underside dev diary #2: what is underside? (Patreon)

underside's first draft began life as a straight-up fangame--an attempt to adapt blades in the dark to the world of worm. what's worm? my favourite piece of superhero fiction ever written. worm does two things that i really care about. it engages with the social realities of the hero/villain dichotonomy--a 'hero' is anyone endorsed by the state, tactitly or overtly--a 'villain' or a 'rogue' is anyone who isn't. secondly, it has a strong thematic throughline of powers as trauma. characters in worm have powers as reflections of their trauma, larger-than-life manifestations of the ways they've been hurt that they project, often uncontrollably, onto the world around them. 

that draft still has 'UNDERSIDE: A WORM FAN TTRPG' at the top. as i've worked on it over the last year or so, i've moved away from this direction. partly because i started to develop more detailed criticisms of worm's worldbuilding (the world outside North America is painted in broad and cartoonish strokes with a lot of bad google translate) and partly because if i was going to put this much time and effort into something i wanted to make it my own thing. 

so underside as it currently exists is... a few things. a dark superhero rpg. a riff. i definitely haven't abandoned worm as an influence, just not quite a direct oen -- what masks is to teen titans, i want underside to be to worm.  but most of all it's a game about being marginalized and traumatised and filtering that through the lens of incredible supernatural abilities that are as likely to hurt you and hurt the people you care about as they are to do you any good. 

'cause that's what trauma feels like innit. like super-senses, like the gift of prophecy, like power armour. except they're cursed prophecies, they're senses overwhelmed by the slightest sound, they're power armour that's draining your blood to function. more than anything about the world or the story (although to be clear the story of worm is good), that's what grips me about worm and that's what i'm keeping in underside. 

in that spirit, this week i'm showing off an excerpt from the player best practices: 

because i know a lot of people are interested in the development of underside and not enough of them have enough cash to recreationally throw at a mad internet prophetess, i'll probably be making these update posts public a week after i make them -- that is, last week's is going to be public when i post this one, and then when i post the next one i'll make this one public, and so on. seems fair