SESSION ZERO WRAP-UP is an ongoing series! Session Zero was the first event in Manila that focused on Filipino Tabletop Roleplaying Game Designers. Your Sword Prince and Sword Queen were so honored to be a part of it, and we wanted to reflect on the games we offered at the convention.

BECOME ONE was my very first micro-RPG, and very first game jam submission. The Emotional Mecha Jam was such a blast, and its themes so evocative. The sheer amount of creativity coming out of the jam was great! Before this I believed Tabletop Roleplaying Games had to be complex, at least a 100 pages, fully realized before even being released to the public eye. Seeing all these raw, beautiful, and evocative game jam submissions was mind blowing for me. It gave me permission to be creative, to show my love for mecha anime, to start flexing my muscles as a game designer. To even consider becoming one, maybe, just maybe?

Originally I crammed everything I could manage into four pages. In hindsight, a streamlined Powered by the Apocalypse hack was too much for four pages. But streamlining the system to such a degree was an interesting experiment, and playing/running the game was a fantastic experience.

The premise of BECOME ONE is simple: you are a Mecha AI. The mech, and the pilot within it, have both crash landed behind enemy lines. The pilot is unconscious, barely alive, fading fast. The AI barely survived, emergency protocols have caused the AI to fragment into distinct pieces and latch on to the pilot’s memories and the strongest emotions associated with them. Players are asked to take on the role of ANGER, REGRET, FEAR, and LOVE. The mission is simple: protect the pilot, return home. Become One.

The game was heavily inspired by two things: the video game Titanfall 2 and the TTRPG Bluebeard’s Bride.

Titanfall 2’s solo campaign story was short, but it deeply affected me. It affected me so much for reasons I can’t get into without spoiling the game. The trailer for the game got me, and it got me good. But I really loved the AI (who suspiciously sounded so much like Optimus Prime’s voice actor, Peter Cullen!). I was so moved by their relationship, and I appreciated how the game didn’t bother trying to justify how “real” a person BT was, if the AI was really “capable” of emotion. It was something was just true, and the game offered numerous moments for that to come into play. I wanted to do the same, and re-imagined the premise of Titanfall 2. What if BT had a chance to save his original pilot? What would they do? What if BT had access to the memories of the pilot, and they felt real, more real than anything?

Bluebeard’s Bride is easily one of my favorite TTRPGs, and it’s definitely in my top three games of all time. What inspired me specifically was how the playbooks focused on one person: The Bride. Everyone playing plays an aspect of the bride: The Animus, The Fatale, The Mother, The Virgin, the Witch. The aspects are very different from one another, but this core makes some form of cooperation necessary: you are all embodying one mind, one body, after all. I wanted to do the same for BECOME ONE, give the players a chance to explore the tension of being so incredibly different from one another, but also forced to work together as they are part of one body, and have one mission to fulfill.

BECOME ONE also pulled deeply from my personal experiences. The character creation process, and a significant section of the mechanics, focuses on memories. This is something that comes up often in my design. I have temporal lobe epilepsy. It’s a fairly rare condition. I can manage my condition and seizures can be rare. These seizures look invisible from the outside. Each seizure erases memories. It’s been almost seven years since I had the diagnosis, and I’ve reached a zen state about losing my memories, or more often, recognizing in strange moments that I HAVE lost memories.

I feel like my games like BECOME ONE help me work through that, help me process this by playing out and designing stories that explore memory. It’s a lot of fun for me, and I enjoy exploring these themes in a creative space with others.

But this game started to grow in unexpected ways. When playtesting its original 4 page version, a dear friend asked if they could play REGRET. They were dealing with a significant loss, and wanted to play the game in order to help make peace with the regret they couldn’t name, that they couldn’t even begin to manage through the grief.

I honestly felt worried at the time, but the other players came through so fearlessly, so lovingly. The game was a really memorable one, the story came together so beautifully. It was a really emotional experience, but more than that, it was joyfully cathartic.

Because of experiences like that, I felt like it was time to really give BECOME ONE the love it deserved and work towards a full and final release in time for Session Zero. I had gotten feedback from the playtesting, but to be honest I implemented very little of it (I feel like this deserves a a blog post of its own, to be honest yeah?). But the feedback DID help me reflect, take a long hard look at things, move things around, and make one significant change. But what the zine did mostly was explain how this game is meant to be an emotional one.

Things like weapon systems, specific combat stats, clearer emotional guidance: these would detract from the core of this game. The players are meant to feel things out, to feel their feelings, to create an evocative story together. They’re meant to question things like: can robots feel? Can machines understand memories? How do memories define a person? When a memory is corrupted, what does it change about the person, if anything?

As a game designer, even as your GM, I don’t want to answer these questions for you. Your ability to answer these questions is what makes you essential to this game. Your ability to reflect and define any of this, is what makes you an essential human being. I want to help you explore a little bit of that, in this game. And once you tell the story, I’d like you to play again, try out a different emotion, see how your heart and mind respond.

I’m glad BECOME ONE made it to Session Zero. The game is pretty much in its final state. It grew from 2,958 words to a whopping 15,718 words. It’s filled with thoughtful examples of play, and it encourages both the Game Moderator and the players to be creative, intuitive, open, a little vulnerable. To trust each other, and trust their story.