The Palace of Dreams

Sands of Time is now available for preorder, and I've become a bit stuck on my other main project, Lost Adventures, so to get a bit of a break I'm brainstorming some new ideas.  I'll fire off a few posts about those mostly to capture some ideas about them and perhaps motivate myself to see at least some of them through.


I just re-read The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare, and realized that lying behind the story is a potentially interesting game concept.  The book tells the story of Mark-Alem, a 20-something member of a powerful family in a 'vast but fragile' Balkan empire.  Mark receives a post in the Palace of Dreams.  In the belief that dreams may hold clues to the future, the empire mandates that all of its people submit their dreams for review by the Palace of Dreams, which sifts through them trying to find the "Master Dream" to submit to the Sultan each week, for clues on possible future events or guidance on how to run the empire.  The Palace is a bureaucracy on steroids but it wields considerable influence in the state.  The story is about how Mark progresses through the bureaucratic levels of the palace and some events that transpire during his time there.


But what's interesting is the machinations that happen off camera, that we only get brief glimpses of.  The Sultan treats the Palace of Dreams with utmost seriousness, which means that whatever it identifies as the 'master dream' is extremely influential.  Thus, unsurprisingly, there is wrangling that goes on between the key factions (the bank, the foreign ministry, the church, etc) to shape the output of the Palace.  The details of this are vague and aren't specified in the text, but it suggests the idea of rival factions trying to manipulate the palace so as to control the state.  There is also the sense that the palace can be weaponized as a means for a faction to take out a rival faction. 


All of this seems to provide a promising set-up for a political game.  I had the vague thought that the game might include a quirky partnership system, such that the game is won by exactly two players.  The twist is that there are two factions that you are notionally allied with and one that you oppose.  So you can potentially win with either of your allies but must pick one or the other in the end.  I don't know what winning means yet but have some vague sense of some climactic event-driven ending whereby two factions make a victory attempt, the other factions attempt to repel it, and if it succeeds that's that.  Or perhaps it's something like Dune, whereby if an alliance is in place that meets the victory condition at round's end, the game ends.


I might also like to add a layer of indirection, namely that your faction's identity is a secret.  So you know what people are doing and you know which factions you're potentially open to allying with but you must work out which person is affiliated with which faction.  This isn't part of the story and would only make sense as a way of heightening suspense and uncertainty and mistrust.


The center of the game has to be the palace itself, but I don't entirely know how it should work.  The game could simply be a control game where you place and promote members of your faction in the various layers of the palace, giving you influence over its decisions.  But because of the nature of the palace's work -- the interpretation of dreams -- I feel that dreams themselves must come into play somehow, as a way of steering the game's action.  Something vaguely Dixit-like could work, where you have dreams represented as illustrations that are open to interpretation.  And maybe you try to connect events with dreams, with accurate 'predictions' earning you something.  Or maybe it's that you are presenting predictions to the Sultan and these cause him to variously gain or lose trust in the various factions.  Maybe it's even that winning isn't something you attain, but rather it's subtractive -- i.e. when only two factions are left standing in the government, they have won.


The problem this presents is that it introduces a subjective element into the game that may be incompatible with the expectations of strategy gamers.  I don't know for sure how to reconcile this but I don't want to rule it out as a possibility a priori either.  Exploiting the subjectivity and ambiguity of dreams is the centerpiece of the novel and should be the centerpiece of the game, but setting boundaries on this so that it can't be manipulated unfairly by players not looking to play in the spirit of the game will be a concern.


I don't have a clear picture for how the mechanics should work but in the book the palace has a selection department, an interpretation department, and a master-dream department (among many others).  So it could be that having personnel in the selection department lets you look at some dream cards and choose which to send along.  Then these get shuffled and given to people with personnel in the interpretation department, who must decide what the dreams mean.  Maybe they write it out or maybe there are a few scripted explanations, like "war", "economic collapse", "insurrection", "corruption", etc.  Then the master-dream department takes these, picks one, and presents it to the Sultan.  Perhaps the palace is a pyramid such that fewer and fewer players can place people in the various layers, with perhaps only two players eligible to be in the master-dream office.  But those people still have to work with what they're given.
The action in the game should be relatively simple, so as to give maximal scope to the interplayer interactions.  It's an influence game at the core but you're trying to gain influence indirectly, because the path to influence flows through the palace.  This combined with the novel alliance system might make for something unique and interesting, perhaps.