Using the guidelines posted in "What's the best way to present a mechanic for discussion?", I'm trying to nail down a game concept I've had for about a decade or so and get it into development mode. Ideally, the game would eventually be published as a PDF of an as-of-yet undetermined but hopefully cheap price. The working title is "Gods" (not too interesting, I know) and I'm hoping something better will emerge as I design it.

The Premise of the game is roleplaying gods, creating and shaping a world, and watching the mythos that emerges over time and continued gameplay. The game is based on something like The Silmarillion or the world-building that many of us did for Dungeons and Dragons games.

The Setting of the game is indeterminate - it would emerge through gameplay. Characters are the Gods of this imagined universe, and the game would be driven by their petty grudges, ennui, and power.

Character creation would begin by selection the God's sphere or domain - wisdom, death, fire, peace, etc. I haven't yet come up with the different attributes that would need to represent the gods, but Boredom/Ennui is definitely one of them (and would be spent to create events of a destructive or manipulative nature). They would be fluid and would change during play as the characters spend them to create and destroy, and would accumulate over time or when certain conditions are met. All players would start with the same attribute scores. The Resolution mechanic would come into play when the God's goals are at odds - war, duels of heroes, or disagreements over where a lake should be placed. This is also something I haven't pinned down yet, but I have one of two things in mind - players bidding points from their attribute pools with whoever bids the most winning the contest and ALL bidded points being lost (meaning the bidding process would have to be tracked), or the attribute pools being spent to buy dice and whoever rolls the highest winning.

The Reward Mechanic would be narrative control and the ability to establish aspects of the world (and perhaps make some of them sacrosanct). I'd also like to include an optional End of Times mechanic for one-shots or limited story arcs that would allow the "winner" to narrate the world's end, or at the very least the end of the Age of Gods and what's to follow. During play, meeting certain conditions would move the players closer to that goal.

Right now my goal is to get all of these defined enough to come up with a rough copy of rules so that I can begin playtesting. From there I'll revise the rules until I'm satisfied enough to come up with a draft of the game for publishing.

All that said, do you see any points of disconnect between the different aspects of the game? Does one resolution mechanic (auctioning vs. purchasing dice for a contest) float above the other as making more sense? Or is there anything at this point that I absolutely must nail down before any discussion can take place?

Thanks for your time,
Bret

I'm not sure how you achieve these concepts through mechanics, making it difficult to give feedback..

Please explain.

Okay, let me see if I can shape this amorphous mass into something a little more defined.

Players take the roles of gods of specific spheres. Application of these spheres to the narrative provides them with bonuses, and all their creations must have an aspect of this sphere (the god of fire can make volcanic wastelands, fire elementals, beings of living molten earth, etc.) I'm thinking something like Fire would be a trait assigned to the God that can be used a number of times per turn. This trait is passed on to all his creations.

A single turn is an Age, during which the players take multiple actions. Creating new lands and so on. Creating Agents and People would be an effective way of getting more actions in an Age, and allow you to build cities, nations, and so on that revere you which would give you more Power in the following Age.

The Gods would be eternally fighting Boredom, which is a score that increases over the Ages. When it reaches a certain cap, the God is overtaken with Boredom and cannot use his Power until he does something to relieve it such as start a war, or make a wager with another god or somesuch. Boredom can be spent in the place of Power for these actions, which means creating a world of eternal bliss and peace is damn near impossible.

Right now I'm imagining the world being mapped with a number of index cards, each index card listing the traits of the land which can be applied for bonuses in any conflict involving it. The traits are chosen by the creating God at the moment of its creation. Same with peoples, or heroes, or what-have-you.

Keep in mind that I don't have my rules clearly defined yet. Does this clear things up, though?

Avoiding boredom, and its ineffectiveness, sounds like a decent drivign force. One quesiton I have: are the players really building a whole world? With a big map with continents in front of them maybe, and reams of paper describing cities, important personna, etc etc etc? That seems...almost masochistic. Building a full world by oneseulf is hard enough. But if I'm reading you right, this isn't really a tool for creating a world, it's a game that takes inspiration from world-building. So why build the whole world?

An alternative might be to just allow the players to highlight whatever things they want. So there's no need for 100 cities in a god's chosen continent. Instead, the player would just say, "Okay, and Belluria, that's a really importan city right now, because a new prophet has arisen there." No more detail is necessary, because all that's important is the fact that there's a prophet in Belluria now. And what cities are nearby also isn't important, unless they start followign the prophet, or whatever.

