underside dev diary #4: teams & ideology (Patreon)

there's a lot of Ideology that goes into calling someone a hero or a villain. in underside, the difference is explicitly a social one. you're a hero if society at large and the power structures within in support what you're doing, and a villain if they reject and vilify you, no matter what you're actually doing. you can do nothing but save puppies and kittens from trees and if the government, religious leaders, media, &c. don't want you doing it, the best you can hope for is "vigilante". so to reflect that,  underside doesn't put any mechanical weight on being a 'hero' or 'villain' team. instead, when you create your party, the game asks you directly only two questions: what do you do and why?

this choice is pretty analogous to blades in the dark's choice of crewtype in that its main purpose is to provide guardrails for the Administrator and players to come up with compelling missions. another important function of your raison d'etre is to help you decide the shape of your demesne. 

demesne is a mechanic develoepd in response to a problem that the first version of this project, capes in the dark, inherited from blades. capes and blades both have teams advance by gaining Turf, a resource representing territory controlled within the city the campaign is based in. that makes sense for some kinds of organized crime groups, but both blades and capes obviously promote and encourage a bunch of other playstyles where having 'turf' as a concern doesn't really make much sense.  

so demesne, then, is a slightly amorphous resource -- just like how funds in blades represent an abstract measure of all a character's liquids assets, your team's demesne (from an archaic term for manorial land) is an abstract measure of your team's stake in whatever it is they need to operate: turf, sponsors, clientele, etc. 

what's fun is that this then allows the very fine-tuned mechanical systems of the game, designed to push players and teams into violently struggling for more power at any cost, and lets them be used to tell any kind of story about people who want any kind of power for any number of reasons while still at core being the same story, asking: what are you willing to sacrifice? which of your traumas are you willing to relive for this? i like that sort of very bounded flexibility. 

from now on, these updates will be weekly on fridays, with miscellaneous writing tidbits dropping on mondays. hopefully this keeps up a nice rhythm and makes this torture labyrinth worth tossing five dollars a month to. thanks to all of you and i'm real excited to keep making underside & other projects with all of your support :)