The Unnamed Fantasy Game

Very Interesting. I may’ve missed your motivation for including the races you did. I did notice links to supplemental info, and I’d love to check them out when I’ve got a moment today. What sort of meta-narratives are you hoping to layer into your world, and how do you hope they influence the beliefs and goals of your characters?

The racial choices are a combination of three factors:

  • Things that are standard fantasy fare
  • Things I think are cool
  • Things my friends think are cool

So I’ll be adding a few more to the above list, such as elves (because elves are a staple) and succubi/incubi (because a friend always asks if she can play one). But I’m trying to focus on the mechanics right now, before I get back into the fun part. I’m about 50% through adapting the SRD to my ideas at this point.

I’m not sure if I entirely understand the question, to be honest.

My intention at this point is to try and provide the tools necessary to recreate the best experiences I’ve had at a gaming table: creating a character whose personality and explorations have led to finding a purpose or cause, and then giving the character opportunities to grow through the person of that goal- with the ultimate choice of whether the story is a hero’s journey or a tragedy being left up to the player.

But if players just want an excuse to sit around a living room with their friends, eating, talking, and rolling dice, well, I want them to be able to do that, too.

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That all sounds excellent.

What I meant about meta-narrative is, what is the history between nations/factions of one racial group as compared to another. Are they clearly delineated, or are there mixed societies? Will you be incorporating cultural frictions from IRL into your setting? Stuff like that.

It varies, I suppose. I’m very tempted to write a giant essay about how they all interact with one another, but honestly, you don’t need that as an answer here.

The Sceadu are very isolationist and xenophobic- they’re half-myth, referred to as the ‘forest folk’ and used to scare children into behaving or as an attempt to explain why something wasn’t as it should be.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have shapeshifters, who don’t tend to hold territory of their own, but take a highly aggressive extrovert approach to other cultures: they create their own districts or wards in other cultures’ cities, openly advertising what they are and acting in predictable ways so as to be comfortably familiar to their hosts even as they’re very much unlike the world around them. Like Disneyland.

Everyone else falls somewhere in between, and there’s differing levels of cross-integration based on cultural clashes, distance, and so on. Very few, such as the elves, have anything resembling a racial nation-state; most are more fractious than that, with multiple political powers that each have their own territory and agenda. Individual personalities, survival, politics, and cultural clashes have led to wars in the past (and present, and future), but it’s far more to do with the world I’m creating than anything in real life.

The crew types for the game (I’ve decided to refer to them as bands) are at this point as follows:

  • Entertainers
  • Explorers
  • Mercenaries
  • Merchants
  • Outlaws
  • Pilgrims

Because the group is expected to travel regularly, it seemed like it would be best to ask why they’d be traveling- whether that travel was in a limited area or as free as the wind. I didn’t like the idea of simply ‘adventurers,’ as that doesn’t fit the world very well, even if you get into the ideas I have for the more savage or monstrous creatures. So I asked myself who would have reason to travel regularly, and came up with the above.

Each one is, of course, fairly open- ‘outlaws’ covers everything from pirates to con artists, for example.

I’m also thinking of decoupling lairs from the band- at least at the outset. Having a lair (stronghold) can be an upgrade, opening up all the other related upgrades. It’s an option, rather than a given, something for groups that want a place to call home, while the ones who want less roots can look elsewhere.

I’m decoupling cohorts as well- the Sceadu are going to have an SA that allows a cohort, and I see no reason why other packages won’t include the option. There’ll certainly be options for adding cohorts to the band, in one form or another, but it’s not intrinsically a group thing.

Have you thought about how high fantasy as a genre meshes with some of the resource economies of Blades?

For example, how are harm and stress handled in your system? In Blades, both are meant to tie into the downtime loop and require committing limited downtime actions to slowly replenish. Are there healing magics or health potions that make healing more immediate in your game? Do characters accumulate traumas and risk “washing out” like Blades characters do?

Similarly, are you sticking with the main action happening in “missions” or “heists”, or trying to represent the more open-world, roaming, sandbox vibe of a D&D-style game?

