FUR: Vision Design, Pt VII: Brave New World

     Welcome to TwistedSpoon Studio! With a new year comes a new approach to Festival of Urbestia, the custom Magic set about a diverse city of beast folk. We're going to revisit the mechanics and world with fresh eyes.

    Let's start with the set's Vision:

• Make Urbestia a world of beast folk
• Put diversity front and center
• Let players choose how to express themselves
• Capture key elements of community, art, and self-expression

    The world is full of beast folk, but they don't really feel like beast folk. They feel like every other creature in Magic, but with a different type line. To address that, we're going to use flavorful tropes and associations to make them feel like the animals that they're supposed to be. Wolves howl at the moon. Dogs like to dig holes. Cats always land on their feet. Whereas the previous approach was top-down festival with beast folk sprinkled in, this attempt will be more top-down animals with festival tropes sprinkled in.

    The world has diversity, but it feels less emphasized. We're going to change that by restructuring the set. Rather than having ten color pairs associated with different tribes, I want to do something a little different-- something that Magic has never done before. Rather than separating the tribes, we're going to put each of the five main tribes-- Wolves, Foxes, Dogs, Cats, and Reptiles-- into each color. Maybe not necessarily as creatures, but each color will have at least a reference to each of the tribes at common. Flavor-wise, the cultures of each group will be divided by color, creating multiple cultures within which multiple races reside-- in other words, realistic diversity. 

    Crafting has been a slam-dunk for self-expression. Developing a custom set gives you a lot of freedom to play around with tokens, especially if you're just drawing them on note cards as you go; being able to choose what the token looks like is very fun and evocative. In the final set, Claws and Pelts will have a handful of different arts each to let players really customize their creatures without creating a ton of mechanical complexity. Never underestimate the impact of art on a design.

    Speaking of which, the set has a hole where the art mechanic used to be. To fill the gap, we're going to use another mechanic that we considered during exploratory design-- Treasure! "Now wait," you're thinking. "You said that treasure was off the table because crafting ate all of the token slots like a big, hungry monster." Right you are, astute reader. That's why we won't be using treasure tokens. Instead, the set will feature a number of whole-card Treasure artifacts. At common, these will have enters-the-battlefield effects that act as sorceries, while the artifact itself sticks around to be sacrificed later. The flavor will also expand to include various baubles, trinkets, oddities-- in convention terms, merch. This supports Vibrant while also combining with crafting to fill out an artifacts subtheme that feels right at home in a convention setting.

    That's all for this week. What do you think of the new direction? What are you starting (or restarting) for the coming year? 

    To be clear, this still counts towards Vision Design; Wizards gets four months, so I'm also planning to cut off my Vision stage at the four month mark as well. The first VD article went up September 25th, so the final one will drop late this month. The plan is to take a break after Vision to playtest thoroughly for a month or so before moving on to the Integration stage, during which time we'll dive back into Worldbuilding wholeheartedly. Next week, we're going to adjust the set skeleton and try out some flavorful top-down animal and convention trope designs. Until then, revisit the introduction of FUR here, or learn about my approach to workflow in the last Monday Musings here.

See you soon!