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Inkwarren Devlog #2: Welcome to Cairnadal!

The trees around your village are tall, and they are old. As you linger on the edge of the cobblestone path, you consider the forest beyond. You have heard of what lurks in the Deeper Wood- old beings, older than Inkwarren, and pale things that hate the things that lurk in the light. You look back to the flickering golden light of your village's tharian, admiring briefly the iron-wrought and rune-laden shape of the lamppost. The Abbey says tharians are shields against the deep and the dark, but doubt lingers at the back of your mind. What if they're wrong about the Wood?

Hello again, y'all! Sorry for a little while with no updates, it's been a crazy and long week in Matt World. I'm here for another update for Inkwarren, my in-development dark fantasy TTRPG of swashbuckling tactics and storybook intrigue, to talk about the game's setting: the ancient and magical woodland of Cairnadal.

Cairnadal

Cairnadal is a massive, realm-spanning woodland that encompasses all of the Known World. Ancient and beautiful, Cairnadal carries with it an odd and bewitching beauty. Woodlanders, the intelligent animal inhabitants of Cairnadal, most often live amongst the roots of the tall trees that make up the woodland around them. Sunlight comes in narrow beams that gracefully dance across the forest floor, and the soil is rich and fertile after centuries of greenery and other things that live amongst the woodland.

Woodlanders

Cairnadal is primarily inhabited by woodlanders, a society of intelligent animals that have built stone cities and little villages that dot much of Cairnadal's breadth. Woodlanders are small mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles, that form into societies and communities amongst each other where they create art, research knowledge, wage war, and consolidate power. There's good and bad in woodlanders, just as there is in us. The current society of the woodlanders is the vast and expansive kingdom of Inkwarren (oh look, the game's title!), which spans across five of Cairnadal's great six regions.

Beasts

Arthropods, fish, mollusks, and other animals are called beasts, and take the place that animals do in our world that we live in as humans. Woodlanders fish for food, ride stag beetles from city to city, send messages via trained dragonflies, and keep ladybugs and rollie-pollies as household pets. Wild beasts, like large hunting spiders or common crabs to be found on beaches, are approached with some measure of caution or respect for Cairnadal's many lifeforms.

Other Beings

Other beings inhabit the vast woodland of Cairnadal. Dead things return to life as lyches, animated by the weird magicks of the Deeper Wood, and massive, gentle stone giants with no name wander the wood, a remnants of the unknown civilization of That Which Came Before. Other animals, massive things known as the Old Masters of the Wood, can be found deep within the Deeper Wood. They have different languages, different gods, and different conceptions of the world than woodlanders do, and rumors are that they abound in a strange and ancient magick at their command.

Inkwarren

Inkwarren is the massive kingdom that spans most of Cairnadal, established over nine-hundred moons ago after a massive, woodland-spanning conflict known as the War of Red Flowers. Inkwarren is ruled by House Greyfell, a house of cats currently led by Alys II, who has served as King Crowned of Inkwarren for thirty-nine moons.

Inkwarren is made up of five major wards, each led by a powerful noble house called a High House. These wards are the Aerie, the Heartlands, the Yawning Roads, the Waterways, and Winterreach. Culture and language varies from region to region, and the High Houses often clash with each other while skirting the edges of violence.

Daily Life in Inkwarren

Every settlement in Inkwarren is protected by a magical lamppost called a tharian. Tharians glow with a light akin to faint sunlight, and ward away magicks and other beings that come from the Deeper Wood. The Abbey, the principle religious entity that dominates most of Inkwarren, professes that tharians are necessary for the peace and safety of Warrenish settlements, but there are those who would whisper and say otherwise. No one knows exactly where tharians came from, and the art of creating them has been lost to history.

Each settlement in Inkwarren is often governed by a noble house, represented by a reeve (which is somewhere between a mayor and a sheriff). It is common to have small chapels for the Abbey in many settlements, where the tharian lies at the center. Most woodlanders carry common professions such as smiths, scaleworkers, weavers, farmers, or messengers between settlements.

