Update 15/02/2021
Hey! Another week has gone by, February is disappearing quickly! This past week I've been quite productive, actually! I've essentially finished the solo rules for Scornlords (although Ahimsa is still taking a look at them, and he needs to add a few things, so I may have to revise something), I've done good progress on the Subterranean Mälström for Muspelhell, and I think I've finally decided how Chaos Magic is going to work! So let's go over these three things, so you guys can see my decisions and maybe help me out a bit:
- With Scornlords, I've decided to base it largely upon the Disciples of Bone & Shadow GM-less rules and tools. I've simplified some of the steps and tools (the oracle, for example, doesn't take probability into account, it's just a D6 table with "Yes, no, Yes, but...", etc.). I've also ditched the hex-based exploration from Disciples because they don't have any hex-based stuff in Scornlords and creating it all from scratch wouldn't have made sense. They do have, on the other hand, awesome encounter and event tables so I just hijacked those, added some travel complications and things like that, and it was done. The last piece was the enemy/NPC "AI"; initially I was thinking of simply taking the one from Disciples, but then I thought this would be a good chance to test something I've considered for both Disciples and Seekers: adding combat behaviors based on role. So each enemy has a role assigned (or one you assign it yourself, based on their skills); this can be brute/melee, ranged combat, support, etc., and based on that, they each have a behavior table to roll on each turn, to see how they act. If this turns out well, I'll add it to Disciples and maybe Seekers as an alternative to what we already have.
- With the Subterranean Mälström for Muspelhell, the idea is to have a kind of pointcrawl that shifts constantly. The Mälström is composed of random tunnels and caverns. Tunnels are just there to link each cavern, and they shouldn't really mean much (there's a table with random tunnel descriptions, and that's it). The meat of the gameplay is the caverns; each one is completely randomly generated, and have one landmark from a table of fixed landmarks. So you can get a cavern that is a lake, another is an actual grotto, and another one that is a jungle, etc., all randomly generated. The goal is to "crystallize" five caverns in a row, so you can carve a stable connection with the surface. It's going to be fun!
- Last but not least, I've made really good progress with Chaos Magic for Seekers. I'm still confused and a bit overwhelmed by the notion of balancing it all and not leaving any options out, but I think that I'm slowly getting there. It's taking quite long because I had several attempts at doing things differently, before settling for what I'm doing now. Essentially, each spell that you develop has a power level that has varying degrees of power associated with it. You also choose a few key concepts that define the nature of the spell, such as "Air", "Negation", "Life", etc. I feel like this is going to need a lot of testing once I upload it here on Patreon, and probably will change over time based on your feedback. We'll see!
Oh yeah, I guess you already noticed but Trees are People Too is up on Patreon already! I'm very happy with this new version, hope you guys like it! I'll upload it to DTRPG as a PoD title soon, so if anybody wants an at-cost code, let me know!
So for this starting week, I'll try to finish the Chaos Magic rules, work more on Muspelhell, and that's basically it. If I have the time I'll look at my other projects, but for now I need to finish these things!
Have a great week!