Designing The Execution of the Lost

The Execution of the Lost has two major inspirations:  the light novels Executioner and Her Way of Life by 佐藤真登 (Mato Sato) and the duet TRPG Soft Shell by Brandon O'Brien | Neon Robin Bard Games. Today, I want to briefly talk about each one of them.

The inception of the game is my love for Soft Shell, which is among the top three duet game I share with a dear friend. It's short and sweet both in terms of rules and gameplay, but it gives you enough guiderails to create mecha melodrama while leaving enough space for you to make it your own. The first time we played it, I was the Yolk (pilot) and my friend is the Shell (mecha), and we landed on a fantasy setting with musically-powered Shells. Our first scene was a rousing victory, which colored the entire playthrough as my smalltown girl became a celebrated folk hero whose deep trauma was hidden by all her newfound fame and glory,  and it culminated in her faking the death of herself and her Shell and return to a life of farming with the Shell's mind transplanted into a humble farming machine; in our second playthrough, we switched up roles and decide upon a hyper-capitalist cyberpunk dystopia, and our first scene is a seige at our corp headquarters that established the Yolk as a beleaguered middle management and the Shell as ChatGPT on steroids, and the story ended with us discovering the Shells are actually living mechanical lifeforms enslaved by the corps before we return to their home planet where they live in harmony with small races like humans.

I wanted to hack the mechanics of Soft Shell for something else, and I decided upon Executioner and Her Way of Life for a simple reason: the power imbalance. In Soft Shell, the Shell is an immensely powerful war machine of mass destruction, but it's still a piece of property while the Yolk is at least a human being with a minimal amount of human rights and social standing; in Executioner and Her Way of Life, the Lost Ones are isekai protagonists from modern Japan who are invested with great and terrible powers when they were transported to the fantasy world where the story takes place, which is why the natives of that world has Executioners in place to get rid of these overpowered invaders and protect their own world from their aberrant powers. In the light novels, there are many Lost Ones with a great variety of powers, and I did contemplate either letting the players come up with their own power or give a picklist of powers to choose from, but I went with the classical time manipulation you can also find in Re:Zero for a simple reason: DRAMA. Specifically, toxic yuri relationship dramamaxxing.

We already know that the Executioner has complex feelings for the Lost, which is why they aren't taking every chance to eliminate the target assigned by their superiors; however, the Lost must be aware of the Executioner's dilemma to some extent, otherwise they're liable to one-sidedly believe whatever the Executioner tells them, making the relationship nuanced only on the side of the Executioner as they struggle with the question "Why do you not wish the Lost dead even if it's your job?"; by giving the Lost greater awareness of the Executioner's betrayal past, present, and future, the Lost also has a complex and nuanced question to consider and answer: "Why do you still care for them, knowing they'll betray you?" While there are other types of power the Lost can have that could facilitate a similar dynamic, I think that's too much work to ask from my players for such a simple game , and players who are willing to put in that effort can just hack this game like I hacked Soft Shell, so I decided to go for what I believe would more reliably deliver the game feel I want the players to have.

I have also done some minor tweaks to the system for no reason but my own preferences: my friend and I very often don't like to do two of the same scene type back-to-back, which happens with a relatively high possibility of 1/6 if you let the dice land where they may, so I added the option for an alternate scene of exploring what the two main characters are like when they're apart when you roll two of the same numbers in a row; we like to get to the roleplaying as soon as possible with only the minimal viable amount of world-building while continuing to build up the setting through dialogues and descriptions, so I added more pointed questions directed at each player to speed up setting up each scene; in the same vein, I designed the ending prompts so there's always one question for one of the players to establish how and why this scene could be their last scene. In our playtests so far, the game holds its own okay because the shell of Soft Shell is ironically very solid, and it does deliver the minimal amount of toxic time-travelling isekai-hopping yuri romantic dramamaxxing experience I want my players to have.

I hope you too would enjoy the game on your journey toward execution.