Ashes of the Magi: Fallen Angel Design Retrospective

I've been designing Ashes of the Magi for about ten years. 

Well, it's more accurate to say I've been designing games that ended up becoming Ashes of the Magi for ten years. 

Starting here, I'm going to detail the journey of designing this game, what I lessons I learned along the way, why I made certain choices, and how the game evolved into its current incarnation. 

I'll try to keep up with doing at least one a week, but that's a goal, not a promise. 

So. The game started as many games do, as a reaction to the many RPGs I was playing between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Dungeons and Dragons 3rd and 4th edition, Dark Heresy, FATE, Call of Cthulhu, Riddle of Steel, Savage Worlds, World of Darkness; those are the big ones but there were countless others and one shots. I was into warhammer: fantasy battles and warmachine at the time, which informed a lot of what I liked about wargames and combat tactics. 
Surely there was a way to take the best parts of the these games, synthesize them into an elegant coherent whole, and leave the chaff behind.

I started working on a game called Fallen Angel in 2009-10. It was a squad based tactical RPG set in Los Angeles after a cataclysm where an mysterious fog turned people into monsters and sealed the city off from the outside world. Certain survivors gained strange abilities to control the fog instead, and they were your squad leaders. People simply called them fog commanders (ick). They had tactics and weirds, and you got to pick a squad of people to start with. 

In terms of the design, its mechanics were similar to Savage Worlds but a dice pool. Yeah, heterogeneous dice pools. I know. That bad idea lingered too long, narrowing my focus on 'balanced' dice mechanics instead of trying to figure out how the dice should be pushing the game forward. Or making players feel. 

Stats were simple. Brawn, Agility, Intellect, Will. Some perfectly serviceable skills. It allowed players to claim and build a territory, while trying to survive long enough to get out of the city. 
Its squad-based combat was based on selecting cards with different actions with a goofy initiative mechanic:

Roll tactical initiative, if you beat the enemy side, you see their action, and can choose a tactically superior card in response. If you fail, you must choose a card before the enemy.      

The list of what doesn't work is way longer than the list of what does. 

The squad building and character creation were functional, but not particularly interesting. 
The tactics and weirds were fun, but fairly generic. 
I enjoyed stating out various guns and imagining squads fighting each other. So much of the game was aimed at slotting players into certain predetermined roles, very similar to how classes work in many of RPGs. 

The ideas were focused on making the wargame aspect of the game playable within an RPG context, and reads pretty ham-fisted to me today. I was designing by stacking 'good' mechanics together. A fine place to start when you start, it's like building legos instead of hand-sculpting your own work. But it had no real goals. There's no real sense of design in it. 

What do the players do? Try to survive.
Why do we care? Uh...because. The combat is fun?

Yeah. No. Ew. 
 
I'm glad no one saw it. The writing is terrible. 

You can read it here.