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| Invisible Sun promotional image by Matt Stawicki |
Looking Glass Moon
Looking Glass Moon is primarily based around a planet and it's collection of eight moons. Each moon is a particularly unique environment, and each moon holds pieces of the puzzling truth of the universe.The Looking Glass Moon, Miravis, the namesake of the game, bears a flat, silvery, and reflective surface that appears to be devoid of life. However, push against the surface, and you will find that you pass right through. On the other side, metropolitan cities, grown from the moon itself, thrive with life and civilization.
Players take the roles of Righthanders (most people who are natural born to the setting are left-handed). These are people who come to the world of the Looking Glass moon through an odd mirrored cube. They have no memory of where they came from, or of anything else before their arrival, only that it was somewhere else, somewhere very different than this place.
A cycle has been found-a way of repetitively moving through the spheres of the planetary system-through which one can learn more about the universe. In this way, one can learn varying Truths which are expanded on one's journey. The more one learns about a Truth, the more that Truth can be bent, granting strange and often mighty powers. This is not a path; it bears no beginning nor end. It can be begun at any point along it, and those who wish to gain the most of it, those who want to solve the mysteries of the universe, must continue to circle around over and over again. As a moon revolves around it's planet, and the planet revolves around its sun which revolves within its galaxy, so too do those who follow the cycle revolve around the Truth in never ending loops.
Invisible Sun
I was there at GenCon this year when Monte Cook Games announced it's new project, Invisible Sun. I missed the announcement, but I did look it up when they posted the video of the announcement. From the get-go, I felt like Monte Cook games had reached into my head and taken ideas I'd been thinking about for a while. Everything from the broad idea of having a game that engaged players when the session wasn't going on to having ways for players to be absent from the game and for session to still happen to a world built up on secrets that have to be solved even right down to the box. All of this was stuff I'd been considering in an earlier version of what would eventually become my Toybox project.When the kickstarter for Invisible Sun launched, I watched it avidly. There were a lot of things about it that I felt captivated by, and I read through every update. Admittedly, there were some things I was disappointed by. Some of my play is online and in my regular group, I have a player who comes in digitally. An absence of a digital play option was, is, more than a little disappointing, given that it means I can't really play with some of my more involved players. The price is also a bit restrictive. On the kickstarter, it was $200 for the base set, and $500 for one of everything. I had a hard time striving to justify the $200, and as a completionist, I have a hard time accepting a lower level when I know that a higher one exists.
Note that I'm not saying the product isn't worth the price. If you take a look at everything that's included, I'm sure that at either level you definitely get your money's worth. It's just also pretty hard for me to spend that much on an RPG, especially one I can't play with some of my regular players, all in one go. I do wish that they had come out with a version that was digital and slightly cheaper (maybe $100 for the base set and $250 for the set with everything but digital), even if it didn't provide access to 100% of the secrets that the physical set had.
Looking Glass Moon's Inception
I had been working on preparing The Machine God's Temple for release through Cypher Creator when the Invisible Sun kickstarter was running. As I moved on from that to working on The Wonder Vault Heist, I was thinking about other potential Cypher products that I could design. Thinking of how there were many MCG fans who were feeling sort of the way that I was about Invisible Sun, I realized there might be people interested in a somewhat similar setting for Cypher.The idea was infectious and I began thinking through the hurdles immediately. To begin with, I was thinking with something of an 'opposite' type connection, and I'd thought of using a moon instead of a sun as the central base of my setting. Thus, the moon part. Then, I began thinking about how the moon wasn't really an 'opposite' of a sun, but how it just reflected it's light. Since I'd already been thinking about surreal fantasy, it was only a short jaunt past Wonderland to get the idea of calling it Looking Glass Moon.
Science Fiction Vs Fantasy
Invisible Sun is a Surreal Fantasy RPG, so that was what I was trying to make when I started with Looking Glass Moon. However, the further I got into working on the project, the more I realized that it was much more Sci-Fi than Fantasy. The role of space and travel through it was important in my setting. The idea of moons and planets and orbits was important in my setting. Overall, while the setting of Looking Glass Moon still captures a very surreal feel and shares many elements with Invisible Sun, it definitely has more in common with science fiction than it does with fantasy.And embracing that has really helped as I've been going through writing the draft. There are many ideas that work very well within that genre that wouldn't have worked as well in Fantasy. I feel that I am able to do more unique surreal things to fit within Looking Glass Moon, and that the pieces just fit together better than they would otherwise.
On top of that, it does create more uniqueness to the product and makes it more different from Invisible Sun. While I feel that the two still share many core elements, I think that the paths I've gone down make my product unique in its own right and as through I am adding something useful to the masses of existing material, rather than just imitating something else.
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