I continue to not be dead, though unfortunately Prima Materia has been on the back burner for a bit as personal stuff has kept me from it. I am trying to get back into the writing groove, and it seems to be marginally successful.
Even more unfortunately, the host I was using for the site no longer hosts projects, so I have to find a new host.
In the meantime, I continue to overhaul melee weapons, and have written a wealth mechanic involving banks, lines of credit, check fraud, and armed debt collectors. I'm also making a list of blog posts I need to write because I think having that list of tasks will be beneficial.
Character Creation and other stuff or How much progress justifies a blog post?
This post is going to be a bit all over the place, because that's the direction development has taken. A while ago, I posted this, which talks about burnout, and plans for the future. I then posted a few more systems then dropped off the face of the planet to retreat to my writing cave for a while.
One of the things I said in that post about burnout what that in order to hedge against it, I would simply switch the system that I'm writing about so I could keep the novelty of writing ttrpg mechanics high enough to not burn out again. Good news! This has worked very well. Bad news, this style of flitting about between systems makes for bad blog posts if I want to keep them cohesive. So I've been sitting in my cave, tapping my keyboard until one of these systems comes to proper fruition... Anyways more than one system is now in a playable state so I'm actually overdue. Now, without further ado -
Funny Patch Note Section
Links here are to other blog posts for the purpose of context
Character Creation has been (almost) entirely re-written (I'm now realizing I haven't made a dedicated post for this when it had the previous system what am I doing truly)
Professions (classes) have been obliterated and their remnants spread through other systems, as fortold
Combat makes a tenuous return and I'm taking another crack at ranged weapons. This time with gunpowder.
Primadelics now exists in universe as a concrete thing with categories of different primadelics based on their production process (as well as skeletons for players engaging with those production processes - this is part of the crafting system)
Natural primadelic plants and fungus now exist
Morale points are now a mechanic that allow you to re-roll checks (maybe - if not that it will be something in the spirit of that)
The skeleton for Cooking has been implemented (I watched a lot of Dungeon Meshi in the meanwhile) and has importance in raising Morale points and making Primadelic foods
The groundwork for the skeleton of Tinkering has been laid
The groundwork for the skeleton of Inventory management and Encumbrance has been laid
The groundwork for the skeleton of a system for increasing skills (among other things) has been laid
Other stuff in my scratch pad, mainly stuff to make humans more interesting. This reminds me I haven't done a blog post on Magi yet.
So, needless to say, some of these have enough content to make into their own blog posts. Stuff that says "groundwork" means I've done a lot of thinking and desperately need to actually write the core of those systems down - at most those ones have a paragraph outlining the general idea I have. Skeletons are very bare bones pseudo-rules.
The question now becomes what do I talk about in this particular post with so much to choose from? The answer is yes, but briefly.
Character Creation
This has been my white whale for some time now. Gutting the previous character creation and making a new one (which isn't finished but sh) hasn't been particularly easy, but I've been itching to actually make characters and conscript my friends into playtesting other mechanics that I also think are cool. Thankfully, it's now in a functional state.
Character Creation will get its own post at some point, but the general idea is you choose a species, a background, and a training before assigning the rest of your stats like assigning skill pips and figuring out your starting HP. Some of this is still in flux, but I'll go through the process really quick.
First, you choose a species. A species gives you special stats unique to that species, as well as other things like a size, speed, number of fine manipulators (hands or hand analogues), etc.
After species you choose a background, which currently gives you an Attribute increase and a skill pip in a skill of your choice from a list. You also get a keepsake with your background, like a dice set, childhood toy, or family heirloom.
Once you choose a background you choose a training, which more represents what your character does now. This gives you a head start into engaging with particular parts of the game, like Soldier if you want combat skills or Rhetorician if you want to craft arguments. They give you most of your items, and make you better in certain skills of your choosing from a list.
After all this is decided you assign the things everyone gets, assigning skill pips, determine your Health Points using your Size and Vitality, Stamina Points using your endurance skill and Vitality, and otherwise just fill in the character sheet in the section known as "copying from the book."
Oh man it looks like that's all the time we have for Character Creation let me please introduce the next sect-
Combat and Guns Specifically
Can't believe they cut me off. Alright so I've made blog posts about Combat before, this post explains where I left it last. It's also linked above in the list but I would never make you scroll back up that far. Anyways combat isn't getting totally re-written from scratch, at least not as far as I'm aware. There are good ideas in there I want to use, so I'm going back into playtesting. For melee and ranged weapons this means playtesting their current state and seeing whether or not I (and my friends) still like it. Firearms, however, are getting a little silly.
Originally, I had firearms work like any other ranged weapon. They are, of course, very common in certain parts of Patek. Balancing them against melee and other ranged weapons while making them both fun to play with and staying true to how impactful they are is hard to do, and it didn't really work. Recently, I decided to tackle this issue again on a whim and watched a lot of videos and read a lot of information about historical weaponry. Particularly matchlocks, wheellocks, and flintlocks.
Before I go entirely too into the weeds with how I came to the conclusions I did (this will get its own blog post once I playtest them) currently muzzle-loading firearms (most all of them) take an action to load. They also take an action to fire. This would take two turns. Matchlocks also need match cord to fire, which takes a quick action to light and will stay lit for a while. wheellocks and matchlocks also both need a quick action to prime and deal with the lock mechanism to get them ready to fire. None of this takes more than 2 turns, even if you want to load and fire a matchlock when your match isn't yet lit, but it does eat your turn resources. The one kind of gun currently that only needs an action to load and an action to fire are snaplocks, a kind of flintlock. On top of this you also need to buy the shot and powder, or paper cartridges, or even make your own paper cartridges, and clean your gun every day (read: have cleaning tools in your inventory).
So that seems like a lot and not entirely fun, why is it so tough to use and take care of a gun? Well, you also need to buy arrows for your bow, so jot that down. But part of the reason it's so involved, other than being historically accurate and painting a better idea of what their place is in the setting, is because now I can make them have big damage rolls. While a bow may do something like 2d6 damage, a gun has a different formula and may have you roll something like 1d4+8 for its damage. This is a system that I think I would enjoy playing with, including the bookkeeping for gunpowder and cartridges etc, but we'll see if I'm insane or not when I playtest it.
Primadelics
Ok so, last time we left primadelics it was here. More things have happened! I'll talk about Primadelic classes first. Actually no, I'll let the current mechanic explain what a primadelic is first, I'm aching to put microfiction in this post.
Primadelics are objects which are imbued with prima materia to cause effects when imbibed, smoked, or otherwise activated so the magic can be released. The word is also used to refer to the crafting and study of primadelics, though Orician scholars would much rather use "primadeliology" and "primadelistics" for those terms. For some reason, the terms never gained traction. If the distinction between the craft and the object must be drawn in clear terms, the craft is called "applied primadelics."
There are four classes of primadelics, those being Food, Tinctures, Incense, and Esters.
Tinctures are created by distilling a spirit (like gin) from particular herbs or ingredients that are soluble in alcohol. Much like spagyric tinctures in alchemy, because that's what they're based on. The magic is infused thanks to an alchemical spell that the final product is distilled over, and voila - portable healing in the blink of an eye. Or a few eyes, the effect is a bit delayed but it's still fast enough to close wounds faster than they can be inflicted at times.
Esters are made in a very similar way to tinctures, they're made by distilling the essential oil, called an oil of essentia, from an ingredient such as orange peels or anything else that has esters in it. The oil is then placed into a vessel that itself is an alchemical spell, which infuses it with prima materia and allows the effect of the oil to come out in things like candles, soaps, incenses, and foods as you add it to these things.
Incenses are what they say on the tin. There are two ways to make an incense a primadelic, one is to add an oil of essentia and burn it to release the effects of the oil. Another way, which is a bit more powerful, is to dry the incense in a particular shape to make it a sigil. Once it's done drying, you can burn it for the effect of the sigil. You can also do this while also having added an oil of essentia for two different effects.
Food is perhaps the most imprecise primadelic, but I like it quite a bit. To make a primadelic food, you have to have cookware that is also an alchemical spell. A masterfully engraved cast iron skillet, perhaps. Most primadelic food effects are from plants which are themselves primadelics, or from oils of essentia.
Natural primadelics often come in the form of plants, and I'll write about them in another blog post because I don't think I can be brief about it if I'm being honest.
Cooking
This is my favorite system I've written. In fact I like it so much I'll just let it speak for itself: here's the section on Dish Quality and Morale.
Cooking, like any art form, has conventions. Flair and style play no small part, and a properly completed dish has composition not unlike a painting or sonata. Food is uniquely suited, however, for the adventurer and common man. A full belly after an exquisite meal can propel a man through situations they may have thought impossible, tapping into a well of strength that can brighten the darkest of times. To reflect this, creating a completed dish requires a combination of ingredients, tastes, textures, seasoning, skill, and presentation. All of this results in a quality level assigned to the dish, which confers a morale bonus. Refer to the Quality table for how much morale this confers and special notes about certain qualities.
Yes I've been enjoying watching Dungeon Meshi, why do you ask?
There are some other fiddly things with liked and disliked tastes and textures conferring morale bonuses or penalties, but that's something for future me to write for now.
That's all for now
There are other things on the list, I know, but I'll write about them when they're ready. Thank you very much for reading this far, I'm continuing to internally playtest stuff (conscripting my friends to become lab hamsters) and once that's done I'll start releasing systems on my website one by one until they're all finished. This will of course take a long time, but Character Creation is almost ready for this treatment. It shall be the first of many.
Hello, I'm back from a bit of a break as I was fairly busy doing things for the holidays and then got some sort of bronchial illness that I am still recovering from. However, I have not been idle, so now that I'm feeling a bit better I will share some concepts I've been working on.