Basically, my qusiton comes down to "how much detail are you imagining players actually creating?"

Jasper,

Key elements for the players to track would be the geographical lands (I'm not thinking nations and cities so much as blasted landscapes like Mordor or, if you play World of Warcraft, the Barrens). Nations and cities in those lands would be notes, if anything.

They'd also want to track their creations: specifically the different races and the areas they've come to inhabit. There will probably also be things like monsters (their creations or children) and whatnot.

I'm also imagining heroes playing an important role in gameplay and being noted on the landscape using tokens.

This is going to be a key question, though: how much is detailed and how much is left to float in the shared imagined space? I'd say only things that are going to be utilized to a great degree in conflicts needs to be defined, or entities that the players themselves have chosen to emphasize. We can, for example, imagine there being a great number of other heroes wandering around besides the ones the players create, but the heroes created by the PCs are the ones that have become caught up in the gods' petty games.

Well, this is a philosophy similar to Universalis'. You pay for something, somehitng appears in the story. You pay to add details to something, something becomes more relevant in the story. About the rest? It is surely there, but it is not relevant.
I would suggest: Work on mechanics which take into account the relevance of a place/characer (the amount of investment used to create it) when it is involved in a conflict. Check Universalis for a good example.

Cheers,
Arturo

Bret wrote:
Okay, let me see if I can shape this amorphous mass into something a little more defined.

Players take the roles of gods of specific spheres. Application of these spheres to the narrative provides them with bonuses, and all their creations must have an aspect of this sphere (the god of fire can make volcanic wastelands, fire elementals, beings of living molten earth, etc.) I'm thinking something like Fire would be a trait assigned to the God that can be used a number of times per turn. This trait is passed on to all his creations.

A single turn is an Age, during which the players take multiple actions. Creating new lands and so on. Creating Agents and People would be an effective way of getting more actions in an Age, and allow you to build cities, nations, and so on that revere you which would give you more Power in the following Age.

The Gods would be eternally fighting Boredom, which is a score that increases over the Ages. When it reaches a certain cap, the God is overtaken with Boredom and cannot use his Power until he does something to relieve it such as start a war, or make a wager with another god or somesuch. Boredom can be spent in the place of Power for these actions, which means creating a world of eternal bliss and peace is damn near impossible.

Right now I'm imagining the world being mapped with a number of index cards, each index card listing the traits of the land which can be applied for bonuses in any conflict involving it. The traits are chosen by the creating God at the moment of its creation. Same with peoples, or heroes, or what-have-you.

Keep in mind that I don't have my rules clearly defined yet. Does this clear things up, though?

See, I told you this one had grabbed hold of me.

The more I ponder this, the more I think an important question should be answered before moving forward: what is the creative agenda the game will support? 

• Is this a game about collaboratively creating a mythology for a new world?  (Narrativist)  If so, then the majority of the work should go into the direct interactions of the gods themselves, and the world they are creating is in a way background material.  What is more important is the development of the relationships between the gods (who hates/loves who, who steals whos golden chalice, who cuts off whos genitals when they aren't looking, etc.)  This becomes more like a role-playing game with table-top game elements grafted on to it.

• Is this a game about building worlds, and what it feels like to build them? (Simulationist)  If so, then your best bet is to stop now and buy one of the many computer games (SimCity, for example) that do this very well.  To my mind, this is strictly a solo activity.

• Is this a game about the conflict of the gods, how they use mortals in these conflicts, and who rules the pantheon?  (Gamist) In this case, I think, the relationship angles between the gods, as described above, will become more mechanical, and the game will be more about the strategy of building the world for your advantage (i.e. if you are a god of oceans making sure there are lots of oceans), and maneuvering your worshippers to control of the world.  In this case, the game probably has a "win" condition or more than one, with a built-in end point.  Functionally, this is very similar to a table-top version of a game like Age of Mythology, with signficant role-playing elements grafted on to it, almost like a fusion of Age of Mythology and Diplomacy with character sheets.

From what you described, Bret, it sounds like you were tending towards the Gamist type game I described in my third point above.

Do you foresee the players truly playing the role of a particular god (i.e. Actor Stance, I think), or do you foresee the players selecting god traits for their utility during the course of the game (i.e. Director Stance, I think)?  Is there a GM, who somehow sets out the boundaries of the conflicts or provides input to an on-going story, or is there no GM, and it is strictly the interactions of the players that drive the story.

