itsaliving-rpg

[itsaliving-rpg]

Changes to Established Cultures in the It’s A Living Universe

Culture is going to frankly be a huge change from what I wrote before about the Fennari & Orcinians. I will retain much of what I like, but things have changed drastically since the wider-world that those cultures were written in, and many parts don’t make sense in this context. So, retaining good ideas, but taking them back to the drawing board, so to speak. Since I shifted things away from “The Civs that colonized the planet still have a shaky connection to their homeworlds through the dungeons, it’s just extremely haphazard & dangerous” to “totally split off ever since The Collapse*” that changes a vast amount on the culture front.

What I had before for the Orcinians & Fennari are good for starting points, which may or may not be what their homeworld-culture was like (haven’t decided), but they’ve had 2-4 millennia of isolation & intermingling since then; Those cultures will be unrecognisable now, if they still exist in any meaningful continuation of the originals at all.

What exists now will almost entirely be the result of the collapse and the millennia that followed, living on a new planet and having to survive, together or apart. Species will not have monocultures; the idea of large Species-Civs with smaller migrant populations of other species was primarily rooted in them having a current link to their homeworlds. It makes no sense for the millenia since to have had everyone living in isolation, migrations, wars, settlements, colonizations, invasions.. All these things will have occurred since then, and made huge changes. Most Civilisations will be based on location & post-Collapse history rather than species or pre-Collapse culture, though the ideas & drives of the civilisations of their ancestors may still push certain factions of species apart; More likely, their idealized visions of what these civilisations were like.

Anyway, a lot of this history will never make it into the books (I’m taking a different approach to lore than huge infodumps of Certain Truth about the past; Real history doesn’t work that way =_=), but I need to know the rough outlines of what’s gone before, at least.

* The Collapse: When the corridor-dimension network infrastructure that linked the known worlds was damaged,. This resulted in all previously established corridors disappearing, however the corridor generating infrastructure continues to (mal)function; constantly spitting out bizarre tunnel networks with environments & creatures merged from distant & contradictory places. These are the dungeons of the setting.

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a) This project now has a Mastodon.art account.

b) The “Ohgod my old concept art is so terrible I need to take it down Right Now” urge is strong today. =_=

c) I only realised the unintentional Flintstones reference in the title of this RPG yesterday. I have been working on it for 8 months.

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Gah I can’t find it now but I saw a Tumblr thing about giving yr critters sharp teeth for no reason other than Sharp Pointy Teeth And I was still kiiiinda tempted to do that with the Fennari even when they literally don’t have jaws anymore. I won’t but. Sharp teeth anteater penguins. owwwo I mean, dagger-spine-probiscis is a prettygood runner up as these things go, if yr gonna go for anything else, go that

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Naked/Plucked Fennari (Planning to doodle digitally over to get feathering right) & more Misc. Fennari Anatomy stuff.

Do Fennari feel self-concious posing naked? Haven’t worked out that particular bit of Vital Lore yet, so stay tuned.

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The Evolution of the Fennari (or: Killer Anteater-Penguins in High Heels)

I haven’t uploaded any sketches to this blog in.. Ever, I think. Mostly through shyness at my sketch work not looking “good enough” to go on the internet. Well today that changes! Here’s two of the first rough idea-sketches I did for the Fennari a month or two ago, and some more recent pages.

So, without further-ado: the Design Evolution of the Fennari in 4 Easy Steps

Skinny Longdog Coyote-People

Stupid Sexy Stretched-Furries with A Lotta Tongue

Too-skinny penguin anteater elephant liquivores

BUFF penguin anteater elephant liquivores

Technically pic 5 was third-from-last, but I think most of it was more on the ball than the previous ones and goes into a lot more detail about some interesting parts of their anatomy, so it goes last. They can be bipedal or quadrapedal, but pic 3 is very unrepresentative of how they’ll look standing- necks don’t bend like that, too skinny, hips-are-where, etc. Hence pic 4′s existence to iron out the skeleton a bit.

I’m not 100% finished with their design- Feather colours/patterning/thickness is still a to-do, and the hips need tweaking after looking up more references to get them consistent & believable moving around on two feet. I was too exhausted to do this by that point; today has been a hypomanic creative day, so I am shattered now I’m coming down. The anatomy pic was verymuch a “gotta get this idea out before my energy goes and my wrist falls off”.