The Five Great Regions

Inkwarren is made up of five massive regions of Cairnadal, each governed by a High House, with their own languages, religions, and cultures.

The Aerie is a massive section of woodland where the towns and settlements are built from wooden platforms around the trunks of trees, with bridges or simple ropes connecting each platform-town. The tharians of the Aerie grow their wrought-iron poles around the trunks of trees, twisting into the platforms that settlements are built around. The Aerie is mostly inhabited by flying woodlanders, although climbing coats of woodlanders such as squirrels or possums have been known to make their home amongst the trees. The Aerie is ruled by House Ddur-Adain, a vulture house.

The Heartlands are the largest region of Cairnadal, built between the massive roots and tall trees that make up the woodland proper. The Heartlands is the home of Inkwarren's capital city, Gwydir, and is a center of commerce for the rest of Warrenish society. The Heartlands are the seat of House Greyfell, the cat house that rules all of Inkwarren.

The Waterways are river-laden hills and marshes where the trees of Cairnadal become fewer and farther between (but still cover most of the land). The Waterways are dotted with settlements populated with woodlanders that make their homes near water: ducks, otters, frogs, and snakes that hunt, fish, and forage for their daily living. The Waterways are ruled by House Wynne, an snake house.

Winterreach is a vast region of pine-covered mountains and snowy bluffs. Winterreach is scarcely populated, and its few settlements are made up of woodlanders comfortable with the cold and ice of that realm. Winterreach is ruled by House Castledown, a snowy owl house.

The Yawning Roads are a massive network of caverns that spans under most of Inkwarren, where cities are carved out of rock and stone. Here, strange 'roots' of the tharians above light caverns and protect from things that lurk under the dirt. The Yawning Roads are inhabited mostly by burrowing woodlanders such as moles, voles, or rabbits, as well as bats, salamanders, and burrowing owls that are commonly found underground. The Yawning Roads are ruled by House Sare, a salamander house.

The Deeper Wood

The Deeper Wood is the section of untamed woodland of Cairnadal not dotted by Warrenish settlements or protected by tharians. Strange things are said to lurk within these woods, magical things that existed before Inkwarren existed as a kingdom. Both the Crown and the Abbey forbid travel into the Deeper Wood, but braver wanderers have been known to wander off the cobblestone path, and your mind lingers on what might be out there...

That's All For Now!

Thanks for reading! I'll be back soon with another devlog to talk about Battle and how Inkwarren approaches its philosophy to combat and violence. Thanks for reading!

[ruinandrue]

I love Root more than words!! :) I’ve got some posts coming up about the setting and Battle mechanics, stay tuned!!

Introducing Inkwarren: A dark fantasy TTRPG of woodland adventures!

Hi all! I'm Matt, and I am an Atlanta-based indie ttrpg designer currently developing Inkwarren, a dark woodland fantasy TTRPG of swashbuckling tactics and storybook intrigue. Today, I'm going to talk to you about what Inkwarren is, what inspired it, and the design goals I have for the game. Inkwarren is already in preliminary playtests, and I hope to have public playtests sometime in the near future.

What is Inkwarren?

In Inkwarren, players take on the role of woodlanders- animal wanderers of the massive Woodland, who use magick, wits, and weapons to take down foes supernatural and mundane. Your woodlanders' wandering band may be a band of mercenary adventurers, a band of high-spirited rebels, or even a band of scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells just looking for their next score.

One player takes on the role of the Voice in the Dark, a guiding force behind the story that presents challenges, describes consequences, and narrates the actions of the woodlander's foes.

Inkwarren aims to merge modern-style deep narrative rules with exciting, flashy, swashbuckling battles that emphasizes teamwork, movement, and positioning. Character creation is a deep and choice-driven process, that fully contextualizes a woodlander within the world and sets them on a path to a truly memorable story.