Of course, there are multiple ways of framing the game beyond what I have described above.  The "characters" the players play could be more like religions/cultural movements, where the type of God is really just a set of attributes on the "character" sheet, and the story that the players are telling is really the history of an entire world.  The world could be pretty much in place already, and the god characters are essentially VERY highly powered superheroes in that world.  And there are certainly other ways I haven't thought of.

Arturo,

I've never read Universalis but I've doubtless absorbed some ideas from it through the gamer collective consciousness. Your reply did set off a chain reaction in my brain which has caused me to change direction in the way I'm designing the system. Thank you for that.

Hans,

I'm glad the idea grabbed ahold of you. It's grabbed ahold of me too. Your post is really gratifying to me because you're thinking about all the things that I've been thinking about when it comes to the game's design. However, today I did some rethinking of my design and I've more or less jumped the tracks to something different completely.

My original intention with the design is almost exactly as you described - categorizing and classifying items, and having the game emerge as a result of their interactions, but it wasn't sitting well with me. If this is going to be a game about gods, as I envisioned it, then I want you to be able to go beyond whatever categories of creatable items I come up. I want to play this with people and have them do something that says, "Wow, I never would have thought of it," and I want the worlds and stories that are created to be as fantastic as the players can dream up.

Also, this game at its heart is about world creation, not strategizing against other players. When I was a kid I had reams and reams of notes on Dungeons and Dragons settings. Nevermind that I didn't actually have anyone to play Dungeons and Dragons with. The creation was the fun. I want to capture that in this game. That means I need to make the system more fluid and more abstract.

Things have slid into place in my mind now - the game just needs a rough copy of the playtest rules hashed out, and then needs to be playtested thoroughly. I'm going to try and hammer those out this weekend, but for now here's the main concepts. Note: The terminology I'm using right now is just what occurred to me as I sketched notes today, so if Keys or GodKeys sounds lame, bear with me.

Keys - These are the building blocks of the game - these are the things that matter to the gods and to the setting. They are how the gods affect and change the world, and how the world relates to the setting. They are people, places, creatures, concepts, and anything else that makes the world what it is. The initial Keys established during the Creation Myth will provide the foundation for the world. Keys created later can reference previously established Keys making them harder for the other Gods to affect. They're more "real." For example, creating a key called the Sword of Nar'jul and describing it as a sword forged by the Rock People out of the bones of the Iron Prophet will make it harder for opponents to Meddle with than if it's just some magic sword.

GodKeys - You will have the option of purchasing Keys as GodKeys. This means that these Keys are important to your god. They could be his sphere of inluence, a realm he has chosen to inhabit, or one of his monstrous offspring. Anytime someone creates a Key that references one of your GodKeys, it is easier for you to Meddle and affect the creation of the Key.

The Creation Myth - The first phase of the game. This is where the players establish their personas within the setting, as well as the very first Keys of the game.

The Ages - These are the "turns" of the game. They represent a significant period in the history of the universe. Each Age has an AgeKey associated with it that gives the Gods more Power if they reference it in one of the Keys the create during the Age. Examples would include the Age of Fire, the Age of Men, or the Age of Bone Butterflies. The Age progresses through the creation of new Keys.

Power - The raw material of creation. Gods spend this to create new Keys and to Meddle with the Keys created by the other gods. Power is gained at the beginning of an Age, when you create a Key that references the AgeKey, when you create a Key that mentions another god's GodKey, or when someone gives you their Boredom tokens.

Boredom - Being an ageless, powerful, and ineffable being can grow tiresome over time. As the Ages pass, the gods grow bored and must cause trouble to prevent Boredom from overtaking them. If this happens, the god grows weary of creation and the universe, and loses the ability to spend Power in any way but Meddling. One decreases Boredom by Meddling in the Keys of other gods. After the Meddling is concluded, you may give that god any number of Boredom tokens you have, which then becomes Power tokens.

The End Times - This is the end of the game, which occurs after a certain number of Ages have passed, the players run out of time, or if all the Gods are overtaken with Boredom. I don't have any rules for it because I'm hoping the players can come to some sort of agreement over How It All Ends. If inspiration strikes, though, there will be rules.

Theres more to write - Turn Order, Conflict, and so on, but I think I'll just wait until tomorrow and write up the rough copy of the rules.

Thanks everyone for the comments so far.

