i love that my players collaborate with me on stuff, i got a message during my lunch break that was just this screencap
it’s beautiful
I will definitely buy this even if I never play it. But I’ll probably play it
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uhh apparently when i first wrote this post i typed “an hour” which uh ha i wish
this is starting to look as convoluted as in depth as Ars Magica’s spell system
Tell me, have you figured out the step by step process for creating an artificial island empire stocked with magic sources in your system? (one of my favorite supplements for ars magica was just a lengthy explanation of how to use the magic system to do just this using rules as written.)
i have not written it out but all of the mechanics exist to do it? you could sculpt a bunch of Simulucra in the Lost North where they wouldn’t melt, and use a series of Suggestion spells to give them Blade Runner style false memories that push them towards that purpose, or you could construct a bunch of golems led by Imbued Sentiences (though i should probably go back and write about Golems in the spellbook in more detail at some point)
an assembly line with a bunch of Create Object enchantments could probably churn out the material for an artificial island, provided you didn’t care about actually having fertile soil or anything, but maybe i should write an Earth spell to let you create patches of land where there weren’t any before, that would be pretty neat
the “magic sources” thing would be the hardest part because i explicitly wrote those to be, well, non-replicable by magic. you can’t churn out gems or precious metals or anything like that (the reason metal currencies are used is because no one can fake them) and those are the strongest magic-conduits
well i wrote a little bit about this before but my goal with my system was always “easy to pick up and play, but with a lot of depth that gets introduced naturally in longer campaigns.” enchanting is part of Aether magic though, which i explicitly wrote as an option for players who enjoy rules-heavy crunch and fucking with rules systems and being a crazy asocial wizard who has to constantly recheck their calculations. it was always a thing i wanted in flavor that every magic school played by the same basic rules, but were different enough that mages from different schools would understand their own school but to each other everything they’d do would look like, well, magic. anyway it’s turning out pretty well so far, @contentdeleted plays the party’s Aether mage in the current campaign and he’s the one whose notebook is full of disorganized looseleaf index cards with notes on his spells and enchantments and progress on engineering projects and when he starts to panic his notes go fucking everywhere and it’s beautiful, it’s the best thing, it is exactly what an Aether mage is supposed to be
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I didn’t mean convoluted as a negative btw (since Ars Magica rules)
The Ars Magica make-your-own-island sourcebook mostly involved importing/stealing a bunch of mythical creatures that produce magic and negotiating some favorable contracts with Faerie.
examples of these projects that come to mind at the moment (there are many):
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one of the first dungeons the party went through was a wizard tower, which included a locked chest under the wizard’s bed labeled “failed projects.” this included stuff like a “flaming sword” which set itself on fire, a “ring of invisibility” which made your finger invisible, etc. yorrik (contentdeleted’s character) found a “staff of force” that knocked the user back instead of whatever the staff was pointing at. he spent a week trying to repurpose it into a witch broom. he couldn’t change the nature of the enchantment though so it ended up more like the world’s weirdest rocketjump. the most he could do was roll Engineering to try to find a decent parabolic arc to fling himself in. he did this frequently.
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he enchanted his hat with Create Object so that he could pull things out of it like a real magician. it was a low enough level that he could pull almost nothing useful out and he did it mostly as a joke but i’m pretty sure it saved at least one person’s life at some point
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he designed a powerglove with a gem inset into each finger, each with its own level 1 enchantment. these were almost entirely spells he made other members of the party cast so he could enchant them, which usually meant they got really shitty favors out of him first. his pointer finger was telekinetic, his middle finger was enchanted with Glow so that he could radiantly flip people off, his pinky healed people very slightly, it was beautiful
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at one point his eye got stabbed out by a giant suit of armor so he made an eyepatch with a Sigil of Seeing on it. it takes up his only sigil slot but he can choose to hand off his eyepatch and give up depth perception in order to cast spells in places he’s nowhere close to
this isn’t even getting into all the Imbued Sentiences he’s made (a butterfly that holds the light mage’s spells for her, sentient flying boots, a small man made out of paper whose only job is to stand guard in his room next to a gem enchanted with Alarm) but there are so many of them that instead of putting actual effort into this post i’ll just drop in the screencap of his latest project that he sent me a few days ago
i am not going to give any context for this i’m pretty sure it’s already perfect as-is
continuing to develop/polish the trained stats system
this one’s gotten close to the visual quality i’m hoping for from the final book (though eventually we’ll need to have our own art obviously, and i should probably decide on a sans-serif font that’s not arial). just staring at this thing makes me feel really cool, like i’m a Real Game Designer
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before you get your own art you should sell PDFs of this with the placeholder art on the dl
specifically to me
i mean i do get attached to my placeholder art pretty easily (god i wanna be that girl so bad) and the temptation to just throw in touhous and jp art everywhere is strong but i can at least promise that the final art will have somewhat consistent style, leverage the setting and be as #haleypunk as possible
editing and formatting and illustrating 200+ pages is kind of a lofty goal for 3 months but the trendline for progress has been really promising and i want to believe
finally found the right format for using our B4 paper effectively. this template is getting sexy, i’m starting to disbelieve that it’s still just an ordinary google doc
(kinda blurry/zoomed out screencap because i can’t fit the whole thing on my monitor at 100% size and am lazy)
I had no idea the styling options in Google Docs were so robust.
it’s basically a hack involving full width/height tables, merging and unmerging cells and changing their background colors
but it’s robust enough for nearly any page format i want
i will not apologize
So first session was last Thursday. And it was a lot of silly fun. I even doodled a report as we went along. Here’s the first page.
I’ve been used to a more “narrative” way so going back to even rolling stats (with a D20 no less) lead to a lot of strange characters with very lopsided stats. And it added to the charm. With the exception of the monk, the rest of the party had pretty abysmal stats. We are a scraping the bottom of the barrel party, but we manage. My cleric turned to be something completely different to what I had in mind.
And it was the usual, rescue someone in a dungeon, kill goblins, ask ducks to quack twice if there is danger around… Playing with people who never played before was really refreshing and they got the hang of it really fast.
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Oh shit is that a motherfucking JoJo’s reference?
It’s good to hear more people having fun with the good ol tables and dice. New players tend to be great or real awkward, I’m glad yours were the former. Also yes rolling for stats is the objective best way to play and noone will convince me otherwise
omgomgomg really
what’s his prescription i have to know
his vision is perfect but the glasses are enchanted with Careful Eye which makes you better at noticing small details (they are his reading glasses for peer reviewing mage college papers)
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“wait, so, haley, top or bottom?”
“um…?”
“the enemy, do you think i should aim for the top or bottom part of their body this round?”
“…oh”
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