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I’ve split harm into physical and mental, each being tracks identical to the Blades variety, with the same (cumulative) penalties for the different tiers of harm. I’m intending to include methods for restoring health during play, with more grievous injury requiring greater investment to offset; alchemicals that will remove the penalties (but not the harm), spellcasting to remove lower tiers, and ritual magic to eliminate the higher tiers (including death).

Mental harm cannot, in and of itself, result in death- but it can result in ‘going mad,’ which is much the same. I’ve written a short callout noting that this is a fictional construct, and not meant to be an accurate representation of actual mental illness.

Stress is used much like in Blades, but I’m also connecting it to spellcasting. To a certain point, a spellcaster can channel magic without stress accumulating- but pushing beyond that will have associated stress costs.

Furthermore, stress is tied to mental harm; once your stress track fills up, you start suffering mental harm instead of stress.

Characters can gain a trauma condition through being incapacitated, and they can be removed . I’m not attempting to create as grim a setting as Doskvol, and I am encouraging players to be more attached to their characters.

I’m eliminating the Score portion of the game session, although I’m keeping Free Play and Downtime. The episodic feel didn’t suit my interests, and I was having a lot of difficulty figuring out how to break game sessions into free play, downtime, and ‘quests,’ where every quest would take no more than one game session to complete.

I’m trying to build something more of a toolbox of narrative options to give to groups, where they can decide what feels right for them, and structure their story appropriately.

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So at this point I’ve drafted the core rules and I’ve started working more on the characters.

There’s ten heritage packages, five career packages, and six crew types.

Heritages:

  • Human
  • Elf
  • Dwarf
  • Kordh
  • Sceadu
  • Orc
  • Changeling (name to be changed)
  • Kordh
  • Goblin
  • Pan
  • Succubi/Incubi

Careers:

  • Freeblade
  • Huntsman
  • Spellbinder
  • Rapscallion
  • Confidant

Bands:

  • Entertainers
  • Pilgrims
  • Merchants
  • Mercenaries
  • Outlaws
  • Explorers

There’s still a lot of work to be done, but it’s progressing.

I’ve decided to set up lairs (strongholds) as a two-point band upgrade you can get, which can then be upgraded. There’s no claims or reputation; tier is another band upgrade option which will cost you coin as well.

I’m revisiting how I’m handling special abilities and heritage packages, because of two factors:

While I want to include veterancy (picking special abilities from other paybooks) as an option, I don’t want to have humans who pick up flight, or orcs who can suddenly shapeshift. So I’m wanting to close off heritage special abilities to veterancy.

Second, a good number of the heritage special abilities are cultural and could easily work as personality traits (because they are- they’re just personality traits encouraged by your home culture), so it makes sense to include them in the general list (did I mention there’s an available-to-all general list?) of special abilities.

So, your heritage may give you a dot to place in one of three special abilities, but not all of them will be ‘heritage special abilities.’ Which will largely only affect paperwork, really.

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Big Question: Do you have any material that you want playtested/ material that is ready for playtesting?

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Not really; I’ve renamed special abilities for the heritage packages but I haven’t done anything with career packages or the band types. Everything’s going in fits and starts, as I get time (and inspiration) to work on it, and as other things distract me. I’ll post something when it’s ready for playtesting, to be sure.

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Interesting stuff, I like the sound of the world a lot. I also think the FitD system offers a lot of flexibility so it’s interesting to see people stretch it.

I have seen other PBTA system try packages of moves though and IMHO it tends to over-complicate things. Just because your would could support a dozen different types of campaign, it doesn’t mean your system has to, and in fact trying to create an all things to al GM’s system risks de-focusing and not doing any one thing particularly well. Take call of Cthulhu, it’s set in the ‘real world’, but focuses of a very specific type of campaign, and is all the better for it.

Take the crew types, they are very diverse so to what extent can you really build a single rules framework to support all those different types of activities? In BitD we have an example of this in the Vigilantes crew. It’s not really al that different thematically from underworld gangs of criminals, and are operating in the same environment, yet the rules changes make it a mini-supplement rather than just another type of crew.

