[Mayhem] Power 19

[JoyWriter]

Setting up the rules to support actions can be done in a number of different ways; you can have a general system and produce examples, or you can start with a single form of activity and work out. Those two ways of building correspond in softwear development to the waterfall method and prototype based methods, where you either work down from general feel or try to refactor and combine separate modules of gameplay, or as they are sometimes called in computer game design, vertical slices. Those priest/farmer minigames would almost constitute vertical slices, and they would be complete if you worked out what kind of stuff you expected to be "on top of them" in terms of how they would each interact with the broader themes of the setting. So in other words, if you can make a farmer act in a way that is not only a farmer subsystem but a set of fun interacting mechanics that cover everything you want within the limits of "a farmer", then you have a vertical slice. Conversely you could be building the social system in one go, from general concepts of how they should interact, and one of the ways I approach this stuff is to leave plugs on the outsides of subsystems, and keep track of the things they need from the other systems to work. That way you can have all the different subsystems setting a specification for what the more over-arcing systems should do.

I really like the "confront the other" idea, I like the idea that the player characters are marked as such because they are people on the border between the familiar and the strange. Now in terms of "other", presumably you want it to be iconically foreign, so instead of being pattern A vs Pattern B, you can't quite see if there is a pattern B, because it is so alien. This would suggest that the job of the players is either to destroy the other or accommodate it, both relying on a bit more understanding of what it is. Now if you are prepared for it, this would mean having characters rebuild their mythology and culture in the light of new information, and perhaps they would be torn between two mechanics, one relating to "the other" and your affinity for it, and the other to your culture and it's tenets. Now the point at which they would meet could be the players shifting the beliefs of their characters as they learn new stuff, trying to get to grips with these surprising events, with all the mechanics tying into the changes they make.

If that is too weird language, imagine that the player sits inside a black box with rules all around, and the rules have to squish the core conflict of the game into that box. The questions the rules ask of the player should relate to mythmaking, and the information it gives the players should relate to the conflict between the other and to their own characters cultural background. Then through the rules the mythmaking should influence the conflict, so that the two are pulled together.
Now all this assumes that you only want it to be about "confronting the other". That is what you said, obviously but some of your original post suggests an interest playing out a worldview that is not in significant crisis. It occurs to me that it might be good to have mechanics both to challenge and to reinforce the old way of thinking, whether centred on the land and technique, or in society and fashion. It could be that in the winter a man behaves like one from another tribe, but in the harvest he comes in to help with the grain like any normal member of his own tribe, and even thinks more similarly for that period.

Thinking again, I'm not sure having a patternless other is such a good idea; it's probably better to have a different culture with it's different ideas and ideals, producing their own specialities and skills, so it's not just randomness, but a proper different culture for them to deal with. Even strange events that are not to do with meeting people could be brought in from different belief structures, so meeting the same things the Inuits meet may encourage you towards elements of their culture.