I must be the most frustrating person to work with. Months ago, I convinced my partner that we should have unique factions and unique faction rules for Desiderium. This was, in large part, a way to bring about a more unified world model for the game to help guide our decision process. This poor guy sat through something like five hours of me arguing back and forth on whether or not we should just nuke factions and release a Build Your Own Army (BYOA) game.

Man, I’m a jerk.

Let’s start with the argument for why we might remove bespoke factions. In short? It’s fun to build units and lists in this game. It provides just enough levers for me to pull such that I can make my different armies feel unique, so long as I can accept a more Lord of the Rings style reality where an orc and a man aren’t really all that different. My rats, by merit of scurrying and readily crossing terrain, feel really unique when measured up against my dwarves who focus more on shooting and sturdy stand-your-ground troops.

Even before I consider new faction rules or unique special abilities, I usually have a strong identity for a potential faction just from generating its unit options. So I almost figure: why not just hand that over?

But then I have to accept a loss. If all factions have access to all things, are they truly unique? In a sense, no. I’m leaving it to you to build your world. Thusly does the world of Desiderium somewhat fall by the wayside. It’s trappings. A vibe. Not really a place. And that’s a shame. We’ve put effort into a place and we’ve shaped something a little more unique than just a set of armies with differing physical attributes.

The Continuity Imperishable can pool magic points, violating one of the basic rules of the game, and enabling a different level of play with magic. They’re far more likely to hit you with a powerful, devastating magical spell at least once in a match. A spell that shifts the balance of the battle. And they need to, because their basic units are barely holding onto this world. They’re a relic of a bygone era, another world entirely. In a strange way, they’ll both last forever but also struggle to even stay on the battlefield. I’m being a little overdramatic, but that’s very much the vibe I get when I play them.

Meanwhile, my Murren, the people of the Nine Warrens, offer a more “normal” army in a sense. Their base units feel like humans, just a touch faster moving. Their society and culture is actually functional. They’re very much of this world. Yet even they are touched by magic.

You add the secret tenth warren, and now we have a slightly different feel. They’re the only ones with access to void magic, which, when layered upon their higher movement values, makes them a more mobile, agile, and flexible force than most.

If we move to a more generic system, we lose that unique nature. We have six factions lined up, each one operating on the same basic systems and world model, but each one approaching it in a unique way. The golems of the Hederan Cults might literally eat chunks of the battlefield. the Anoethlinge are incredibly elite and have a unique interaction with stress in the game that makes them less likely to break until suddenly they “crumble” because they’ve done enough damage for today. They’ve spread their grief.

I found myself going back and forth repeatedly. I very much want to hand people something like Dragon Rampant, but with enough meat on the bones that it’s easier to build what you want in our world. Unfortunately, it has to be in our world. We built a world model. We built a world. It has lots of magic, but that magic is a struggle between wizards that often results in no magic at all. It has a lot variety in armies, but the reality is a well trained soldier is a well trained soldier—whether he’s got whiskers or knife ears.

Go create an Age of Sigmar army here. You’ll be disappointed. Game of Thrones? You’re probably close enough. That random army of demons riding horses you’ve had sitting in your closet for thirty years from some weird fever dream game no one’s ever heard of? I have no idea if that’ll work.

Our hybrid solution is obvious: we have the Mortal Kingdoms (name potentially still working), which allows you to select custom faction rules off a list and build variable mortal societies to bring to the board. Beyond that, I think we better serve a potential audience by truly embracing our vision.

Don’t get me wrong. I do worry about how unique our forces might be. Not everyone has rats sitting around to be the Murren. Not everyone has golems backed by woodland peoples wearing masks to be the Hederan Cults. I worry about that. The flip side is that I really should stop and think about why we’re building this game.

It’s not to make sales. The furthest this will reach is my little blog. A few hundred people might read about it.

It’s not to impress anyone. The people who have played have already reported back that they really enjoy the core rules. That’s not surprising to anyone who knows me or Paul: it’s more or less what they expect.

It’s to be proud of what we’ve made.

I am proud of the core system Paul and I have crafted. I want to stress that. I could release it as a BYOA game and move on and know that we made something cool. But with the added benefit of the factions? That’s a world. That’s the true world model. That’s something I can point to as an example of what I mean when I say that rules build a world.

That’s what I’m here to make.

I look forward to this weekend when some random line I gave my design partner leads to him flipping on the idea altogether.

Game design, folks.