Introduction

Venleitche, pronounced fin leech ay, is a vaguely Germanic spelling of wenlicce, a old Anglic word meaning handsomely, in a comely fashion, agreeable, consistent, in accord with, harmoniously, fitting to the purpose and appropriate to the venue, meet, fit, and suitable. It encapsulates the ideas of magic appropriate to the season, soul in alignment with the element, physical and mental and spiritual components creating a person at their junction point with that point being a moving target. Within the culture of the game world, venleitche pulls together a number of critical beliefs and concepts in a single term that describes how people live, how magic works, and where the controls are for the world we're all piloting. It’s spelled with a capital L in the title of the game because the logo looks cooler with the L swash underlying the following text.

The world of Venleitche loosely resembles our own early medieval Europe, but with a Neopagan twist. The dominant religion is complex, and could be viewed as monotheistic, duotheistic, or polytheistic, worshiping the Divine manifested as a God, a Goddess, Their Unity, and the Transcendence, each taking different forms according to the Season. People live in a sustainable way, moderating their population growth, leaving little to no waste from their activities, and carefully ensuring that the next generation will have a world to live in that is much the same as their parents' in terms of available resources. Other paths beside the Faith do exist, but given the way that magic works in the world, they either follow a similar path of sustainability, or burn themselves and their lands out in short order. Gender and sexual identity are considered a matter of individual choice to some extent, although the magic makes the nature of a person obvious, in a way that we'll explain shortly. Conflicts arise between religious factions, between political factions, and between individuals. Sometimes these are solved by talking it out, and other times by violence. This is not a perfect world. It's a world in dynamic balance, and sometimes bad things happen, and then people try to set it back to rights and restore the balance.

The stories this game tells are mostly about setting things to rights, restoring the Balance, knowing that it’s going to shift over the other way pretty soon and you’ll have to run round the other side and push it back again. It’s not so much maintaining the status quo, but keeping the bicycle balanced as it rolls forward. There’s as much healing as there is fighting, as much negotiation as there is warfare. More often than not, the proper course of action is going to be an equal and opposite reaction.

Dynamic Balances

There's been plenty written on the subject of dynamic balance from theological and philosophical standpoints. Search for the phrase online and you'll find treatise after treatise. We're going to restrict ourselves here to what it means in the context of the game world and the game mechanic.

Let's start with an example. You have a balance scale, one of those measurement devices that has two pans suspended from chains at either end of a beam, like the Scales of Justice that show up on courthouses all over the world. You put a bag of sand on one pan, and some metal weights on the other. The pans go up and down a bit, and finally level off, with the weight on either side in balance. But your bag of sand has a leak. Sand trickles out of it and off the edge of the pan. The beam tilts. The scale is out of balance. You can remove a metal weight from the other pan, or you can add sand to the bag. You don't have a weight that exactly matches the bag when it's empty, and you're not allowed to take the bag off the scale, so you're going to have to adjust. So now you're constantly fiddling with the balance, adding sand to the bag, adding metal weights to the other pan to compensate for the sand you add and removing them for the sand lost out of the hole in the bag. This is a dynamic balance, one that you have to keep adjusting in order to keep in trim.

The world is in constant motion. Nothing stays still. Nothing remains unchanging. While there are balance points, the balances that exist across them change, some from moment to moment and others across spans of centuries. Nobody is ever truly out of debt. Even in a society without money, there's always a balance of favors owed, that shifts every time someone collects on a favor or pays one back. The weather changes, from hot to cold, wet to dry, and farmers adjust what they're growing and how they care for their livestock as the seasons pass. People have balances within them – how social they feel, whether they're concerned with themselves or others, how in tune with the world they are. These shift from internal to external, from intense to barely there, across a balance point. Someone who keeps all these dynamic balances more or less in tune with each other gets along in society. In the modern day, we refer to a person who is deeply disturbed, to the point of being socially dysfunctional, as being mentally unbalanced. In the game world, this has a deeper meaning, and a mechanical effect.

The world of Venleitche, and the game mechanics that allow you to adventure there, are based on dynamic balances. Everything a character does affects themselves, other people, and the world around them. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Fence off your garden to protect your vegetables, and the deer go find someplace else to graze, and maybe the hunter can't find them as easily. Take an injury in battle, and you have to focus on your own problems instead of those of others for a while in order to heal, or risk dying by overextending yourself. Help another person, and they may help you in return, or pay it forward by helping someone else.

Problems arise when things get out of balance. A person who focuses too much on themselves and not enough on others becomes greedy, and starts stealing or killing for their own gain. This becomes a vicious cycle, as the thief or murderer escalates their behavior, their focus moving more and more inward, their own desires gaining stature in their mind that overshadows the needs of those around them, until someone either brings them round and gets them to correct their behavior, locks them away where they cannot harm others, or kills them. In the world of Venleitche, where magic is real, drawing too much power can cause crops to fail, and the magician's connection to nature and the source of mystical energy to collapse.

Further Along

I'm currently developing this game on my Patreon, and will be porting my development posts, shangelog, and so on over here as I have time, to build a presence here. When the 1.0 version of the game is done, I'll send out the patron copies, then release it here and do further development and expansion on Itch. My Patreon will remain a funded incubator where I work on new game worlds for the Dynamic Balances mechanic.