System overview: Characters

First, what kind of feeling are we trying to produce with our mechanics? I'm aiming for a high-magic feeling, swords and sorcery where it's possible to go from a relatively minor player to the host of an insect god-head in a session. I definitely want high lethality without imposing grimness. Blood and guts should feel brightly colored and splashy without losing their significance. At the same time, I want non-mundane power (mundane power being political, physical, power by numbers etc.) to be very dangerous. I want players to grab high-powered magical artifacts or fill their terrible little bodies with tremendous energies for short periods of time at great risk to themselves. I want the world to be weird, and I want physical & political power to be very reliable in this weird world, while the magical and extranormal elements are chaotic, powerful, and undergird the elements of reality. I'm not very concerned with a specific setting, as I assume anyone who uses anything I'm making will be homebrewing it to hell and back, but I am concerned with capturing this specific tone.

I'd also like this system to be light enough to introduce players to roleplaying games but modular enough to encourage tinkering with it if the players or the GM want something different out of its skeleton.

I'm using the standard D&D array of stats, minus constitution, so Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Players roll 2d6+3 for each stat. None of my initial playtesters were fans of this method, but 2d6+3 puts the probability of players rolling a 9,10, or 11 at about 44%, and the odds of them rolling lower or higher than that at about 56%, which averages 2 median stats and then 3 exceptional/terrible stats, which allows players to focus on their deficiency/strength when they're placed in roleplaying situations. One character made by a playtester was Roland, a fighter with a 5 in dexterity but an 11 in strength, which led the player to role-play Roland as a wrecking ball fighter, crashing into combat and social situations equally until his ignoble death at the spines of a dissolver-beast.

Not Roland.

I tossed constitution because I could just fold its entire purview into Strength. I thought about adding another Stat like Arcane, or a Social stat like in Traveller to measure your place in society just so we could go back to 6 stats. But, I decided that I wanted the magical class you choose to be the primary determinant in how your magic works, and I realized that splitting Charisma's job into two stats would just mean that I made two stats so niche they're not worth investing in. So I was left with:

Strength, for activities that require brute physical force.
Dexterity, for activities that require finesse.
Intelligence, for activities that require quick thinking.
Wisdom, for activities that require careful thinking.
Charisma, for activities that require interpersonal appeal.

Perception checks are the realm of both Intelligence and Wisdom, depending on the speed of the check. If you're scanning every inch an object or investigating a scene without a time limit, then wisdom allows you to glean a depth of knowledge about it. If you're the middle of a dungeon and need to know if the shape barreling towards you is the ranger's dog or a feral ghoul, roll intelligence.

And then I began building my character sheet.

As I playtest the system more and adjust how the numbers on the sheet interact with each other, I'll begin laying it out for understandability instead of grouping types of characteristics together.

This is the third iteration of the sheet. If you aren't a magic user, then everything you need to play should be on this sheet. Starting from the top left hand box and moving downward are your stats, then your defenses, which are derived from your stats, third are your skills, which you gain from your class, background, and origin, fourth are your inventory slots, calculated from your strength score, and finally your currency.

I'm using a d20 roll-under system. You roll a d20 and try to get a number lower than the most relevant statistic. If a player wants to leap across a gorge, they would have to roll under their Strength. Particularly large gorges would pose a penalty, while any particularly small gorge would not call for a roll at all. I assume a certain level of competency of all characters so that as long as the fiction doesn't give me a reason to doubt their ability, no rolls are made unless there is stake in failure as well as victory.

Penalties and bonuses are never applied to the roll itself, but always to the statistic that's being rolled against.

 A character's Defense is the penalty the apply to their opponent's attack roll. A Strength 15 character attacking a manticore with a Defense of 3 would have to roll a 12 or below in order to hit. Defense is your Dex mod, but some classes, like the fighter, allow you to add your level to your Defense, making you even harder to hit.

Save is 10 + level. This is used to save against any kind of magic you can't jump out of the way of, or if you would be required to roll against something that none of your stats would cover. Some classes, like the cleric, allow you to add your wisdom to Save rolls.

Speed is both the number of feet you can move per round and your initiative. Your speed is your dex mod plus your racial speed. Humans have a base speed of 10, so a human with a +3 in Dex would be able to move 13 feet per round. Some classes, like rogues, allow you to add your level to your speed, letting you dip in and out of situations much faster.

