TLDR: Working on Shattered World, still highly unfinished, but we’re gonna play anyway. Probably Thanksgiving weekend.
I am wide awake at 4am─my body just does that against my will from time to time─and still waiting for coffee to brew. When this happens, I often decide to use the time for something productive. May as well. So, since it’s been 8 months since I’ve posted anything on this blog, I decided to write an update. We had an impromptu, unscripted talk last night about Shattered World/Syseria and I found it to be very productive and fruitful. I didn’t stream it or record it, so it’s now a drop in the bucket of spacetime, but we definitely had a spirited discussion.
We’re gonna give this a go. Highly pre-alpha. Maybe Thanksgiving weekend, not sure yet but that might be a good date to shoot for.
Let me start by reminding everyone that before January of 2023, I didn’t intend to write a Fantasy Heartbreaker. Although the thought had been nibbling at the edges of my consciousness, especially that I was breaking 5e making it do things it wasn’t made to do. Which is, to a certain degree, okay, but also a balancing act because I don’t want to lose player trust. The hintergedanken was always there though—if it were my own system, it would be doing exactly what Syseria needs. So here we are, nearly two years later.
I am overall pretty glad with the direction of the Fantasy Heartbreaker system I’m writing. I don’t feel like it’s perfect—and let me be absolutely clear, we haven’t played it a single time yet—but I feel like it’s got some good ideas that are ready for playtesting.
In terms of Lore there isn’t a ton to talk about, a few minor changes only. (Can I just throw in a side-tangent here and say 25 years ago, this was colloquially called “fluff,” which I didn’t particularly appreciate—I’m glad to see culture turn to “lore” as the preferred nomenclature.) But yeah, not much has changed on Syserian Lore.
EXCEPT.
I had been thinking about it for a long time but just didn’t commit. The time seemed right. The planet is now actually physically shattered. This is a retcon. It is considered to have happened during the Dark Times when gods shattered the continents with a lightning bolt. Shards and planetoids orbit the sun and hold their relative positions together with gravitational and magical threads. Portal cities and spacefaring remain, which is how travel between these planetoids (and beyond) is accomplished. This brings with it many implications all of which have not yet been explored, but there will be effects from this.
In the broadest nutshell I can come up with, the Shattered World game system mechanics are of modular design. The single mechanic is that you generally roll action dice (assuming your actions are not resolved narratively) to determine success, kind of the d20 of the system, although it’s not a d20, and determine success or failure. Damage, or at least baseline damage, is usually the number by which you exceeded the target.
All mechanical actions function this way. In sequence you will determine initiative, do the above procedure in turn, and continue until the action is resolved. For combat, this is probably obvious.
Some of the not obvious examples we talked about are skills. So you’re using diplomacy, let’s say. Your PC’s have to convince an unfriendly king to open the gates and let them in so they can help with whatever. Roll initiative. You will now roll an action di(c)e for Empathy using the Diplomacy subskill. This will result in a total according to raw ability and training. You will check that against the king’s Empathy stat. If it fails to exceed the King’s Empathy, the attempt fails and nothing happens. If it exceeds the King’s Empathy, progress has been made toward success. The user of their Diplomacy skills needed to attain a 20 (the King’s Empathy score) or higher and the result was, let’s say, 25. This does 5 Empathy damage to the King’s Score. 15 more and their attempt at Diplomacy will succeed. What precisely this looks like is up to the narrator, but presumably the King’s mood is at least moved in a notch toward favorable, or at best he opens the gate and lets them in. The results of failure would be about what you would expect—the King’s mood worsens, he tells them to leave his Kingdom at once, etc.
Each of the six stats (Physical Fitness, Mental Acuity, Endurance, Empathy, Perception, and Spirit) are also resource pools, and will be used as a way of determining the success or failure of most or all actions in the system in a way that is mechanically identical to combat. There are also of course hit points and the expected combat mechanics.
Other mechanics—interacting with traps comes to mind—will be handled this way, but sudden death. I’m using the term “death” in a non-literal way here, although with some high level traps, it would in fact, be literal death! But once the first damage is dealt, the action succeeds, or if damage fails to be dealt, the trap is sprung.
I’ve been really agonizing over what species there should be, and after months of tearing my hair and gnashing my teeth, I haven’t really changed anything—but most importantly, I decided I’m not changing much. The basic/generic fantasy species will remain: Dwarves, elves, humans, halflings. I removed gnomes. Half-elves are not removed, but they are also not present. Why? Because you can’t play half-elves? No, you can play half-elves. But I want the design to be modular, so that halving is a template rather than one canned species. The bestiary ties in as well (for which nothing has happened), in that it will be a monster manual, but there will be no technical difference between the monster races and the playable races. The bestiary just contains those species which are less likely to be playable.
Not much about species has changed since the last time anyone played in Syseria, although Ixthalcouatl are new. They are a race of cat people based on the Aztec/Mayan/Mesoamerican civilizations.
I have, what is it, 7 or 8 Field Roles to choose from: Elite Warrior, Warrior, Priest, Rogue, Psion, Mage, Engineer, Wizard. I think that’s it. These are more like templates than classes and will probably where the whole aforementioned “modular design” thing really shows up most visibly. In most traditional RPG’s [that involve level advancement, which mine will], level advancement is handled with kind of a “prize package” that each character of that class is bestowed upon attaining a certain amount of experience, or, narratively when the narrator deems it appropriate. I took basically that and broke it down so it’s granular, giving the player more ways to customize their character as they advance. There isn’t really a tank class, if that’s the party role you want you can put more emphasis into hit points and armor and less into dealing damage.
This is done with a system of experience points and buy-ins. A character earns an Achievement for an action that merits an experience. The text contains many many suggested Achievements broken into basically three categories: Universal, Special [by which I mean “of your species”], and Field Role. Each merits one experience point. They also come from combat but combat experience is not as heavily emphasized at the expense of other life experiences. There are many possible experiences, and I believe they all have merit. There are combat experiences as well—not all of them winning a fight, either.
These experience points are in turn spent on buy-ins. As with Achievements, there are Universal Buy-ins, Special Buy-ins, and Field Role Buy-ins. Field Role Buy-ins are the same piecemeal components that come with each level in traditional RPG’s: More hit points, Faster attacks, hit harder, and certain powers.
That is a fair feel of what’s been done up to this point. I so far haven’t touched equipment, magic, anything more specific about combat than what I outlined above, or some of the logistical rules like movement and vision, downtime, that kind of good stuff. But we’re starting, so I reckon I’m just gonna handwave it, or pull a ruling out of my keister. Classic.
There’s a lot more I could talk about, but this has already gotten pretty long-winded, so I’m going to wrap up here. Hope to see you at the beautiful train wreck that will be session zero/one.
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