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One day I ran across an illustration from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comic series from Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, and immediately started to think about steampunk – perhaps because of the characters' Victorian costumes – and about people with "powers". I wasn't thinking about "superhero powers", mind you, conceiving of powers in a more subtle way. And as suggested by the comic, "extraordinary gentlemen" was the right word to describe what I was thinking about.
Anyway, I started to build up the core mechanism for my game, working on a strange system based on two "physical" gears bonded in a unique engine screwed to the main board. For sure, my primary inspiration was the rondel in Mac Gerdts' Antike and Imperial, one of my favorite game mechanisms ever, and I must admit that at first glance I didn't find the true potential of a multi-gear system. Moreover, I was lacking on the most important things for an adventure: a nice plot.
That realization ground me to a halt – how could I set up an adventure game without a decent adventure to tell?
A Merging of Minds
Some months later, I ran into Paolo Vallerga during the 2010 Lucca Comics & Games. I've been a big fan of Paolo's games since his first production, Le Saghe di Conquest, and I've also enjoyed his books. What's more, we've had many discussions during designer and publisher meetings set up by my association, so we immediately started talking about our projects.
He passionately told me an intriguing plot of an adventure filled with Norse mythology, magic symbology and many "musical" elements. In his mind, the game was really complex, and although it revolved around Turin, the game was set in a multitude of cities, ranging from London to Lyon.
As he had mentioned a steampunk setting, I said something like, "What a coincidence. I've been thinking about a steampunk adventure game for a long time, but I cannot find the right plot for it." We talked a lot about our ideas: Paolo had a nice story for a game — still in development, yet well-defined – and was in need of game mechanisms; I told him of the strange, "physical" action system for a steampunk game sitting in my drawer, which was waiting for a publisher fool enough to take a look at it.
We had many things in mind that all meshed well. We agreed immediately to set the game in only one city, and concurred on having a group of extraordinary characters: a Sherlock Holmes-like detective from London, a mysterious professor from Lyon, an erudite rabbi from Prague – the rabbi was an idea from Lara Mottola and for a long time Paolo and I called the design "The Game of the Rabbi in Prague" – and many others. We also agreed that the "menace" to fight against had to be something big, with Paolo initially thinking of Armageddon but searching for something less expected.
The earth rumbled – Fenrir's awakening was starting.
Beginning the Game and Ending the World
Paolo came to a final plot quickly, telling me that had received great news from Scandinavia and leaving me to wonder what the hell Scandinavia had to share with our game. In the following days, I worked feverishly on the game. The plot was really intriguing with many ideas to work on: a mythological winter, many fantastic characters, a foggy steampunk city, and a perilous search for a magic instrument to stop the onset of Ragnarök.
Starting from my old idea, I decided immediately to work along the lines of a Eurogame, but to have the mechanisms work in service of the strong theme that Paolo had sent me. My original idea was pretty simple. If I think of steampunk, my mind fills with images of engines, gears and devices. I tried to mix these elements with one of my "pivotal points" of game design: the resolution of many chained effects through a single action. Think, for example, of Michele Mura's Jerusalem, in which selecting a card gives you turn order, the number of wooden cubes you receive, and also a special advantage. This was the "engine" I mentioned earlier. In my mind, this was nearly a standalone mechanism, enough to complete the game with just a fistful of secondary rules.
But Paolo had bigger projects in mind.
Paolo is well-rounded creative person, and he blasted me with all sorts of input of what he wanted to see in the game. He had a huge amount of brilliant ideas, and many of them were complicated to integrate into the game mechanisms. Anyway, the main point was that he was looking for deep, absorbing game play revolving around the search for the Chosen One and the quest to stop Ragnarök.
So the game quickly became an investigative adventure: discover this, find that, and so on. First, I worked on a dynamic "whodunit" system, for while in 011 players are searching for the Chosen One and not a murderer, the goal is similar. More importantly, the Chosen One is a role too important to be played by a single player, so I tried to think in a lateral way, building the mechanism from a reverse starting point, namely that a character linked to a player is never the Chosen One. Also, the chances of spotting the Chosen One must increase over time, but with the conditions for this under control of the players and not determind by luck.
Thus, in 011 you must unveil the secret identities of your opponents in order to discover which character is the Chosen One, determining that by excluding other options. Every time a player uses the inner energies and resources of his character, discovering his alter-ego becomes a little easier. Will you preserve your energies and stay hidden in darkness, or will you unleash your special powers for the price of your identity?
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An old map of Turin, the basis for the game's main board
Players must also find a magic instrument – the Organ of Snorri – hidden somewhere in Turin in order to play a magical song that can put back Fenrir. Paolo set the plot (and therefore the game) in a steampunk Turin not for emotional reasons, despite having been born there and living there now, but because Turin is the most magical city in the world, the only one that belongs both to the black magic and white magic triangles. Thus, Turin was simply the perfect place to gather all the terrible and mystical energies that would lead to the beginning of Ragnarök.
Also, the area phone code for Turin is "011" – but that's a coincidence.
Anyway, players will try to locate the Organ of Snorri by finding a set of photos taken of a mysterious building, which represents magical buildings on a map that is an accurate reproduction of the old town center of Turin. (Also, magical places are real locations in the city that have a great "magic charge", according to theories of esotericism.) This is a bit tricky to explain without an example, but in general if you know that from a particular location you can see something specific by looking in the cardinal directions, you can roughly determine where this place is located. In 011 this concept is translated into rules, something that wasn't easy to do, but the result is evocative.
To make things more challenging, I decided that players must select and use a different character each round independent of their secret identity. Also, in 011 the characters are working together to foil a great threat – the end of the world as we know it – but the players play the game competitively, with the game having only one winner. To give the players' sanity one final blow, one of them will become the incarnation of Fenrir in the middle of the game, suddenly working to help Ragnarök begin instead of trying to stop it.
Are you thinking about the concept of a traitor? Wrong. You're playing a competitive game, so there's no one to betray. To be honest, this idea was neither mine nor Paolo's. Instead, the idea of Fenrir came from Christofer Johnsson, the founder and leader of Therion.
Yes, that Therion, the symphonic metal band. When Paolo told me that the characters of the game would be the members of Therion, one of my favorite bands, I almost fell from the chair. Paolo, who is perhaps an even greater fan of the band than me, managed to have them agree to be "actors" in the game, giving names and faces to the characters and adding a really intriguing twist to the whole project. Christofer Johnsson and the rest of the band have continued to follow the development of 011 and all its fringe activities with interest, and I'm really honored by that.
Prototype game board with only a few details, which works for the playtests
And Now?
After the early playtests, we increased the number of gears from two to three, making the engine even more dynamic and speeding up the gameplay. Now, moving a gear (and subsequently the other two) generates a triplet of values and icons, which presents the active player with the actions he can perform during his turn, with no need for additional and annoying computations. We've also worked on balancing tiles, cards, and all the less predictable elements of the game.
After this enormous amount of work, we playtested the game a lot to streamline the game play and tune the game's duration and depth (and, of course, we're still testing it over and over). We're now bringing the game to the biggest Italian fairs – the next one being Play in Modena, March 26-27, 2011 – and tuning the final details.
Prepare – Ragnarök is coming...
Marco Valtriani
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