Spectres of Brocken - Designer Commentary 01

This started out as a thread on Twitter, but I thought it would be useful to also have it documented here.

Spectres of Brocken: Full Cover is the expanded version of a game I made for the #sadmechjam back in 2019. It's a game about trainee mech pilots at an academy developing relationships and skills together who then meet again years later as ace pilots on the field of a pivotal conflict.

This commentary will also cover Spectres of Brocken: Quarto Edition, which was my initial jam submission, since they share a design lineage. I'll probably still talk more about the Full Cover edition since that's one I'm more keen on developing at the moment.

The game started from these 4 lines. I wanted to make something about how mechs, especially in mecha fiction, are often reflections/amplifications of their pilots. We make machines to help us do things that we couldn't do alone. Mechs, esp humanoid ones, are an extension of that.

I'm obviously very influenced by Friends at the Table and CounterWEIGHT's motif of "We could have made them look like anything and we made them look like us" and Austin's opinion that mech stories are stories about bodies.

They function not just to extend what we can do, but to also obscure and distance the impact and results of the violence that their human pilots perpetrate. Every Gundam Teen learns eventually that inside the metal shell that rips your friends from you is bone and flesh and memory.

I chose the name Spectres of Brocken based on this concept, referencing the phenomenon of Brocken spectres, and the cover is actually a distorted image of a Brocken spectre. The mech is your shadow, amplified.

When I decided to split up the games, I chose Quarto Edition for the initial version since it fit on 4 pages (I know quartos have 8 pages ok, please just let me have this) and Full Cover to evoke the expanded design of the new version and also a mech enclosing a body.

So far so good. In terms of mechanical design, I knew I wanted to focus on the pilots first rather than the mechs. In both versions of the game, a Pilot is a collection of 4-5 Traits which describe them, and these Traits are then represented as Systems/Quirks in their mechs.

The main difference between the two versions is that in Quarto, your pilot starts the game pretty much fully defined, while you take time in the first half of the game defining your pilot's Traits through play in Full Cover. The framing of the game is adjusted to accommodate.

In Quarto, you'd play out two stages of a conflict and the expression of your Pilot Traits could change in the second conflict e.g. Overcoming your own Flaw instead of Exploiting a rival's Flaw. This worked OK when I playtested, but I wanted a bit more investment in the pilots.

In Full Cover, I changed the framing such that you'd still have 2 phases but they would specifically be years apart and in different contexts. This also played to a bunch of other mecha anime tropes where pilots would meet as friends & then have to fight each other in mechs later.

This also reinforced the theme of "distance", both in physical space via the mechs, and in metaphor and emotion via the time skip and changed contexts and relationships.

I drew on stuff like Break Blade, Eureka Seven and War in the Pocket, but also luckily found out later on that it was the premise of Fire Emblem: Three Houses which helps quite a lot in pitching it to other players.

A thing I've found as I've playtested games with people I play with is that I like providing more structure and trust players to then figure out when to bend out of those structures rather than give them a blank space and free reign that might intimidate some players.

I personally like having the blank space, but I've come to understand that not everyone does, and so I've started to lean towards being more explicit with game structures and scaffolding. I might change my mind on this, but for now it's something I'm trying to consciously do.

In Full Cover, I based the scene structure on Microscope, with the lead player choosing a question to answer through the scene. I provided some examples of questions and prompts for scenes.

Something I will probably change in the next revision is try to expand the question list to 8 items. In my recent games, I've been trying to keep list lengths the same so players can use the same die or other randomizer method for each list.

I also added some general questions for everyone to contribute to the setting. Another influence from Friends at the Table and in keeping with the tropes of mecha anime is letting players come up with launch phrases as they launch their mechs into battle.

The other big mechanical change between versions is how the tokens work with fictional positioning of how well each faction is doing in the conflict. In Quarto, tokens represented how well you and your faction were doing, and each move had its own way to interact with tokens.

This caused memory and downtime issues, so I changed it in Full Cover, taking inspiration from the 'no dice no masters' token system in Dream Askew/Dream Apart. I also simplified and abstracted relative positioning with an Advantage Marker.

Even though the basic economy of "weak move gains you a token, strong move costs you a token" is maintained, there are enough peripheral moves and variance that I'm worried I might have just replicated the issue I initially had in Quarto.

This is definitely what I'm most excited/worried about to playtest more. I've also added explicit moves about recognizing pilots through their mech Quirks before you can exploit their traits as I really want to model that dynamic, but also worried about how this will play out.

Final change in moves that I want to talk about is being more explicit with the evolution of traits. In Quarto you had new ways of using traits, but in Full Cover I also made it such that they would be re-named and redefined (also the big Eureka Seven shout out).

I'm pretty much done, but just wanted to show you the Pilot Sheet as well since I think it looks nice :)

That's all for now for Spectres of Brocken: Full Cover (and Quarto!). I hope you found it interesting, and I hope you'll check it out and let me know what you think!