Crafting gear in Carnage & Aether
As most of you know, I've been working hard on the Ker Nethalas tactical arena game Carnage & Aether: Revenants of Veldonia. One of the key elements in the game is crafting: there is no XP in C&A, so the only way to progress your character is by getting better gear. And the best and most reliable source of gear is crafting.
As you fight your way through the Ranks, the different remains of your defeated foes will be processed and given to you, so that you can create new gear and improve existing one. These remains are called components, and are classified into Aspects and Materials. Initially I thought of making it so that each enemy dropped its own combination of Aspects and Materials, but since what you face in the arena is random, this caused a series of problems, the biggest one being that you could end up lacking a specific component. Now this is mitigated by the fact that you can trade in components for different ones, but it would still be a handicap. Instead, you roll on a table to see which Aspects and Materials you get, with Elite enemies dropping larger amounts.
And what do you do with all these components, you ask? Well, craft gear and empower it with unique abilities, of course! Every gear type you can equip (weapon, armor, belt, gloves, etc.) has a list of powers and modifications you can add to it, and each one has a different component cost.
All gear is classified into four different tiers: Bone, Bronze, Iron and Steel. You start off being able to craft only Bone tier gear, but as you go up the Ranks you'll gain access to higher tiers. Higher gear tiers allow you to attach more powerful properties to your gear, so you are definitely going to want to upgrade your sets as soon as you have access to better ones!
As you know Carnage & Aether is a spinoff of Ker Nethalas, and it wouldn't feel like KN without Masteries. In C&A, instead of picking a Mastery or two (or three), all the different Mastery Abilities can be attached to a piece of gear, through a process called Mastery Sigaldry. Since you can equip a lot of different powers and effects to each piece of gear, combining those with Mastery Abilities really allows you to make the character of your dreams. There's total freedom here, you are not reliant on loot drops so all you need is to plan your setup and collect enough components to craft the perfect gear set.
Eventually, you'll be able to have different sets of gear for different circumstances. You are going to face an Elite (the bosses, or "Overseers" in C&A) that is vulnerable to Cold damage? Equip your Cold damage weapon and freeze it to death! You are going to have to face enemies that love ranged combat? Make sure you equip gear that allows you to close the gap quickly. Want to forget about weapons and just blast your enemies with magic? You're going to need a lot of Aether for that, so make sure all your gear gives you bonuses to your Aether pool!
All this is still a WIP, so it's subject to change, and probably will once I start playtesting (very soon now!). But so far I'm extremely happy with how it's all falling into place, and I think we're going to have a lot of fun planning builds and beating up all the horrible creatures that you'll face in the Veldonian arena!
What do you guys think?
Comments (2)
This sounds really cool! One thing that I do hope you do, is make a way to use this ruleset as a combat supplement to the core game. The initial concept (and attraction to Carnage & Aether) was that it was a game / supplement we could use to play out our battles in the KN core game. This was initial draw for me, and I imagine a lot of players. I think it critical that Carnage & Aether have integration rules that allow us to use it in taneem with the core KN characters and game (basically use C & A's tactical combat ruleset to play out the fights we are going to have in the KN core game). This would add tremendous value! Another thing you could do, to really enhance both games, is also have rules that we could use to take our Carnage & Aether characters into the exploration mode of the core game. Please consider this. It would add a tremendous value to BOTH games!
That's been my design goal since day one. I want Carnage & Aether to stand by itself as a fun game, but I also want it to work as an expansion to Ker Nethalas. The only issue with this is that it requires adapting all the encounters in KN to tactical combat, which is a lot of extra pages. So I might release that as its separate book, I'll not know until I'm done with C&A. But yes, both games are compatible and use the same ruleset. And you can easily convert characters from one game to the other, you'll see!