Currency in Ruin Raiders

One of the things I wanted to do differently with the Ruin Raiders world was to make the economy a proper barter system. I wanted prices of items to naturally vary based on the usefulness and availability of items.

But, I also wanted to create a yard stick that people could measure worth by. So I needed at least one fixed point on the economic scale that you could use for reference. The fixed point I used was the amount of electrical energy carried by the most common batteries..

This unit of measurement was the Cell.

These small coin sized batteries have become the backbone of Raider bartering across the ruins. Each one carries a small amount of electricity that can be used to power the various items found in the ruins.

Importantly, they can also be used to power the Protein Spinnners, meaning that they are one of the few items that has an almost fixed price. After all, everyone needs to eat.

There are also larger batteries that carry a charge equivalent to 10 cells. These are commonly called Bats to differentiate them from Cells.

Armed & Dangerous

One of the big decisions I had to make for Ruin Raiders was whether to allow any combat within the game.

The main goal is to use this as a taster game for people that have never larped before, so by definition, my target audience does not have larp combat experience. And would need an introduction and full safety briefing before they could do any fighting. That seemed like overkill for an action event that will last for less than 10 minutes.

On the other hand, I love the element of danger that the threat of violence brings to the game. Without the possibility of combat, it’s just a scavenger hunt in an obstacle course.

I’ve decided that I’m going to allow ranged combat with various nerf style weapons and any threats also only use ranged attacks. In fact, one of the starting pieces of equipment that you can be equipped with is a x-shot bow and you will be able to find the components to make zip guns in play.

I may have bought a bunch of nerf weapons this week. Don’t tell my wife :-)

Getting my bugs in a row...

Lots of good chat at the No Rest For The Wicked Christmas party last night. It was good to get a catch up with folks.

In particular I had a decent chat with Sean and Diz from Skian Mohr about my plans for compulsion and what I was looking to do. Lots of excited banter and some good ideas were suggested.

I need to get some ideas down on paper and then go through to have a proper chat about it.

One of the subjects that came up was the importance of Scran.

More on that later :-)

Getting Started...

I have the tools, now I need the
target to aim for!

It feels like I've been turning Ruin Raiders over and over in my head for quite some time now. I've got a lot of ideas and I've had some good chats with some helpful people. It's easy to stay at that stage, just keep it as a little mental exercise where it's safe (and the players can't break it).

It was time to make a move.

I know I don't function well without a deadline to define the scope of my projects, so that was my first priority. I had to sit here with hardly any props organised and no rules written and take the big step of scheduling my 1st event. Without that I'd get this properly under development.

I'm sticking to home ground for my first run, the local RPG convention at Edinburgh University is Conpulsion. The theme this year is Innovation and I think that rather suits my little gaming experiment.

I'm all set for the Saturday morning slot as people are arriving and starting to get registered. Fingers crossed that means there are people wandering around with 15-20 mins to spare to do a Ruin Raid.

The second step?

Oh, that was telling people I'd booked a slot :-)