Any Given Wednesday - Genrenauts Pillars (Patreon)

This is a collected and expanded version of a thread I did today on Bluesky.

I've been working on a new bit of Genrenauts design which I'm calling Genre Pillars. The idea is to concretize and mechanize the idea of genre convention as dimensional physics in a given region.

Writing Genre Pillars for the Genrenauts RPG is an interesting challenge in trying to identify major narrative centers of gravity in a given storytelling tradition across multiple media. What is a Truth About How The World Works in a given genre that's strong enough and prevalent enough that it could realistically represent a dominant law of narrative physics for that region?

I started with the Region Advances I'd already written for each region, team-scale bonuses that the PCs could unlock by maxing out the region's XP track through completing missions. But because those were written to be supplemental abilities, many of them didn't go deep enough to the core of what makes a given genre.

But now I'm digging deep enough that I'm finding some I really like, and hope to be able to use them as a lodestar for others.

Here's a positive Pillar for the Superhero genre:

Any Given Wednesday
Whether Jane Justice can beat Titanus Rex depends largely on who is writing the story. In this case, it’s you, the Genrenauts.

You may always push yourself to ignore scale or tier.

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This is pillar represents the variability in characters' power and the results of a clash between 'mismatched' characters. Wolverine can win fights in his comic that he'd lose in an Avengers comic, but then beat the same person two years later w/a new writer.

Mechanically it means that a character can square off against a whole army of enemies and fight as if they weren't hopelessly outnumbered. It also lets them face any obstacle as if they were on equal footing even when they would normally be thoroughly outclassed.

This pillar also represents the aspirational underdog quality of superhero stories. Heroes take on challenges that are out of their league because no one else is around to step up.

It's this iconic sequence from Amazing Spider-Man 33 by Lee/Ditko. If this isn't a depiction of  character Pushing in a FitD game, what is?

(From The Amazing Spider-Man #33 - written by Stan Lee, Art by Steve Ditko. C Marvel 1965)

[The title "Any Given Wednesday" is a two-layer reference - A riff on the saying  "on any given Sunday, any team can beat any other team" from Gridiron Football and Wednesday because superhero comics traditionally release on Wednesdays]

But Pillars come in two forms - Positive Pillars representing narrative properties of the genre when operating as normal, and Negative Pillars ('positive' and 'negative' are placeholder terms) representing the shift in narrative rules when cynicism and cruelty dominate in a genre.

Here is a current Negative Pillar for the Superhero genre:

Necessary Misery

Characters in happy relationships or stable living conditions aren’t “interesting” or “relatable”. Every marriage has an expiration date, every good break is inevitably followed by a disaster.

At the start of each mission, set a 4-clock obstacle for each level of Chaos representing problems in the hero(es)’ personal life. All rolls involving the supporting cast addressing supeheroic problems suffer reduced effect until these obstacle clocks are overcome.

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This pillar is a good one to pair with the above example, because Peter Parker *cannot catch a break*. Almost everything good in his life is taken away from him, he inevitably ends up single and broke, to the point where it's become as much a meme as "Jean Gray Will Be Back" and Batman's "My Parents Are Dead". 

The idea that superhero characters aren't relatable when they have long-term, positive relationships or stable work reflects a pernicious idea about what makes a good story, suggesting that suffering is paramount. Many people relate intensely to Peter's iconic bad luck, but for me it sometimes goes so far as to be ludicrous (see the Brand New Day massive retcon in his life/status quo). This negative pillar represents the narrative trend that keeps characters on their back foot in their personal lives to be "relatable".