More specifically, the more I try to write Potioncraft the more I realize that the name doesn't make sense and it should include other craftable magic items. I've also been thinking about the social encounter system in the game and how it would be fun if someone could make an argument good enough to hurt or curse someone, not unlike legends of the Filidh of medieval Ireland. I'll talk about that later.
Alchemical Crafting
So, this of course is not talking about Spellcraft, which I talked about in a previous blog post, but rather the process for making tinctures, among other things. I still haven't landed on a proper name for it unfortunately, but let's walk through why what was originally Potioncraft became what it currently is.
The process of making alchemical tinctures was called potioncraft, because tinctures are like potions in other games. I already didn't like the name because of that disparity alone, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that there had to be something before and alongside crafting tinctures, as all tinctures are are ingredients infused into a distilled alcohol that's been treated alchemically with a spell made for treating tinctures; usually to increase the effects of the ingredients already within the tincture.
Alchemically treating consumable or ingestable items can't have started with tinctures, they're only a few centuries old in the setting, coinciding with the advent of strong spirits. To that end, I decided food had likely long been alchemically treated to impart specific effects, as well as smokeable items. I then went ahead and extended this treatment to candles and incense, as it made sense that those would become natural things to treat. A cleric could use a censer that billows smoke which puts enemies to sleep. A ghost hunter could use a candle that attracts spirits. A doctor can finally recommend a cigarette that's good for your health (don't smoke this is a joke).
[Just a note, as I was reading this post back to my flatmate he suggested the term "Primadelic" to describe these items as a joke while chopping garlic. I looked up the etymology of psychedelic and found the delic part comes from the Greek "δηλείν dēleín" which means "to manifest" so it actually makes sense and is a banger I fear.]
The difference in mediums means there's only two things that unify them, being limited or consumable and being empowered by an alchemical spell. I do plan to have one crafting system that takes care of all of these things, so how do I make a system that encompasses such a diverse group of things?
Crafting
We have to zoom out a bit, because this is a secret that pervades through the entire game. It's all the same system. Crafting spells will mechanically be very similar to crafting tinctures and other items, with some quirks unique to the particular system and different skills used. This applies to everything from mechanical creations to crafting arguments. Spellcrafting requires the Spellcraft skill, primarily. If you want to create a sword that will be a different skill, requiring different things. Spellcrafting requires a focus, a sigil, and spellcrafting tools. Crafting a sword will require materials, a blade, and smithing tools. Tinctures require an alchemical spell, ingredients, and brewing tools. These will all be slightly different, using different skills and having different results and mechanics if you fail or succeed, but you can see the blueprint is largely the same.
Time for a segue into how Social Combat will work, and how to craft arguments with this same blueprint for the system.
Socialites (and intimidating soldiers) Apply Here
Another confession, my background in ttrpgs largely consists of games which have very lite or no narrative rules. Some of those simply consist of beating a number by rolling a dice, and others like LANCER give a little more oomph to social encounters with bond powers. Trying to write a social system has been very challenging, and I wouldn't have been able to figure it out if not for one of my friends essentially handing me an example system on a plate and saying it would be cool to craft arguments.
The concepts for crafting an argument involve using a school of rhetoric, an argument type, and a purpose for the argument. For example, using the school of logic and the intimidation type you could compose a logical intimidating argument to convince a king to do something about bandits. That argument might mention that the bandits are getting powerful and it stands to reason the king will start losing outer villages if he doesn't hire someone soon. Or, using the school of presence and the persuasive type of argument, you could convince someone they will be safe with you by puffing out your chest and standing tall. I will talk more about the schools and argument types in its own blog post when the time comes.
I've been playing around with a few mechanical ideas as to how the school and type play into the power of an argument, particularly with augmentation from the character's skills. If a character wants to make an argument pertaining to cooking for example, a higher cooking skill will benefit them, but the specific benefit that incurs eludes me because I still need to write the base mechanics for using the arguments.
Another concept I thought would be fun is the ability to deal psychic damage or otherwise making someone sick from a crafted argument once a character finds out how to pour themselves into their words well enough. This would be a feat that is fairly hard to achieve, but I enjoy the idea immensely.
Conclusion
Alright that's all folks. I'm going to focus on getting better so work will still be a trickle. If you read this far, thank you very much. Next post will probably be about the social argument system.
Writing alchemy started feeling like banging my head against a wall and so to circumvent burnout I chose to work on another thing I'm excited about - the medical system. Medicine is the art of putting someone back together after they've fallen apart, and I want the mechanics to reflect that. Prima Materia is not really a power fantasy, it's about preparation, so I want a few more grounded consequences from fights or bad calls. To that end, there are wounds characters can get that require more complex treatment than "number return to full." A party may require the services of a bone doctor or surgeon to get fully back up to speed and regain the use of certain body parts.
Mortality
The first thing I did was try to set the tone for what to expect in the game, and hammer home the mortality of the character you play. The setting isn't grimdark by any means, but a strong fighter will still have a problem trying to fight a rhinoceros, and even the strongest Koura will probably die if they try to fight a revenant unprepared. Grounded is the goal here.
The second goal for writing the section on mortality was to actually write the mechanics for it, and if I write them well they will reflect the ideas I've already set up. Characters have Hit Points (HP) which loosely maps to how badly your character has been hurt, and Fatigue Points (FP) which map to how much energy you have for blocking, fun maneuvers, and fighting off death itself. Once you run out of FP, you pass out. Once you run out of HP, you fall unconscious and start losing Fatigue Points as your character fights to stay alive. Once your HP and FP both reach zero, your character dies. The first turn a character is down they lose 1 Fatigue Point. The next turn they lose 2, then 1d4, then the FP loss caps at 1d6 per turn. These numbers will no doubt need to be tweaked, but I like the core idea.
To put the above mechanics in a bit more context, the current low end for HP and FP in the game (which is subject to change of course) is 12 for both, and the highest is 36 for HP and 48 for FP. The reason these are seemingly so low (and if you've read my melee playtests they should indeed seem low) is because I want players to primarily rely on things like armor, blocking, and dodging to protect their HP. Of course these numbers will be similarly low for most enemies, unless that enemy is something that inherently outclasses most other things, like a large animal or something more nefarious.
Recovering HP and FP
Most ttrpgs have some sort of system for regaining HP and whatever other limited stats it throws at you through natural healing or some sort of wait time. LANCER has rests and full repairs, DND has short and long rests, Call of Cthulu gives you 1HP per day, the list goes on. Prima Materia also does this if you'd believe it, in the forms of Breathers and a Good Night's Sleep. Personally, I don't like the term "Good Night's Sleep" for this mechanic, but until I come up with something better that's what it is. A Breather is a quick 10 minute break that allows you to regain half of your spent Fatigue Points. That's it that's the mechanic. A Good Night's Sleep is 8 hours, and restores your FP completely, as well as 15 HP. Why 15? Because I think it's more grounded that way as it's supposed to mirror the body's natural healing without being too unforgiving. It's also meant to encourage preparedness, a player needs to make sure they have other ways to heal themself (tinctures, alchemical spells, salves).
Tinctures and Alchemical Spells are primarily in the domain of alchemy, and I haven't written tinctures yet, but they're worth mentioning here as the core concepts of those ideas are pretty formed. Alchemical healing spells are immediate, roll a die and the person will heal for the amount rolled. It is blasting your injuries with magic that speeds up the natural healing process, and if you take too much healing from a spell you can get sick. Healing tinctures are less immediate, they are imbibed and begin healing you very quickly, but not very quickly compared to healing potions in other games. As an example, a healing tincture may heal you for 1HP at the start of your turn for ten turns.
Salves is where things get tricky, as I haven't written them yet and haven't thought a whole lot about what I want them to be. Because tinctures are essentially alchemical infusions that get most of their oomph from the choice of ingredient, salves may work like slower tinctures, allowing you to regain an extra number of hit points during a good night's sleep.
Grievous Wounds
Grievous Wounds are the system outside of HP that I'm using to simulate the more serious things that require surgery or bone doctoring or burn salves. The first thing I decided is that if someone has low or no HP, they probably have a grievous wound. Someone at zero HP isn't dying because their funny hero number isn't high enough, they're dying because something has gone very medically wrong. So, if a character falls to 0 HP after something like an attack, they also get a grievous wound. I also wanted the chance for a character to get a grievous wound outside of being nearly dead, so if something hits a character and the damage is equal to or greater than half of their total HP, they also get a grievous wound.
Grievous wounds also have levels of severity, ranging from 1-3, that need to be treated in different time frames or bad things(tm) happen. For severity 3, this was easy. A severity 3 grievous wound is critical and if it's not dealt with within 4 hours the character dies. The other ones are a little harder to figure out, but while I try to come up with that allow me to distract you.
What is a bone? No, really, one of the grievous wounds I decided a character can get is a broken bone if the damage they take is Blunt. One small problem, not all creatures have bones. I checked, and exactly half the playable species in the game do not have bones. "Ok, well what if I stipulate that the species needs bones?" I said, bumbling around with the mechanics like I was trying to catch a lost marble. Well, that's an issue, what if someone doesn't realize a species does or doesn't have a bone? If a character gets hit in the body, how will they know the Entari don't have a ribcage? Alright scratch that. "What if we expand the definition of a bone to include shells and chitin?" I hazarded, trying to coax the mechanics out of my mind like one calls a stray cat. That wouldn't work either, much too clunky. Eventually, I decided to get rid of the broken bone wound and replace it with "Skeletal Fracture," which seemed to work nicely for all those non-boned species. General enough to be used elsewhere, not so gritty that it starts to become grimdark, and the treatments I have in mind will work with any skeletal system. One small problem, two playable species do not have skeletal systems. I decided that this wasn't an issue, as I can make a special wound for the Sepia, and the other species is an amoeba. A living mass of cytoplasm and membrane not being affected by this particular wound just makes sense.
