So, my dear friends!
However can we make the Apocalypse phase work? Hmmm?
How do I possibly make this work if I’m so adverse to building a whole section from scratch?
Of course I have a solution.
Let’s look at our inspiration. Good old Ragnarok.
But wait… Ragnarok isn’t what kills the gods! Why… it’s the final battle! Odin dies to the Fenrir Wolf! Thor bites it to Jormungandr… but wait… those didn’t come from nowhere! They were all encounters from earlier.
In other words… what kills the gods?
Everything they didn’t vote for!
That’s right! Everything the gods didn’t decide to lock away with ichor until the new year comes back to bite them in the ass!
(also thematically that’s what the vote does)
This also means the GM has time to make monsters of the remaining aspects (or we can do it as we design the 48 aspects), since this doesn’t happen in one sitting. In turn the GM (or PC) can narrate each battle of the Apocalypse!
God damn I’m jazzed! This sounds fun!
Okay, so we planned for 48 options of which one out of four will be the outcome! That means 36 aspects show up to kill the gods at the end of the world, 24 at the least.
Wait… I spotted a bug: What stops the players from just paying 1 ichor and taking an option as an aspect each round?
So yeah, we’re going to have to price options. We’ll come back to this.
The ten million dollar problem is: how much legend will a god have at the end?
Keep in mind, only one god is left standing at the end. So it doesn’t matter how MUCH legend these cost because it will all be over as long as one god is left standing.
But let’s do some math!
We have the sliding scale of ichor per month(4-1). That gives a total of 30 ichor by the end of game PER PLAYER
Let’s assume all ichor is spent by end of game (because it does goddamn nothing if it isn’t spent) either in wasted votes or abilities and such.
None of those abilities have a cost on them (yet) so we’ll stick to the 30 as a guideline with some variance.
That means given a total of 36 opponents total with four players have to kill a total 120 legend. Averaging that out that’s 4 legend to the enemy aspect.
But, if we have more players say 6, that’s potentially a total of 180 legend or 5 to the enemy aspect.
So I need input. We can either do it that the GM rolls 1d6 (in a thus diceless game) for each enemy aspect, or just average it for 3 legend for three players or fewer, 4 for four, or… 5 for 5 or more.
Jesus that math works just as that where legend lost per enemy aspect is equal to number of players.
Huh.
Actually, we can even impose a difficulty here, because if we price that each final challenge is based on number of players, we ratchet up the difficulty by adding +1 to each challenge at the end!
This is of course soft math at best. I haven’t even priced actions yet.
So yeah, Do we roll dice to determine how much legend is lost each aspect attack? Or do we make it equal to the number of players (minimum 3).
Lastly, resolution.
So let's chart all possible outcomes.
- Final god survives with aspects intact, items they voted for made it.
- Final god survives with aspects intact, items they didn’t vote for made it.
- Final god survives with no aspects intact, (same split)
- Two gods survive with no aspects intact (same split)
- All gods get wiped out.
So let’s deal with the first split. Ultimately the GM has to describe the ending and the new world. These are just prompts and I feel we should stay relatively hands off.
Two, the question is how did the god respond to the parts that are contradictory to it? That can actually be a co-op narration moment between GM and surviving PC. We can give prompts though.
- A new god appears for the things the god opposed. Becomes enemy/spouse (6 or less aspects match)
- The god creates a pantheon to help fill the need (6-10 match)
- The new world rejects the god. (2 or less)
These can be amended though.
Additionally let’s look at what happens if a god has no aspects. Let’s say, if we have a single surviving god who has and no legend they survive and instead we have this:
- The surviving god begins a great rewriting. It takes time for faith to find itself but they eventually begin a whole new existence.
If two gods survive with no aspects or legend? Fuck it, wipe them all out! Unless you think we should have a tie outcome.
If all gods get wiped out this is easy.
- A new era begins. Will humanity make new gods?
See you next time as… well I guess we draft the rules together and see what we make!
After that… we have to design the 48 aspects of the world.
One of them shall be dogs.
Later!