No thank you.
Bought a new faucet filter, which is much larger but seems much sturdier and easier to use, even if it’s not from as well-known a brand. Also many bottled drinks, because the filtered water is mostly for the cats.
Read (manga): UQ Holder vol 2 (Ken Akamatsu): Yeah, it’s still just selected bits from Negima! with a more generic protagonist. I can’t find volume 3 to continue and probably won’t bother to.
Written (game design): 272:
The mix of diegetic advancement and XP is just reinventing training time
from AD&D. Can we use longer training time as a counterbalance to a more
powerful thing in a slot? Probably not, unless we have a cost to
spending downtime, and don’t just let it slide past. I don’t think we
do, because we’re not looking at anything as structured as Blades in the
Dark. (Should we be? Perhaps, but that’s not the mission statement and
I’m not giving up on it yet even though I obviously should because a
more focused game is easier to design initially, although maybe harder to
perfect.)
From the RRD Discord: “Setting is in the characters”. They were talking
about Heart, which is set in a horrible underground world that literally
responds to the PCs’ desires, so it’s more true there than for other
games, but I think it still applies broadly. In this case, it would be
the sample characters first, and then later the character creation
system. So what should those characters be? Or what bits should they
showcase?
– Renegade Fancy Temple Wizard
– Prophet – needs attributes for god (snails? birds? plants?)
– Renegade soldier
– Performer
– Assassin
– Con artist
– Cat burglar
– Hunter/Woodsrunner
– Mounted knight – not on a horse
– Detective
– Witch/hedge wizard
– Psychic
– Princess
– Big Bruiser
– Martial artist
– Alchemist
– Living Dungeon Explorer
– Artificer
That’s eighteen, with varying levels of magic, but are any of them
besides FTW and prophet actually interesting? Probably not, or at least
not interesting enough. If setting is in the characters, those
characters are in a formless void.
The prophet is probably the best one of those, although it raises
the question of how one becomes a prophet, and also what the best
god attributes are. (At a later point, we probably need multiple
tables to choose/roll on. One is definitely animals, but what are
the others? Philosophical principles like truth and lies and
stories? Natural phenomena like storms and earthquakes? Seasons?
Terrain types? Probably best to have a bunch of tables, and let the
player pick one entry from one table, then pick two tables to roll
on as a default.)
One thing I like that seems to crop in OSR games is weird languages for
non-(demi)humans, like the language of plants or the language of greater
undead or whatever. I’m not sure I’m actually creative enough to
implement something like that, but if I did, prophets would be the ones
with the weird languages. What’s the point of being the prophet of the
god of snails if you can’t wiggle your fingers in front of your eyes to
communicate with snails?
Setting elements we want to display in the sample characters, in no
particular order:
– living dungeons
– fancy temple magic/the Celestial Bureaucracy
– alternate ritual magic
– the edge of the world
– people turning into monsters/monsters that used to be people
– black powder ray guns
– mystic hermits developing powers of the mind
– wuxia/xianxia martial arts
– familiar spirits
– spirits of places/events
– people getting magic from exposure to supernatural
– things coming from meteors
– personal transformation
– weird folk
– visitors from the higher realms
– corrupt soul processors and unprocessed souls
Some character ideas from looking at both lists:
– Detective who finds evil-doers that might turn into monsters
– Escapee from some higher-realms activity
– Princess knight exiled after killing the queen when she became a monster
– Unprocessed soul inhabiting a different body
– Prophet of the god of snails, iron, and distillation
– Martial artist who has advanced into a scaly dragonish form
– Psychic hermit come down from their pillar with a third eye
– Living-dungeon explorer changed by what they found
– Fancy Temple Wizard sent to the boonies for being unsound
– Witch with a familiar spirit who gives questionable advice
That’s only ten, but much more interesting even though they still need a
lot of work. Besides “class” abilities, they need ancestries (probably not
all strange), interesting equipment, and I feel like at least most of
them should have a Serious Concern to take up a Psyche slot. The
princess is worried they were corrupted by the vampire queen, the
hermit is following the Currents of Fate that they see with their third
eye (see previous for the effects of looking beyond the world), etc.
What does the princess knight ride? Not a horse! Battleswine? Robot
chocobo? How did the prophet get selected by the god? Somebody should
come from the edge of the world. What did the explorer find in that
living dungeon? What body is the unprocessed soul inhabiting? Does the
escapee from the visitors have a tracking collar? What is witch ritual
magic like? Do we need somebody who throws spears of burning blood? Who
assigned the detective their task?
If we have pregen characters, we probably also need an adventure that
plays to all of their strengths, or rather a modular adventure that can
have opportunities for each one to shine toggled on or off depending on
which characters get played. Small town, optional wicked deeds by local
authorities, surprise living dungeon?