When you choose your race and your class you roll on a list of backgrounds to get a skill at 1. Skills are broad, and encompass years of a character's life. Farmer, soldier, herder, mountain-man, servant, deserter, etc. are all examples of a skill. Skills allow you to their rank to a roll that they could assist you in. Every time you fail a roll that includes a skill bonus you may mark it. After two marks for each rank your skill has, you may erase them and raise the rank of the skill by 1. Skills also provide you with items that it would make reasonable sense for a person of your profession or background to own. If a GM does not believe that a skill would make sense in a given situation, then they must ask the player to provide justification in the form of a story from that character's life.

You have a number of inventory slots equal to your strength. Most items take up an inventory slot. Two-handed weapons and particularly large items take up 2 inventory slots. Armor you are wearing takes up an inventory slot, except for plate armor which takes up 2. Armor you are carrying takes up 2 inventory slots if leather, 3 if chain, 4 if plate.

The top right box holds a character's vital statistics. Health, hit dice, armor, and wounds are in this box.

Hit Dice (HD) are given to your character each time they gain a level in a class. The system heavily encourages multi-classing, so it is likely that a character can have multiple types of Hit Dice. If the size of a Hit Die becomes relevant, use the hit die that you have the most of. If there's a tie, use the smaller Hit Die.

At 1st level a character's health is equal to highest number on their HD plus their Strength modifier. Health measures glancing blows, minor injuries, and exhaustion. Eating a decent meal, sleeping in a comfortable bed, or spending time with a loved one or someone trained in the art of stunning conversation will let you regain health. This cannot bring your health up from below 0.

Wearing armor other than leather lowers your Defense by its armor rating. It also reduces damage taken by its armor rating. Narratively, this is cushioning, deflecting, and dispersing energy from blows. It is more difficult to avoid strikes, but easier to survive them. Leather provides 1 armor, chain provides 3 armor, and plate provides 5 armor.

If your health reaches 0, then you roll on the wounds table. Wounds range from concussed: may only take 1 action per turn, to mangled: take a -3 to all rolls requiring the use of 2 arms, and all the way up to Dead: A lucky strike kills you on impact. You may act normally at 0 health, and continue to take damage into the negatives, but each time you take damage you must roll on the wounds table with a penalty equal to your life total. You take 1 point of damage at the end of your turn, every turn for each unstabilized wound. Any character can attempt to stabilize all of a character's wounds by making a wisdom roll. Stabilized wounds do not go away, and can only be removed by visiting a medical expert with appropriate tools, such as: swamp witches, city surgeons, clerical healers, biomancers, etc. Once under a medical expert's care, a character gains 1 health a day until they are at 0. They then lose 1 wound every 1d6 weeks. Some wounds, like enucleated: One of your eyes is non-functional, you have disadvantage on all rolls to locate anything by sight, cannot be cured, and those wounds will say so on the wound chart.

The abilities box is due for another re-design, but I left it alone for now because I like the open space. It lets players put in class abilities, racial abilities, magic items, etc. all in the same area.

I really have to stress how unoriginal this framework is, not to self depreciate, but because this is a synthesis of a lot of what I've been reading for the last few months. This is still version 0 of the system, and although I've run a few sessions in it with some pretty decent results, it's probably never going to be finished.

Next up: Probably combat and dungeon-specific rules.

Cults! Overview Pt. 3

So the standard beginning of a game of Cults! goes like this:

1. Choose a cult leader.
2. Choose 2 of their 5 tenets.
3. Grab tokens to fill your resource pools and your heat.
4. Begin capturing locations or playing actions to increase your resource pools.

The main loop of the game is in capturing locations to improve your ability to shuffle resources around until you can meet the conditions of your objective. You are also trying to prevent your opponents from becoming more resource-mobile in order to prevent them from being able to meet the conditions of their objectives. Each resource limits the others in some way though, so it also becomes a balancing act between the 3 resources as the game forces you to make up for any excess by punishing unbalanced resources.

I heard pictures were good for blogs, so here's a cult leader card mock-up from before Heat was a mechanic. 

Your primary mode of exerting influence in the game is through your cultists, which are both locked down by your supplies and your fervor. Focusing on raising fervor leaves you with a deficit in supplies, which limits the actions you can take (many actions require an investment in supplies). This slows down the beginning of the game, which should help differentiate your cult leader's play style from the others. If you're playing Symbion, then for most of the early game you'll be choosing locations and playing actions that help increase your cultist pool or reduce your heat. If you're playing Berthold, you'll be prioritizing fervor over your other two resources, and will most likely be more willing to eat the Heat cost that most action that increase fervor demand.

Even though, as the game progresses, your starting values won't be as important as the decisions you've made in the game, your initial range of locations and actions will be very tightly constricted by your starting resources. Amy & Roald and Berthold both have a high number of starting cultists, but each face a different problem with keeping it high. Berthold loses cultists from his first turn onward because of his low fervor, but Amy & Roald keep their cultists at the cost of gaining 2 heat per turn (1 at the beginning for not feeding their cultists and the heat everyone gains at the end of their turn). I hope that these early game differences will make sure the late game is always diverse, as players look for ways to overcome their leader's defects in their first few turns.