The Skeletal Fracture wound is the only one I have so far. The treatment is of course setting the bone and putting a cast on, with higher severity wounds requiring surgery, and then a recovery period of several weeks where the use of the limb is hindered. The recovery time is a hard line to walk, as I want something that's grounded but also doesn't hinder the ability of a player to play the game. Going through a period where your character does nothing for a month while they wait to heal is not fun. So, characters can still get up and do things. They can even participate in fights, they just get a penalty for a while. Healing magic can also expedite the recovery process of grievous wounds, so most players will either have to stick it out for a few in-game days to find a healer or they will already have the requisite alchemical spell on hand.
Future Stuff
That marks the end of the written mechanics. So where am I going from here? Well, I have more base mechanics to write. First Aid can mitigate the bad stuff(tm) from grievous wounds happening. I need to write one grievous wound each for the Pierce and Burn damage types (and maybe one for the Psychic damage type but that's really not needed yet as psychic damage is incredibly rare in the setting). Toxins, Maladies, and Exhaustion has to be written, which deals with magical and mundane sicknesses, and actually integrating those systems into gameplay.
Once I write those base mechanics, I can start writing the feature trees that change those mechanics for characters that take them. Of course, this will take some time.
In the meantime, if you read this far, thank you very much. The next mechanics post is unpredictable; it may be Alchemy Part 2, Medicine Part 2, Character Creation Reimagined, maybe even Social Combat rules. The next species post is still Species Highlight - Possum, though it's been slowgoing.
I've been working on a few things this week, and the actual mechanics behind alchemy is one of those things. For those of you who don't know what alchemy is as it relates to Prima Materia (probably most people who will see this), it is the most prolific magic system in the setting. For more than that, here's the blog post that goes into the concepts.
Unfortunately I am sick, so I was not able to make a full version of the Spellcraft rules, but I'm still excited about them so I'll go into what I have currently.
What is a spell?
A spell is a physical object. It includes a focus made from a specific material, and a sigil that determines the effect. Spells have a lot of shapes and sizes, from engraved rods that shoot fire to large engraved containers that keep things cold.
Sigils
Sigils are engravings that elicit a certain effect by channeling prima materia and manipulating it in a specific way to make a particular substance. This can be something like a fire sigil, which when used in certain foci can act like a flamethrower or send out bolts of fire. Some sigils are able to stimulate cell growth, and are used in healing. Others can do more fantastical things with reality.
Sigils themselves in universe are developed by many people, and lots of them have been known for thousands of years. As such, I've decided to separate them into alchemical traditions, and then further into Paradigms, which represent specific practices within a tradition. These traditions and paradigms have different shapes of foci that they use, and different philosophies driving their development. For example, Entari Staffwriting comes from a culture where the alchemical tradition is mostly clerical, and most of the foci are wooden staves. As such, the sigils in this tradition can only be engraved onto staves because that's what they were built for, and the tradition is fairly small with powerful effects. In the practical alchemy tradition, there is a paradigm concerned with making very small sigils that can be concealed or placed into larger alchemical machinery.
But of course the sigil is nothing without the focus it's engraved into.
Foci and Materials
There are specially shaped foci that determine the final effect of a spell as well as how powerful that spell can be. The material a focus is made from has a specific Flux Capacity (FC), and a sigil with a larger Flux than the FC of a focus it's engraved into may break or warp the focus on use. Sigils with a higher Flux can absolutely be put onto a focus that doesn't have the FC to handle it, but in those cases whenever the spell is used it has a chance to warp or break the focus somehow, giving it a flaw or destroying it outright.
The types of Foci at the moment are Tapered, Flared, Concave, Flat, and Blade. Tapered foci will cause the effect to be launched from the focus like a bolt. Tapered foci will make an area of effect. Concave foci spreads the effect out in such a way where it's gentle enough for things like healing sigils. Flat foci will make the effect spread out over a plane, and Blade foci are a type of flat focus that extends the effect into a plane but only in one direction.
Materials have Flux Capacity ratings that range from 0 to 7. Of course, as mentioned before, these can be overloaded. A spell can be used a number of times equal to the difference between the Flux Overflow doubled and the Flux Capacity of the material, the Flux Overflow being the difference between the Flux of the sigil and the Flux Capacity of the material.
The equation for this is FO*2-FC=number of uses.
When a spell is overloaded like this, you also have to roll on the overload table, which is not yet written but some of the Flaws a focus can have are written. These flaws are Flickering, Faulty Trigger, and Jank. Flickering means a focus has an unstable output and is sometimes not as strong as it should be. Faulty Trigger makes a passive effect happen to your focus (for example a focus with a fire sigil may be constantly warm) and the spell has one less charge than normal. Jank allows you to re-roll a result on the overload table if the result would destroy the focus, and I still need to make a downside for it.
That's It
If I were feeling better I may have written more and this post might've been longer, but alas getting a cold waits for no one. Or something. If you're wondering why I haven't written the rest of character creation yet and worked on this instead, that's because I started getting burned out in the character creation mines and there are some decisions about it I need to noodle on.
Thank you for reading, once I get better I will continue working on alchemy. For now, I rest.
Over the past week, I've been cannibalizing the Professions system of Prima Materia and shunting those mechanics into other places. Not every mechanic I pulled out of them fit with the existing systems of the game, which presented an opportunity for me to make an entirely new system that I think is very cool called Metaphysicalities. Metaphysicalities are very rare quirks that allow for a character to do strange and maybe even helpful things that interact with the metaphysics of the setting.
What is the system?
Metaphysicalities is a system that's being wrapped into character creation. Not every character will have a metaphysicality; in fact, most characters likely won't. In order to explain why this is, I also have to explain how I'm reworking character creation at least a bit. The original character creation system was pretty simple, you choose a species, background, profession, and allocate points. The new system does away with professions, splits up backgrounds a bit, and adds metaphysicalities. It also introduces rolling for certain things, one of those things is whether or not your character has a metaphysicality, and what that specific metaphysicality is. There are also some other metaphysicalities which can't be rolled for because it doesn't make sense for them to be random, which I'll talk about in a bit. Rolling for a metaphysicality involves rolling a d100 to see if you have one. I haven't decided yet whether the metaphysicalities should be on the d100 table directly, or if it should determine whether or not you roll on a specific metaphysicalities table. However, random tables don't always make for the kind of story a player wants to tell, so there will be optional rules for picking a metaphysicality, likely at a cost in character creation.
In the meantime, let's get out of the weeds of hard mechanics land and get right into talking about-
What Metaphysicalities Do
All metaphysicalities cause the affected character to interact with the metaphysics of the setting in some way. Generally speaking, a metaphysicality happens when the ousia (oo-see-uh) that makes up the soul of a person is abnormal or has been tampered with in some way. Of course, this is about as useful as saying elements are made of matter that's interacted with other matter in specific ways, so here are the specific metaphysicalities that have been written thus far.
Vessel
Vessel used to be a profession, and is the reason metaphysicalities now exist.
Vessels are born with a soul that is predisposed to be able to host more than one consciousness. While some Vessels live mundane lives unaware of this quirk of the soul, it can result in attention - unwanted or otherwise - from beings that wish to make your soul and body a home for themselves. These beings, called consorts when they bind with a vessel, will sometimes pay their keep on principal by performing magical favors for the host. Others require a working relationship between consort and vessel to be productive.
Draconian
Draconian used to be a background, and is only able to be taken by a Possum from a specific region of the world. You cannot be born with this metaphysicality.
You hail from Balaura, the successor to the Aelian Empire, ruled by the living god Aelius Soarstea. You were taken before Aelius Soarstea as part of your coming of age ceremony, and now bear his mark. The mark gives you the ability to sense danger, and call for divine help in times of need; but it also binds you to the will of Aelius, which is not so easily broken.
Prophet
Prophets were originally going to be a class inspired by biblical prophets, but they got written as a metaphysicality instead because I got rid of classes. This is another one that has to be chosen rather than rolled.
You have been chosen by a god to do great works and change the course of history. Should you heed the call of strange dreams and visions, you will be granted the ability to perform miracles to aid you on your holy quest. Otherwise, if you refuse the call, the gods will deem you unfit for service and such privileges as performing miracles will be revoked.
Miraculous
The Miraculous are the latest metaphysicality I've written, made to replace another one I deemed unfit for the setting. The idea behind this one is essentially "what if luck ontologically exists, but only for some people?"
The circumstances of your birth were auspicious. Your mother may have had a very easy birth where nothing went wrong. Or many things may have gone wrong, and yet you survived the ordeal. Whatever the circumstances, this swinging pendulum of luck has stayed with you throughout your life making it one of extremes. Horrible luck may cause your home to burn down around you, as good luck lets you survive it. Good luck may cause you to come into a great deal of money and bad luck may be that the check gets lost in the mail for a month before it can reach you. There are times when you can force one luck or the other to manifest, but the pendulum will always swing the other way eventually.
Reborn
Some believe when a disembodied spirit is unwilling to freely unravel, it jealously takes the first breath of an infant and becomes a Reborn. Others say a spirit that by chance wanders too close to an infant will become trapped in the body. Whatever the case, this spirit becomes a latticework indistinguishable from your own soul. If you are able to push through confusing and sometimes alien memories, with practice you may be able to draw upon the skills this spirit had in its previous life.
Seer
This is my personal favorite, it draws on tropes I enjoy.
