This is a really fun game jam and a really fun design concept but I'm finding it really hard going to translate thematic ideas to mechanics with numbers and probabilities based on only the SRD because there's a lot of terminology but so little detail or examples about what it would actually feel like from a player's point of view. It absolutely doesn't have to be a playable game within the document, that would be far too much, but some sample locations, powerful outsiders and written out gameplay examples would really help bridge the gap between you as the system maker and someone reading it who'd never encountered the system before, because as it stands when I write the SRD is the only way someone could engage with the system without spending money.
Taking power levels as an example, the SRD explains you should raise the size of dice when the player's power level increases and it implies (but doesn't clearly say) that this happens when power level increases to six and eight which implies that it should run from four to eight or one to eight. Earlier in the location section it says that nine of the optional locations should affect the power level. Should they directly increase it? That would mean it would increase to eight within roughly two trips through the lair , which feels intuitively too fast but I don't know for certain that wasn't how it was intended to work because nothing in the SRD gives me a basis for comparison. If progress toward a power level increase should be slower then how fast should it be? How should the size of the increase in the outsider's stats relate to the power level increase on offer? How powerful should the tricks or traps be in the two or three tricky locations be ? How does that relate to the optionality of those locations? Should they account for the fact that a player may not choose to include them? How should they make a player want to include? Should they do that? What does it mean to "aid" the player in transforming outsiders in the remaining locations when as far as I could tell the only way to do that is via the player power which gets more powerful through the power level , which is specifically what the first group of nine locations should do? And that's one element of the game
I realise that on the one hand , these are questions I as a potential designer should answer for myself in the context of my own game but to use an analogy when I make a meal for the first time I want to make it exactly according to the recipe so that I have an idea of what the recipe-maker's version tastes like before I start adding my favourite spices and changing cooking times and so on, and the SRD alone just doesn't allow me to do that. Neither hovering over the published games pages waiting for a community copy to come available nor spending money on a published game feels like an ideal solution and that's not to say you shouldn't charge for your games. They're works of art and they're 100% worth the price but I think that factor is something to be conscious of when you're writing the SRD especially if you're planning on running a jam based on it. I really really want to get my head around the system. It feels like it'd trigger really interesting, really evocative gameplay when I do that but I just can't get a clear enough sense of it to write anything playable from the SRD.