Onward, Wee Beenships
I adore this game, but I’m not wild about where I was as a designer at the time. The opening line is “Onward, Wee Beenships is a fantasy roleplaying game that does not use dice or luck.” To me, in 2016, a diceless game was so novel, and I had to tell you about how my game was Not Like Other Games right off the bat. Heavy sigh.
A little self-deprecation aside, Onward, Wee Beenships was an interesting exercise in game design for me. Players take the role of hive-minded superorganisms (the beenships) that were composed of a bunch of little critters (the beens, said like “beans”). The idea was that problems were not accomplished with luck, as with skill rolls, but with time and resources. Beenships could grow, bud and split, and learn new abilities. You might have to wait until you get enough beens that can pick things up before you’re able to move that big obstacle in your path, but once you do, you can.
This approach wasn’t super well defined with the rules themselves. When I cracked back into it back in 2019, the plan was to implement a deck of cards to give it a lot more structure, leaning into a more turn-based board game feel. The original rules generally implied—accidentally, perhaps—that that format would be a bit better suited. If nothing else, it’d be easier to keep organized.
I had completely forgotten this, but Onward, Wee Beenships was design for the 2016 Fantasy RPG Design Challenge hosted by Brent P. Newhall. This would another one of those Google+ communities that faded away at the fall of the platform. The rules of the challenge were wonderfully strict:
Thematic Requirements:
- No swords.
- No guns of any type.
- No dungeons (or dungeon equivalents, like widespread ruins).
- No undead.
- No demons or devils.
- No Conan-style barbarians.
- No elves, dwarves, or halflings/hobbits.
- The player-characters cannot be generic adventurers for hire.
- The setting cannot be just the standard Medieval Europe environment (peasants, barons, kings, Norman-style castles, horses, wagons, rolling farmland, etc.). It may include some of these individual elements.
- If your game includes monsters, beasts, or other non-sentient opponents, they must be complex and interesting, not just a handful of simple combat stats.
- If your game includes magic, it cannot use discrete, memorized spells with specific effects.
Rule Requirements (here’s where things get interesting!):
- Your core mechanics cannot involve rolling a die or dice, adding modifiers, and comparing the result to a target difficulty number to determine binary success or failure.
- Your game cannot be directly Powered by the Apocalypse.
Source: https://brentnewhall.com/games/doku.php?id=fantasy_rpg_design_challenge
I can’t take credit (or blame, really) for too much of that “not like other games” business because that was the entire nature of the challenge. Bog standard euro-centric fantasy is something that needs to be critically picked apart at every opportunity. So much—and so much damage—has been done in that framework, our media will only be richer for growing away from that.
The setting of Onward, Wee Beenships (in 2019, I would also stylize the title with an ! at the end) is plucked straight from my childhood imagination of pretending to be very little. I’d picture myself on a leaf floating down a little stream or walking through a jungle of grass and towering dandelions. Onward, Wee Beenships takes place in a magical, alien world but is largely inspired by those outdoor adventure segments from media like Stuart Little and The Borrowers. Inadvertently, having never played a Pikmin game, it would hit a lot of the same vibes (or so I’m told). The beens are very small in a very big world full of wonder, mystery, adventure, and a splash of danger.
The story of the intended relaunch is a disappointing example of my own inflexibility. I had found an artist who was excited to work together on the project (a proposed rulebook plus deck, filled with cool environment and monster art). Unfortunately, life and scheduling conflicts hit both of us, and then 2020 happened. Because I couldn’t move forward with that one specific artist, I functionally froze on the project and couldn’t move forward at all. I’d prioritize other projects and, with the existing version unlisted in anticipation of the relaunch, Onward, Wee Beenships would all but disappear.
My ongoing experience with a variety of game design, especially prompt- and card-based games, leads me to feel I could much more readily hop back in and finish this game well. I would love to give Onward, Wee Beenships a proper release. In the meantime, it’s in a little too rough of shape to make available.
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