You were born able to see things others can't. Your eyes pierce past the mundane into the Ousia that makes up souls, spirits, thoughts, and the fonts that spew Prima Materia onto the surface of the world. With practice, you can tell when someone is lying, or when they will do something before they know it themselves. However, you cannot stop seeing Ousia in the world, which can be distressing to your senses and highly disorienting. Seers that are blind don't deal with this distraction, and often become the most highly skilled
Dreamwalker
This is also my personal favorite, it draws loosely on experiences I have had when I was more spiritual.
Where we go when we dream is a mystery that even the talkative gods have trouble answering. Since you were a child, your dreams have been almost as real as life, and the doors to the space between realities have opened to you. Legends of dreamwalkers speak of finding secret information and bringing objects into the waking world from the space between. All is not safe, however, as injuries sustained in your dreams of the space between often bleed through to your waking body.
But wait, there's more!
These are all the metaphysicalities that I'm writing, bar any strange moods or other inspiration. However, they're far from done. I'm still working on the crunch part of these, with mechanics that will hopefully convey the narrative of the quirks in a way that's fun and satisfying.
If you read this far, thanks! The next mechanics post will in all likelihood be a more in-depth post about the updated character creation, and Species Highlight - Possum is being worked on.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if cephalopods could live for more than 2 years? Perhaps even passing on generational knowledge? My mind wanders to this topic fairly often, the Sepia are a result of me following this line of questioning to its conclusion. I present to you, the Sepia.
The Sepia are Cephalopods, very similar to cuttlefish. They can mimic other objects and animals thanks to their ability to change the color and texture of their skin, as well as their very fine motor control over their arms. Sepia are also mildly telepathic, an ability that allows them to coordinate large shows of mimicry and move in tandem with any number of other Sepia involved in the show. They use this ability to mimic creatures that are much larger than they are, such as sharks, or sometimes to hypnotize larger animals by sending pulses of color through a wall of Sepia.
As Sepia are unable to make any useful sound underwater their languages are polyvisual; they incorporate multiple glyphs, colors, and textures into words and tonality which they display on their bodies. Some of these words are even animated to an extent. Despite the inherent complexity of their languages, Sepia conversations are very fast; ideas that would take a sentence to convey in most phonic languages are often condensed into a single specific word in Sepia languages.
Much like humans, what the Sepia lack in strength they tend to make up for with their ingenuity; and as a species that needs to navigate fully three dimensional spaces to survive, they're very sharp. They have domesticated many species of sea creatures for various purposes. They keep fish for food, blue sailsharks for herding fish, bio-luminescent remora for use as lighting, and many others. Many sedentary Sepia civilizations farm clams for food, and nomadic Sepia tend to keep small beds of poisonous clams for use in hunting.
Tagging along with Giants
Many Sepia are nomadic, having forged a mutually beneficial relationship with the Sophont whales on Patek. How this relationship started is lost in the fog of time; those who live in these communities say it has always been this way.
The Sepia act as hands for the whales, using their tools to take care of them and even help them with forms of self-expression through making tattoos, piercings, and other outward displays. In return, the whales carry their homes, cargo, and graves. The whales, blessed with two and a half century long life spans and nothing to manipulate objects with, also do the majority of the mental labor of lore keeping and social deliberation. This relationship is not generally seen as transactional, but rather as expected contributions to a community or family - the whales and Sepia often form multi-species family units, with whales in the family often carrying their family's home.
The religious beliefs of the nomads are very heterogeneous, but they share more in common than one might first expect as a result of meeting up every year for the Sophont's breeding season. The courtship rituals of Sophont whales; wooing potential partners, meeting the families to be joined together, and spending much-needed alone time once a partner and their family is chosen is very complex and takes several months. These social interactions often sweep up more romantic Sepia into the moment, and lots of cultural exchange happens as a result which leads to certain tropes appearing in most of the nomadic religions. The most important of these tropes is the idea of the three realms of existence. The realm of the living is full of fish to catch and life to live, where all your favorite things exist and unless you're very unlucky, where all your experiences have taken place. The parched realm, where the water is too thin to breathe and the weight of your own body can crush you; not to mention the horrible beaked demons that may pick you apart as soon as they see you. The gods often summon great storms, and Sepia of great folly can get caught in them and thrown wayward never to be seen again. Only whales can tolerate the parched realm, and only for a time, as they must draw life from emptiness itself. The third realm is the realm of the dead, far below the world and past a barrier of frigid water. Some wild whales are able to breach this barrier, and though they cannot be spoken to their scars tell stories well enough.
Whales, being the only creatures with a connection to all three of the realms of creation, are revered by many Sepia and have great religious significance. Some whales are happy to be the center of the nomadic spiritual life and are attended to by Sepia priests as they speak expansively on the metaphysicality of creation with their peers and share their wisdom with others. Other whales take on a more utilitarian roll with their spirituality, becoming graveyards for Sepia that have past. It is their job once they die to ferry all the Sepia souls that they carry into the realm of the dead so they don't get lost.
Natural entertainment in the pelagic zone is sparse, so the nomads come up with endless games and art forms to pass the time. The Sepia perform plays, re-enacting heroes and important religious and cultural events; Sophonts will come up with songs and tales, and tales in the form of song, and have a Sepia transcribe it. Children play with each other and their remora pets. Thinking puzzles, conundrums, and paradoxes are popular among most of the nomads, courtesy of the whales; many of which love to talk long-windedly on philosophical matters.
Not all nomadic groups interact with others outside their cultures, though after a particularly good hunting season, some will often take their surplus catch to their sedentary cousins who live on the reefs and seagrass meadows to trade for finished goods and luxuries.
Putting Down Roots
The vast majority of Sepia are sedentary, settling in coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and on the periphery of estuaries. Their towns range from small aquaculture villages that raise beds of clams, to large cities among the reefs that are host to thousands of Sepia kept fed by surrounding aquaculture villages. While there are some Sepia civilizations that have sprung up on seamounts or the shelves around islands, most of these civilizations are found along the coasts of continents, and as a result have much more interaction with other sapient species, especially Koura who live both in water and on land.
Most people know of the Sepia from stories Ternaki bring from Sifia, as the Ternaki have excellent trade relations with the Sepia off the Sifian coast. Sepia will trade food, finished goods, and raw minerals in exchange for metal products and other things they usually can't make themselves. Some of them have taken to training small hammerhead sharks to act as metal detectors to find silver and gold on the ocean floor for the express purpose of trading with land species.
Religion among the Sepia varies wildly among the sedentary civilizations, and often has influence from those they trade with. One belief, which varies in its interpretations, is that estuaries are gates to start on the journey to the afterlife. They are guarded by divine creatures with beaks that snatch anyone who would be so foolish to try and find what lies beyond, but tales of following the rivers and streams up to the mountains speak of untold beauty. Some Sepia believe that when they die, their spirit will be free from their body and they can physically follow the rivers to the mountains past the birds and unbreathable fresh water to see the heavens, and they aren't technically wrong. Spirits do exist, but that's a topic for another blog post.
In the modern day, the beaked creatures are known to be birds and many estuaries are made safe for Sepia to farm fish, shrimp, and mussels. As a result, most Sepia that have this belief, particularly ones that work in estuaries, don't interpret it literally. In addition, there are Sepia that have taken the first steps on land inside mechanical drysuits, designed by Sepia and aided in their manufacturing by the Ternaki.
Life on Land
The Sepia are an aquatic species, but they're also playable so I need them to be able to go on land. The answer, obviously, is mech suits.
Sepia drysuits are a relatively new phenomenon, a consequence of the industrial revolution allowing access to manufactured goods and other recent breakthroughs bringing technology and alchemy up to speed with the ideas some Sepia have been having for centuries. The first drysuits were little more than fishbowls on wheels, connecting pedals or other cranks to the wheels for locomotion. However, over the past twenty years drysuit technology has been drastically improved. Cockpits are now hermetically sealed and durable, with alchemical salt water recycling systems where oxygenated salt water is mixed in one or two canisters and pumped into the cockpit; the old water flushed out of the drysuit. Many drysuits are still utilitarian and use tracks for mobility, with the addition of graspers for manipulating objects. More complex drysuits also exist, including ones with humanoid plans that are piloted with levers, cranks, and quite a bit of pullies. Some more high-end ones use Hydraulics. Some Sepia have taken to pushing the limits of these kinds of suits, making names for themselves on land as skilled pilots able to make their suits do acrobatics.
On the mechanics side of things, I have some simple drysuits written that need to be playtested. Currently, they have a Strength (which is used in place of the Strength Attribute), Size, Speed, Fine Manipulators (number of hands), Armor, Durability (hitpoints based on materials used), and Cockpit Durability (Cockpit hitpoints). These are a way from being tested for the moment though, hopefully within a few weeks.
If you read this far, thank you very much! Also huge thanks to @donutboxers for the art in this post. The next Species Highlight will be the Possum, and the next mechanics post will be about Metaphysicalities.
It's been a while, and I need to put out a blog post or I'm going to go insane. This post was meant to be "Species Highlight - Sepia", which is still sitting in my drafts half finished. Instead, this is going to be a post about burnout and some not-quite-finished things I've been cycling between for Prima Materia. If there's one thing you take away from this post, let it be that you need to take care of yourself and take breaks. You need to rest or your body and mind will force you to rest and it won't be fun.
Last time I made a blog post, I promised that you would get the Sepia, and barring that I was sure that I would be able to get my "next experiment" up and running by the time the week was out. It turns out, I was very wrong. The experiment in question was an attempt to try and write mechanics relevant to the kind of adventures I wanted to see in Prima Materia. This entails actually writing a module, then seeing what mechanics it would require and writing those mechanics. I figured I'd churn out three modules that were intended to run for 3 sessions each, and start playtesting. To probably no one's surprise who's ever done the insane amount of work it takes to write a module that can be run by another human being, this hasn't worked.
