Game design discourse in Realis: The Mechanicalogica vs The Narrasoulic

30 Aug, 2026

You find yourself in front of a rusted spaceship port - though, on closer inspection, that rust looks an awful lot like old blood, and are those insect legs sticking out from one of the joints?

Either way, a slip of paper has been stuck through the seam in the center. It begins:

The full PDF for Realis has been released to Kickstarter backers, and it is gorgeous. I am fully, truly, and completely in love with it. Each new tidbit of worldbuilding, all the new classes and moons and NPCs, I feel as though I have been handed a bin of beautiful toys and told to go wild.

I've been running several text RPs for my Realis campaign (Realis works stunningly well for text RP, and it allows me to indulge in the same dramatic narrative voice that the rulebook does). One of these RPs was a way to narratively transition a player character from Runner to Panoplis.

yes I let my player have a transformer as a ship. everybody say RIP FUSELAGE

The Panoplist class is one of my favorites from the full book, along with everything else in The Sphere of Semantics (and I could go on about what a brilliant section that is as a whole, both in how it offers more complexity to players who are looking for it and how it gives people a taste of what you can do with Realis' mechanics) (but I wont cause I'm a good writer and I'm able to stay focused) (soooo focused).

Panoplists are a take on mechs, with the name literally meaning "a complete suit of armor," and there's one part of the class sheet that immediately caught my attention.

"...the Mechanicalogica, a metaphysical counter-current of chaos and corruption; an erosion of the crisp, linear order that the Narrasoulic ensures and which other Dreamers embody."

Folks. What is "the Mechanicalogica"?

When I first posted a screenshot of the Panoplist to my Realis campaign server, I was told by one of my friends that the description of the Mechanicalogica sounds like "spirals/anti-spirals" from "Gurren Lagann".

I watched like five episodes of Gurren Lagann back in high school (it's good I just have a chronic condition called "never finishing a TV show") so I can neither confirm nor deny any similarities. However, we will be putting this on the board.

say hello to the board

Now, to look at the other terms in this description: "the Narrasoulic".

The most definition/description-like thing I can find in the text for the Narrasoulic is in the afterword by Bendix Vital, the in-universe Guardian-Author of Realis.

It reads as such: "...the holy Narrasoulic, the metaphysical agent of story-itself, which gives shape to history and hero both."

Put it on the board!

The other word that gets the Capital Treatment in the description of the Mechanicalogica is "Dreamers", but that one is actually pretty easy to explain: Dreamers are what Realis calls its player characters (very cute).

So, having drained this sentence of all relevant meaning, it's time to move elsewhere and see what other sections of the book have to say about the Mechanicalogica.

The first mention of it is right at the start of the book, as Bendix Vital lays out What Lies Ahead:

"The only true heretics of Realis are those who espouse that our world is driven by process and not narrative: the desperate and deceived followers of the dire Mechanicalogica"

So only heretics follow the Mechanicalogica - at least according to the Wordwrights, aka the group of people who originally created Realis (the game) and who now maintain the text. Our friend, Bendix, was a Wordwright.

The Wordwrights follow the Narrasoulic, as a philosophical belief, or a religious one, or as one follows gravity, or perhaps all three. Therefore by calling followers of the Mechanicalogica "heretics", the two forces are once again placed in conflict with one another.

And if we go a bit further up on the page, we get another bit about the Narrasoulic:

"...our game’s design instead aims to miniaturize the absolute Narrasoulic truths to which Realis’ history itself is leashed. In short: Ours is an orbital sphere driven by the structure, convention, and momentum of stories."

The structure, convention, and momentum of stories you say...

There's something about that... something about process versus narrative... Mechanicalogica... mechanics... I've almost got it but-

Well, let's put it up on the board.

Wait a second...

Let me just... rearrange some things... cross that off...

My god.

GNS, or Gamist, Narrativist, Simulationist, is a theory of game design that was created in the early 2000's by Ron Edwards. If you're deep in the indie TTRPG scene, as I assume you are if you're reading this, you've probably heard of it before. Still! I shall elucidate in case someone new has wandered across my labyrinth.

To scrunch down years of discussions into a paragraph, the idea is that different players want different things from the games they play, and that these wants can be put into three camps:

• Gamist players want a contest that they can win.
• Narrativist players want a good story.
• Simulationist players want a consistent internal universe.

These are succinct versions of Ron Edwards' original definitions, and it's important to note that what GNS means has expanded and changed over time.

For example, people also started using them to talk about games rather than the people playing them. A game could be more gamist if it had heavier mechanics, or more combat, more narrative if it was "rules-light", more simulationist if it was the HERO system.

This feels like a fairly intuitive short hand, at first. As a guy who sells TTRPGs for a living, even people who have never played a roleplaying game before get what it means if I tell them a game is more narrativist or gamist. But the theory doesn't get much use anymore, and most of its champions have since decried it.

Personally, I don't use it any more because, from a gamer standpoint, I want different things from each of the games I play. That's why I play a bunch of different games.

I also don't think its a particularly useful way to talk about what a game is.

