Design Goals, part one

So what sort of game is Cursed World, anyway? While designing it, I had a few goals in mind. The first was to make room for some moral ambiguity alongside old school gaming's good vs evil.

The clear-cut, black and white morality of D&D is both a strength and a weakness. Bright shining heroes facing off against black-hearted foes can make for a great story, but but so many other good stories can't happen in a world where detect evil exists.

The solution is to downplay the cosmic good vs evil struggle. Don't get me wrong, capital-e Evil still exists, but a generic bandit isn't it. Mundane evil is familiar and complicated. Cosmic evil is inhuman and implacable. There's room for both in the same game.

In my notes, I have the phrase "Orcs are people too." This doesn't mean CW orcs are nice, it means that people are often nasty, and you can't tell who's a good guy by the pointyness of their teeth. Goblin heroes are great fun. Elves and dwarves make great villains. A touch of moral ambiguity widens the range of stories that can be told, and that can only be a good thing.