Blog Hoard: Bastion's Triple Rule
On the Sly Flourish Discord server we have a channel called Explore Your Hoard. People use it for a variety of things related to their RPG collection. Often it is showing pictures of new acquisitions they're excited about. What I like to use it for is a reminder to dig into things I've bought or gathered that maybe I've never gotten around to actually reading or doing anything with. Spending more time with the interesting things I already have can help ward off the FOMO about the newest shiny thing. Lately, I've been trying to do that by spending some time going back to some of the blog posts that I've saved in a number of Feedly boards to see what gems are in there that maybe I didn't read deeply when I first came across it. I've been posting some summaries and reflections on the Discord, and thought I might share them here too.
Chris McDowell's Bastionland blog has a ton of great posts - I often reference his ICI Doctrine and 34 Good Traps posts. Digging into my blog hoard, I came across this great blog post with a simple framework to help add multiple layers to any different part of your game. From the timing of the post it was probably when CD was working on Electric Bastionland. But I think it's got some useful nuggets for any game.
Bastion's Triple Rule
The core idea is the Triple Rule Everything has Three Purposes:
- The Original: What was it originally to be?
- The Current: What is it doing now?
- The Tangent: What is its secondary use?
CD gives some suggestions for how to apply this idea to Places, People and Objects.
For Places, he suggests coming up with a commercial, a residential and a civic use - and then picking one to be the defunct original purpose. E.g. an old broadcast tower that is now an open-air scrap market, with a group of engineers living and worshiping at the top.
For People, he suggests: what the NPC was born into/what their youthful ambition was, what they actually grew into, and then something unexpected on the side. E.g. a former teacher turned soldier, who does pub trivia on the side.
For Object, he suggests that the layers can come from previous owners/uses rather than changes to the object. E.g. a portable cannon that killed a famous outlaw, now deactivated and mounted above a bar - but is being used to hide illicit goods.
My Thoughts
I love it when things in my game can have these multiple interesting layers; I've done that with dungeons (it was made by the X, but now it is used by the Y) - but it is great to think about how to do this for everything. I liked seeing the variations on the core idea for each application, and the way that the Tangent layer prompts you to have those quirky side features that add lots of fun interest. For People the "something unexpected on the side" reminded me of the obsessions of a Zelda-Style NPCs. The key thing is how simple this idea is - more likely that I'll actually remember it and use it during prep. I'm excited to give it a try!