Project Codename: Nova Crystallis

I Have Something to Tell You

I want to tell you about my current major RPG project, which has been on the backburner for a few years but has been rapidly coalescing as a result of the posts I’ve been writing on this blog. I am ready to share (and soon to play) it with you.

A few years back I worked on a project named Horizons (you might have heard me talk about it on Jeremy Gage’s DYD Podcast in 2020). That project is technically still a WIP — it was a culmination of a lot of critical thought I had been nurturing in my arts practice about queer utopianism and, at a certain point, stalled. Working on it was becoming laborious for many reasons¹, one of which was simply that I wanted it to be a game that meant something, which put a lot of pressure on the project! I was fantasizing, at the time, that my next big game project was going to be purely self-indulgent. It didn’t have to be “art”. It could be something just for fun. Something just for me.

Eventually, I gave in to that desire, swapping one focus project for another. Horizons is still in the queue, but I think it needs more time to develop and transform. I’ll come back to it one day, but for now, I will put my energy toward that which brings me joy. A new, silly little game.

I’ve codenamed this project Nova Crystallis, which is an obscure little reference to the Fabula Nova Crystallis subseries of final fantasy — a sort of “new era” for the franchise that attempted to redefine the role of the “crystals” motif in their storytelling under a new, loosely unified cosmology. This codename has little bearing on the design of my project, but I do find myself drawing inspiration from the connections between technology, faith, and fantasy throughout these games. Eventually this project will find a name of its own.

What is it?

Nova Crystallis is a game of diasporic fantasy by way of JRPG love-letter:

By diasporic I mean that it is reflective of my experience as part of the second Italian diaspora. It is not necessarily a game about diaspora as much as it is a game formed from the mythos that has crystallized about the land my paternal family came from. It is a fantasy born in the dream of a place I have never been.

The term JRPG (Japanese Roleplaying Game) refers to a lineage of digital roleplaying games that come out of Japan. While generally not a favored term among Japanese game developers, it is useful here as a descriptive (rather than formal) category because I am referring almost exclusively to Japanese roleplaying games in my game making.

The specific intercultural history of Italy/Japan relations and the popularity of Japanese cultural exports among Italians also lays some of the social groundwork for this project — I am part of a sizeable population of Italian weebs.² I learned to read on the instruction manual for Dragon Warrior, I developed complex language comprehension in Golden Sun, and I continue to religiously devote myself to experiencing every minute of these 80-hour adventures. Now, drawing on the mechanics and science-fantasy aesthetics from games like Final Fantasy (especially X and XIII), Lost Odyssey, and NieR: Automata; this project is my love-letter to these games that have been with me since I was a child.

Where it began. Where it’s going.

This project began in earnest as a hack of Ironsworn by Shawn Tomkin for a friend group that wanted to play Ironsworn as a kind of MUD on a discord server back in 2021. Even before that, though, I’ve had my eye on Ironsworn as a source of imperfect inspiration — a game so close to being what I want that keeps drawing me back in despite all of its rough edges. I found myself enamoured by its building block asset-based character creation, its focus on a grounded kind of “slow magic”, its GM-agnostic play structure within its progress system, and the dreamy possibility for drop-in-drop-out MMO-like cooperative play.

The project has evolved a lot in the years since and I don’t think it’s a true hack anymore, but it remains true to a small mechanical question that struck a spark in my brain: what if each asset was its own job?

I hope to talk a little more explicitly about some of my plans for this project going forward, rather than toiling away in private as I have for years and years. Design philosophy, specific mechanics, inspirations, play experiences, and dreams of what could be; all are ripe for exploration. If this blog has taught me anything, it’s that I work best when I work socially. I can’t wait to start playing together soon and to see what this game becomes.

I hope you are as excited to follow along and play with me as I am to grow and share it. Fantasy awaits.

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Notes

1. Reasons for stalling include but are not limited to: the Is It Art question, the search for bespoke mechanics in conflict with design goals, feeling like a misfit in an industrialized RPG scene, disillusionment with the RaDiCaL pOtEnTiAl of storygames, anger at social trends toward moralizing play, increasingly overactive ADHD / challenges with executive function, personal mental health crises as a result of pandemic isolation, the death of a friend, and upheaval + transformation within my career.
2. Heck, even my dad loved Cowboy Bebop and watched Ghost in the Shell as a kid. Like father, like child.