Aaron Berger ooooh boy. Okay. Is it like a storygame? I would say definitely not as I understand and think of storygames. Probably way way more like an OSR hexcrawl kind of thing, where you need to track your food, water, sleep, wear and tear on your equipment, profitability of going to certain places, being able to get back somewhere you can spend your profits, etc. Whatever narrative arc comes out of all that is totally emergent and not purposefully constructed. Again, that’s just as I understand the phrase “storygame” and use it myself. There’s no narrative awareness but there’s lots of pattern-matching that our brains do regardless.

Imagine a hexcrawl where you started with a map full of known features, likely payouts, and a process by which you need to pack for the expedition but your town has only one long rope, one pair of crampons, six different kinds of magical torches that each throw light under different circumstances (only in the spring, only in a narrow cone, only around moisture, whatever), specialist hirelings that are only good for certain small ranges of endpoints (so Harald the Dwarf is awesome at finding his way around mines, which are typically only in mountains, so you’d better get your hands on that rope and those crampons and oh shit no crampons, got bought up, now we need to rig something out of caltrops on our feet…).