Hey, I could be way off mark. I look forward to seeing what you’ve come up with, but my best homebrew and home modded games have come about when I’ve started with something overly ambitions and then brutally pruned it back down to the essentials.

Makes sense. Do you plan to mess with the pace of progression? I’m thinking about the llimits of character growth in BitD at the moment so this interests me.

Yes… and no.

I’ve modified the way that bands (crews) advance in that I’ve eliminated claims and made having a lair (stronghold) optional, as well as eliminating reputation. Your band’s upgrades (through experience) is the direct method for advancing in tiers, and it’s entirely possible for a band to focus solely on increasing tiers before worrying about anything else. So you could potentially have a band that’s tier 6 and only the starting upgrades. I don’t think it’d be very enjoyable, but you could do it.

For the individual characters, I’ve been thinking that including XP triggers in heritage packages might be a good way to go- so you’d end up with at least one more trigger than you have in Blades (not counting any gained from special abilities) and that could potentially affect the pace. But while I like the idea of tweaking progression to be faster, I’m hesitant to ramp it up because it could devalue advancement- achieving something easily isn’t worth as much to you as a hard-won accomplishment.

As for the upper limits of progression, I can see how at the far end of things you could potentially have characters who can do effectively everything well, filling in every action dot and having whole pages dedicated to the list of special abilities they’ve acquired (since I’m intending to include a list of general SAs that anyone can pick from) over a long and arduous career. However, I don’t see that being very commonplace, and I don’t think I need to really do anything about it: games that go that long are going to have enough narrative engagement that any breakdowns in the systems should be a minor quibble.

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It’s not dead yet.

Life got away from me, and honestly, I ran out of motivation for a while. But I’m starting to get back into this, now that I’m at a point where I’m starting to put characters together. Right now that mostly means that I’m digging into special abilities and trying to think about how distinctive I want each one to be.

I want each combination of heritage and career to feel unique from one another, while at the same time allowing players to ‘Goober it up’ (because I keep thinking of that Smuckers mix of PB&J in a jar) by borrowing from different careers, as well as having a generic listing of special abilities that are available to everyone.

Which means a huge listing of special abilities that need to be written. I haven’t even started to dig into the band specials and upgrades.

But, here’s something that might be worthwhile: a link to a copy of the working document that I’m writing.

The name is a first draft, I’d be amazed if nobody’s grabbed it already. And honestly I feel like having Blades in the title is a bit more coattail riding than is really necessary (he says, using massive amounts of the SRD) while hopefully giving an appropriate vibe to what I’m trying to create.

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Hi there, Stormcaller! This thread is very much to my interests, so thank you for sharing this with us! It looks really really cool so far and I do hope that you will see this through!

A question: The working document you linked above, is it just me or can i not save this to my harddrive? I’d love to be able to have this as a pdf on my tablet and maybe even print out to read it properly. Do you think you’d be willing to enable that? (or maybe it’s just me and my really old and crappy computer… :cry:

Hi there- I went looking and yeah, it appears when I was working on it at some point I disabled the ability to save, print, or copy the document. I’ve enabled that again, so it should be available to you now.

I do intend to continue with it, I just need to find the time to work on it, as well as… well, everything else. :sweat_smile: My desk is covered in miniatures, paint, watercolor pens, half-sketched world maps, dice, rulebooks, and more things that are reminding me I’ve been neglecting them. But at least I have the laundry and dishes done every week, right?

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Thank you, I will check it out tomorrow (I still might “stumble” over my old computer, but my fingers are crossed).

Oh I hear you! Time is always in short supply, unfortunately. I have way too many started projects that I’d love to finish someday. But sometimes it’s hard to work in a void. So I hope our interest is more help than hindrance. No pressure! And if you have maps for this fantasy FitD project, I’d love to see them…big map addict here ^^

No official maps of yet, I’m afraid. My original intent was to leave the broader swathes of the world nebulous, so that gamemasters could decide where the Kordh homelands are, for instance. My freshman efforts at mapmaking were done with the game in mind, however, and this is the result:

The island chain in the right center I envisioned as home to a sprawling city, with the lesser islands and the bridges between them filled with buildings, along with a pair of fortifications on the larger islands acting as gatekeepers to the harbor. I thought that it might extend out onto the mainland, with the furthest reaches being farms, then poorer districts, with affluent citizens becoming more commonplace as you get closer to the large islands.

