Why A Fallen Cycle RPG?

Reflections on four years of playtesting 

Happy holidays, everyone. At least as much as we can find it in the world, such as it is. 

It’s hard to believe that four years have passed. Let me start by stating that we are not quite there yet; we’re still approximately one to several years away from being ready to crowdfund a true first edition. As the saying goes, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right” …or at least as well as possible. I will continue to adhere to the philosophy that you should only initiate crowdfunding campaigns when the materials are ready to ensure fulfillment within 6–12 months after a successful campaign concludes.

Getting to the starting line is its own finish line. 

This period of early development has still provided ample opportunity for deep reflection on role-playing games and game design, from a meta-perspective than ever before. Aside from running and participating in Fallen Cycle playtest campaigns, I’ve explored numerous systems I hadn’t tried previously, and many hours of discussions about game design, thanks in both instances to my friends’ assistance. These include Cypher, Unknown Armies, Invisible Sun, Fate, and Blades in the Dark, along with familiar favorites like Chronicles of Darkness. There are things I do and don’t like about each, and some of that discovery plays into what I’d like to do with the Fallen Cycle system.

The combined impact of pandemic attrition and the exhaustion of enforced “back to normal” policies have made the halcyon 3–5 session a week days of 2020 and 2021 seem like a distant dream. Despite that, I’m still managing at least one or two a week.

In the future, there will be time to delve into the intricate questions regarding the interplay of system, story, and game. For now, however, I’d like to focus on how this particular project has developed, and why I think it’s significant.

I’ve been playing RPGs fairly consistently since I was nine years old, so it’s funny that it’s only been in the past few years that I’ve started to ask myself what function it serves for me. Why do I keep coming back?

So far as I can tell, it’s mostly two things…

The first is the obvious appeal of having a shared activity with friends. I simply find open-ended games like RPGs more engaging than Chutes and Ladders. It’s not necessary for every RPG to deeply explore a character or dilemma to be enjoyable. Sometimes a game is just a game, Doctor Freud. 

However, the narrative potential within RPGs is clearly a part of the allure especially for those of us with a creative bent, particularly if it involves writing, acting, or illustration. I spent a considerable part of my childhood scribbling notes about imaginary characters and the worlds they inhabited in notebooks. In retrospect the process of exploring these things that may have put me on the path — you want to draw your character, and so you start to want to learn how to draw. 

I can’t imagine I’m the only one. 

I prefer systems that facilitate a certain type of experience. I’ll get into what I mean by that in a moment. I think this starts with the system gently pushing player behavior in a particular direction or within certain constraints for the character, rather than rules that limit player options. 

In school I was an essay kid, not a multiple choice one. Give me 4 multiple choice options, I’ll write a 2000-word essay about why none of them are adequate. (Or maybe all of them are, for different reasons). 

When my focus is on the collaborative story, I don’t want the system to tell me what my only options are, I want it to guide my top-of-mind sense of what that character can do within the world they inhabit. At best, the system helps cut through all the implicit assumptions that need to be made to make a decision as a character who inhabits a world that we do not. 

Games that prioritize limited options and strict adherence to the rules can overlap with roleplaying — dungeon crawls or war games for example — but as the narrative gains importance in regard to the activity, that approach can become counter-productive. I don’t want to feel like players are in competition with the rules, and much less with the storyteller or one another. You don’t need to play D&D for long to notice how frequently the forums (and many tables) can descend into something resembling a legal debate. 

This is baked into the system. So I knew right off that we wanted to frame things much more openly. 

“Success” is what’s interesting, such as when the well-laid plans of the storyteller meet the unmitigated chaos of a group of players, or when the random element of the dice indicate a direction no one had considered. The unexpected is often interesting, but not always. Even a plan executed flawlessly can be entertaining in its own right, when it’s the exception rather than the rule. 

“What’s interesting” around a gaming table becomes just as much of a puzzle as it is in a novel, and some of the same rules apply. Repetition is a good example. No repetition and there is no pattern, nothing to latch onto. Chaos that is just chaos. Too much repetition, or in the wrong way, and it becomes tediously obligatory. 

Regardless of the system in use, I’ve noticed a tendency over the years to revisit specific character archetypes and scenarios, returning to archetypes of characters again and again, refining them through subsequent gameplay. This iterative process has significantly influenced my approach to fiction writing.

In fact, this is how the Fallen Cycle began. I will delve into this further shortly.

The combination of collaborative storytelling and the unpredictability of dice rolls in RPGs often reveals unexpected facets of characters that might stay hidden in solitary writing. Sometimes, these revelations lead down paths better left unexplored, but that’s the beauty of it being a game — it’s more casual and less consequential than working on a novel.

