A toy game from the 2016 game design advent calendar.

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The full, uncropped prompt-picture. It depicts Chuquicamata, the largest open pit copper mine in the world by excavated volume. This immediately brought to mind thoughts of the environment impact; while I won't make any commentary on that (as the machine I'm typing this on would make me a hypocrite), it'd still make a neat premise for a game!

This game is mostly a hack of Grant Howitt's The Witch is Dead, with less of the juicy flavor and some of the structure of the Apocalypse World engine. I'd strongly recommend checking out "The Witch is Dead"; it's really very elegant, and a lovely little game. You can find more of his stuff here.

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You are one of Nature's servants. You and your companions are members of Her hidden order of protectors, tasked to protect Her against Her enemies. You each control one of the four elements, and together you wield all of Nature's power. Go forth and wield it in vengeance against Her foes.

Requires:

• A GM and some players
• A d6 for each player

Rules:

Each PC has four stats: Ferocious, Solid, Flowing, Fleeting. Assign [-1, 0, 1, 2] to these however you please. Additionally, each PC controls a different element of nature: Fire, Earth, Water, Air. Though the stats are based on these elements, respectively, a character might wield stone flowingly, or another create a solid barrier of fire.

When you do something dangerous, uncertain, or tricky, roll.

When you roll, the GM will say which stat to roll with. Roll an extra number of dice equal to your stat and take the best. If your stat is -1, roll one extra die and take the worst. See below for rules for resolving the roll. You may choose to exploit your elemental instability; if your Instability is less than 6, take it as a bonus to your roll, and cascade it.

When your Instability cascades, distribute your Instability score evenly among the rest of the party. Set your Instability to 1, and add any leftover.

For example, if your Instability is 4 when it cascades, your three other party members will increase their Instability by 1, leaving 1 as the remainder. Your Instability is now 2. If you were to take this as a bonus on the next roll, you'd boost that roll by 2, choose two of the three other players to give +1 Instability, and set your own Instability to 1.

Rolls are resolved by the following metrics:

• If you roll less than or equal to your Instability, it's a miss. The GM will make a move. Cascade your Instability.
• Otherwise:
  • If you roll 5 or greater, it's a resounding success
  • If you roll 4 or less, partial success. The GM will make a soft move, offering some cost or complication. Increase your Instability by one.

GM:

Create a big environmental menace. Could be the mine above, or polluting factories, or heck get real topical and make it a North Dakota oil pipeline. Don't be afraid to include a supernatural element, spice things up a bit.

When a player's Instability cascades, make a move. Decide its severity based on the value of their Instability:

1. Endanger or threaten the player.
2. Bring consequences to bear against the player.
3. Endanger or threaten multiple players.
4. Endanger or threaten the local environment.
5. Bring consequences to bear against multiple players.
6. Bring consequences to bear against the local environment.

Follow the guidance for soft and hard moves for Powered by the Apocalypse games (for example, the advice here advice for Dungeon World). If you'd rather not read a bunch of other stuff, just know that a GM move is essentially any time the GM adds to the situation. The bigger a cascade, the more the GM should add and the more permanent those additions should be.

Notes:

This game works by same mechanism for generating emergence that Abelian does; both try to create and exploit self-organized criticality for fun and profit. This game operates in a much, much smaller space (Abelian has 21 cascade-able cells per player, while this game has just 1 per player). Since it's so much smaller we won't see organization emerge as interestingly, but we combat this by ensuring there's no sink in this game.

Since there's no sink for Instability (that is, no where for instability to "disappear" into), it just keeps accumulating in the party throughout the game. This means misses happen more and more often as the game goes on.

Allowing the players to use their Instability as a bonus, and thus completely avoid misses, only accelerates the increase. They can even keep it up, driving their Instability up to 6, but they'll only guarantee failure after buying their success.

--Karaktakus the Increasingly Unstable

Prompt/cover photo: Wikimedia Commons