underside dev diary #12: home moves (+ apology)

hi everybody! thank you to everyone who has kept supporting me over the last few months. to make a long story short, my rent was suddenly raised, i was forced to move on very short notice, and then i spent a month visiting my girlfriends in the usa. i should have posted about that here, of course, and i'm genuinely sorry to everyone supporting this patreon for vanishing off the face of the earth for a couple months. that said, work on underside has continued: all of the 'cape phase stuff', as in, the rules you need to actually go out and have a supervillainous adventure -- they're done! that means the first set of technically-playable playtest rules should be coming next month or so, and i'll be posting them here.

all the stuff that i'm working on now is campaign stuff, stuff meant to help you structure and guide your campaigns into a constant mess of escalation, cycles of violence, and superpowered chaos. one of those things is home moves -- one of the game's two ways to relieve tension.

now, tension is something you accumulate during your caped adventures, marking it to give yourself an edge on high-consequence rolls, or even filling your whole tension bar to avoid a potentially deadly consequence. you can drain your tension by doing dangerous shit in costume -- these are lapses, a set of actions that clear tension depending on your approaches:

 but of course, lapses can be life-threatening, putting you in more danger than you started. if you rely entirely on lapses to clear your tension, you'll end up in a vicious cycle very quickly. so the home phase exists, a part of the game focusing solely on your civilian life in which you can clear tension by, well, ruining your own life.

underside is a game that wants to focus on the psychology and humanity of its caped characters, not just their awesome superpowered fights -- but nobody wants to spend a whole session roleplaying what Buzzsaw is doing in her day job as a temp worker. so home moves are a list of scenarios designed to capture the points of friction between the caped and real identities, the drama and toll that the 'main' part of the game takes on its characters. it pushes you into a choice: try and keep your life together (and have less free tension to mark for when you need it in costume) or let it all burn down to dedicate all your energy to heroics.

here's just four of the 21 home moves i've written:

 you'll notice that they're framed in a question-and-answer format: while you can (and are invited to!) play out any of these scenes in detail, the default structure of home moves keeps a laser focus on the most interesting parts, the conflicts and emotions that are going into these situations, so that you can have your fill of drama while still knowing you'll soon be getting back to your caped escapades.

hope you enjoyed this long-overdue dev diary! i'll be posting some poetry and miscellaneous writing bits here over the next couple weeks, as well as more dev diaries for underside and my other tabletop project i'm undertaking with magnesium oxide, PRAXI -- i hope to make this stupid and gay maze of Exclusive Content a bit more worth being trapped in going forward. thank you all for your continued patience and support -- it means the world.