The first module is currently unfinished, and I am still excited about it and want to finish it; however I ran into burnout while writing it over the course of a few weeks because I agonized about it not getting done and agonized when I was writing it because I was tired of writing the same thing. I then ran into several life snags that haven't allowed me to work on it. I won't go into details of my personal life here but suffice to say stress has been high and time has been relatively short. Add burnout into this and you have a recipe for not even thinking about Prima Materia for a month and some change.
So, in order to get back into the groove of trying to write, I decided to be a little self serving and write a part of the setting that I wanted to write right then because I finally got hit with the inspiration beam again. This bit of writing will have no relevance to anything for probably years down the line in this project, but it's fun and interesting to me so it served as a wonderful tool for diving back in. I will share with you the little blurb that I wrote about a planet that exists in the setting, though it is hardly even a first draft so much as a note. Names are placeholders and everything here is subject to change.
Ternaki Log(?)
World: Carcosa; cold eyeball planet orbiting a red dwarf
Carcosa is a planet engineered by the "Architects," a group of aliens that were active between three and four billion years ago. They left a beacon in orbit of the planet that tells us this planet is called "Carcosa" and was the work of an individual named "Hastur." Dating methods used on the beacon and ice core samples taken from the cold side of the planet reveal that this was likely one of Hastur's later works.
The planet's crust is comprised of mostly water ice and water, which experiences varying degrees of tectonic activity.
A circular portion on the day side is hot enough for this water ice to melt, resulting in the usually hidden subsurface ocean to be visible. In this melted portion there are a few rocky continents and a number of hot spots resulting in island chains and active volcanism.
The continental portions are home to several forms of native life, mostly plant-like in nature. Native life on Carcosa has signature markers placed by Architect gene weavers, and share genetic similarities with several nearby planetary biospheres which are unrelated to each other. The native plants can be divided into two categories that use either red or blue pigment in photosynthesis. Animals on Carcosa are wildly varied, but due to the high gravity of the planet most are either very small or very robust. There is one native sapient species on the planet that boasts several civilizations; many of which use bronze tools.
In modern times, Carcosa has been designated as a resort planet / nature preserve with several island chains being co-opted for resort use, and is listed as one of the 7 ancient wonders of the galaxy in several major periodicals. The planet is managed by a satellite station in orbit of the planet, which has been in place for several centuries.
The joke here is I saw the meme about the flat earth ice wall planet actually existing (specifically this planet spied by JWST) and decided to make something like it in Prima Materia.
So what's the current project?
When approaching everything again, I came face to face with more design decisions I made in the past that didn't mesh well with what I want Prima Materia to be. Namely, I don't want there to be a class system in the game for several reasons, but there are two main reasons. Firstly, because I want player characters to be able to learn whatever the character would be able to conceivably learn (within the bounds of the system, this isn't a simulation game). Secondly, while I want both vertical and horizontal progression, I want the progression to be more horizontal than it is vertical. I find that classes lend themselves more to vertical power systems and particularly power fantasies (at least when I write them). The profession system I have is just a class system I've been pretending isn't a class system because I cleverly called it something else. So, I've dissected the profession system because it was still in the early stages and divided up the parts to other systems, which made way for at least one new system (quirks of the soul) as well as trees of features that are specifically related to things like combat, medicine, or specific kinds of alchemy.
That was a lot of the word "system." In short, Prima Materia in my brain currently looks like a disassembled car, but I have a checklist to put it back together better than it was before. In fact, here's the checklist:
The checklist isn't finished (and some stuff may be removed or changed) but it has enough to keep me busy for a while, and enough where if I start getting burnt out on one part of the project I can switch gears and start writing other parts. Currently, I'm working on quirks of the soul (working title) and integrating that into the character creation system.
That module I talked about earlier will definitely be finished at some point, though that will happen after more of this checklist is done. I'd love to tell you more but.. Spoilers. All-in-all I'm considering the experiment with side by side module / mechanics development to be.. a teachable moment.
If you read this far, thank you very much for your interest! I need to spruce up the "Species Highlight - Sepia" post before getting it out but I hope to put it up before or on the 16th, @donutboxers art has languished in my drafts long enough it needs to be seen.
I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking with my friends about Prima Materia, as I often do these days. For the past few weeks there's been something itching at the back of my mind, I'm making mechanics that are starting to work well but for whatever reason they don't "feel" like Prima Materia to me. They technically fit in with the design pillars I've assigned myself; grounded, cinematic, dynamic, and fantasy, but I've felt like things are missing. Going beyond that, I don't think someone would properly grok the game if they were to read my past blog posts. If I read my past blog posts without knowing what Prima Materia is, I would think it's a game mostly focused on combat with some interesting worldbuilding.
I decided to talk with one of my friends about this, and the conversation led to me trying to properly articulate the kinds of things I want to happen in Prima Materia and compare that with the direction the design is going. In particular, how do I imagine a campaign going? What do people actually do in the game? While these are questions that can be applied to most ttrpgs, I hadn't realized how important it was to answer them concretely to make correct design decisions for my game rather than the design being driven by vague subconscious conceptions of a game that does not yet exist filtered through some core design pillars and my own limited experience in playing ttrpgs.
What do people actually do in the game?
This is a wide question, and has a wide answer.
When I think of what it would be like to actually play or GM a game of Prima Materia my mind tends towards uncovering secrets, diplomatically dealing with situations, and overcoming obstacles that require lots of preparation to pull off without getting seriously hurt. Secrets should be important to the party and world, and depending on the tier of play can be anything from uncovering new alchemical magics to metaphysical secrets of the universe that can act as MacGuffins for a longstanding party.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that uncovering secrets is one half of the beating heart of Prima Materia, and the other half is preparation for overcoming obstacles to achieve the uncovering of those secrets. Characters in the game aren't meant to be incredibly powerful but rather incredibly skilled at their area of expertise, whether that be being good with a sword, knowledgeable in certain subjects, good at diplomacy, or making useful items. That's the concept of the game that's in my head that needs to be concretely written down (and how convenient for me that I've just done that).
Going Forward
A lot of the ideas and drafts I've written or verbalized to friends make a lot more sense in this light of uncovering secrets and preparation, as lot of those ideas hinge on uncovering secrets or being prepared. There are lost manuscripts I've been itching to put in that grant skill bonuses as well as character features due to the knowledge contained within. The Alchemist profession alone is a class that takes the ideas of preparedness and uncovering secrets to 11, where you create new spells and tinctures and unlock more and more useful things to make as well as ways to make them.
There are several design decisions I've been making recently that do not spark joy for me. They will be dealt with, and going forward I will have this to keep in mind as what I want the heart of the game to be.
If you read this far, thank you very much! It means a lot. The astute among you who read my last post will notice that this is suspiciously not a post about the Sepia as I promised, and that's because I thought this post was important. I will of course try to get the Sepia post out next week, but if that fails I will bring you an update on my most recent mechanics experiment which will surely have transpired by then.
Over the past few weeks I've been writing the combat systems, teasing out core ideas to see if they're fun and whether they can work well in tandem with the other systems. There have been some bumps, as it often goes when designing things, but I believe I've pinned down the core concepts well enough where I can start fleshing out the systems and tweaking the knobs on balance.
As for the specific systems I've been working on for the past few weeks I've written Armor and Healing (through tinctures and alchemy) as well as how the hex grid system works, and I've introduced core concepts for how ranged combat and throwables (alchemist's fire / clay grenades etc) will work. I also went back and reworked some things, like how melee attacks land and how the dodge and block skills work. All-in-all a lot of things are happening, if this interests you read on!
The Hex Grid
Up until now, all the playtests I've been running have been on a hex grid, because in my mind that's how I wanted the game to be played. However, until now I never wrote down how it works nor had I introduced concepts like Flanking. For something so core to the combat, I decided that I should finally write it down and play with the concepts I wanted to add.
After adding in a hex system, I also added flanking and surrounding because I want positioning to matter. The behavior of the hex grid in playtests encouraged my players to try to position themselves appropriately because the benefits are pretty decent. Flanking gives you advantage on hit rolls and damage rolls, and surrounding does that as well as imposing disadvantage on dodge and block rolls for the person who's surrounded. Something funny that came out of this is as both players and enemies were trying to flank each other, they made flanking chains where they alternated player/enemy/player/enemy which was pretty funny to see. A system along the lines of attacks of opportunity doesn't exist yet, but I do want to add something along those lines. Next playtest, perhaps.
Armor and Defense
Armor is another thing that I'd been toying with the core concepts of before I fleshed it out. The simple explanation is armor acts as damage mitigation, you roll your armor stat against the enemy damage roll and reduce the incoming damage by that amount. In playtesting this feels fun conceptually but the numbers for armor need to be re-worked. This is also how dodge and block worked though, and I didn't want them to overlap. On top of this, dodge / block being damage mitigation on top of armor was way too powerful no matter how you slice it. Damage would get mitigated twice and often nothing would ever get through, so instead I added melee weapons and ranged weapons skills (a surprise tool that will help us later) which are used in the context of contested rolls against a target's dodge or block as a hit roll. If you fail the roll, you don't hit. If you win the roll you do, then the damage gets mitigated by armor if there is any. Originally I didn't want any sort of hit roll in the game, as I was jaded by d20 systems being swingy in this regard and resulting in never being able to hit as often as hitting every turn. This system makes the skills of both combatants an important factor and it feels more like a contest than luck.
Another important part of this system is that armor often doesn't cover an entire person, it will cover one or more of the torso, head, arms, and legs. This way, if someone has armor on you can target an unarmored part of them, getting past the armor and perhaps gaining another effect in exchange for giving your target a flat bonus to their dodge or block roll for the attack. If a player doesn't specifically target one of those parts, it's assumed that they're attacking the torso which gets no benefits one way or the other.
