the first d20 clatters on the table. Combat shouldn’t be a guaranteed fail state, but it should always have consequences and unpredictability.
The Game Master Experience
You have to go into designing a game like this with the game master experience front of mind. If the GM is not having fun, they are going to share that not having fun with the other people at the table.
While I love procedural generation in video games, I am not a huge fan of it when I am running a tabletop game. Random charts are an awesome resource for brainstorming or situations where character agency puts the GM on the back foot, but I don’t want to structure the play experience around them. There should be surprises in the course of a game session, but not everything needs to be a surprise. The game I produce should have enough stuff in it in terms of lore, geography, and a bestiary to inspire game masters to tell their own stories. I do not want them to have to roll on charts in order to make anything happen. I want them to be able to pluck a map from anywhere and decide that it is their little corner of Oz.
That’s a good place to start. I have been busily illustrating some character archetypes and a few distinctly Ozian monsters just to put my foot on the gas, and I look forward to sharing some more of the details with you as we march toward a playtest. Along the way I’ll be bouncing between the crunchy bits of rule design and some other, more philosophical concerns around designing TTRPG content for public consumption.
The Dodgy DM.