Vincent Baker has an article where he talks about GNS theory and how it was used back in the "Forge Era" of game design (when all the cool kids were on the Forge forum in the early 2000's).

It essentially defines what narrativism actually was vs what it was originally defined as vs how Vincent uses it today.

The thing is that none of these definitions are how I usually see people use the term narrativism, that being "games that are more focused on the narrative than on the mechanics."

Gamism is the same way, there's how it was used (which, according to Vincent, it sorta wasn't) and how it's used now, that being "games that are more focused on the mechanics than on the narrative."

Simulationism is, perhaps ironically, the most useful of the three, since it's used to mean "games that are interested in simulating real life," which can actually be used to tell you something concrete about what a game is doing.

But, just like with hyper-realistic video game graphics, I find that sort of thing technologically impressive but uninteresting on its own. Plus it's pretty easy to fold into gamism, since simulationist games usually involve a lot of mechanics and focus on said mechanics.

So, in the grand tradition of those who came before, we shall be largely ignoring simluationism and focusing in on narrativism vs gamism. Partially because, while people don't use those terms anymore, the dichotomy of those ideas is definitely still around. This is the storygame vs OSR debates, the rules-light vs rules-heavy discourse-

The Narrasoulic vs the Mechanicalogica.

That's right gamers, the Wordwrights are nothing more than a group of itch.io storygame freaks, going around and disparaging the good blogs panoplis of the Mechanicalogicaly inclined¹.

I think I've seen this tweet before...

I find the dichotomy of narrative and mechanics to be a false one. The mechanics of your game are the story that will be told. Each of these things influences and feeds into the other. Therefore, to focus on the mechanics of your game is to focus on the story.

Even Realis, which is written by careful hand to follow only the holy Narrasoulic, has mechanics, and a process by which the narrative is woven.

(Though I wonder at the difference between rules and mechanics. One could say that Realis has very few mechanics, but is not every "I always..." sentence a rule that must be followed within the fiction?)

Which is why I think that GNS isn't a very useful way to describe games. Similarly, I don't think that saying something is rules-light or rules-heavy does much. I mean, even if you're more interested in games with a lot of mechanics, aren't you most interested in what those mechanics are doing?

Storygame vs OSR at least tells me a little bit about what your game is about, though it's heavily dependent on your definition of those design spheres.

Even then, I think it is silly to place these things on opposite ends of a spectrum. There's a lot of folks currently taking lessons learned from lyric games and B/X hacks alike to make some really brilliant games and I think that pitting them as opposites against each other can lead to...

Well, hopefully it doesn't lead to strange religious cults that'll excommunicate you if they find you working on a game they don't like, but you never know. I'm not on Bluesky much these days.

Poor Bendix got canceled :(

So, how should we talk about games?

Well, as Vincent says in his article:

"At the Forge, we thought that narrativism was its own kind of game, it’s own kind of gameplay, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. What’s true is that narrativism is a thing that games and gameplay can do."

And I think that's true of terms like storygame and OSR and old school and lyric game and, yes, the Mechanicalogica and Narrasoulic. They are types of games, but more than that, they're things that games and gameplay can do, and it doesn't help any of us to see them as opposing forces.

Rather, we should all feel free to scrunch them up together and stick them through a wash cycle and see what happens.

I hope that wherever Bendix Vital is, he's having a great time committing all sorts of heresies, and I while I cannot wait to see what Irrealis is, I hope it hasn't cast aside the Narrasoulic completely. There's some pretty cool stuff in there.

-N.A.

p.s. of course its Realis that brings me back to the blog once again. i cant not talk about this thing.

there's a lot of stuff i cut out of this post in favor of "staying on topic," but i do want to mention that the full game does, in fact, have a robust section of GMing advice that is all very well done. 10/10 fantastic job gang.

i feel like ive emerged from some sort of cocoon. the last few months before gencon were... weirddd. gencon was absolutely wonderful though, even though i caught con crud and spent the rest of august recovering.

i've been working on stuff though! you may have seen my submission to the one-page RPG jam, or my two-player epistolary alien game? i'm quite happy with both of them!

one of the things ive been working on is a class for Realis, as part of an effort to port a character from a different system into the game. i'm currently calling them Satellites, but we'll see if i come up with something better. theyre people who have turned their bodies into radio receivers & relays in service of The Wavelength: a series of radio signals that are looking to connect all 1000 moons of Realis.

as such, Satellites are able to connect to and switch between different radio stations, all of which boast sentences starting with "I always connect the..."

for example:

• I always connect the near and the far.
• I always connect the mundane and the fantastic.
• I always connect the perverse and the accepted.
• I always connect the weak and the powerful.
• I always connect the spiritual and the material.

currently im thinking that they get access to three stations at a time, and can change them either when they move to a new moon or by spending a token. sorta like the flâneur?

they'll also have some sentences that dont change but i dont have those down yet. same with how realization is going to work =w= goes bleh

in any case, i love this game so much gang. im going to play it forever and ever until i die i think. i cannot believe that Austin Walker put a post credits sequel teaser at the end of the book. im probably gonna lose my shit when Irrealis comes out. Woe, beast be upon ye.