Other important ways to mitigate armor are with Fatigue Damage, which damages a character's Fatigue causing them to pass out when it reaches zero, and busting the armor with brute force. If an amount of damage gets past a piece of armor above its Resistance stat, it lowers in quality.
Quality itself is one half of the equation that tells you what you roll when damage hits your armor, the other half being what material it's made of. Quality going down means less protection. This is partially a tool for me (and GMs) to be able to design a piece of armor, and a tool to help later when I inevitably introduce armor crafting into the game. Crafting in general is going to be a large part of Prima Materia because preparation is an important theme.
Healing
So far there are two ways to heal in the game, tinctures and spells. A tincture is just a potion but with a word that I think fits the setting more. Tinctures act very quickly, but they don't act immediately. Their effects come into play at the start of your next turn, and healing tinctures in particular work over the course of several rounds. The aim for healing tinctures is to prepare for being hit rather than as a reaction to being hit in most cases. The core for tinctures seemed to be liked with my friends that I playtested with, so I'm sticking with how they work for now. In the future, tinctures will also be able to get specific and niche uses, and of course a crafting system to engage with.
The second way to heal is with a spell. A spell in Prima Materia includes an alchemical sigil, the material it's made of, and the focus which directs the magical energy. In this particular case, the healing spell is mechanically similar to a melee weapon but instead of doing a certain attribute die of damage it does your alchemy attribute in healing. And of course you don't need to make a hit roll with it, that would be a bit silly.
Throwables and Grenades
So, this is a core concept that exists only in a stat block for an enemy and nowhere else. As a result, it hasn't been incredibly thoroughly tested, but I have used it in playtests, and it seems simple enough where my players understood what was happening just from watching it work as well as enjoying the mechanic (albeit they were a little surprised as AoE effects hadn't existed until then)
There are two ways to throw a grenade, one as a Ranged Weapon and the other being lobbed. Lobbing a grenade requires you to pick a point within the grenade's range, and roll 1d6. The number it lands on corresponds to what direction your grenade sways towards. A second 1d6 is then rolled, which corresponds to how many meters (or hexes) the grenade is off by. Because this is an AoE, taking that chance will more often than not result in hitting your target. As for how this interacts with armor, well, we'll get there when we get there.
Throwing a grenade as a ranged weapon requires getting within 10 meters of an enemy and rolling your ranged weapons skill, but this isn't entirely fleshed out yet. If you miss, the grenade is still live and will land somewhere. You roll a 1d6 to see how far behind your target your grenade lands. I may change this, but this is unwritten and untested so I will have more solid mechanics later.
Ranged Weapons
The last several times I tried to write ranged weapons it didn't go so well. This time, all I wrote was a single revolver before giving it to one of my players to use during a playtest. The way it works is you roll your ranged weapons skill against the hit difficulty stat on the weapon itself. This actually worked well in the playtest and mirrored the way melee weapons worked with its own spin to make it its own. Now that the core of ranged weapons actually makes sense, I will have to playtest it more and see what mechanics other than just wearing armor make sense as a counter to ranged. So far, I'm looking at cover and tinctures for that, but we shall see how it goes. Hopefully a lot better than last time.
That's It
This is a fairly quick recap of all the mechanics and such that I've been working on, I probably missed something somewhere. Once I finish playtesting these mechanics with friends, they'll go up on the Prima Materia website and they'll be available for public playtesting.
Outside of that, I want to put together a proper playtesting module so people can just grab a PDF and play the game. I don't want people to have to make a character and make up their own combats and stat blocks etc just to playtest a game they've likely never heard of before.
If you read this far, thank you very much! Next week will be a post about the Sepia, a playable species that are actually just cuttlefish.
What if there was a type of creature that enjoyed climbing on things? A species heavily motivated by social bonds and the need to stack rocks? What if I told you this fantasy species exists in Prima Materia? Perhaps you would be surprised that such an interesting and cool species is in the game. Without further ado- here's humans.
Humans on Patek, like humans on Earth, have developed many different groups and cultures over the thousands of years they've been loose. Of course, humans from Earth no longer exist as they died out an impossibly long time ago. Despite their different cultures and practices separated at times by ten thousand or more years of isolation, humans hold a few things in common between them. Their endurance, their ambition, and their ability to pack bond with nearly anything.
Human endurance has no equal among the sapient species of Patek. This is reflected mechanically, giving humans extra Fatigue Points and a bonus to rolls when determining Fatigue Points on level up. Their ability to pack bond with almost anything is reflected by the second unique trait humans get, "Social Creature." When a human thinks it's bonded with someone, whether that be a pet or a person, they get a bonus to protect that creature as well as a general bonus after socializing with them.
Human ambition isn't represented mechanically, but rather through world building and narrative. In particular, I like the idea of humans being uniquely driven to build large things; monuments, pyramids, palaces. They have made some of the most impressive buildings on the planet, and many groups are still trying to one-up another in this regard. In the setting's current time period, the focus is on skyscrapers.
But of course, for everything humans have in common there are a dozen ways in which they differ. And it's the differences that are the most interesting, after all.
Looking through Windows
There are many different cultures and kingdoms of men, so we'll look through the windows of a select few to see what it's like to live there, and what the people are like.
The Northmost points of Eastern Atiyeret are covered in evergreen woods, and half the time covered in snow. Summer beckons the snow to melt the other half of the year, with temperatures in some months reaching above 50F (10C). For thousands of years the people there have done what people do: live and do things. There are several groups of humans in NorthEastern Atiyeret, though they all hold commonalities between them. Many hold the same religion, many raise and ride bearzoi, and many have placed fish at the backbone of their economies. Those who come into contact with the northerners have brought tales both of lucrative trade and of bloody battle. They have a reputation for their brutal martial prowess as they ride fearsome beasts into combat. A reputation shared only by those who ride horses in the west. Most northerners organize into groups based on familial and traditional ties called tribes, where family name is important and in some cases decides what your role in society is. These groups can range from being the size of a small village, to encompassing several towns. Some tribes can get larger, and in the past that's allowed for families to take control and create dynasties.
The human kingdoms of Western Atiyeret consider themselves the pinnacle of modernity. They have railways, textile factories, and tall buildings. One kingdom in particular, the United Kingdom (named such because it was made from several kingdoms which were united under one banner), is a multicultural Cobb salad which in recent years has disrupted many job markets in the name of industrial progress. The trade capital of the country, made the political capital just ten years back, is the beating heart which sends goods by rail and canal to the rest of the empire, from which in return they are supplied with food and other necessities like producer goods and natural resources. The United Kingdom boasts the most skyscrapers in the world, and soon the first glass skyscraper if their king is to be believed.
The last stop on our tour is the savannas of the Atiyeret peninsula. Separated from Western Atiyeret by desert, and Eastern Atiyeret by mountain and steppe, the peninsula was the birthplace of humanity on Patek. In the northern portion of the peninsula, some of the oldest continually inhabited cities stand to this day. Sadhapor is one such city, once the capital of a spanning empire and a hundred things before that, it's not uncommon to see an archaeological dig when walking through the older parts of the city. Sadhapor itself is ruled by two regents who in turn swear fealty to the dual regents of Rajkhari, one of the current nations of prominence in the area. Located at the mouth of the Naronadhi river where it flows into the Khari gulf, it's a major center of trade as evidenced by its world renowned Great Bazaar, a flurry of sounds, smells, and sights of things brought from far and wide to the main street which stretches from Sadhapor's docks to the city center. Sadhapor itself warrants its own blog post.
This is just a small look at some of the more fleshed out human cultures in Prima Materia, there are many others I want to write and bring to a blog post, but this post is already long and is just meant to give you an idea of what humans are like.
Thank you for reading this far, and being patient for this one. Lots of real life stuff(tm) has been happening and it's been a whirlwind. I'm still going to try to write a blog post every week, this is simply what I want to do. Speaking of, next week will be a mechanics post; specifically on all the combat related things I've been cooking like armor, healing, and death.
Playtests are on my site here, and thank you @donutboxers for the artwork.
Sucking slightly less at writing Ranged Combat and knowing when to move on
So, my last attempt at writing ranged combat didn't go so well. I rewrote the system; gunpowder weapons do flat, consistent damage and have a chance to misfire. I got rid of rolling to hit entirely and added cover mechanics; being behind a stone half wall will reduce incoming damage by a significant amount. In addition, players could "Hit the Deck" as a reaction to being targeted with a ranged weapon, going prone and reducing damage by a little more than half.
I wasn't sure if these changes would work, and sure enough, they didn't.
It was better than the last attempt, and my playtesters pointed out that it was more fun, but it was also a slog. Hiding behind cover more often than not completely mitigated ranged damage, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but when everyone has ranged weapons and can't hit anything it becomes boring. In addition, the misfire mechanic wasn't fun to engage with at all eating an entire turn if your gun misfired. Being prone was rather powerful against ranged as well, but all it seemed to do is delay the inevitable when not behind cover.
The session turned into players and NPCs shooting from behind cover and never getting hit, and a Koura NPC tanking almost every hit with natural armor. I do have some ideas for playing with the type of damage guns do to allow them to get through armor somewhat, specifically doing Fatigue damage due to the impact even if no "normal" damage goes through the armor (similar to how war hammers work in melee) but I still need to redesign most of the system again.
Instead of doing that, I think it would be better to fully flesh out the other systems I've been teasing out, like armor, and test them with the melee combat system that already works and just needs tweaking of the dials to make the math math correctly. Once I have melee combat, armor, healing options, etc in a good place I can try tackling ranged combat and cover again with a more full ecosystem of the systems that it will be interacting with. This way I can do less guesswork in how strong I can make ranged combat and I have more options to counter it that don't involve making combat boring.
