Querent

The last few months, I’ve been turning over an idea for a game, probably a browser game, called Querent, and I finally threw together a little intro snippet, which you should go play through before reading the rest of this – it’s basically a backgrounder/FAQ, although of course since this is a brand new project, there are no questions being asked yet and therefore no frequently asked questions.

Am I the only person who gets occasionally peeved at the misuse of that term?  I suspect not.  Moving along.

Querent: the world

Querent takes place in a Balkanized, near-future US.  You’re in the northeast, a region which I have yet to name, but which is pretty blue-statey: social services are reasonably robust as are laws protecting civil rights, weapons are closely regulated, businesses are more regulated than they are in the US today, and most people have relatively cosmopolitan attitudes.  I have a narrative about how the US splits up (“Partition,” the game calls it), which maybe I’ll rattle up here at some point.  The Texarkanan Populist Union, for example, describes itself in its Constitution as “a Freedom-Loving Nation serving God and protecting the sacred rights He gives us,” but most progressives call the TPU’s ideology Bundyism, for its clear debt to both Bundys Cliven and Al.  Chicago really suffers, no matter how you cut the US up, by the way.  Unless it becomes a micronation unto itself, the region that contains it will still be borderline-nonfunctional.  Poor Chicago.

A querent is any person asking a question.  Tarot books (or at least the books I read when I was learning to read tarot, now something like 25 years ago) use it to refer to the person getting a tarot reading; they don’t usually say “client,” for example, because that ceases to make sense if you’re reading for yourself.  So the game is about asking questions, and it’s about tarot.  In Querent, tarot cards can be used not only to predict the future, but to control it, and – your character will gradually discover – the world is full of high-powered politicians and warlords and CEOs and celebrities who are basically throwing tarot spells at each other, trying to make the fate they want.  The little intro actually lampshades this – you know where your character is talking about dc, and says you didn’t pay attention to what gave dc its edge over other cryptocurrencies?  Some libertarian nerd with a little extra insight into reality pushed his imaginary money to world dominance with tarot cards.  He probably uses the Thoth deck.

Li may be shaping reality right there at his table, or he may just be reading it.  You didn’t get close enough to find out.

And for those of you who are David Foster Wallace fans, yes, the man in the wheelchair on the transit pod is one of les assassins des fauteuils rollents.  This is not to say there will be actual wheelchair assassins in Querent (although are they not awesome, holy shit, yes they are), not least because I’m not sure Wallace’s estate would permit that.  It’s a little homage, though, and a signal that the game shares some of its DNA with Infinite Jest.  The way that book takes completely absurd concepts and pushes them in this wry, but totally straight, way, like managing to make a secret society of legless Quebecer assassins not only fascinating but absolutely terrifying – when I’m thinking about this world and the things I want to do with it, that’s a polestar.

Character construction and mechanics

You have five core stats:

• Brilliance: Intelligence, but I’m using this very strong synonym because at high levels, you’re making leaps of logic and getting crazy insights that go beyond normal human reasoning.  Without having any real background in medicine, you might, on a successful check, figure out what a dead person died of, for example.
• Clandestine-ness: Sneaking around, lying to people successfully, hiding stuff.
• Empathy: Understanding others’ emotions and connecting with them on that level.  As far as the skill goes, Querent doesn’t distinguish between being a receptive, loving person and being a savvy sociopath.
• Forcefulness: Encompasses physical strength and having a forceful personality.  If you buy the .50 cal and you want to say it gives you the bonus it does because you’re a crack shot with a powerful shooting arm, that’s fine, but if you want to say you’re totally inexperienced with firearms, but so personally intimidating that opponents are basically scared into standing still while you inexpertly blow a hole through them, that’s fine, too.
• Visionary-ness: Psychic power, both the ability to sense things and the ability to affect the world.  This trait doesn’t start to have much effect on your story until you’re a ways into it.

You’ll also have a number of minor traits that change more readily.  The demo lets you try out a little Patience, Restlessness, and/or Lawlessness; others might include Caution (which could warn you away from harmful actions at a low level, and prevent you from doing more daring things at a high level), Blessedness/Cursedness (might change your results on luck checks; might also open and close certain options), etc.  Querent will definitely have some stat to represent your departure from ordinary reality, which will be both necessary and a pain in the ass.  If you want to start altering reality, and of course you do, you can’t be entirely trapped within it, but breaking out comes at a cost to your sanity.  At high levels, I’d like to make that happen in the UI as well as narratively – strange bits of text might insert themselves in passages at random, colors might fade in or out, pieces of the UI might start moving around.  Nothing disruptive enough to make the game unplayable, and hopefully more entertaining/interesting than irritating.  Plus, of course, visions and, who knows, talking to ghosts or touring the land of faerie or flying around on a broom/giant squirrel-dog-dragon creature/happy pink cloud.

