What Holds the World?

This is a late-night thought following my last post.

I proposed Anchors as thematic elements of the campaign that would serve as self-understanding and self-defining for PCs, with all the complications that defining oneself through such categories (and rating them!) brings. It’s a self-reflective and at points meta proposal, as game concepts such as DR and leveling intermingle with character identity, table performance etc.

As someone who doesn’t like variable difficulty in games, the rather strict measures of difficulty there are appealing. But what if in some campaigns we dissociated Anchors from “stable” identities?

PCs have Being. It starts at 10 and goes up with experience. They roll 2d6 (DARO) + Being vs Difficulty Level. Difficulty goes from 10 (1) to 35 (6). Rolls of 1,2 are always failure. Okay so far?

The Anchors that determine Difficulty are in the world, not in the character sheet. Rulers whose personal excesses and obsessions influence the land with psychic miasma, sleeping gods in different degrees of rebirth whose portfolios compel acts from those within their dreamwalking grasp, or even fundamental Laws of the world/game, linguistic ideas of identity that are so entrenched in the agreed campaign logic that they are as tangible as the rules of fairytales. In summary, actions (and resisting influence) have their difficulty determined by the Anchors that rule a campaign setting.

Which also means, once we’ve set the world’s Anchors in dualistic oppositions, the players have a very clear goal: achieve greatness, convince hearts, and Be in ways that shift existence towards the Anchors they want to rule. This is even better in PvP campaigns, where everyone is competing to uphold the Anchors they are the most attached to.

I believe that being compelled (that is, forced to roll to not give in to the Anchor) would work best in two ways. First, in downtime: everyone rolls to resist the most powerful Anchors or describe crumbling under their weight, or each character has one or two Affinities (Alignments, really) that require them to do such checks, likely one that is very low and one that is very high.

This seems fruitful in the context of doing magic. Spirit summoning (the archons that operate Anchors) or my curse rules would be particularly interesting.