Pacing isn’t just a matter of formula, and can’t be done by rote. We’ve all seen movies that try to follow the orderly formula a bit too closely. So-called “gamification” shouldn’t only seek to drive players towards and away from certain behaviors through incentives — its more critical function seems to be finding the rhythm of pace within the chaos of the unexpected.

Transcribing our table’s antics into a written form was never the goal. The dynamics of RPGs don’t always translate well to books, comics, or movies. This holds especially true when your gaming group isn’t made up of professional actors. Yet, there’s a unique charm in creating a space where it’s okay to start with a concept inspired by something like “The Witcher” and end up with something akin to “It’s Always Sunny In Rivia.”

The gaming table gives you the freedom to find out what happens when you shrug your shoulders and go there anyway. Ideas will probably present themselves that can be easily repurposed later, even if it’s otherwise a trainwreck. And if they don’t, well. You’ll always have that time Trazlor the Magnificent got kicked out of Aretuza for fucking a Greater Air Elemental in a public place.

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that when you write a story around characters you’ve played through multiple iterations and imagined circumstances, they feel more “lived in” than those developed solely in your head. But recognizing this consciously was a minor revelation. In hindsight, a blend of that revelation and my interest in comparative mythology and occult systems led me to attempt to amalgamate these elements before it was clear to me that’s what I was doing.

Coming from that background, the use of tarot and other symbol systems with the understanding that they reflect our learned, and yet effectively inborn pattern-matching tendencies is old hat. Projection of meaning and pattern matching requires a specific symbol to give our mind something concrete to latch onto. Even a meaningless sigil will do. Use it consistently for a while, and it’s no longer ‘meaningless.’ That’s 101-level stuff. And yet, I have to admit it’s only been fairly recently that it was clear from a top-down perspective that these divergent paths all lead to a singular destination.

Although neither the art, materials, nor presentation are finished, I’ve put the notes about the 12 aspects of the Fallen up, so you can get a sense of what I mean.

Initially, the complexity within the mythos might appear overwhelming, but the essence of the Fallen Cycle is its underlying patterns — and those need to be relatively simple. This is a fundamental design principle I’m trying to stick to through development. Each element serves as a gateway to the others: “Many Entrances. No Exits.”

While some stories are more accessible entry points, all paths ultimately lead towards the same destination: death and recapitulation in the next cycle.

Each time you learn something new, and build up memories (and certain abilities) for subsequent incarnations. Or perhaps you instead feed those memories to a patron Feyn, doing the same for subsequent generations of Oyun.

Over the years, RPG campaigns have subtly influenced the development of the Fallen Cycle, a process that became more deliberate from 2020 onwards. Comics now in development trace their origins back to these RPG sessions, with these narratives in turn inspiring future gaming storylines. This interweaving of different mediums has made the creation of a dedicated RPG system for the Fallen Cycle a logical step. We’ve gone Full Ouroboros.

The alpha version of our playtest rules (currently at v1.1) invites players to engage with a distinctive aspect of our world: that of Fallen and their Scion, or whatever we ultimately wind up calling their mortal avatars. The transition to a public beta will occur when I’m ready to broaden the test group beyond my current circle.

Although rooted in esoterica such as the Zodiac’s triplicities and elemental alchemy, the game’s twelve archetypes and core mechanics are designed to be intuitive and engaging, regardless of the player’s background knowledge. This approach aligns with our core design philosophy: creating a system that is relatively simple at its core yet rich in the complexity of its variations.

In the vast sea of indie RPGs, the necessity of a Fallen Cycle RPG might not be apparent. We’re not aiming to reinvent the gaming landscape. Instead, our focus is on crafting a system that embodies the unique tropes of our mythos, blending elements of mythology and pop culture. We’re creating a narrative playground where stories can unfold in as varied and dynamic a manner as the Fallen Cycle itself has evolved since the publication of Join My Cult! in 2004. (Technically JMC! Is more of an easter egg, a story written by one of the characters in Party At The World’s End very loosely inspired by real world events, but who’s counting?)

My overt aim at this stage of playtesting is to produce a system that I enjoy running and playing in, which is well-suited to the types of stories we’ve been creating in the alternative history sandbox of the mythos.

I hope that we will one day invite others to create their own mythos within the Fallen Cycle, and for more engagement with the stories that have emerged from decades of shared storygames. But as long as I’m gathered around the table (or VTT) with friends, the time spent is far from wasted.

Why? Why not.

-JC 2023