The keepsake as a design goal

#1

I’m in love with the nostalgic feeling that’s invoked by stumbling on old campaign notes. I’ve often attempted to build that into my games deliberately.

One of my current projects is a game about bards writing an epic about a hero. By the end of the game you’ll have collectively written a poem or song that you can keep forever.

A backburnered project involves collaboratively building a wiki that describes various aspects of a fiction, using the interlinking component of the wiki platform to connect everything. In the end, you have a library of information related to your fiction.

Collaborative map drawing games do the same thing.

What other games have a built-in keepsake?

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#2

Often times groups who have played Dialect will continue to use their created words later.

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#3

I just found out about Dialect the other day and this has just added to the many reasons I can’t wait to play it.

#4

I love the collaborative wiki thing, I’ve got a friend who builds those to keep track of her games, and making that extra work part of the game itself sounds really interesting.

As for other games, shameless plug, I’m currently preparing to print one where players are reporters, and capturing the headlines of the session in a “newspaper” worksheet is part of basic play.

What are some of your favorite map-building games? I recently picked up The Quiet Year, and it looks like it’s gonna be a ton of fun.

#5

Lexicon is a game entirely about creating a wiki of fictional encyclopedia entries. Like Microscope, people sometimes use it to create fictional setting information as a lead-in for other RPGs. But it also just creates a self-contained body of knowledge you can come back to later and read through.

In The Dream, you create a period accurate silent movie as you play.

They’re Onto Me (contained in this anthology) has you create a series of paranoid YouTube videos as part of the play process, that you can then share across media and go back and watch later.

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#6

The Skeletons ends with an artifact of play, a fairly detailed map of the tomb their bones lie in.

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#7

In Lizzie Stark and Nick Fortugno’s game This Miracle you build a series of objects that define the methodology of worship of a new religion. After playing you have these weird objects imbued with secret meaning. I played at a convention and afterward Lizzie put them on display in the hotel lobby as an anthropological exhibit.

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#8

I love seeing old notes and items. Sorting out my old RPG filing cabinet dredged up a lot of precious documents (and admittedly a lot more which were to be got rid of).

Microscope’s timeline is fantastic to see. I’ve taken photos of my group’s game as it charted the grimdark alternate future my group were trying to avoid in our Masks campaign.

In Monsterhearts I had my players write text messages to each other on post-it notes which were fantastic to read through years later and completely out of context. Fate’s a little similar, in creating this stack of aspects and boosts you can go back to in order to see the ingredients of a fun game.

My first Apocalypse World game used a map and opening scenario we made using The Quiet Year. We modified it through play, but it was a fantastic jumping on point for the campaign.

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#9

My Lovecraftesque campaign rules (coming soon from the Codex annual Kickstarter) involve generating a campaign journal where you record all your theories about the various horrors you create. If you play for long enough, it will become a sort of custom mythos encyclopedia, filled with detailed notes about all manner of eldritch creatures, as well as wrong scribblings of your early theories that turned out to be wrong. It’s sort of a keepsake, but you can walk into any game of Lovecraftesque and use it, so it never really stops being available as a game resource.

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#10

I created a microgame for the 200-word RPG challenge where a vintage cookbook was the resolution mechanic—you flip through and, based on whether or not you liked the recipe you landed on, resolve scenes with homespun or unsettling details. Lingering mysteries at the game’s end are to be copied down into the cookbook. So, if you play the game multiple times with the same cookbook, its margins will fill up with weird, unresolved plot threads from various games of small-town mystery!

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#11

I love the idea of campaign journals. I admit as someone with coordination problems I always feel a little jealous of the artistry some people have applied when writing Quill letters. I’m thinking my eventual artefacts of a Quill game might be audio recordings of the letters instead.

#12

To Serve Her Wintry Hunger leaves the players with a paper snowflake created jointly during play. As I recall, if the player succeeds, they take a big cut out of the snowflake, if another player helps, then they take a small cut out of the snowflake. That’s what you get for playing imps that serve Her Majesty in her hunt for food…

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#13

I have spent a not insignificant amount of time thinking about this since putting my Wintery Hunger snowflake on my shelf next to my Ten Candles tealight and EttinCon robot and crane. I adore these. I designed a game that asks you to create one (at https://sidneyicarus.itch.io/riderslastrites). Mine was about putting consequences into the world. Physical permanent consequences that will live on, and remind you of your choices.

I also like Ash McAllen’s Footprints (https://acegiak.net/2017/05/11/footprints/) which is a game where you edit the gametext as you play, and then it becomes a keepsake to be passed on to the next person playing it as a changed document. It’s a keen idea that I would love to see more of.

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#14

To piggyback on @Charlie mentioning Quill, De Profundis produces a series of letters for each player to keep.

Another game that plays with the idea of a keepsake, similar to the above-mentioned Footprints is Dictionary of Mu, where you add more entries to the “dictionary” as you play. After multiple plays the book will have extra notes on pages and extra pages taped inside, etc.

The game I am currently working on takes that Dictionary of Mu idea and runs with it. Players can add new “entries” to the world as well as new rules to the game. My plan is to release a pdf with multiple “empty” pages that you print and write in in as the play progresses. After a campaign you have your very own version of the game.

Also somewhat related - legacy boardgames - recent trend in boardgames that plays with the idea of a keepsake. Games like Risk Legacy, Pandemic Legacy or Seafall make you change the game (adding cards to the deck, putting stickers or writing on the board, etc.) as you play a campaign. When you are done you are left with a unique version of the game.

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#15

So far we have maps, letters (and plethora of other texts), wikis and even rulesets as keepsakes… I am wondering how one would approach incorporating other keepsakes (even things not normally associated with games?) in game design?

I vaguely remember a game that was part of threeforged event where players created a modernist/suprematist artwork. I think it was heavily inspired by early XX century Russian avant-garde I quite like the idea of creating a piece of art as part of the game. Any other examples of such games?

What about other physical keepsakes? Props maybe?

#16

I think an obvious answer here is LARPs and the work that goes into creating history, settings, and costumes, often in a very physical, real space. There are a lot of LARPs and LARPers that work to just create the world as part of the game, even if they aren’t involved in ‘wars’ or the larger mystery or story of it.

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#17

Adjacent and maybe worth its own thread are self-destructive games like Sweet Agatha, A Guide To American Soap Carving and The Blue Way.

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