Overall? I’m really proud of this development. I’d rather not have had the hypomania dumped in the middle of my sleep cycle, but getting the Fennari’s physiology past

“they’re long-coyote-anthro things that turned out awkwardly too-pretty/human for the setting.. Um, with insectivore tongues”

was a roadblock for too long and jarred with the rest of the setting.Freeing myself from that has allowed me to create a playable species I’m happy putting in the game and confident I won’t rip them out later. They’re physically very different from how I first imagined them, and some cultural things will have to change to accomodate the changes. But I like them infinitely more this way, and they feel like part of it now rather than stuck in-potentia as a bunch of ideas.

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Speculative Biology, Art Abstraction & Game Pragmatism

Lately I’ve been stumped by this trifecta, trying to merge them into a cohesive world. Primarily this has been in the form of Player Races.

Originally, I had tonnes planned. But this was back when this was effectively an “Our Elves/Orcs/Dwarves Are Different” setting- playing with tropes, making often-EXP-fodder races like Kobolds & Goblins more of a people than punchbags living in tribal raiding villages.

It’s A Living has changed a lot since then, though. It still has that conviction at heart that there are no “tribe of evil-nasty-pygmies it’s okay to slaughter” races. Likewise, no “they’re just big, barbaric brutes. they only understand violence, they need to be put down” races. But it’s not set against the rough backdrop of High Fantasy anymore- I’ve moved on to my own races. How to make them is the problem.

People who know me know I’m a spec-bio nerd. Not in the sense of sneering at fantasy animals (they’re cool!) but appreciating ones that are well-designed and live and interact with their biomes; not necessarily at 100% Realism, but.. Granularity, I guess? I can appreciate Wayne Barlowe’s Expedition stuff in the same breath as the way the creatures in Monster Hunter interact with each other & their environments. Creatures that live, that are designed to be able to live, where and how they live, how they interact with other things that live there, not just to stay frozen in time before they appear in an ‘aha’ moment; That’s a passion for me.

So, I started designing my core 5 races with that in mind. But then I hit a snag- Dungeon Crawling and tactical combat relies on, at base, a level playing field in certain contexts. You can’t have Darkvision or Spider Crawl or Orb Of Light spells or the like without a baseline assumption of what your basic player races can do. In most RPGs they tend to tweak that between races, but you get a feel for the ‘average’ (usually the Human race, or Human-analogue) they’re tweaking. Some are a bit stronger, some are a bit more dexterous, “Legolas, what do your Elf eyes see?”, etc.

..That doesn’t work out so well when all your races come from different planets (read: No core biological ‘baseline’; Earth’s macrofauna tend to be symmetrical along a vertical axis, have 4 limbs, a head which contains their brain & sensory organs, etc) come together to live on a new planet (as is the case in IAL).

How does vision work when you have a species who echolocate and the rest don’t? How does a race without roughly-humanoid forearms & torso use even remotely the same weapons as the ones we’re used to, let alone the ones the other races use?

How does a player emote as a race without a face, with a whole language-structure based around antenna? Or a nonverbal race? That’s going to be a huge wall for anyone, and extremely offputting to anyone new to roleplaying in general, or who doesn’t want that huge challenge. And, finally, how do all these different races gel together to form a style and look for the artwork & the feel of the setting? This is the most abstract one, so the one I’ll touch on most briefly, but it’s still an important component.

..So this is what I’m struggling with lately. I think my answer is (apart from “draw even more designs, wait for ones that stick”) to humanize a bit. I dislike this compromise from a spec-bio sense, but from a sense of both stylistic congruity & not bogging down the game with flicking through hundreds of rules for dozens of ability subtypes & subsystems (looking at you, Infinity), it’s the best solution I can think of.

This doesn’t mean everyone’s going to be human-but-armor, human-but-short, human-but-planty, etc. Just that I need to design around the game and my potential players, and consider that when setting the limits & the goalposts of my forays into fantasy, biology & the space between them.

