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One Mechanic Left
🕑 Added 2023-10-01 22:44:52 +0000 UTCThis month is busted out some of the biggest mechanical monsters in the entire game. I worked out titles and expressions (the basis for the entire magic system), Stress (the health system), Touchstones (contacts, lived experiences, and cultural connections), and adventure journals (experience system and what you can spend it on). I still have one left to do and it's PHASES, basically the macro building blocks and kits a gm builds a story out of. It might take a bit to make that feel good and have enough crinkle, but it will be worth it.
But let me go into a rough overview of some of these mechanics I have been perfecting on my own.
Expressions and titles:
The big conceit of magic in this world is one basic assumption, magic has a symbiotic relationship with stories and intangible culture, which can make magic feel like an expression of that culture. Whether the magic, monsters, and mystical artifacts you will encounter exist because we tell stories about it, we tell stories about it because magic exist, or some thing in between is ultimately immaterial, unknowable and does not change the concrete facts that it will act real enough. It's part of that reality. What defines it is it's nature, sometimes complex, multifaceted, or even changing.
So as you go on adventures, experience the people and world around you, live, you will touch the lives of others and they will tell stories about you too. Your connections to magic strengthen as those bonds grow deeper. It's a living thing in the same way those stories are.
Every now and then, based on your adventures you gain something called a title. A Title represents a deed, an accomplishment, reputation, or adventure of the character. It's the legacy of their actions.
These become tags that, instead of giving you dice, when evoked they will give you an extra verve (your do cool shit meter) to do things. What's more they represent something else, these are the anchors for your Expressions. Magical abilities and spells anchored in that connections you made.
You craft expressions out of tags and tools. They're special tags that require you to pay verve to use and have a set defined thing they do unlike most other tags which are narrative flexible. A person who has the tag "World's best sailor" might use it to read navigation maps, steer a ship, or tie knots. But "Summon the phoenix flames" will always shoot an arrow of flame in the shape of a bird.
you make them by tying them to a title, naming the ability in a tag, pick a level for what they do using a table, a narrative and mechanical effect, and create a condition. Conditions are a good way of anchoring yourself to the experiences that forged that link. They should be thematically and culturally appropriate, represent an effort, and feel important to you. You can cast without meeting them, but life will be a lot harder and they might fray the connection. Something you'll need to work to repair if you want access to it.
Stress:
Stress is a measurement of how much pain, consequences, and tension your character can take outside of their norm and it's split into two tracks Physical and Mental. Stress is set up in units of 4 hits like this.
(oooo)
every time one of these bad boys get filled you get an injury tag and they work a lot like they do in Exceptionals. They mean 1 less dice on a roll The biggest wrinkles are Mundane Injuries vs. Magic Injuries.
Mundane injuries are injuries from non-magical source. Everything from gunshots, to migraines, to motion sickness. Most injuries will be mundane. They require proper and appropriate treatments to be addressed. Magical healing can't heal mundane injuries.
Magical injuries are injuries from magical sources, but can be rather mundane. You can be cut by a magic sword or bit by a mysterious cryptid. And these sort of things can be treated by magical and mundane means. However they can be strange and esoteric in ways that might require magical solutions too.
I have more mechanics to talk about, but I'll save it for another month. I've been figuring out how to summarize about 8 pages of notes for 4 hours now. But feel free to ask questions.