Bret wrote:
My original intention with the design is almost exactly as you described - categorizing and classifying items, and having the game emerge as a result of their interactions, but it wasn't sitting well with me. If this is going to be a game about gods, as I envisioned it, then I want you to be able to go beyond whatever categories of creatable items I come up. I want to play this with people and have them do something that says, "Wow, I never would have thought of it," and I want the worlds and stories that are created to be as fantastic as the players can dream up.

Also, this game at its heart is about world creation, not strategizing against other players. When I was a kid I had reams and reams of notes on Dungeons and Dragons settings. Nevermind that I didn't actually have anyone to play Dungeons and Dragons with. The creation was the fun. I want to capture that in this game. That means I need to make the system more fluid and more abstract.

Hans! Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate your questions and you've given me a lot to think about. I'm going to hold off on answering some of them since I now have a set of rules that can be found at http://gillan.coopster.net/gods.doc . Keep in mind that these are just proto-rules at this point. Their purpose is to provide people who would be interested in playtesting the game the basics to work with, as well as letting myself organize and put together all my thoughts so I can begin playtesting immediately. After playtesting I will eventually expand it to make the text more illuminating and give more examples - essentially flesh it out into a fully-fledged roleplaying game. And maybe I'll actually think of some rules for the End Times.

Anyhow, specific things I'm looking for in terms of feedback from anyone who would be interested in providing me with some:

Does the game sound like something you'd play? If not, why not and what do you think could be improved?
Do you foresee any problems with the rules as they are currently?
Anything you particularly like?
Anything you particularly hate?

Thanks everyone.

I like your idea, and the initial draft does appear interesting.

But I also had a few questions after reading it, mostly concerned with how meddling worked.  Let's consider that in the previous age my god created a major civilization, and that in the present age someone wants to cause that civilization to fall.  Is that possible?  Is that considered meddling with the older Key, or is the creation of a new Key "The Fall of Nowheresdom"?

I think a few play examples might be helpful.

Hey Owen!

You're not the first person to tell me I need an example of play. That's going on the docket and I'll try to get one into the document tonight.

Yes, it is possible to cause the fall of a major civilization that someone had created in a previous Key. Keys created in previous Ages are untouchable, though. The only time you can Meddle in a Key is in the turn that it's being created. The way to affect an older Key would be, as you described, to create a new Key which would go something like:

The Fall of Nowheresdom was not immediate, but came about as a result of growing corruption and the squandering of Nowheresdom's tax money, which left its military forces unprepared when the Horse Skull Tribes came pouring out of the Red Hills.

One thing I've also thought about that I should include is a cap on the benefit you can get from putting Keys in a new Key your creating. Otherwise, as the game goes on, it could get ridiculous.

I'm not so sure of the idea of a cap, but you might experiment with other ways of controlling the degree of benefit gained.  I'd consider placing a limit on direct dependencies of a key (things mentioned specifically in it), but perhaps working in indirect dependencies (dependencies of the dependencies) in somehow.

Hey Owen!

My idea isn't to cap the number of Keys that can be included, but just the total benefit that one can gain from using them in Key creation - for example, capping it at 10. You can have 40 (!) Keys in the Key your creating, but in order for someone else to Meddle the most they will ever have to pay is 10 Tokens.

Also, I've thought about the idea of dependencies of dependencies, and I'm concerned that it might be cumbersome or complicated to track.

Bret wrote:
Yes, it is possible to cause the fall of a major civilization that someone had created in a previous Key. Keys created in previous Ages are untouchable, though. The only time you can Meddle in a Key is in the turn that it's being created. The way to affect an older Key would be, as you described, to create a new Key which would go something like:

The Fall of Nowheresdom was not immediate, but came about as a result of growing corruption and the squandering of Nowheresdom's tax money, which left its military forces unprepared when the Horse Skull Tribes came pouring out of the Red Hills.

One thing I've also thought about that I should include is a cap on the benefit you can get from putting Keys in a new Key your creating. Otherwise, as the game goes on, it could get ridiculous.

Bret wrote: My idea isn't to cap the number of Keys that can be included, but just the total benefit that one can gain from using them in Key creation - for example, capping it at 10.

Bret, I read your draft over lunch, so now I can actually talk specifics.

I like your concept a lot, but your game currency is pretty broken.  Furthermore, you have no reward system, which means the game may spin pretty fast, but it won't go anywhere.

If players get 1 Boredom per Age, and in each Age they get a guaranteed opportunity to Meddle and spend that Boredom, I don't see any reason why players will ever have more than one Boredom.  Alternately, they'll save their Boredom until they have nine and spend the all in some heavy Meddling in the Ninth Age.  There's no reason why anyone would ever get to 10 Boredom unless they pretty much wanted to end the game.