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Quick Little Update:

Personality Traits are coming along nicely. These give little perks as rewards for in-character RPing, while not restricting players or making them give up too much. Basically I want to encourage RP as much as possible considering characters’ traits & backgrounds, without going into “But my character would do [dick move]..!” territory or “But if I don’t stick to acting like this 1 trait I’ll lose this really vital mechanic.”

So. Just a little perk that comes & goes easy. We’ll see how it playtests out.

Work continues on the Skill Tree (which feels like Yggdrasil in size a lot of the time.. QQ). I really love Acrobatics and love the bunch of abilities I’ve made for it, but having a seperate subsystem of “Acrobatic Points” to use multiples in a turn was wasteful & went against my core simplicity aim- So I’ve refined the system so that you may now use X Acrobatic Abilities per turn (where X changes with Skill Level) and count them as a single Quick Action.

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I really want to get back into the guts of IAL

Worldbuilding and sketches and faction-fluff are great and all but I have this scraggly skill tree looming over my head begging to be at least fleshed out to a better degree than it is now. For a lot of the skills though I need to nail down how social interactions work mechanically- I know it’s not going to be “Kindness Coins” and it’s not going to be “Nothing, all on you, GM ol’ pal”. It’s also not going to be trait-based; You walk into a bar, the barkeep doesn’t go “Well, you’re Chaotic Evil and I’m Lawful Good, which I can tell by mechanical omniscience, so shove off*”- Things will be based on what has been observed (or rumoured) about you as well as your interactions with those people.

I know that shopkeepers & questgivers will be affected by how much they like you (along with other factors, such as your Renown), which means there has to be a quantative aspect to it. I’m starting to suspect that travelling to worlds on the other side of Dungeons may be over-reaching- Something best left for expansion books, perhaps, but I’m not thinking that far down the road yet (that way lies broken dreams..). * Alignments aren’t actually a thing in IAL, that’s just an example of what I’m not doing..!

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Update!

IAL still lives, I just haven’t had much energy to scan & upload the kinda work I’ve been doing (analogue media pencil/pen stuff). I’ve got the look of two of the playable races (these ones happen to also be major factions on the political scale, though that’s not a 1:1 thing) prettymuch nailed down- The Orcinians & the Fennari.

They’ve gone through a lot of changes since I first envisioned them- The Fennari are now insectivores with an anteater-like snoot, for instance, while the Orcinians grew from their roots as “I want Orcs to be obsessively-’civilised’ roman-ish colonizers” to 5-limbed, beaked & barbelled critters they are today, with rudimentary echolocation & barbel-whiskers backing up their poor eyesight.

Currently I’m playing around with the art style I want IAL to have- As always, I’m wrestling between my love of biology with wanting something abstract & characterful (with workrate also factoring into things). Currently I’m playing around with a style reminiscent of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy stuff- I find it extremely effective at portraying the alien and the bizarre with expression & depth of character, which is tricky to pull off (the moment something loses ‘human-ish (right bits in approximately the right places) face’ you’re in murky waters in terms of expressiveness, and have to rely more and more on human-ish body language or a Big Ol Wall O Text. Beaks are my nemesis here..).

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Character Development

So, I’ve got the Character Creation process in the final stages- Structurally I’m happy with it, it’s now just a case of filling in more content in the parts that need it.

I’ve written up a 6-step summary of the process below, which also touches on a variety of the mechanics that these choices will be interacting with throughout the game.

1. Choose Species

Prettymuch what it says in the tin- These will affect your character’s Core Stats of course, as well as some giving you additional/replacement background options.

2. Decide Background & Starting Personality Traits

Your character’s background is split into two parts- Their Childhood & their Early Adulthood. There is a table of prompts for each of these to choose from, with each prompt giving enough room for personalisation & a question, often relating to an important event or what led to the transition from that period of the character’s life.

Personality Traits emerge from your character’s background- The life they’ve lived & experiences they’ve had so far will affect what kind of person they are. Acting according to your personality gives you Personal Comfort, which gives passive benefits (often, but not always, to interactions with others). Personal Comfort can be spent to act against your traits, or bolster a party’ member’s decision to do so themself.

