Here’s the cover for the Planarch Codex: Over-Turned, the streamlined hack of Inverse World that we will release for…

Here’s the cover for the Planarch Codex: Over-Turned, the streamlined hack of Inverse World that we will release for…

Here’s the cover for the Planarch Codex: Over-Turned, the streamlined hack of Inverse World that we will release for free to all backers if the Kickstarter reaches $15,000 (currently at $11,500 with only 9 days left). The cover illustration is by the very talented Turkish artist Bülent Gültek.

26 thoughts on “Here’s the cover for the Planarch Codex: Over-Turned, the streamlined hack of Inverse World that we will release for…”

  4. Jonathan Walton: realised after I’d posted that that you actually say so in the post. >.>

    Appreciate the link, though. His style is absolutely awesome and completely fits.

  10. P.S. One thing you should definitely ask me about is “inverted heritage moves.” In Inverse World, you don’t have a heritage, your heritage has you!

  13. I’m glad you asked, Sean Dunstan 🙂

    So, in Dark Heart of the Dreamer the PCs are all people from sordid and complex backgrounds, having rejected or been barred from the more straightforward life-paths that exist in society, so it made sense to think about their heritage as an accumulation of a number of different things. A lot of desperate freelancers are from a mixed-race or mixed-species family (if they had a real family at all and didn’t mostly grow up on the streets), have complex ethnic and cultural heritages, have spent a lot of time living in different places, and have done any number of strange and dangerous jobs to get by. Hence: heritage moves are set up to reflect and empower that.

    However, Inverse World is inspired by a different kind of fiction and has a different type of protagonist. In Avatar: The Last Airbender and other sorts of YA fantasy fiction about exploration and identity, the young characters are often in the process of growing up and don’t really fully own and draw on their heritage in the way that jaded mercenaries might. Like the mercs, they may not fit neatly into established categories of ethnicity, class, or behavior (who does? that’s what makes them stereotypes!) but they haven’t yet decided to reject The Powers That Be and live among the outcasts and underclass. They still have some desire to fit in and be acknowledged and valued as upstanding members of society, and maybe they actually will be! And maybe, since this fiction is more optimistic, they can actually change how society works to make it more just and representative of how people actually are, rather than reflecting preconceived notions of how they should be.

    Consequently, in streamlining the rules for race / culture / heritage in this hack of Inverse World, the game will posit a number of “fixed” traditions that characters (both PCs and NPCs) can have some claim to — through birth, connections, or deeds. When a PC acts to fulfill, resist, or reinterpret one or more of those traditions (stealing directly from Simon Carryer here), they get hold that they can then spend to invoke the power of that heritage (even when you resist a tradition, you’re acknowledging its power and make a statement by breaking with it). And if the PCs can find a way to truly make an impact on the way people think and act, they can change the actual traits of the traditions…

  15. If we don’t hit the goal, then I’ll do something with this eventually, but it may be a while in coming, since I have a bunch of other projects to work on. I’m happy to release a half-finished early draft to backers, though, so people don’t feel like their extra money was “wasted.”

  19. Also, Jonathan Walton, and Sorry for the extra-wide question:

    How does this expand on Inverse World?

    I understand how Dark Heart of the Dreamer expands on “standard” DW, at least theoretically (not played it yet, starting tomorrow): what does this add to IW?

  20. Alberto Muti Good question!

    So Dark Heart builds on DW by narrowing the premise, right? Rather than playing through any number of different fantasy adventure concepts, you’re playing planar mercenaries struggling to get by in the interplanar city of Dis (or something vaguely like that), yeah?

    For Over-Turned, my thinking is that the premise is more or less exactly the same as IW: you’re a group of explorers and travelers on a journey of self-discovery and adventure among the floating islands and stone sky. The things that are different are on the structural and mechanical side.

    I haven’t seen a full draft of IW yet, but from the playbooks it seems like the core of the game is still DW and the moves look like DW moves. What  Over-Turned will do is craft a very focused and short set of rules that do exactly what the premise requires, without being too worried about the moves resembling DW.

    However, like Dark Heart everything will be modular and plug-and-play, allowing groups to mix DW/IW-style mechanics with the stuff from Over-Turned in a variety of ways. If you prefer the existing moves for X, you can keep those but use my more focused version of the rules for Y.

    Does that make sense?

  21. It does, and it’s a Very interesting approach… Looking forward to see it!

    (Bonus question, feel free not to answer, especially as it’s quite OT: I hear YA, adventure and self-discovery. How related is this to Afterborn?)

  22. Alberto Muti I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about journey-of-discovery games, for sure! Not just The Afterborn but various Avatar-inspired hacks and other things. This will be pretty different from The Afterborn in almost every way, but certainly my work on other games in this genre will help.

  23. I can certainly see how that is a good theme to build a story on 🙂

    Having both The Afterborn and Inverse World to do that can’t but be good!!!

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