My friend Matt and I have hashed out some more items on the generator tool. He’s figuring out some technical stuff in his spare time for me, and after talking with my brother Adam, I decided that it was time to just jump in. Either I get the gen tool I want… or I guess I just don’t have a gen tool. I’ve spent a LOT of time trying to force the game into a non-customized gen tool, like Excel. I spent a morning building a simple front-end off a free template that is more or less how I see the gen tool. You have some drop downs and pick the big things, and have some presets you can save (in-browser only, no user accounts planned presently).
Then after that, you’d get an output of various table of your characters. To start with, they wouldn’t be editable, but the idea is someday you could click on one and it would load in an editor and you could tweak it. Then export to PDF for printing or JSON for import to a VTT (only Foundry supports it as far as we have discovered). In this way you could infinitely expand your fantasy world.
Card Design
The last 2-3 days I’ve been trying to get a nice card design together for the game, something that feels familiar and fairly traditional/generic fantasy but also is tailored to the needs of the game. You can see just how messy my work is if you zoom in close.
In the feature image you can see the evolution. If you want to join the Discord and provide feedback and help with discussions, here’s an invite: https://discord.gg/DBQXwgzN.
The important parts of the design
Things I wasn’t expecting but I think will be useful are:
- Having all the skills in a circle around the art: I was really worried this would be too much but I think in the end it’s what’s needed, as any other location and there’s no room for text.
- The Apples-to-Apples-inspired huge shortcut bar at left. I think of this sidebar as the “GM’s Section”. A GM could quickly sift through cards and be like “I need some Wilderness people, some Traders, and some Bandits” and just grab a few of each and BAM! Scene is ready. Also, need a crowd or an army? Just grab a stack of cards and spread them where the players can just see the names. It gets an idea of what you are looking at without overloading the senses with data.
- Using a RED marker to color in pips. I always was thinking black but red is a way easier to see.
- New Idea: Each character has a “Life” side of the card (front) with 7 everyday life skills and an “Adventure” side (back) with 7 combat/survival skills. This developed for two reasons:
- 1) I need the cards to have all main combat stats AND have the picture on the same side, where before I had all the skills on the back and the pic on the front and it makes combat hard to know who’s who.
- 2) 14 skills is a lot for a small trading card. It just makes your mind turn off if they are all on the same side.
- Dual Classes may be returning: in the past, I had a system of “Keys” and “Sides” like “Key Class” and “Side Class” but it just got to be too much when you are managing several characters. Having moved to a skills system that simplified things quite a bit, there was not much need for classes except just organizational reasons. However, now that the cards have one side Home Life and one side Adventure Life, it makes sense to have two classes – one for at home, and one while off on adventure. I see a lot of possibility in blending these classes in interesting ways. Someone could be a Caretaker: Guardian (stay at home dad) while not adventuring but out adventuring they are a Chaos Knight!
- Matt brought up a conundrum if we use the Life/Adventure sides. How do we keep mystery in the game by keeping NPC info from players? They can see the character’s skills right there on the card?
- Idea 1: Don’t print the character cards with their skill pips marked and instead mark them when you learn about that part of a character. ie, If you fight a character, you would know their Fight skill and maybe Shoot and Guard skills. This would be a good rule for people that REALLY LOVE TALKING TO NPCs OVER LONG PERIODS OF TIME. It’s a fairly real simulation of real life, too.
- Idea 2: Just don’t worry about it. The players can only see HALF a character at a time. Thus, if they are in battle, they get to know the adventure side. If they are not in battle, it’s probably the Life side. In either case, you’d only ever know 1/2 of a character without talking to them or getting to know them better. It’s the “lite” version of Idea 1 and honestly probably the one I’ll ship the game with. Idea 1 above will likely be an advanced rule.
- For this reason, I’m considering shipping the game with blank cards of all the characters as well. For hard-core GMs and players that want a 100% unique sandbox experience and don’t mind waiting, Idea 1 above is for you!
- For people that aren’t hard core, they could still use the blanks to expand their world. They will have a different color set from the core cards so will likely not be perfectly recognizable instantly.
Ok I’m out for the next week on a trip but I’ll be back in two weeks with another update on Super Maps & Legends!