As always, thanks for reading. This is a bit of a shorter post, and I've been talking too much about the mechanics for my taste. Next week will be a Species Highlight - Humans.
Well it's about time I talked about the core idea of the setting. There are a few different kinds of magic that exist in Prima Materia, all of which stem from some mastery over the titular substance that makes up everything. I'm mostly going to be talking about Alchemy because it's the main form of magic that most players will be coming into contact with, but there are several disciplines that exist.
Gods like Patek do magic innately, they've mastered the art of pulling prima materia from the fabric of the universe and willing it into what they wish. Some people can also do magic innately, usually with the help of something else: Vessels have a quirk of their soul that attracts certain metaphysical beings able to live there, and often offer their services to the Vessel as 'rent'. Magi use alchemical roots (I'll explain those in a bit) to inject themselves with prima materia and sling crude elemental spells with their will. Some animals evolved patterns in their skin or incorporate alchemically conductive metals to do certain spells, like the Urd trees in the western forests of Falbhia that can grow up to 1000-1200 meters tall because their bark grows in such a pattern that channels magic to make them lighter than they would be otherwise.
But, the primary way people on Patek tap into magic is with alchemy.
Alchemy in the modern setting is a field of study and scientific undertaking, though cultures on Patek have been practicing alchemy in various forms since the dawn of civilization. All that's needed for a basic alchemical spell are its components; a sigil, a root, and a focus. A root is made from an alchemically conductive material, and etched into the root is a sigil. Some cultures also raise the sigil from the material, though since metallurgy has developed that's been more rare. The focus is also made of an alchemically conductive material, and is shaped in such a way that the raw energy from the sigil and root are funneled in a particular way to get the desired effect. A root and a focus are also not usually distinct parts in most places on Patek, as utilitarian spells are used constantly. Some examples of these spells are clay carvings that emit an odor to lure certain animals, and Koura nets laced with silver whose shapes cause them to emit warmth for particularly cold nights or latitudes. People on the Atiyeret peninsula have been making magic bowls for thousands of years, meant to capture a person's soul after they die and place them in a mausoleum with the rest of their family; something that warrants its own blog post later.
Outside of its nearly infinite utilitarian uses, there are of course military ones. The military use of alchemical spells goes almost as far back as the utilitarian uses, and is just as varied. The Entari create staffs from Urdwood and carve them with sigils, allowing their priests and knights to call down lightning or create strong winds as they will. The Narud in Makeret incorporate sigils into their bows to make them stronger, and most industrial nations have alchemical weaponry such as guns that create flying spikes of ice and cannons that create and spew greek fire. In the past, some alchemists have captured angry ghosts and bound them to machines for war, though this is largely frowned upon and the people who did it are known in history as the world's villains.
Military things are not the only effects under alchemy's purview of course. There are sigils made to accelerate tissue growth for healing, though not without side effects. There are also sigils used explicitly for the making of tinctures which have various effects, such as imbuing strength unto the imbiber. Industrial nations have factories that make near-instant acting healing tinctures like any other medicine out of aqua vitae, honey, activated charcoal, and the effect imbued by the proprietary sigilry they use. There are even some alchemical power plants that use sigilry and machinery to make electricity, though sigils that make electricity directly can be finicky so most of them create power by boiling water.
How do players interact with this though?
Well, there is the Alchemist profession which is the most obvious, but mechanically, alchemy hasn't been entirely written. There's a skeleton for it, involving grades of quality for material and certain shapes and sigils that a player can use to make various different spells. The goal is to put the player in a sandbox and let them build whatever they want within the limitations of what their character can do and the materials available.
There are four distinct kinds of alchemist, and alchemists aren't the only ones who can use alchemy. There are Dunamists, who are more akin to chemists and make things like alchemist's fire and dynamite. Homunculists create constructs that can do a wide variety of tasks, or memorize lists and instructions to repeat back to you. Eternalists are just Humonculists without borders; instead of making a body they dig one up, and some may become obsessed with the idea of immortality. Philosophists are the most in-line with what alchemists are in the real world, they make alchemical spells and tinctures, and try to complete the "final work," the pinnacle of alchemical prowess to philosophists, the creation of the philosopher's stone. State alchemists in Eastern Atiyeret know the recipe and use it to great effect, but that's a heavily guarded secret.
Players who want to be alchemists can go down one of those four paths, or mix and match different philosophies, perhaps in an attempt to create something like a Golem with sigilry on its arms to spray water on burning buildings, or acid on foes.
Anyway. I need to go back to reworking ranged combat. Thank you for reading all this, next week is up to chance. I want to write the species highlight for humans, but we shall see, it depends on if I can playtest ranged combat this week.
Shooting for gold and falling flat on your face or How I failed miserably at writing ranged combat.
Not every mechanic is a winner, and designing a ttrpg is hard. First drafts, playtesting, modification, second draft, playtesting, modification. So far all of the systems I've written, while they absolutely needed extensive work, had solid cores. Sometimes, though, like when I wrote Ranged Combat last week, the base it's built upon is faulty and the whole thing needs to be gutted and scrapped for anything salvageable.
After playtesting and modifying melee combat, its core seemed solid and I decided to move on to ranged combat. One of the core principles involves not missing, or missing being rare. This is why when someone comes at you with a melee weapon, you can dodge or block to mitigate some or all of the damage. Armor, while not yet written, will also play an important roll in damage mitigation.
Ranged combat as I wrote it does allow missing, but missing is rare (or so I thought) particularly at close ranges. It didn't make sense to me to be able to dodge projectiles or block them with a weapon, and I haven't written a cover system or put in shields which would be able to block projectiles, so the only real thing that mitigates getting hit by a ranged weapon is armor. This was a mistake.
Before we get into all of that though, let me get into the core of how I wrote the mechanic and how that was bad. I decided that because ranged damage was hard to mitigate, it should have a chance to miss, which means an attack roll to see if you hit. For some reason, I decided that the player should roll a d100 so the Hit Chance (the number you try to roll at or under when rolling the d100) would align with a percentage. In theory, this works, especially since I tied it to the Dexterity attribute on the character sheet. In practice, the very first playtest I ran with these mechanics saw characters with long guns and an 80% chance to hit miss most of the time, and a single Xente character (large amoeba thing - it will get its own species highlight later) nailed two player characters one after the other on one turn with a roughly 18% chance to hit with its revolver due to the distance. My players have dubbed this particular Xente Big Boss after the metal gear character, and it will be making a re-appearance.
The clear issue here, of course, is that rolling a d100 gives you as much a chance to roll a 1 as it does a 100, and even if you play with percentages like I did, weird stuff is going to happen at some point. Perhaps even often within the span of a session. There were other issues with this ranged system as well, one of my players said it felt like it came from a completely different game compared to how melee combat feels. Another player astutely pointed out that a class of weapons that can one-tap most characters with little effort and no real choice for the player to be able to get out of the way or otherwise mechanically try to save themselves, feels bad.
I got some good feedback, and I'm still trying to figure out how to move forward with the ranged mechanics. I have some ideas that will bring it more in-line with melee mechanics but I have to see how it hashes out, and then playtest that. All-in-all, this is a good experience. Not every mechanic is a winner, but failure is incredibly important.
If you read all this, thanks! I appreciate it very much. I'm trying to figure out what to do for the next blog post, it's a toss-up between another species highlight (humans - I promise it will be interesting) or how alchemy (magic) works in detail. This would be the history of alchemy as a field of study, animals that have evolved to use it, and what players will be able to do with it.
If there's one thing I know, it's that lobsters are cool. If there are two things I know, it's that they're immortal and one of these days a cult is going to help a lobster molt for over a hundred years until it takes up the space of an Olympic sized swimming pool and they worship it as a new god.
Anyways, here's a highlight from the depths of the oceans, the very playable Koura species.
The Koura, like the Ternaki, are functionally immortal. Adults usually grow to be around 7 feet tall and 20 feet long. During the course of their lives they never stop growing, but they do eventually get so big that they can't move anymore. This happens once a Koura starts getting to around 500 years old. Koura are amphibious and can breathe in both water and air, though many would rather stay in the oceans if only because it's easier to walk around.
This isn't to say that some Koura cultures don't incorporate land-based cities and such. Many sedentary Koura civilizations enjoy interacting with other species and their cultures on land.
Most Koura, however, are semi-nomadic; seasonally migrating between shallow, hot latitudes in the summer when they have children to deep waters of any latitude in the winter. The semi-nomadic Koura are organized in autocratic societies, with warrior-kings at the head of groups; generally relying on trusted friends or family to give them advice. They are concerned with survival and the continuation of their way of life, hunting large sea monsters and foraging for food. They preserve their stories through oral history and shell etchings, a Koura Lorekeeper has many generations of stories both memorized and etched into their shell.
One such legend is that of a Koura King who lead the charge on an existential threat to the world - when the hollow god deigned to fill itself with the flesh of every living thing and the substance of all that is, she stood in battle while alchemists used powerful alchemy to seal it at the bottom of the deepest trench in the whole of the world. This king survived and continued leading her people. Eventually, when she got too old to walk on her own, her people put her back near the trench and took care of her in her old age. Thus, the valley of the kings was born. Many Koura take pilgrimages to this place to offer food and supplies to the monks that are there, taking care of many kings who have grown too old to lead their people until they are ready to die. The king who fought the hollow god declines death, and has been in the valley for over two thousand years enjoying herself.
