Design Diary — The Warlock, Revisited

Developmental editing is a sobering process. When you’re writing a game you get used to careless writing, leaving gaps that only you know for certain how to fill. For a game as broad as Seven-Part Pact, I cannot allow that level of ambiguity. The game is so meandering and so broad that ambiguity must be a tool used with specificity, not from thoughtlessness. But I’ve been working on her for so long that I’ve grown careless.

For the past month, the renowned game designer Avery Alder has been deep in the mechanical belly of Seven Part Pact, picking apart every errant sentence and challenging every unsteady little claim. It’s a humbling experience. I’m intimately aware of every small mistake in the game, everything I’ve been letting myself glaze over with a “well I’m sure the players will figure it out.”

I have a responsibility to take that scrutiny as the gift it is, and convert that energy towards creativity. 

…easier said than done.

So I’ve been in a bit of a slump on Seven-Part Pact ever since I came back from the UK. I have a lot of big ideas, but I’m worried that those big ideas may involve starting work on a fourth draft! Some part of me wonders if I actually want to finish the game, or if the endless tinkering isn’t itself part of the point. Maybe I’d be happier if the game was a series of disconnected blogposts and the players were forced to assemble my madness into coherency. 

But maybe my full-time job involves publishing the beast, so I should set that aside and focus on the task at hand. 

Let’s talk about the Warlock.

The Warlock

The Warlock is an interesting case in Seven-Part Pact’s design. In some ways its the iconic playbook, the one that cuts to the core of many of the themes of the game and lays them bare. It’s the toxic masculinity playbook. For a long time it was the standard I was holding other playbooks too. It still is — the Mariner and the Sorcerer both wish they had the same grip as the Warlock upon the firmament of the game. But the Warlock also has problems, and I’ve never felt more aware of them than when Kieron Gillen played as him during a recent UK playtest. 

To be clear, Kieron did a phenomenal job, and his character was unimpeachable. His feedback was incredible and brilliant, and he actually identified a couple things about the Warlock that I wish I could take credit for, because they’re absolutely brilliant.

My favorite observation was that the Warlock’s game is all about femininity and manipulation and treachery; that it actively undercuts the core capacity of the Warlock himself. That wasn’t consciously intentional on my part, but like all art — sometimes brilliant shit just happens.

But it also made me aware that the Warlock’s game is very fiddly, very low-impact, and doesn’t engage with the parts of the game that I want it to engage with. It needs reconfiguring, but I also need to keep the core of it the same. I want men and women to both feel powerful, but in different ways. I want the clans to matter. I want the structure of the king’s authority to be more tenuous, more about forming coalitions. And I want all of that to be simpler, less fiddly, and interact more with other people’s games. 

I should wish for a plum pudding and a fig tree, while I’m at it.

So with this impossible list of goals, how on earth can I start rethinking the Warlock’s domain to align more with these goals?

Using The Tools

Thankfully, this isn’t the first time I’ve revisited a domain. While working on the Hierophant, the Mariner and the Sorcerer, I’ve developed tools to help me manipulate the narrative framing of the Domain while keeping the mechanics I like. Some of these tools (having been discussed in past Design Diaries) include:

• Flip It Sideways: Identify the various components of the domain, and change which mechanical part signifies which narrative part, focusing the rules on the portions of the narrative you care about. Then, change the mechanics to reflect the implications of this change.

• Start Complex: Start by building the most complex and fiddly version of it possible, then cut away and refine by removing the parts that add too much overhead, rolling them into simpler systems.

• Think Abstract: Squint your eyes and identify the emotional vibes of the game in an ideal world. If you were to see people playing the game from a distance, what would it look like? Now what are the important components of that vision and how can you implement it?

Coming to the Warlock’s Domain game:

Thinking abstractly, I want it to feel like the king is sitting atop an unsteady consortium of various powers, and the clans are pushing nobles around like pawns to ensure their own selfish interests. I want it to look like a bunch of people crowded around a chess game, with the king in the center — both very powerful but also very fragile.

The Warlock’s game currently is composed of Nobles with Agendas and Secrets (which are the same, just public vs. private), whose Standing determines their influence over the outside world. What if instead, each Clan had an Agenda (whose secretiveness is determined through play), and the Standing of their various Nobles determined the amount of power influence they have over the rest of the game? 

I’ve sketched out the most complex version of this. It has each Clan with an Agenda, the Lords and Ladies their pieces they shuffle around the board, power and influence serving as an abstract currency that builds up in various locations, and the King as a fragile ruler, executing their will but always vulnerable to the pressures applied by the queen and his family. It’s really cool, but really convoluted.

Getting Closer

It’s hard to play Seven Part Pact when all I can see are mistakes I still need to fix. But also the game’s worth comes from the fun I have playing it. So how do I reconcile this tension? I simply must buckle down and solve the issues and then play a lot. It’s a relief to know that the game at least is extremely close to the state I want it to be in. The raw clay is all here, I just need to refine it into a game that can somehow be sprawling yet (somewhat) accessible, abstract yet evocative, and both clear and murky in the places it needs to be.