Classes!  The classes (the demo calls them callings) are based on chakras. Yes.  I am writing a near-future speculative noir game with character classes modeled after the chakra system, because that is friggin hilarious.  (Hence the colors for their names.)  I really, really hope that at some point, a gamer who’s into noir and cyberpunk goes, “your class system is based on chakras?  what the fuck is that, ugh,” and I also hope that someone who’s serious about Buddhism or Hinduism goes, “you’re using the chakra system as a thing in some crime/sci-fi game?  what the fuck is that!"  I like making people benignly uncomfortable.  Gets me out of bed in the morning.

There are other reasons, though.  A lot of games’ class systems jar with character development, for me, because of the way they yoke skills and resources to a whole complex of personality traits (any system that uses alignments) or alliances (as with old WoD Mage).  Querent is about discovery and power, which are strongly motivating forces for basically everyone who isn’t dead in the soul, so I situated those ideas at the center and then asked myself, why do people learn things like tarot (the way it works in Querent)?  I came up with the list that’s in the demo pretty readily, felt like it was reasonably comprehensive, and then realized it corresponded perfectly to the domains traditionally associated with the seven chakras, and said, oh, man, I have to do this.

What you end up, with, then, is a core desire that motivates your character to figure out what’s going on, and to seek and use a position of power in this world within the world.  Eventually, there will be a bunch of factions/institutions you’ll be able to work for or against, but I don’t foresee any restrictions on them.  You could be a cautious, stoic, even unimaginative Root and join forces with highly mystical monks/nuns, because you’ve seen enough evidence of real, live weirdness that they look like the experts, and that makes them the safest bet.  You could be an idealistic Heart and put your energies toward law and order because you believe in the mission to protect and serve, and if the institutions are a mess, you want to go in and improve them.  You could be a self-interested Core and work your way to the head of an arts charity because it affords you access to all sorts of wealthy people with all sorts of secrets in unguarded moments.

Game shape/narrative arcs

As I’ve been envisioning it, Querent has three phases.  In the first, you’re bumping into these things and figuring out, bit by bit, that the world is much, much weirder than you ever imagined.  (Unless you’re playing as a Peregrine, in which case you get to have your decidedly minority view of the world pleasantly confirmed.)  The four stories listed at the end of the demo constitute the main arcs of this stage.  Each one is a pretty substantial trek, keyed to one of the four suits of the tarot’s minor arcana, and each one opens extra options in subsequent "suit” arcs.  For example, the court cards (King of Cups, Page of Wands, etc.) usually represent actual people in your life, so through the Cups arc, you’ll meet individuals who match those roles for that suit, and they may be able to help you with later challenges.  You’ll also get access to actions that match the number cards, which is maybe somewhat murkier to imagine if you’re not familiar with the tarot; once you’ve done the path of Pentacles, you’d be able to do Eight-of-Pentaclesy things where they’re useful, and the Eight of Pentacles has to do with craft, so that might let you make something that another player would have to buy or acquire from an NPC.

This first phase is really a series of initiations, both for you as the player, figuring out the game world, and for your character, who’s gradually earning access to people and abilities and other resources.  Probably at the end of these four sustained arcs, you’ll get a deck in your UI.  At this point, it will only have the minor arcana – suit cards – in it, each of which will present options appropriate to your skills and position within various stories.  I’m not sure how I want to handle drawing cards; I want the whole game to play with the tension between chance and choice, so you can’t just summon up whatever helpful card you want, but beyond that, I’m kicking around a lot of ideas.  Maybe you only get a certain number of draws per day, maybe you have to spend some resource to draw at all, maybe you can hold a certain number at a time but can’t discard any of them.  Or some combination, or other things entirely.

At any rate, you get your minor deck and move into the game’s second phase.  The main action here is deepening your knowledge, taking risks, and working toward a position of power.  You’ll get to complete a bunch more stories that give you major arcana – the famous cards, Death and The Lovers and so on – probably one to three cards at a time.  These will be much more overtly occult/magical than the stories for the suit cards; they’ll also be challenging, and I’d like them to have not only stat/item challenges, but puzzles, too.  The first computer games I ever played were Infocom text adventures, way back in the 80s, and while 8-to-12-year-old me was not especially good at the puzzles, I always thought they were a cool feature, and the more fun ones  – Trinity had a bunch, using items in unexpected ways, finding clues that would obliquely tell you to take a particular series of actions in a particular location – made me totally elated when I did figure them out.  Plus, again, tarot are about hidden knowledge.  A game about the tarot would really be missing the boat if it didn’t work that angle up.

