If you’ve known me very long you know that I, like every geek on Earth, am working on a role-playing system. I call it my garage game; I’ve been tinkering with it for years like an old hot rod.

It’s with immoderate pride that I invite you into the garage to listen to me rev the engine. The system now has a name and, most importantly, a trademarked logo, thus making it legitimate.

Triunity Features

Story-focused Gameplay

Triunity enables “literary gaming” allowing for parallel plotlines, foreshadowing, flashbacks, non-linear storytelling, separating characters without excluding players, cliffhangers, and surprise twists.

Shared Narrative Power

In the Triunity system, players are co-creators equally responsible for creating and guiding the story.

Generalized System

Play can cover any style from modern realist drama to fantasy or science fiction and everything in between. Players can control entities of any size from galactic empires to individuals to amoebas if that’s your thing. Triunity is not limited by setting, genre, or scale.

Tri-stat System

Triunity defines characters of all kinds by three simple attributes that govern broad classes of action.

Unified Core Mechanic

One clear game mechanic drives the whole Triunity system. It takes ten minutes to learn and…a very long time to master (but not a lifetime).

Diceless Conflict Resolution

Leave your dicebags at home. Triunity uses resource management and opposed wagering to resolve conflict and apportion narrative rights.

Integrated Reward System

The more enjoyable you make the game for the other players, the more you get what you want, and the more you try to make the game enjoyable for the other players. It’s positively pavlovian.

Playtesting begins in October 2010.

Future posts will expand on the design philosophy behind Triunity as I reveal my (wait for it) game design manifesto. Yes, I am that pretentious.