The Zettelkasten of the Soul

18 Feb, 2025

A while ago I wrote a bookmark game called The Rules Are Fictional which was the first thing to come out of my exploration of stat-less RPGs. Since then I’ve read a lot, and written a lot, and thrown a lot away but I have ideas for how to expand that seed into a full game. My heartbreaker¹, except the heartbreak is constant realisation that nothing I do is original and my ideas move faster than my pen. The reason that I keep poking at it though is that when I find a game I think might be close enough I don’t need to do it I realise there’s something different enough that it feels like a difference in design goal rather than me working on a dead end. Something I think about a lot is that writing a ruleset is akin to writing a manifesto of the things which are important to me as a player and a GM. What I choose to focus my design on and what I choose to incentivise mechanically in this project is in part me working out what I want to prioritise as a facilitator and player of these games. In that sense at least this project does have merit, even if it doesn't become a project that I can release as a product² the work I have to do on it is helping me organise my thoughts about my hobby. I wrote about this project in January of 2024³ when I was planning on doing the Lore24 challenge⁴. I said then I planned to come back to it which I’m doing now, I'll admit somewhat later than I'd expected to. I’m going to frame this as a chronology of my thinking about the influence of card game design on my work and how I got from Tags to Cards as the primary driver of the game.

Atomic notes

I started this project from the point of view of an Information Professional with an interest in knowledge management and wanting to put those ideas into practice in game design. For me RPGs are a space where I like the option to get away from computers. I buy my RPGs as physical books, I tend to start my prep sessions in physical notebooks. I wanted my game to step outside the realm of filling in numbers on a character sheet and allow the notes which I take in my games to shine which lead me to tags as a primary engine for character action and development. I think one of the most interesting ideas in the knowledge management space is the Zettelkasten Method⁵. The idea is that notes should be described by an statement which you can connect to other things and build out over time. It means that as you're taking notes you constantly summarising and re-contextualising not only the material you're taking notes on but previous related notes. It isn't a big leap from there to consider how tags and notes in this context can be combined. Rather than a fussy method of highlighters, or a list with little context, I had a framework where the note and the tag were not only easier to manage but more flexible and extensible.

My design goal for this project is to produce a system which helps the players and the GM communicate their intentions and potential consequences, to be able to situate characters and worldbuilding a context which allows for delightful, serendipitous, connections. I want to give players clear information to make their choices and help the GM make sure consequences relevant, fair and interesting. With those principles in mind, moving from tags to cards lets me draw on mechanics and techniques from board games and oracle decks which opens a design space people will be familiar with.

Tableau building

The first thing that I settled on was to replace character sheets with a tableau of cards. This was partly inspired by my experience playing Quest and wishing I’d had the cards, the inventory from Mausritter and the contacts from Good Society⁶. Each card represents a part of the character sheet which can be broad, like a country of origin, or specific, like a specific action which is unlocked by a piece of equipment. By using cards rather than tags these concepts can be connected or nested in a way which is intuitive and explained using the language of games like Magic the Gathering where attaching, exhausting and so on become easy to implement if it's useful. Bringing this back to Zettlekasten the connection element of the tableau is directly inspired by how the various elements of a city are connected in Caro Asercion’s i’m sorry did you say street magic.

Spreads and dice

Once you have a tableau of cards when choosing which ones are relevant to a situation it becomes easier to demonstrate which tags you want to evoke. My personal preference for resolution is a Forged in the Dark style pool, my draft resolution mechanic for quick actions is based on that. You put all the cards from the player and GM’s area into what I’m calling a Spread, add dice for good, take them away for bad and roll them looking for the single highest.

Spreads allow me to indulge my love of oracle decks. Once you know which cards have been put forward and how the roll went the cards in the spread can be interpreted in line with the action. For example if it’s a mixed success and you have a weapon on the line it jams or breaks. If it’s a failure and there’s a guard dog in the spread you’ve been located. The idea here is to improve communication between the players to make it clearer what was is stake and what consequences might look like.

