Thank you for sharing this! Also thank you for sharing work-in-progress: it is nice to be able to offer feedback when it has more of a chance of being useful.
* I really like what you’re doing here. I like the idea of being able to play the same archetype incarnated in lots of different eras. This feels like a great way to tell a big story and make it intimate, exciting, memorable. I can imagine enjoying (especially by the third or fourth incarnation) coming up with distinctive and unusual versions of the archetype that defy expectations.
* My hunch is that the game will come together beautifully if it can give the players prompts and mechanical support to tie together the big picture with the individual stories. From the example prompts, I wonder if the players might need more support to ‘zoom in’ to a specific concrete scene?
* The lists of suggested “looks” are evocative, but to me they didn’t yell “this archetype spans thousands of years” yet. Maybe it’s a matter of expanding the lists, including fragments of various time periods and speculative societies?
And maybe even including one-or-two things that feel a bit arbitrary and random (and poetic), to challenge your players’ imaginations? Why would the Facilitator be wearing a crystal kilt? What do the Mender’s multicolored seeds do? Why does the Automaton have chest-mounted printing press? Etc.
It’s tricky of course: you want a balance between tapping into things your players already know about, yet not limiting the kinds of futures they could dream up. In the looks list, you could consider including made-up words to create even more openness, e.g. “A device called a yumur (what does it do?).”
* Nitpick: “effect change” (even though the verb form is usually affect).
* In its current form, I am still a little confused about the flow of play. Say there are four players. Does that mean we do four scenes in Stage 1, then four epilogues, then move to Stage 2? Or do we do six scenes, with two players going twice? Does the game always have 25 scenes? Is there support / encouragement for characters to step into each others’ scenes?
* I like this mechanic:
“The person to your right then answers the cost of the other choice not being focused on. What are the consequences? How does this also change your world? [...] Alternatively, the next player can choose to answer the unanswered Prompt, and not choose a Prompt on their turn.”
* This may be melodramatic, but maybe you should keep an open mind about the ‘succession’ keywords associated with each phase! It is of course cool and in some ways the core of the game. But in other ways the game could work perfectly well without it, and you might find you prefer the flexibility to write the prompts, without the constraints of the succession phases. Also, is there a risk that players might feel like they have to respond literally to each keyword?
You could always secretly keep the keywords as inspiration to help with your prompt-writing, but omit them from the game itself. (But idk; maybe the keyword correlated version will go swell!).
* Can migration be presented more positively? Clash, collaborate, and transform each other for the better?
* Have you decided yet how Society and Environment will be used? Presumably they will influence the prompts for the final part of the game? Maybe with some randomness added in?
Thank you again for sharing your creation, and good luck with developing it further!