3. Decide your Starting Relationships.

These are your relationships with others in your party and NPCs in the Town (this is an RPG heavily rooted in place- There is travel, but it is not an RPG suited for hopping from disposable locale to locale- Building & evolving relationships with the townsfolk & your impact on the town as a whole is more of a Thing). Your characters start off having spent enough time in town to get at least a starting impression of one or two others.

4. Decide your Core Stats & Work Out Transitory Stats.

I’m starting off with Point Buy being the dominant system, but a version I’ve devised that’s weighted towards less powerful characters. The stats should really get their own post, but in brief;

CHA: Good ol’ Charisma. People skills, not “Looking Pretty”. Important for gathering information, getting the best deal, and getting people to like you, but most importantly- Bragging. The more you impress people with your tales of daring-do, the more Renown you get as a competent & fearsome band of Dungeoneers, and people will approach you with more sensitive or dangerous tasks. STR: Strength. For pushing things(/people) around and adding to the damage on your melee & certain other attacks. QW: Quick Wits. How perceptive you are of your environment, how quickly you react to danger, how often you get to act in battle. All of these rely on QW. WIL: Your Will- Your resistance to mind control, your ability to act against your inner desires for a greater goal, and your ability to continue fighting when wounded (even when it may be unwise or foolhardy - Pushing yourself always comes with a price to be payed). ML: Magical Link - How innately are you linked to the Elements, and thus how easily do you speak their tongue? As with will, Magic comes with a price- It’s more bartering with the Elements & reading up on the right spells than a daily allotment that increases with level. (Elemental Debt does of course come with a range of Consequences.) DEX: Dexterity - Your ability to perform fine tasks with ease & finesse. Not stealth-related in terms of gross-motor movements. Crafting, field surgery, pickpocketing, lock picking, disarming traps.. CS: Combat Skill - You fight good? Good. This affects your chance to successfully hit/not be hit, but does not add additional damage onto your attacks, as Strength does.

Transitory Stats are ones that tend to change a lot, and are often affected by other things- Your Armor Stats

(Encumberance, Toughness, Coverage)

, your Item Slots, your Fatigue & Sustenance.

5. Choose your starting Skills.

IAL is a classless system- There are two trees of skills, Combat & Non-Combat and you start off with the points to buy a certain amount. As it develops, this will probably be weighted so everyone is guaranteed at least one weapon proficiencies, etc.

Skill Points are also Combat or Non-Combat, so everyone will (in theory) end up with a unique, rounded character- no one’s going to be “just the muscle” or “just the party healer”- The muscle might be the goto for sewing & patching up your armor, the healer might be the face who tells suitably-aggrandized stories of your accomplishments to raise your Renown (and thus gain access to better missions) and gather information from their network of contacts.

As I know Skill-Buy systems can be overwhelming, I’ll be making Starter Packs that players can choose instead for Character Creation, based on a handful of archetypes. They can then customize these as they wish as they earn points throughout the game.

6. Choose your starting Equipment.

As your town grows & your relationships with the townsfolk grow also, you’ll unlock access to better equipment- Doing tasks for certain vendors contribute to that vendor being able to expand their business, as well as paying as any other mission would.

..But at the start, you have access to starting equipment, and a limited fund to buy it with. (Everyone starts off with the basic Dungeoneering Kit, though, so no one can accidentally shoot themselves in the foot here)

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And that’s it! I hope you’ve found this interesting. Any questions, I’ll be happy to answer (if I have the answers yet, haha. Otherwise, well, I’ll ruminate or guess :p)

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Since I’m moving away from the Tolkienian racial archetypes entirely, rather than trying for “my own spin on..”, I didn’t want to throw away all the work I did on the Orcian Empire, so I spent today on a series of rough sketches to rework a new faction species/playable race to fit them. These are the ones that’re closest to “finalised”.

The nasal cavity is for echolocation. I’m not entirely sold on the feathers, yet- I started off the design with catfish-like barbels, I may still go with that.

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I’m pretty proud with how this turned out! After a few playtests, it became clear that the old Time Bar for Initiative had some problems- At the core, it’s a good system that does exactly what I envisioned- bringing a more granular, dynamic initiative system to the game where turns can be unpredictable and your character’s speed, recovery time and abilities that slow or stagger enemies really matter. It adds a whole new tactical layer to the gameplay, and the playtests have born this out.