That's the rough sketch of Cults! There's not a lot of content, just a set of bones and a couple dozen cards, but I think that the resource exchange loop and the actions cards provide a stability that gets interrupted fairly often by the event deck, which should lead to dynamic, unpredictable games that don't feel completely chaotic. 

Cults! Overview Pt. 2

A single turn of gameplay is broken up into 4 phases. I already gave brief outlines of those phases in my first post, and I'll go through the phases in more detail at the end of this post. First, I will explain the different types of cards in this game and the values on them.

1) Cult Leaders. Your Cult Leader card has the following fields: A unique name, a value for each of your three resources, and a starting heat value. Your cult leader does not have any special abilities themselves, but each cult leader has a small deck of 5 tenets that you can choose two from each game. The ability to mix and match tenets means that there are 10 different combinations for each Cult Leader.

2)  Actions. The most common card you will see and use are action cards. Each Cult Leader has a deck of action cards made up of cards common between all cult leaders: Credit Card scam, Knee-Breaker and cards specific to your cult leader Burn your gods (James America), A Happy Family (Amy & Roald). Each Action has a name, a cost, and an effect. In order to play actions, you must assign cultists equal to their cost, and potentially pay any other price listed in their effect. As an example, Burn your gods costs 2 cultists to play, and says Destroy up to 4 supplies, gain 1 fervor for each supply destroyed this way. If you have a Significant Cultist with the Pyromaniac trait, gain an extra fervor. You may only play action cards during your Act phase or in response to an event card.

I don't have any in-game images, so here's a cult leader to break up all these word word words. Listen to the Heaven's Gate podcast to learn more about him.

4) Locations. The game board is a circle divided into 3 zones. From outermost to innermost they are: Rural, Suburban, and Urban. Each zones has its own deck of locations. When the game begins, players lay locations down at random from each deck to its associated zone until all slots are filled. Some location cards are modifiers to locations, such as Decrepit, which is in both the rural and urban decks and says play another location on top of this one. That location costs -2 cultists to control but does not provide its effect. Modifier locations cannot be placed on top of other modifier locations. Other locations stand alone like Pharmacy (Suburban), which says Once per turn, you may gain 2 supplies and 1 heat. When you capture Pharmacy, search the Significant Cultist deck for an S.I. with the Poisoner trait and put them on top of the deck. All location cards that are not modifiers require a certain number of cultists assigned to them to capture. Once captured, the location is yours until you meet its loss condition even if the number of cultists assigned to it drops below its cost (to a minimum of 1, all locations have the loss condition "have no cultists on this location"). The loss condition for pharmacy reads, if  you trigger a police raid, lose all cultists assigned to this location and lose this location.

As a design note, rural locations generally do not increase your pool of cultists (or they do so at a cost or very slowly) but allow you to draw from the Significant Cultist deck more often than not. Suburban locations are the most punishing of high heat, but they also allow for the quickest accumulation of supplies. Urban locations allow the fastest accumulation of cultists, but are a severe drain on both fervor and supplies.

5) Significant Cultists. Certain cards and abilities will cause you to draw cards from the Significant Cultists deck. When you draw a Significant Cultist, place it in front of you in view of the other players. Each S.I. has at least 1 trait, and may have abilities as well. For instance, Thomas Peargreen has the trait Spiritual. Many locations, such as churches, provide bonuses to players who own a spiritual cultist. Thomas Peargreen also has the ability When you draw from the S.I deck, look at the top 2 cards and keep 1. 

And another one. You should watch Wild, Wild, Country to learn about him.

6) Events. After your return phase you must draw a card from the event deck. All event cards have a rural, suburban, and urban event on them. You can only choose an event from a zone that you control a location in. An example of an event card would read:

Rural: Forged Land Deed - "You manage to live off of someone else's land for a while before they run you off." You may use the abilities of one location you do not control this turn. If you do, gain 1 heat at the end of your turn.

Suburban: Book Club - "After a few meetings, you started introducing more esoteric books." You may add 1 cultist to your cultist pool for every suburban location you own.

Urban: Ad campaign -  "You gain a gaggle of lukewarm followers." Add 5 cultists to your pool, but lose 2 fervor.

