Introducing: Omen GME
A series of gameplay examples with the forthcoming 'Omen' Game Master Emulator
Omen is a Gamemaster Emulator I’ve been working on for the past year.
I spend many many hours testing it so far and I believe the project is at a point I can share it a little more publicly.
The following article is by no means a complete explanation. It’s meant as a quick overview to give you an understanding of what is going on in the next articles.
First, a short overview of Omen:
Omen GME is a full and complete Gamemaster Emulator that makes use of a Scene-structured approach to your solo RPG adventure. At its core, Omen is a ‘Scene Generator’. You, the solo role player, will consult the Omens before each scene. Scenes can take place under ill or auspicious omens while for some scenes, the omens will be unclear.
More mechanically, once you have a quest, Omen will translate your quest to a number of scenes. Omen will generate the scenes, add Themes, and details to each scene. Once the scene is set up - sometimes without a Theme, your PC has to ‘test the scene’ (read the omens). The result is based on the Scene Rating + the number of your Omen tokens. The result can be one of these 4 states: Fumble, Fail, Success and Critical success. The Theme’s flavor adjusts to the result of your test.
Burning Omen tokens can force a Critical success or some other positive turn of events, but beware - new Omen tokens are hard to come by and playing with few tokens means the world will be harder to play in!
Design Principles
Concept 1: Agency in story creation
In solo games, interaction with other players is emulated usually by either luck/randomness or by procedural steps. Omen falls into that second category. Omen combines a short procedure and Omen tokens that can be ‘burned’ by the player. Though there is still a lot of randomness, the player is given some unique agency into the story creation.
Concept 2: minimal interference with the RPG rules
One of the design principles was to build a GME that would interfere minimally with your RPG system. When you are done testing the scene, you can switch 100% to your RPG system and close Omen, until the next scene.
Concept 3: No slowdown of gameplay
By doing so, the gameplay is never interrupted in the midst of a scene. One of the things I personally don’t like is when a GME interrupt my actions with some vague event sparks I now need to interpret. I stop playing and have a long meditation on what the oracle means.
Omen doesn’t do that, it will expand on the scene YOU had in mind and when you start playing the scene, disappear in the background.
Concept 4: easy yet relevant oracle interpretation
Creating a story, scene by scene, is a creative act. But creating in a void blocks most people. That why we lose so much time interpreting spark tables. By adding a Theme to the scene, Omen creates a constraint for the player - something that does wonders when creating, though! Omen points you to a topic: Look, there is an important Location in this scene. What could it be?’
This makes for easy, fast creation of relevant scenes.
Concept 5: A single mechanic, a complete GME
The scope is to design a single mechanic that is used throughout the GME. The same mechanic that is used to test scenes is used to further flesh out the Theme, with an NPC and Location generators, spark tables, intensity table and more. With various Lists providing input for Clocks and Story twists, Omen can be used for long-running solo campaigns.
Once you are familiar with the mechanic, running a game with Omen will become a breeze.
Omen will be available in a free and paid version PDF. The Free version will be the full GME. The paid version will feature a couple specific variants and art I will create specifically for that PDF. This version will be mainly there for those who would like to support the project and would like to help the further development.
The Adventure of Siegfried and the Forest Sauvage - I and II
To prove its versatility, I will play the same adventure twice. I will be playing it using only Omen GME, a setting book (The chapter ‘Sauvage Forest’ from Pendragon’s Great Pendragon Campaign) and an RPG system. For the first example I will be using Tricube Tales. Because of its super simple rules, I can focus the example completely on the roll of Omen and don’t have to explain TT as well.
Continue reading here:
Siegfried & the Forest Sauvage Example I, part 1
Omen is a ‘Gamemaster Emulator’ that I’ve been working on and is now close to being finished. A Gamemaster Emulator (GME) can be used to play an RPG system solo. If you like to learn more about Omen, you can do so here.