Similarily, with players getting 1 Power per Age, players will either (a) create lots of free Keys that reference the AgeKey and the various GodKeys and only occasionally (b) spend some Power to create something new.  I suspect that Power will be stashed and saved for later Meddling, instead, so (b) is even less frequent.  I don't think the game would expand away from the GodKeys much at all.

I said you didn't have a reward system and technically you do, it's just relatively weak: the satisfaction of introducing Keys and leaving your mark on others' Keys.  This is, however, purely aesthetic satisfaction unweighted by any systemic factors.  I could be really proud of the city I created, but creating that city doesn't actually do anything for me afterwards.

I think you need to make your game currency actually matter, which means it needs to (a) affect credibility and/or (b) limit player options.  Additionally, I'd reinforce that root satisfaction in creating Keys by having Keys be 'owned' by players (and thereafter fought over).  Have players get power based on how many Keys they own.  Let Meddling allow players to steal Keys from eachother -- players spend Boredom and Power tokens to initiate Meddling, and other players can spend Power tokens to support or interfere with that Meddling.  Other players' Power can be limited by how many referenced Keys they own (so if you're Meddling with the Iron Prince Key and it references my Red Hills Key and Muskets Key, I can spend 2 Power to support or interfere with you).  The stakes of Meddling would be the ownership of the Keys -- you can add or remove references to other Keys, and whoever has the most referenced Keys owns that Key.

If you want to really ramp up the Boredom currency, don't let it be spent and go away -- if you spend Boredom and win, whoever loses gets those Boredom tokens.  And if it's your turn and you have more Boredom than Power, you can't create a Key, you must Meddle.

Here's my suggestion vis-a-vis the capping:

A given key can only depend on at most 3 other keys.  If you're gaining the AgeKey or the GodKey benefits, that takes up one of the dependencies.  A key could conceivably reference other Keys that it does not depend on, but the three that it does depend on must be the three most central dependencies.

The End Times occurs when a Key enters the Chronology that, tracing back its ancestry, incorporates every othey Key.  The End Times signify fulfillment of whatever purpose or destiny there was in this world.

Now, in order to play like that, it would obviously be necessary to have a way of keeping track of indirect dependencies, almost like a flowchart.  I'm thinking of something of either cards or large sheets of paper.

Hey guys! Thanks for all the great feedback. Unfortunately I don't have the time to respond to all of it, but I'll do what I can to cover as much as I can.

I think this game is worthwhile as a self-contained, complete game. I'm not going to get into arguments about whether it's a roleplaying game or not, but I do not think it needs to only be a prelude for some other RPG nor do I think it needs the addition of elements to play it out on a microcosmic level to make it worthwhile. I think creating a compelling, interesting mythology for a world, from scratch, with my friends that I can pull out and say, "Hey, we made this, and it's COOL" is a complete and worthwhile activity without any addition. Could the results be used as the setting for a more standard roleplaying game? Sure, but that's not going to be the goal of this. And having not much of an interest in mythology or history myself, yet still thinking that this sounds like it'd be really cool, I think I can say with some confidence that other people would enjoy this as well. There was a tandem story game called Pantheon produced by Hogshead Publishing a ways back (which is similar to what I'm doing with my game), and me and a group of friends pulled it out and played it. None of us are interested in history and mythology, but we had a Hell of a time, and at the end of it we were all impressed with the epic story and mythos we'd created. What I'm trying to create here is a game that gives you that feeling, but is more organized and powerful than Pantheon. Anyhow, that was a group of eight people with a wide variety of gaming preferences that had a whole lot of fun. So, Hans, I reject your assertion that nobody will find this game interesting. Once I get this published if I don't sell anything and I get no Actual Play reports, then I'll say you're right and buy you a pizza. But I think this sounds like fun, as do some of my friends, as well as a couple people who have IMed since I started this thread. I think the current game's goals, without any modification whatsoever, are complete and satisfactory. Thanks for your concern, though, Hans. :)

Now, I'm going to look for ways to incorporate some portrayal into this (actually roleplaying out the interactions of the gods and whatnot) but right now I can't think of any way to really do it. Maybe inspiration will strike during playtesting. Right now, the focus of the game will be the creation of a cool-ass mythology - not portrayal or even getting emotionally engaged in the interactions of the characters. As long as the people playing it are having fun, that's enough emotion for me.

