When I was at school, I wanted to be an archaeologist like Indiana Jones. Sadly, things didn’t quite work out that way. It turned out there wasn’t much call for whip wielding tomb raiders in the wider world.
From childhood to adulthood, there felt like a trend in my career options - a move from the abstract to the specific. At childhood, “what you want to be” was a vague notion of what I liked doing. Career guidance at school presented general categories of job, becoming more specific career paths at college. Then "shit gets real" with an actual job – and it doesn’t get much more specific than that.
In RPGs, there seems a similar spectrum between the abstract and specific in “what you can be”. Classically though, there is a tendency to stop at the final stage - where a character class becomes a concrete role in the game world, rather than just a career guidance template. This post ties in with a collaborative project I am undertaking with Panic Pillow, where we attempt to represent the last bit in an RPG context.
Half a year ago, Panic Pillow approached me with a suggestion for developing an idea in one of my blog posts. I’d been talking about an alternative type of character advancement based on institutions. Panic Pillow had the idea of applying this to a GLOG hack, and we decided to work on this together as a collaborative project.
Our first draft of The 2nd Age is now free to download on Itch. It’s evolved pretty far from its GLOG origins. What were class templates are now institution templates, with the emphasis on how these 12 institutions fit into the game world. It's currently geared toward a qualitative style of play, and Panic Pillow will likely produce a minimalist statement of rule to accompany this.
