Design Notes: Ages & Challenges in Seven-Part Pact

I’ve been struggling for a while now with a central conflict between two desires buried within the Seven-Part Pact. One desire was to make the game as much of a sandbox as possible for experienced players, something that can serve as a repository of endless creativity and explosive challenge. The competing desire was to make it possible for less-experienced players to sit down and integrate into the game at all, which would necessitate a tight tutorial experience and successive gatekeeping, so that I wasn’t overwhelming anyone who wanted to try it out. These desires prompted me to make contradictory choices at different points in the design process. “What if I make the Warlock Domain as complicated to start as initially possible” I’d say, while at the same time limiting other Domains to keep them feeling new-player accessible. I was adding more and more steps to the process of starting play (such as relationship questions and more and more picklists) and while those steps were a lot of fun for more experienced players, they were eating up a lot of time for onboarding people into the game.

This isn’t great! It was pulling the game’s design in two different directions, and I couldn’t find the balance. That is, until I was playing the board game ARCS with a couple of beautiful women (it’s important for the story, obviously, that the women are beautiful) and I was thinking about how the “let’s sit down and play a board game” version of ARCS was structured in many ways as a tutorial for the more convoluted campaign play. Aha! What if Seven-Part Pact could do something similar? What if the starting position of the play materials were dictated by the group’s experience, and so the game itself is arranged differently based on what sort of play experience you’re looking for? And what if I could combine this with an idea I sadly have had to cut from the Sorcerer’s Domain, that there are multiple different Ages to the Pact’s history?

Aha!

It’s kinda a wonder it took me so long to figure out how to implement this. It’s an idea that’s not uncommon in more traditional RPG spaces, and certainly the idea of “scenarios” shows up all the time in board games and war games. I knew something similar to adventures or modules would be useful for Seven-Part Pact, it just wasn’t until I figured out how to combine it with the challenges around starting positions that the system clarified itself.

So here’s how it gets to work now. When you start a game of Seven-Part Pact, you choose an Age to begin with. There’s four ages I know will be included in the game:

• The Great Conjunction — a focused 6-8 hour play session designed as a tutorial for new players, with a clear ending and discrete goals.

• The Age of Awakening — the start to a campaign for newer players, which locks away a lot of the more powerful spells / complicated mechanics at first and grants ways to access them.

• The Age of Dominion — the start to a campaign for experienced players, that opens the door wide open to creative choices and self-expression from the get-go. 

• The Age of Apocalypse — a focused 6-8 hour play session for extremely experienced Wizards, who want to take on an impossible challenge and overcome it.

The Age dictates the position of the stars for the initial month, and what character creation, companion choosing, and Domain setup all look like. It also adds special rules that adjust how play occurs. For example, the Age of Awakening adds a rule to the Grimoire preventing mythic-import magic until specific books are acquired. 

I have other ideas for Ages too (what about a 2-player age? A solo age? An age focused on a historical event of some fashion? Ages that add special rules or put one Pact member in a PvP position with the rest of the Pact?) but I’m going to focus on creating these first four Ages first. The Great Conjunction will serve as an explicit tutorial for the rest of the game. The Age of Awakening will also serve as a tutorial, although it’ll assume the player is at least familiar with the rules and structure. The Age of Dominion and the Age of Apocalypse will drop you right into the deep end with maximum creative and logistical control. Something for everyone!