Tradition and Lorekeeping
Koura have a strong tradition of keeping stories alive. Every nomadic group has at least one Lorekeeper, and sedentary Koura cultures generally have orders dedicated to preserving history in one way or another, whether they be more academic in nature or closer to their Lorekeeper roots.
Lorekeepers hold a high place in Koura society, and often find themselves as confidants to community members seeking guidance for hard decisions thanks to their wealth of knowledge about the past and perceived wisdom.
Any Koura can become a Lorekeeper, but it is quite the undertaking and is steeped in religious tradition. A tribe's current Lorekeeper chooses one or more successors to train and mold into new Lorekeepers. They are taught the oral tradition of their tribe; religious and mythological legends, philosophy, and history. At some point, when the Lorekeeper thinks their apprentice is ready, they undergo a rite of transformation to become a Lorekeeper themselves. The rite of transformation involves the apprentice going into a cave to meditate in solitude for three months. Over this period, the apprentice challenges themselves mentally, and meditates on various stories and Lorekeeper traditions, forging their own views and philosophy with context from their oral tradition on what it means to be a Lorekeeper. Physically, the Koura's body undergoes changes as well, by the end of the three month period whether the apprentice was male or female the changes cause them to become a third sex able to take on the role of both. This form is religiously significant in many Koura cultures, and is an intentional part of the ritual.
After a Koura becomes a Lorekeeper, they choose their first story to be etched into their shell. New Lorekeepers continue to aid the elder Lorekeeper and learn from them, being an apprentice never truly stops as there are many stories to record and tell.
When a Lorekeeper molts, their shells are preserved and bound together as books, and new stories are etched into the new shell. Some of these books have been with Koura tribes for thousands of years.
Life among other species
A far cry from the waters of the ocean, some Koura do make their way onto land every now and then. Some are even permanent residents of land-based cities. Nomadic Koura tribes will often trade with land-based civilizations for nontarnishable metal goods. Sedentary Koura civilizations trade with their neighbors both on land and in the oceans, generally producing large quantities of food. In some places, Koura settle in the oceans directly next to land-based cultures and over time their cities and the cities on land become more intertwined, to the point of being a single city on some occasions.
The largest standalone Koura settlement, or group of settlements rather, that's on land is on the shores of Meridionalis. The Koura there have called the shores of Meridionalis home for thousands of years. Some Koura on Meridionalis tell stories of a time of co-existence with humans on the continent, but the human civilization there vanished long ago if it ever existed in the first place.
Koura that choose to live in land-based cultures will often find themselves doing jobs requiring strength. Labor jobs, hired muscle, and adventuring are all relatively easy jobs for Koura to get into. Some Koura are hired as farmers because their claws make for good plows, and they can move hay bales like they're nothing. This isn't to say that all Koura do physical labor jobs, of course, there are many accomplished alchemists, astronomers, chefs and all manner of other career-focused Koura in the world. One Koura, Robu, owns a wandering restaurant called "Nhànten Ebi" which is very popular along the West Coast of Atiyeret.
The Logistics of being a Sea Monster
Koura, as a playable species, are hard to figure out. They have hefty natural armor, hit like trucks, can't jump or climb, their language is unpronounceable to other species, and most characters will be around a ton or two. These things, realistically, should rip up or at least severely damage cobblestones when they walk on them. They can't even fit in most doorways. So how do I write them mechanically? How do I incorporate them into the land-based setting in a way that makes sense for players to interact with the world?
The narrative question is much easier than the mechanical one. Places that see a lot of Koura will have accommodations for them, and Koura wear rubber capped "shoes" in and near towns so they don't rip up the ground. Many Koura on land will have retainers that know their language and can translate for them. Other narrative questions about the Koura's unique physiology can be answered in similar ways.
Mechanically, it is hard to balance the Koura. Luckily, the species in Prima Materia are meant to be somewhat asymmetrical anyway, with skills and features being more closely balanced. However, I do need to make sure the Koura aren't too crazy while staying true to how I want to portray them as creatures. At the moment, they start with the best natural armor in the game, but not the best overall. It is above average. They can also use their claws as melee weapons, which only really make sense as the best blunt weapons in the game considering most other blunt weapons are much smaller and Force = Mass x Acceleration. There's quite a lot of mass in one of those claws (not to mention the sheer force of getting caught in one). The only other unique trait they currently have is "Exotic Body Plan," which lets them roll an extra die for checks involving Strength, and doesn't allow them to swim, jump, or climb.
As always, thank you for reading this far. This post took a while to write as I was forced to make the Koura interesting (actually worldbuild beyond "I like lobsters, I want lobsters in the setting"). If you want to make your own Koura and perhaps use it in play, here are the playtests for Prima Materia. Next week (or I suppose in half a week, because this post took so long) I will talk about Ranged Combat and some lessons in failing miserably.
And of course big thanks to @donutboxers for the art (it's taking commissions btw)
Melee Combat or the Art of hitting people with sticks
Melee combat has been written, and the first playtest was two days ago. But will it blend? was it actually fun? And what does the combat look like anyway?
These questions and more answered below the "Read More" link!
There are a few things I wanted to take into account for melee combat. The first, as always, is mechanics that are fun to engage with. The second is whether or not they're intuitive and easy to understand. The third is whether they're cool to my own subjective view of coolness. Now, "Fun" and "Cool" are subjective terms that are largely useless, and "Understandable" is a given, so I have other terms that explain what I mean that I can use as a proper design philosophy when making and talking about the system. Combat should be:
Dynamic. Meaning the player should have a lot of choices, and those choices need to matter. Initiative order and terrain should be interesting to engage with and traverse, and players and enemies should be able to do things that change a lot of the variables on the battlefield to their favor.
Deadly. This doesn't mean that the player should always die of course, but it means that players should be constantly kept on their toes and things should have tangible consequences. The player and their character should feel like they're 3 steps away from death at all times during most 'normal' combats.
Preparation. "Combat should be preparation" doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a sentence, but it does as a design pillar. This means that players should be encouraged by the mechanics of the game to prepare for encounters, at the least donning armor which could be the difference between life and death for some characters. Other preparation includes setting up ambushes, making bombs, or giving existing equipment an edge by poisoning, sharpening, or otherwise taking care of weapons and armor.
As always, the first step to creating a new system for me is to do research to see what interesting things already exist. If the wheel has already been invented, I don't need to reinvent what works. Of course, there is always fine-tuning involved and systems become mixtures of different things I like that get chiseled at until they're perfect, but for research purposes knowing what's out there and what can work really well for your system is rather important. I looked into how various other systems handle combat in general, and initiative and turn order (if they didn't forego it entirely) to try and set up a base that works. Something instrumental in the design philosophy of the system was a video titled Intuitive TTRPG Combat by The Broken Blade on Youtube, which in my opinion said a lot of things that make sense.
The second step was, of course, actually creating the system. The first thing I really had to sus out was how the action economy works. I had been throwing a few things around in my head, but I decided that a turn would be made up of an action, a quick action, a free action, and movement. These can be done in any order, and movement can be split. Additionally, you can trade an Action for a Quick Action. This gives the player quite a bit of choice in what they can do without allowing them to do everything they may want to, I think. Actions are reserved for attacks, Quick Actions let you change weapons or use an item, and Free Actions can be used for things like yelling a sentence or activating a lever.
Of course, waiting around for your turn to finally come isn't fun, so I needed a way for players to interact with things when it wasn't their turn. Because you don't roll to hit with melee attacks, I wanted the player to be able to have an active role in mitigating damage to themselves. So, when you get attacked, you can Block or Dodge. Block comes from a stat on the weapon (or shield) that tells you how many Strength (or Dexterity) die to roll to mitigate damage, and Dodge is the same but it's based on the Dodge skill. I do want to add a bit more nuance to this later (and will definitely be adding reactions later, as per playtest feedback), but for now it's serviceable.
After this I wanted to focus more on the dynamic side of things, allowing different weapon and damage types, and the start of a tag system for weapons that changed their behavior. I didn't (and still don't) need it to be super complicated, but rather I want simple rules that can be used in interesting ways that interact with other systems. One such tag that interacts with the system in a fun way is the Versatile tag. A weapon that's versatile gives a range, the low number is how many hands you need to wield the weapon and the high number is the maximum number you can wield it with. This increases damage and blocking effectiveness, and is very funny when you have a four-armed creature wielding a Warhammer.
All of this (and some more) came together as the first draft of the weapons mechanics, which I then sent to a friend to check out. The very first thing I got back was, "How does turn order and initiative work?" I was so engrossed in the mechanics that were more interesting to me that I had forgotten to write how to actually run combat. So, I went back to try and make that functional and interesting. The system I wrote requires everyone to roll initiative and add them to a total. The side with the highest total initiative goes first, and the individual who rolled the highest on a side is the first person to go on that side. At the end of a player's turn, they pick who on their side will go when it is their side's turn again. Initiative is rolled every round, which I was fairly wary about because in other games Initiative is usually a slog for me trying to figure out turn order and making players wait a few minutes while the mood dies; but it worked well in the playtest I ran and didn't slow down things much at all. I will continue testing, of course.
And you can test too if you want! I've put the combat playtest and four pre-generated characters on the website, which you can find here.
If you got all the way down here, thanks for reading! Next week I'll talk about some of the history and lore of the Koura (with more art on the way 👀)
I realized today that while I did announce that the Prima Materia website is finally up and running, and you can go there to download PDFs and playtest the game, it was at the end of a very long lore dump about the Ternaki and most people probably wouldn't have read all the way to the end of that. It deserves its own post methinks.
This is that post! Go check out the site if you want to, and if you decide to check out the PDFs that contain the organized game mechanics feel free to give me feedback about it!
The website is https://primamateria.glitch.me
If you want to go straight to the playtests, that's here