I pictured (and should eventually add, in a future version) scattered orc settlements on the eastern coast: fishing villages that work hard to pull in the massive amount of piscine protein that the inhabitants need (I figure an adult orc requires roughly eight pounds of meat per day, as they’re obligate predators), as well as trading (or raiding) for whatever else they require.

The hills between the two lakes I thought would be a good area for a few dwarven outposts, though they don’t use them all the time- they travel with the herds from location to location, leaving only small groups of caretakers at the settlements they’re not using.

The large forest to the southwest seemed like a good spot for some Sceadu to call home, while further north beyond all the trees could be a place for some Kordh villages or towns. The Pan would have no permanent settlements on the map, though they’d have several travel routes that their caravans follow, both looping through the area from the Southeast, and continuing in a wide arc from the Southeast up to the North to follow (roughly) the coastline.

The Mara, Guhartin, and Goblins mostly live amongst the rest, though thinking about it, the area where the swamp meets the forest on the coast would probably be a good place for Goblins, what with their dietary habits. And everyone breathes easier when the Goblins are off on their own, where you’re less likely to offend them by accident.

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Having written up short blurbs on the different heritage packages, I’ve started work (finally) on the band types, adding more rough information to the end of the document (just before the aforementioned heritage blurbs); it’s not fleshed out or carefully balanced yet, it’s just ideas I had at 2am that I partially recall having slept since then.

I want each of the band types to have its own feel to it, something that makes it distinct from the others in how you approach it. So far I’ve only been working on the special abilities, but I’ll add upgrades later on.

The Pilgrim band type is meant to be religious or supernatural in nature; this may be a group on a set pilgrimage to a particular location, or it might be a group of priests and laypeople constantly following a route through towns and villages to minister to the faithful. You could even use them as a band of mages or the like. I want them to feel resilient, magically capable, and overcoming obstacles through faith (theirs and others) as much as anything else.

The Explorers are designed to constantly push frontiers, reach new places, and blaze trails. They’re superior to the rest when they’re in unfamiliar territory, and there’s supposed to be a dash of Indiana Jones-style exploring lost civilizations feel. If you’re wanting something close to dungeon crawls, this is the band type that’ll fit.

Mercenaries are your military campaign- your PCs are commanding officers, and the cohorts/coteries are the troops. Designed for lots of combat, and I’m thinking the seventh SA should be something that enhances the Train downtime action. Letter of Marque is probably going to attract murderhobo-ish activities, but it felt appropriate, and I’ll see if I can’t make something other than a license to be legal Outlaws.

Tradesmen are your merchants and craftsmen. David Eddings has had a few characters who were running mercantile empires in the wings, and I found the idea fascinating, so I wanted to include that option. This is the band that is going to have lots of coin and ways to use it to get around obstacles.

Outlaws are your bandits, pirates, Robin Hoods, and so on. You’re always on the run from the law, regardless of if you or they are the baddies, and you live on the outskirts of civilization. Direct fights are more the mercenaries’ gig; the outlaws are intended to be closer to traditional Blades scoundrels.

And the Entertainers are your circuses, carnivals, fortune tellers, thespians, musicians, and so on. You put on a good show, navigate society (polite and otherwise), make some coin, and then return to your wagons (or tents, or whatever) and unload all the stress that comes with propping up someone else’s fantasies long enough to make a living.

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This sounds fantastic! The crew is the only piece i think really missing for me to try this game out within my existing campaign.

I was actually thinking of making a crew element tied to a specific town- something they’d have to re-establish when moving to a new town. Essentially their relationships with various town resources. Hoping to read what you’ve got soon- and hear more if you’ve been continuing along!