I really like that cover art, it has a foreboding feel to it.

I find SRDs useful for extracting the underlying mechanical ideas from a text for study and consideration, but never manage to actually make a game conforming to one because I always end up wanting to tweak things and end up making something too different to fit the original label.

I would want to be a part of the hivemind if it actually was a complete merging of minds and memories Childhood's End-style, but after that discussion of the novels in episode 4 I am no longer convinced.

(Also I'm not sure the hivemind would be good at RPGs, it doesn't seem capable of acting.)

I settled for "Fish Fear Me".

The Scylla/Charybdis trade-off of actually having enough energy to accomplish anything today versus sleeping enough to accomplish anything tomorrow.

That sketch of a game is just one possibility, though. Properly executed, the core structure shouldn't require any supernatural elements, nor be strictly political. A good, sufficiently modular design would scale down to playground friendships. The tone is up to the individual implementation.

7PP is definitely one of the systems I have in mind here, it's part of the cutting edge moving toward the ur-social game.

I'll turn it into a blog post pretty soon - I have many thoughts. A large part of what turns trad-adjacent players off from social games, I think, is the perception that they lack strong goals and structural grounding, but that's not inherent to sociality. Real life is mostly talking to people!

There's a bit player skill/lateral problem solving, not focused on "how do we circumvent this trap" but rather "how do we get this guy to like us". You need to, because that guy can get you into the Eyes Wide Shut party happening next week, and you need those votes for the upcoming Shadow Council.

I'm mentally gestating a game about navigating a global conspiracy of immortals - vampires, cryofrozen industrialists, Vandal Savage - for whom killing is off the table, leaving influence as the key amidst the schemes within schemes. Something like the VtM LARP but in a tabletop format.

All of these thoughts spun out of an excellent blog post I was musing about recently - make sure to read the two follow-up posts as well. It's triangulating closer to the elephant I'm feeling the trunk of, here.

I'm sure there's a way you could divest the structure of all the super powers and expectation of violence, though. A game all about managing relationships as the core source of interest. It can still be cutthroat if you wish, but in the way of political intrigue rather than war.

A book I find myself often returning to is Sixteen Sorrows, a Godbound supplement for procedurally generating complex, systemic problems for players to solve. That game tries to foreground this sort of play even in the core book with "courts", an attempt at a social equivalent of a dungeon.

The other half, though, the part that's less articulated, is the structure for creating situations that reliably generate those scenes. There are a lot of great one-shots that toss you into charged social situations with clear goals, but it's hard to find that for longer-form campaigns.

The need for simple, bedrock solid social mechanics is part of it, balancing the need to add to the conversation while remaining out of its way. Abilities that give information (what do they want, what are they hiding; AW Read A Person-type questions) rather than exert control are key here, I think.

There's been a lot of development in the direction of this submerged shape in the last 15 years - Hillfolk and Dream Askew come to mind, as well as a series of other games contributing pieces of the puzzle. We're triangulating ever closer to it, someone's going to put it all together eventually.

(Would it be weird to say I wish that were me?)

Face...