An Otherkind of Resistance

In addition to a quick resolution, which I see as a weighted luck roll, I wanted something more in depth to allow players more control over their characters. Blades in the dark has the resistance roll which lets the GM go harder and puts decisions in the hands of the player about what they’re willing to accept. Initially my thoughts about how this could work were pretty simple. By taking the dice you’d rolled you could allocate high dice to cards you didn’t want to impact the outcome, protecting your gear in favour of being found by the dog. My thinking about this evolved and I’m toying with a concept of card modules which I later learned could look like Otherkind Dice⁷. The two core modules are Clocks and Abilities. By placing dice on a card with a clock you evolve the card. When a clock fills or empties you update the card or destroy it and create a new one representing how the interactions the card has been involved in have changed it. In this way instead of blocking harm with a card forever the player’s relationship to it changes over time. If they keep blocking with it the tool or the relationship degrades whereas if it’s protected it changes or grows. One way I thought about things changing was that they could gain abilities which are triggered if a specific die value is assigned to them. This is where Otherkind dice are the most visible in the design as each card could have a bespoke move. Every time a spread is created the moves and clocks will be different with the possibility space always changing. As I developed this I changed the default die results to incorporate a “no but” on a 2-3 in the style of the failure with a plus result in The Land of Eem. That addition means that good things could be triggered in dire situations which appealed to me more as the whole pool became more important than the single highest value.

Hidden information and hands

Character creation and GM prep become an exercise in designing these cards either collaboratively or individually. Each one is a lexeme of world building, each with equal weight as each can be called on when needed. Like Agon you may have a world where a name can be evoked to open doors, a village may have a clock representing how the players are perceived by the inhabitants, an adversary may have equipment cards which have specific uses, or abilities which players can learn and exploit. In a more direct sense I was thinking about how combat zones in The Electrum Archive may have their own abilities or states which can be tracked. When I was working through that I realised that cards could be templated to preserve mystery for players. Cards may have modules on the reverse which could then be played face down to hide what they are while ensuring their impact is felt. Similarly creatures may have their description but not have a title yet to evoke how monsters are named by the players not the GM in Trophy.

Preserving this sense of mystery has lead me to considering the discrepancy between GM cards and player cards. At this point I consider the GM to have a deck, a hand and a tableau where the players only have a tableau. To explain my reasoning here the GM would prepare a world deck, the details they need for a particular arc would form a Hand which they can reference but keep hidden while the details of a scene or situation form part of the tableau of information the players have access to. Players on the other hand tend to have less hidden information. They may have face down cards in some groups for example but the information they’ve built up is more likely to be open knowledge. As cards can be moved the GM may give equipment and allies to players or players whose characters aren’t in a scene could pick up setting elements to embody as in a Belonging Outside Belonging game. Using this method I can return to the original GMfull intention of the design by putting the responsibilities of the GM on cards in the tableau where they can be shared around and acted on as other cards. This would allow the rules of the game itself to evolve like the action modules in Oath: New Horizons.

World Building

My intention with this design originally was that it be a way for groups to build a world together as they needed it. Each card would form a part of their own wiki style world building which links things in a way which preserves their history, their connections and the narrative power they have. As I begin to formalise these thoughts into a play-test document I think that will be the primary mode. Through my reading, conversations on Discord, and with friends it became obvious that this framework lends itself to pre-written content. Pregen characters could be Smash Up or Jumpstart style decks where the tableau is made by combining packages for different folk, classes, weapons, magicks etc. like the Failed Career’s in Electric Bastionland. In the same vein worlds could be provided as pre-written decks with locations, factions and NPCs who’s goals and skills could be tracked with card modules. This would allow an opportunity for players to jump in with something to get them started while demonstrating the more advanced templating they might like to use in their own designs. I like this idea and it follows on from the city I was building out for Lore 24. It’s not a project I have capacity for at the moment though and it would need a lot of effort to scope and edit, as well as art to bring it to life, so that the world provided is complete enough to be useful out of the box but with enough gaps to let groups inhabit it. As a GM I’m not in need of a setting at the moment which I feel would be the most important prerequisite for me starting this part in a structured way.

What’s next?

There are ideas which cards help with which I haven’t considered systematically yet. A few I’ve been toying with are:

• Making random encounter decks rather than tables.
• Creating sentence spreads with different card types similar to reading the Lenormand.
• Incorporating in-world oracle decks using existing notes.
• Replacing dice with a tool like the Challenge Deck from Earthborne Rangers
• More module templates including oracle interpretation guidance.

I feel like the logical next step in this is to put together a play-test document and put it through its paces in the most basic form but that’s where I stumble. In theory I like the idea of this. I love how modular it is, allowing space to borrow ideas from card games, board games, video games and other RPGs but grounding it all in a single simple system. What I don’t need right now is another system I want to bring to the table. I will start writing it up so that I can figure out how to articulate the moving parts and work through where it needs pruning. For now though it lives here as an explanation of my design thinking and influences. I think 2025 will be a good year for RPGs and in particular for ideas from other design spaces being seen in published games. I think card games are a lucrative design resource for RPGs and I hope my thoughts of the last few years are helpful to other people interested in exploring the space.

#Lore24 #cards #game-design #rpgs