Moving a half dozen, often-stacked counters meticulously along a row of boxes, though? That’s a great way to slow down gameplay and add a tedious gap in the action after each turn. At the core of IAL, I want fast-flowing gameplay, so this was clearly not a workable system (see the last picture for a comparison of the two).

So; the Time Wheel. This allows players & GMs to not only get all the information they need over who goes when, but to move the entire timeframe of the combat on after each turn with a touch. With an hour or so in Manga Studio, a laminator and a brass fastener, I now have a hard-wearing & easy to use time-tracker for my alpha testing, that I’ll pretty up & release with the game proper when it comes time to.

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Big Changes in the Background

So, I’m currently sitting and thinking through the core design goals of IAL. I initially wanted to make an open, easy dungeon crawler, that can use any old miniatures and yet also go against the post-Tolkien-fantasy norm of “there are types of people it’s okay to kill because of their race”. Those two last goals clash rather hard, and as my worldbuilding grows, it feels like Orcs, Goblins & such are just a vestigial leftover of the genre archetype I started with. So.. A lot of rethinking. Also whether I want the core game to cover all the cultures & factions in the setting, just focus on life in one of them, or stay vague enough that GMs & players can design into the gaps.

So, I’ve got the gameplay structure down to the tweaking level, the skill tree’s coming along nicely, and I know the setting itself.. it’s just whether I cut off a few last ties & go fully into my own fantasy world (haha), or keep the old guard in their new forms of “Our ____ Are Different”, as TVTropes would call it.

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You know you may have dived too far into your magic system when you’re trying to effectively discern the crossover point between a wave and a particle.

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Ninja-ing So Hard You Break Through To 5-Dimensional Space

Me: ..Oh Dear. I'm writing about 3-Space Wallruns & 5-Space Wallruns and such Me: in terms of "amount of spaces traversed" Me: however.. X-Space is math nomenclature for "A reality with X dimensions" Me: so a 5-space wallrun would involve some thoroughly non-euclidean geometry. Me: ..I really want to make /that/ game now.

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So, yeah, Acrobatics is coming along. My philosophy for dubious action movie acrobatics is “You can do it, but if you aren’t ranked in anything that’d give you a bonus, welp, don’t expect the GM to make the roll a kind one”. The Acrobatics Skill is partially there to help you out with that, and partially there to make certain moves explicitly worded in how they work/etc.

Also you can now chain Acrobatics into one final blow. We shall see if this translates to interesting fights, OP characters or players taking too-damn-long with their turns while they do this stuff.

Anything can happen in playtesting!

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Finished the Seeker Silencer (Assassin) Adept; tried to keep to a simple style. Don’t like how the coloring turned out, but that’s fine; I wasn’t planning on colours for much anyway (staying at-least-mostly monochrome for the book, if not completely?). Leather armor, lots of pockets/sheathes for knives, throwing knives, small pistols & general Nasty Stuff. Also WIP of the Seekers’ emblem.

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So, since I decided to adopt Print & Play as the 'primary' way of playing It's A Living, I've been toying around with what I can do with that toolset. I have unfond memories of changing stats rapidly resulting in crumpled, eraser-scrubbed grey messes that end up barely legible after a few times, so Blood Bowl Team Manager inspired a quick & easy solution to that; dials. Cardstock + a butterfly clip = a sturdy character sheet with changable numbers that track over time (you could track by dice or counters, but would still need to write down at the end of each session). This also fixes some of my worries about players struggling to track Hunger & Fatigue, which will be regularly ticking down when wondering around the dungeon; I'd hate that to be rub-rub-rub-scribble every time you move around a bit. I'm not going full Survival Game with those (aka "eat a 5 course meal every 20 minutes or die"), but you will need to eat & sleep a sensible amount to keep your stats at full. Roll20 Tokens, normal character sheets, etc will still be there; This game isn't going 'exclusive' to one method of playing anytime soon. I just figure making it as easy & quick to play as possible = Good designer gets many headpats. On that note, I'm also planning on Twine-ing some combat/character creation/crafting tools for people who struggle with the maths side of things; It'll be very simple to program, but potentially very useful.