The tarot deck would, I think, be a pretty interesting mechanic.  You’d only ever get these 78 cards, but as you played through different stories, acquired different contacts or items, and advanced stats, different options would appear that fit the themes of each card.  Hopefully, this would create a piece of the game that’s constant and limited – that is, it has a definite shape – but that remains engaging, because there could always be new options you haven’t seen, on any card.  It’d also be a way to develop NPCs and other facets of the game world casually – like, oh, now I can do X with my access to this place, that must mean Y has changed/grown/diminished at that place.

The third phase, if I do it well, becomes an ongoing thing where you’re working to alter reality in accordance with your calling.  There will be a number of different goals to pursue (beyond the usual end-game goal of any open-ended game, of course, which is to grind ridiculously high numbers of arbitrary resources or stats) and a number of different ways you could work toward them.  The stories in this phase will make up something like a text version of civ or kingdom-running games.  It’s possible that running an actual country, or at least a city, might be one thing you get into – or running an activist organization, or a university, etc.  Some, maybe a lot, of the action would be in creating alliances with various NPCs and other players, betraying them when it’s to your advantage and when you can get away with it, enacting retribution, earning and owing favors, and compelling things to happen and people to make the choices you want them to make with your madd cartomancy skilz.  With substantial effort, you’d be able to get out of one enterprise and work your way up into another, which would let you play through a lot of content, even at a high level.

There’d also be repeatable actions to let you build stats and resources and plenty of stories along the way that aren’t part of this long central arc.  My favorite games have always been the ones where you have a good bit of license to set your own goals, which builds a strong sense that you’re moving around in a world rather than playing out a preset quest, even if there is a main preset quest available.

Logistical questions

Will Querent get made, in this very ambitious form?  Hard to say.  I’d need a lot of server-side skills that I don’t have, and I’m pretty sure I could learn that stuff, but it would take time, which is never in great supply. 

(Incidentally, on the tech angle, wow do I hate Twine – sorry, IF community.  I would have built the game in JavaScript, but I couldn’t figure out one particular problem with having players click a link in one place, and having it disable links and hide them in another the way I wanted.  If anything was ever going to motivate me to learn the DOM better, it’s building things in Twine, and if you happen to be a coder who does know the DOM well and who’d hang out with me on gchat while I bumble through things like that, please get in touch.  I have a much better layout done up, and I thought if nothing else, I could do the story in Twine and then drop it in there.  HA.  No.  Twine outputs such vomitous gobbledygook that I’m not sure how it counts as HTML.  I’m extremely comfortable with HTML and CSS, but there’s no way I can work with a Twine story after the fact, unless Satan would accept a sacrifice of a couple goats + my soul for the ability, and it’s really not worth the mess.)

One possibly insurmountable obstacle is that I’m not at all a visual artist.  At a minimum, I’d need someone to draw a pretty cool set of tarot cards, and that’s 78 images that have to have certain things in them and convey certain concepts.  Plus, hopefully, matching assets to fill out the UI, represent items, and on and on.  I have friends who are illustrators, and really cool, talented ones; I do not have friends who are illustrators and who have time or the desire to draw probably a few hundred images for a game that isn’t being made by a studio and therefore isn’t paying out significantly any time soon.  I’ve looked into licensing the Rider-Waite images previously, for another project, and US Games are your average corporate assholes about it.  The black-and-white line drawings are in the public domain, but I’ve not been able to find high-quality images of all of them on my own, and US Games, who have such images because they use them in a lot of the books they publish, again, are corporate assholes – they don’t provide people with access to the drawings just because they don’t want to.  I’ve thought about finding an existing tarot deck and seeing if the artist would be interested in licensing the images to me for cheap + exposure, but that seems unlikely, and I’d still need to make the rest of a UI, and it would need to harmonize with the main images somehow.  So that’s an issue.

As far as the stories go, I could write versions of the first four arcs right now, and I may.  I could probably write the majors’ stories, too, but I really need to learn to create and manipulate databases so people can make accounts if I’m going to go much farther with this.

For the immediate future, I have a couple standalone story-games in the works, one that is about a little girl named Muffin going on a magical quest, and one that also ends up being sort of detective-y, about the Machine of Death.  And government corruption and overreach.  And possibly about how shitty civil service jobs are.  If you’d like to help get those made, go make a donation at my itch.io page so I can get out of my apartment and go work at cafes, where I have neither snuggly kitties nor a cozy bed to distract me.