I’ve got a system setup that can generate between 500-1000 character cards in a respectable amount of time, albeit still very rough and with a very limited artwork library to work with. Gender, age, race, and visual variety per profession (hopefully 8 total per profession eventually, 4 male, 4 female) are all things planned but not present in this draft.
A brief description of card layout
- Top Left Dots – this is your level. Present idea is a the GM will roll a d6 when you meet new characters and fill it in on the spot or just choose the character’s level based on what the GM thinks fits the current situation. Class is listed at left just below these dots.
- Top Right Icons – these are your skills. There are 13 skills currently divided roughly equal between adventuring life and domestic life. Multiply your level by your skills to get your current skill rank.
- ie, if you have two Bows (for Shoot skill) and your are level 3, you have a Shoot skill of 6.
- Center Banners – Name & Profession, selfe explanatory. But please note that characters that have the same last name belong to the same family. The current plan is to ship the character cards organized by FAMILY and AGE. It will be up to the players or GM to define the relationships within the family, I think.
- Center woodblock – Traits. Each character has two traits. There will be a book to let you know if these change gameplay for this character at all, although I’m considering just letting the GM and players sort this out as it seems a bit more fun that way to me. Need to playtest it.
- Bottom plaque – Scars. After much debate on adding special abilities or defining their profession or whatever, I’ve finally decided that scars just feel better to me as they tell a story. Also, it helps people to understand what kind of game they are playing. It’s a fun game, but it’s a game where you may get scars.
Exploration
There will be location and landmark cards. A location might be a bar, a temple, or a small section of a dungeon. A landmark would be the city or the dungeon itself. With these two card types you can explore the whole world.
There will be no world maps. You will just have trails of cards that lead from place to place, starting from where you are. For example, a city landmark card may have trails north, south, east, and west that lead to the next landmark and the trail is series of location cards. Once these have been explored or are known to the party, then when the game gets put up they get kept together.
Combat
I’ll make a post on this in the near future but for now, just know I’m leaning towards a Magic-like or Hearthstone-like combat resolution. In short, if you need to fight, you take 15 minutes and play a quick “game of combat” using rows of cards divided onto two sides of a battlefield. There will be sufficient tactics that players (called Stewards) should find combat challenging and ever-changing. All the normal roles such as melee, range, guard, artillery, magic, cavalry, etc, will have tactical representation, and I’d like to see some kind of location-based battlefield mechanic as well.
Currently I am thinking of having a one wound and you tap your character, a second wound, and they are “downed”, taken out of combat, and will have to draw a critical injury card (which can result in death). Players will have hands of cards they can use on their characters to change the tide of battle or save them from death. The GM is not currently planned to have a hand of cards to buff the enemy side unless that hand is simply the special abilities of the enemies. Stewards have special buffs for just their characters.
Printing Printing Printing
My brother-in-law Patrick helped me set up the color printer and we are good to go to start printing out the first batch of cards. Hopefully by this time next week we will have the following ready to go.
- 100-200 unique horse cards because I love horses. The first campaign setting will be inspired by Rohan from the Lord of the Rings. I’ve always wanted to play an RPG where horses/mounts matter.
- 400+ character cards to test out. They’ll have tons of errors but we’ll just play through it for now.
- 100-200 backpack cards – this is how you track inventory. These are only used for PCs or very detailed situations where knowing what is inside a backpack is useful. There’s so many mainly just for aesthetics and feel, like horses. You write your non-equipped inventory down on the back of the card. The only major gameplay mechanic is that you have to drop your pack to do combat or suffer penalties, and while dropped it is vulnerable to theft. if you have a mount, you don’t have to drop the pack as it is on your mount, but if you lose your mount or it dies, the same problem happens.
- 50 Location cards (no art)
- 10 Landmark cards (no art)
- Some vehicle cards like carts and wagons
- Recent History Deck – this is a deck that anyone can draw from if they want some inspiration on a character’s recent history. Hopefully very helpful for the GM while doing improv all night long.
- Nation Generator Deck
- Location Generator Deck
- 100 unique goblin cards for enemies
Everything is in Flux
So much has changed in the last few weeks and my guess is in a month the same may not even look that similar. But hopefully the playtests next week will be enlightening and will help me to get the game moving in a direction that is insanely fun and addictive!