I'm not going to worry about capping the benefits from using Keys at the moment. The way the system is currently set up, there is nothing beneficial about making your Keys impossible to be meddled with by opponents. Driving an opponent to Boredom means they can't create Keys for YOU to Meddle with. Not a good situation.

Joshua is right, though. The system, as it stands, is really weak. I think it'll get the job done, but I don't think it will really push the game towards compelling or engaging play. I have to think about this for awhile and possible solutions, and I have a couple ideas:

- Tinker with what I have now and try to find possible solutions using the system as it stands - maybe make Boredom more oppressive and difficult to get rid of using some of Joshua's suggestions (Boredom > Power = no key creation, or create a competitive contest in Meddling where loss means the accumulation of Boredom)
- Allow GodKeys to change hands as the result of a lost contest or the creation of a Key to that end, and make them more meaningful - perhaps you get more Power for each GodKey you have? Something to that effect.
- Creating two types of Keys - persistent object keys that generate Power and that the players can struggle for, and event keys that represent the struggles for them. I want these things to be very vague though so that players can be as creative as they want to be when it comes to the creation of these things. A Object Key could be a city, a hero, a sword, a story, or a concept, and an Event Key could be a city, a hero, a story, or a concept - it all depends on the context, how much they mean to the god in question and to what end these things are being applied. This would require a big overhaul of the rules.

I'm going to playtest the rules as they exist right now, see if gameplay sucks or is pretty good but could use some tweaking, and go from there. This discussion is extremely helpful, but I want to get some Actual Play under my belt with the game to help me get some perspective before deciding where to go next with this.

Also, thanks everyone for the consistent and great feedback!

First off, GodKeys = Power Income is golden.  That's a big hunk of what you were missing.  And then fighting over those GodKeys would be awesome -- Appollo had to win all of the things he was in charge of, and he took most of them from other gods.

Bret wrote: Creating two types of Keys - persistent object keys that generate Power and that the players can struggle for, and event keys that represent the struggles for them. I want these things to be very vague though so that players can be as creative as they want to be when it comes to the creation of these things. A Object Key could be a city, a hero, a sword, a story, or a concept, and an Event Key could be a city, a hero, a story, or a concept - it all depends on the context, how much they mean to the god in question and to what end these things are being applied. This would require a big overhaul of the rules.

This is probably my personal tastes seeping in, but I find it interesting to think of the playing out of the Keys as some sort of destiny or prophecy, without the personas of gods involved.  Hence my above suggestion about how to handle The End Times.

I suppose a lot of things really depend on how you want the game to end.  If you want it to eventually come to a close with all of the gods fading into boredom, then there needs to be something in-place to encourage that to actually happen.

Generally speaking, I like the game as it stands more than any of the proposed major changes.  But, again, that's probably just my taste.

I'll concur that an endgame would be a good addition.  The Gods grinding down to boredom will probably be a little anticlimactic.  Perhaps they are attempting to accomplish some goal (perhaps Owen's destiny) before they're unable to do anything but Meddle Meddle Meddle?

I'm not sure it's inherently anti-climactic.  It depends a great deal on how the ending is narrated.  For instance, Middle Earth played out this way would eventually end with the gods (the Ainur) fading into boredom (or weariness) until the world ends in a big apocalypse when Melkor returns.

My earlier suggestion about tying the endgame to the creation of a Key that depends on every other Key (indirectly) would do a lot if you're following my "destiny" kind of idea.  Then the game isn't necessarily the entire history of the world, but rather a (potentially very complicated) unfolding of events that culminates in some kind of fulfillment.  Think how all of the Greek myths culminate in the Trojan war, the exile of Aeneas, and the eventual rise of Rome.

There are two stumbling blocks to this idea, though:

First, it has to be easy to track indirect dependencies.  I'm not sure how, but some kind of clever recording mechanism might be able to fix this.

Second, the gods' power needs to gradually decrease over time, so that the number of new Keys being introduced slowly decreases.  Otherwise the dependency tree won't get any narrower as time goes on.

Bret wrote:
So, Hans, I reject your assertion that nobody will find this game interesting. Once I get this published if I don't sell anything and I get no Actual Play reports, then I'll say you're right and buy you a pizza. But I think this sounds like fun, as do some of my friends, as well as a couple people who have IMed since I started this thread. I think the current game's goals, without any modification whatsoever, are complete and satisfactory. Thanks for your concern, though, Hans. :)