7) Objectives. I don't think I've mentioned this card type yet. At the beginning of the game, you chose an objective from a selection open to every player. You choose in reverse play order. Objectives have unique names, and 3 conditions. Each condition must be met in order. Every time you complete a condition, you gain the marked amount of heat for that condition. Once you've completed all conditions on your objective, you win the game. Once you've completed a condition, you may complete the next condition, but all conditions must be true before you can win the game. An example of an objective is:

The Ascension Project

1. Gain a Significant Cultist with the poisoner trait. (5 Heat)
2. Pay 10 supplies. (6 Heat)
3. Have over 15 cultists in your cultist pool. (7 Heat)

If a player was trying to win via the ascension project, they would have to gain a Significant Cultist with poisoner first, then they would be allowed to complete the second condition when they had at least 10 supplies. But, if they somehow made it to 15 cultists, but lost their S.I. with poisoner, they would need to obtain another one in order to win the game. Conditions are completed automatically.

The final mechanic in this post is the Police Raid. When you reach or exceed 12 Heat, roll a d6, and roll a d6 every time you gain Heat after that. On a 1, 2, or 3, you've been raided. Your heat goes down to 1, you lose half of all resources, and you must immediately end your turn. 

 

 

Cults! Overview

Cults! is a strategy/resource management game themed around feuding cult leaders vying for their own specific goals. Each cult leader has specific abilities that alter the way you play the game. Cult leaders, and by extension, their cults, have 3 resources: Cultists, Fervor, and Supplies. Each resource is represented by a small pool of tokens that can be gained, lost and played for specific effects.

Cultists are a measure of manpower. Cultists are used to capture locations, and all actions require you to assign at least 1 Cultist to the action to play it. An assigned cultist cannot be assigned to another action or location unless they are recalled. 

Fervor is a measure of devotion. Fervor is spent and gained by a variety of actions and abilities, is used to capture locations, and causes you to lose 1 cultist for every cultist you have over your Fervor each turn.

Supplies: Are consumed and raised by a variety of actions and abilities, and used when relocating your cult's HQ. At the beginning of each turn, for every 5 cultists you have you must spend 1 Supply to feed them or gain 1 Heat as your negligence attracts attention.  

In addition to those 3 resources, players must also keep track of their Heat. Heat measures how much attention a player's cult has managed to attract from police. Heat applies penalties to certain actions, and if it gets too high can result in a Police Raid and the loss of a significant amount of Fervor, Cultists, and Supplies.

Each cult leader starts with a specific number of the three resources and heat, which I'll determine once the entire skeleton of the game has been established.

Leader	Cultists	Fervor	Resources	Heat
Amy & Roald	High	High	Low	Low
Symbion Decinque	Low	High	Medium	High
Berthold Masani	High	Low	Medium	Low
James America	Medium	Medium	High	Medium

When players choose their cult leaders at the beginning of the game, they also choose 2 Tenets. Tenets have benefits and drawbacks, and are chosen from a deck of Tenets specific to each cult leader. Some Tenet examples are:

Ascetics (James America) Your cultists take up a vow of fasting, so that hunger would bring them closer to the natural world. Your cultists only consume 1 supply for every 10 cultists you have. You lose 1 supply every turn as long as you have more Supplies than Fervor.  

Shepherds (Amy & Roald) Your doors are always open, your beds always full. Anytime you gain any number of cultist you gain an extra cultist. (If you would gain 1 cultist you gain 2. If you would gain 4 cultists you gain 5).

The Elite (Symbion Decinque) Power is the language of change, and you speak very loudly. Once per turn you may have 1 cultist count as 2 cultists for the purpose of playing an action. When you gain any amount of heat you gain an extra heat.

Once each player has chosen their cult leader and assembled their 3 pools of resources, the game can begin. A turn is, at this point in development, this:

1) Return: Any actions played last turn that are not ongoing are placed in their owners discard pile, and any cultists assigned to those actions are recalled to their pools. Any ongoing costs, such as feeding your cultists, are also paid at this time. Ongoing benefits, such as from a significant cultist, location, item, etc. can also be collected on during this, or any, phase other than the End phase.

 2) Event: Draw a card from the event deck and follow its instructions. You may play actions before or after the effect of the event card goes into play.

3) Act: Actions may be played, locations may be captured, and abilities of cards on the field may be activated. This will most likely be the longest segment of your turn. You may play as many actions as you have cultists to spare, and you may capture any locations whose requirements you meet. You may also complete any step of an objective.

4)  End. Gain 1 heat. It is now the next player's turn.

I'll post the second half of my current work soon, with definitions for actions, locations, zones, capturing, and everything else I bulldozed through to try and get the bare essentials laid out.

A really rough mock-up of the board. From outside in it's: Rural, Suburban, and Urban. Each zone has four slots for location cards from its respective location deck, chosen at random.