Michael Curtis (Goodman Games)
CREATOR
8 days ago
Project Update: Design Diary #2: Lou Hoefer
Greetings, backers!
At this stage in any funnel, all of you should be down at least one 0-level PC who perished horribly in some fashion due to bad luck, lousy dice rolls, overconfidence, or poor planning. Hopefully, however, you've all remained unscathed from such calamities in real life.
The campaign continues to chug along, tapping the flagstones with a 10' pole and making the chump with a Luck of 3 go first. Over the weekend we cleared another stretch goal, the first of the classic Goodman Games bumper stickers to adorn your wizard van, Trapper Keeper, slow-moving pet, or even--gasp!--a normal car. This brings the current total stretch goals for the campaign up to 20 adventures, two ribbon bookmarks, the character sheet bookmark, and one hilarious bumper sticker. We'll be posting a poll shortly to determine which of the bumper stickers will be the first to be unlocked. And remember, only backers will receive the beefy, expanded The Book of Funnels, but if you've not backed the campaign yet, there's still time.
Speaking of time, one person who has given us some of his is Lou "Luau Lou" Hoefer. Lou contributed one of the MCC funnels to the book and, in addition to writing the adventure, has some thoughts about his design process which may be of use to others. Take it away, Lou!
Design Reflections For “War for the Warbot”
by Lou Hoefer
Those that know me, know I don’t play or run many funnels. So, when I emphatically agreed to write an MCC funnel for Goodman Games, I had two immediate tasks: discover what makes a funnel great and come up with a unique theme in the “color pallet” of Mutant Crawl Classics.
The theme was easy. The muses had conspired to bring the perfect confluence of things into my zeitgeist. A week earlier I was down a Google-propelled rabbit hole of childhood toy memories. One memory was these wind-up, pseudo-model kits from 1983 called, Zoids. These things looked like a plastic version of those wooden dinosaur skeleton—BUT, these toys had cockpits for heads with little mech pilots inside! In the same space of days, I was thinking about Gamma World (a spiritual ancestor to MCC) and an article from Polyhedron #53, “American Steel.” It detailed a lost mech that could be unearthed by PCs. What a treasure! Mechs walking the Gamma World landscape—my 14-year-old mind was blown! At the same time, I became aware that the generation below me was inhabiting an ever-larger demographic within the hobby. I tried to consider what interests/touchstones they might have and realized that their '90s Power Ranger Battlezords were in the same space as my '80s Zoids. From all that, I was inspired with an MCC mission into the confines of an animal-shaped mech and the possibilities and callbacks that could offer.
Then there was the desire to analyze “funnels” as a phenomenon. It seemed there were four concessions:
- They are bloodbaths.
- They teach and have opportunities for using the system’s rules.
- They filter characters into different classes.
- They reveal the meta and Appendix N of the game world.
By design, my response was:
- So, you want a gruesome meat grinder? With DCC that means death trap dungeons and horrible monsters. MCC has the advantage that you can literally put the PCs in a meat grinder. That is, some big machine that tears them up. So, as I thought about that, I imagined PCs trapped between giant gears and smashed under pistons, and I thought, yeah, a big machine…like a Battlezord or Zoid
- Teaching the rules would be easy. This was a scavenging mission right into the belly of one of these beasts. That offered saving throws against moving parts and deadly gases, combat against pests that had come to inhabit it, artifact checks, and Radburn conditions.
- I tried to highlight certain genotypes throughout the experience. There are spaces where security is useful, pushing toward the Rover class. There are mutagenic effects to kickstart a Mutant or Manimal class. There are some AI security features that might highlight the benefits of a Plantient, and I threw in some venues for a PC to become a Shaman meeting the Patron AI (HexaCoda) present in the mecha’s mainframe.
- As for meta concepts and Appendix N, I think the adventure drives that MCC juxtaposition of a stone age culture rubbing up against the far-advanced technologies of an ancient people—victims of their own designs. It paints ideas of horrific wars waged with boundless weapons and the wastelands and mutated creatures left behind. It introduces the idea of archaic alignments (the Technorabble) Patron AIs, and radburn - all important meta pieces for MCC. It also touches on Appendix N materials. The rival scavenging gang has a sort of “cyberpunks without a clue” nature that echoes a lot of post-apocalyptic literature. MCC’s Appendix N nods at the Thundar and Kamandi properties. These Kirby works have really cool smash-up villains that are both hi-tech and a bit wizardy. I tried for that aesthetic with the techno-helmet-wearing energy being that awaits at what might be the adventure’s end.
There it is, all this serendipitous stuff that inspired and guided me, and the funnel that came out the other side!
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