Smokestack Spirits
November-December 2024
Platform: Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG)
Team Size: 6
Duration: 5 weeks
As the capstone for the UW Game Design Certificate, we were tasked with making a TTRPG in small groups. Smokestack Spirits was the result of our efforts. It is a companion-driven RPG set in a world in an age of two renaissances. In Carcora, industry is booming as human invention finds new highs. Outside those city walls, however, the gods of nature are trying to maintain and grow their power in the world.
Our primary goal with Smokestack Spirits was to make a TTRPG where the companions were key actors in the player experience rather than incidental characters that came when things got dicey. Initially, we weren’t going to tie in factions and minimize world building, leaning towards soft rather than hard world building. However, the ideas of “stressing” and “pushing” your companions were introduced, and as they were, the questions of how those came along and how they were subsequently resolved became pivotal to the overall design.
Once we had figured out the essentials, we spent a long time trying to figure out what rolls should feel like and how stats should contribute to your chances of success. For a long time, we were stuck between a dice check system, wherein skills and companions increased the value of your roll, and a dice pool system, where you need a certain number of successes to win. Our final solution represents a compromise, wherein the maximum number of dice was reduced, 6d6, and a spirit assisting in a task in which it is specialized can reduce the needed number of successes at the cost of stress.
Once the primary mechanics were resolved, the next most important matter was the world. The team’s goal was to make a world where the factions weren’t tied to morality, but rather had values and goals to adhere to. We wanted the companions and the players to be able to have opposing goals to further increase the tensions within the party and within each player-companion pair.
I was the team lead and lead narrative designer for Smokestack Spirits. As such, I took the brunt of the initial work in coming up with the factions, their goals, and how they would interact. The idea was that each city faction would have some parallel in the natural world. In the case of Mukaba, the god’s goals and the industry’s goals are the same. With The Living City, we wanted to consider what it would look like to have the natural spirits that power machines be the human spirit itself, creating a unique and uncanny union.
At the end, our last two questions were how to manage two entities on one sheet of paper, and what health should look like for these separate entities. We knew the spirit companions shouldn’t be killable, so after a long time of having health and stress separate, we realized that they should be one unit. The player health and companion stress are driven by statuses that get increasingly bad for each, ending in death for the player. The spirits have more positive effects for going above neutral stress into happiness, whereas the machines can take more damage (and therefore more stress) but aren’t able to develop the same bond and therefore go above neutral stress as much.
All of the art in the project was made by Dylan Losee and Kendra Dunsmoor except for the icon pictures for the factions, which were made by AI. Jennifer Mai made the character sheet and filled it out with her player character.
