Whomans

What the hell is WHOMANS? (CATS)

WHOMANS is a 3-5 player TTRPG about making meaning in a fucked-up world. You play as a group of artificial humans created by the evil alchemist-wizard Lucifer who have finally escaped from his grasp. Created to be superior to humans in every way, the world is yours for the making. 

There’s just one problem. Your superior bodies are unstable, and without Lucifer’s weird science-magic, you’ll all die in 52 hours. With what little time you have left, you can topple governments, mind control the masses, end poverty, party, fall in love—whatever you so desire. Just know that whatever convictions you stand by are a bet into an unknown future you will never see. You are planting trees whose shade you will never sit in.

Though you can ‘change the world’ in WHOMANS, there is no real ‘winning’ in the game. All of you die when you exhaust all of your energy, or when the 52 hours are up—whichever comes first. You can complete your goals, but whether you do is up to luck and chance. So while every character adopts a different ‘aim’ with what they do during the time they are in the outside world, there is no ‘aim’ to WHOMANS. The only aim is to stick to the ‘aims’ one chooses in the beginning, or perhaps find new ones.

WHOMANS can be a fun and joyous game, but it is rarely peaceful in tone. Each character is assigned a lofty goal, and every character will die in the end. Whether players meaningfully engage with those goals is up to them, but in any way, they will have to address them. A game’s tone is also heavily dependent on which goals the player’s adopt in the setup portion of the game. There can be games where the tone is quite playful, in which all the player’s simply want to use the time to enjoy everything that the human world has to pleasure. Nonetheless, all the players must address the infinite capacity in those choices and all of the terribly temporal consequences of those choices. 

Lastly, it’s hard to play WHOMANS without thinking about its inherently political and social themes. If you want to change the world, ultimately, you’ll have to engage in what you believe is fucked up the world. Similarly, the very base question of what it means to be human is a question that is entirely entrenched in movements designed to delineate and reduce that definition (the idea that humans can be any one thing is the contradiction that spurs colonial, fascist, and transphobic ideologies). Therefore, it is imperative that players mutually agree to be respectful and safe when engaging with the game. That being said, a successful game of WHOMANS thrives on difference and disagreement. 

Why the fuck would you make this depressing game?

In all honesty, I would have never made a TTRPG if it was not spurred. In coming up with the game, I looked at my Magpie Journal for any inspiration. Although I did not get any material from my Magpie book for the actual content of the game (besides a vague reference to how I like gambling in Mahjong), I was inspired again by the notion of choice I explored in week 4. When I was responding to the prompt, I was really struck by its suggestion to come back to the choices one made during the week later to see how one's choices 'reverberate through your weeks, your months'. This was a central impasse for me. There's an infinity in one's actions that can't be reduced to the infinity of choices one can make. Innately, there's always a secondary infinity in every action in that it inadvertently spurs the conditions for another; each action cannot help but ripple endlessly. This is the fundamental obstacle one has to face in the process of making any choice, a point that has ultimately led me to make spontaneous actions, to be concrete in convictions I would never have made otherwise. In reflecting on that concept, though, I realized I had missed another important part about this infinity—one that my choice to attach living leaves to those choices began to symbolize. Though there is an infinity to the impact of one’s actions, one can never live in that infinity. The desire to make a choice, to follow any conviction, is to believe in a future that one can never fully know. I thought about another person looking at my Magpie book, or even my life, long after I had lived it. They would look at the living breathing actions that I had written down, ones that undoubtedly rippled in the air and reached them too, ones that probably spurred the conditions for them finding and looking at that journal. But in the end, they too would index the dead. The leaves beside them would be shriveled and disintegrate to the touch. Though living in some way, my actions would die with me, because I would die.

Why the weird card playing mechanic?

WHOMANS is based on a playing card deck mechanic rather than a conventional D6 one. There were many reasons for implementing this choice, and a few unexpected ones. For one, it gave a proper method of characterization and guiding the game to potential conflicts. Players are randomly assigned to a suit and number, which they must utilize throughout the entire game whenever making an action. If WHOMANs is about choosing a cause and sticking with it, even if one can never see all of the outcomes of that cause, this first mechanic is a perfect representation.  Players have no agency to choose their motivations besides arbitrary chance. Playing cards also allow for a finite but plentiful combinations of different characters and character motivations. There can be games where all the players have the same motivation because they all have the same suits. There can be games where all the players have different motivations and actively all oppose each other. 

An unexpected reason WHOMANs uses a playing card mechanic was that it also feeds into the mechanic of the poker-induced ending. Depending on which player has the highest hand at the end of the game, the game will end according to one motivation or another. Although this is mostly luck, there is in fact a bit of ‘strategy’ to the game. Making actions allows players to draw more cards, and inevitably pick more cards to hold onto. In order to gauge better hands, players have to literally ‘bet’ on their convictions—they have to make more actions, hold onto some actions more than others, and hope that those actions will amount to serving their desired outcomes. 

Example of a possible game setup

There is a bit more to this ludonarrative choice. Because playing cards are a finite resource, the game has a predicted and fashionable end. Players will inevitably draw enough matching character cards, and their characters will die. While making more choices does improve the chance for ‘successful endings’ it also speeds up their end. 

A bit on the visual design of the actual game. It was quite hard stuffing the game onto a one-pager, especially with the character cards. In the end, though, this brevity served the interests of the game and its themes. In the process of making the game, I was constantly tempted to write more, and give more background to each motivation. In looking back at how the GOAT of the genre Grant Howitt writes his games, this is actually a blessing of the genre rather than a curse. Because of how little background I can give to the game, players must fully engage with what they would do with the possibility of infinite capacity, especially when that time is even more limited than the time they actually have. 

If players walk out of WHOMANS with anything, I hope it isn’t the conclusion that there is no meaning to action. Though there is no ‘winning’, there is undoubtedly meaning in the creation and task of doing things. But at the same time, one has to engage in the infinite and finite capacity of everything one does. To quote a great wizard, all that we have is the choice of what to do with the time that is given to us.