War of the Harvest Nobles
Rec Room / Development: July-August 2025 / Writing, Design / Competitive Leaderboard Roleplay Event / Link to Leaderboard
War of the Harvest Nobles was a Rec Room competitive leaderboard event, for which I served as design lead, that took place during the summer of 2025. It was a three-way battle among Rec Room's population where nailing opponents with throwable, rotten tomatoes would score you points and cause them to emit noxious clouds of stink. Adding to the drama of a conventional leaderboard competition, my design attempted to create even more potential for narrative and emergent storytelling by making this a fight between three factions, which themselves were divided into two: a class of so-called Nobles comprised of our most influential content creators alongside our biggest spenders; and underneath them an army of conscripts, or Knights, made up of the rest of the population automatically sorted into one of the three factions. With its unique narrative and leaderboard structure, War of the Harvest Nobles meaningfully expanded the competition dynamics and opportunities for community engagement created by previous Rec Room events.
I wanted this event to present itself to our players as a scenario free for them to engage with through whatever means they could afford, be that directly via the economics of the competition, as roleplaying participants in its unfolding story, or by contributing to the spectacle of the event online in our community spaces outside of the game. I supported that aim by framing the event with creative theming, lean storytelling presented in-character via our community Discord, and by intentionally complicating what was previously a conventional single leaderboard design to provide players with points of inflection for developing their personal relationship their faction and the war at large. My hope was that, even if a player was not wealthy, or particularly good at landing hits with throwable tomatoes, and even if their faction came in last place, Nobles and Knights would be enough of a simulation of social class to relate to players that the story of the way the war progressed was also the story of the role they played within it.
An event proudly made entirely without the help of any LLM technology!
Devlogs
01/27/2026 - "Memorial for War of the Harvest Nobles Pt.2"
01/14/2026 - "Memorial for War of the Harvest Nobles Pt. 1"
Media
Created by Dude (Source)
Created by Rec Room (Source)