Inspirations

Mechanically, Inkwarren borrows from and is inspired by games like Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, Modiphius's Dishonored, ICON, Blades in the Dark, and City of Mist, mixing design trends of modern tactical fantasy games with deep narrative based trends found in other systems. Inkwarren's combat also shares inspiration with the Hades series of games, aiming to emulate the fast-paced action where movement and positioning are just as important as the attacks you use.

Narratively, Inkwarren is inspired by The Secret of NIMH, Dishonored, Redwall, Root, and Hollow Knight. When designing Inkwarren's eponymous setting, I want to evoke the gravitas and melancholy somberness of Hallownest from Hollow Knight, with magic as eldritch and strange as the Outsider's gifts in Dishonored. With this, Inkwarren is still a game about hope, and aims to capture the optimism-despite-adversity and little-heroes-against-great-foes vibes of stories like Redwall or The Secret of NIMH. I have to credit Root for originally giving me the idea to shift my game concept to one where the PCs are little woodland creatures.

Choice, Sacrifice, and Hope

Inkwarren's core mechanic emphasizes choice, intent, and narrative weight. The base 2d10 roll is modified by the woodlander's own Virtues (core strengths like Brawn, Nimbleness, or Insight), combined with a Style to define how they're using that Virtue (such as performing an action Cunningly, Quickly, or Sneakily). Difficulty is measured by Risk and Effect, that assign narrative weight to the severity of consequences a woodlander faces, and how effective they will be if they Prevail.

When woodlanders just don't roll high enough, they don't simply fail- they Falter. Faltering grants Hope, a resource that can be used to Persevere and succeed despite consequences on future challenges. With Hope, failure is never the end- it simply closes one door, and opens another.

Swashbuckling Battles

Inkwarren's Battle system emphasizes movement, positioning, and teamwork. Woodlanders interact with the battlefield through exploits, combat disciplines that have a variety of different effects to use on the field. Exploits have an at-will root effect that can be used as a woodlander's bread and butter, but more powerful effects are always within reach. By using root effects, meeting battle objectives (such as defeating enemies or reaching escape points), and continuing the fight (by ending rounds), woodlanders build Momentum, a shared resource pool by the entire band that can be used to power a woodlander's most powerful abilities. Woodlanders can spend Momentum to use an exploit's powerful bloom effect, or power a duo effect that they can use to combine their abilities with those of another ally. Momentum doesn't deplete until the Battle is over-- use it for quick bursts, or build up to unleash more powerful attacks against your foes!

Other rulesets like charging attacks, staggering mechanics for bosses, climbing on top of larger foes, environments, high ground, and ally turns (that don't clog up combat) also add gravitas, pace, and exciting tactical decisions to make Inkwarren's Battles so engaging.

Sweeping Narrative

Inkwarren's narrative mechanics work to ensure that solving problems outside of Battle carry just as much weight as Battle itself. Inkwarren's narrative ruleset includes:

The Doubt system allows woodlanders to call upon the Voice in the Dark for aid, but at a cost: as the woodlanders build Doubt, the Voice can spend it to increase the danger of the surroundings, unlock new abilities for foes, or act as a mastermind behind the antagonistic forces of the narrative.

Narrative abilities called flourishes that woodlanders can use to interact with the world.

A special character-based tour de force that a woodlander may use to do something truly legendary, although infrequently.

Rest Activities woodlanders may use to Cook Meals, Spar, Entertain, or Pray to give themselves bonuses and restorations for use later.

Wounds to carry over how trials in-combat affect a woodlander after the Battle ends.

Rules for Tongues that establish a woodlander's knowledge of a language with several levels of fluency.

Ties, which are narrative bonds with NPCs woodlanders may use to increase their effect against them, or burn them to ask for a favor.

And So Much More!

Deep character customization for woodlanders, including a Coat mechanic that allows you to play as any little animal your heart desires, unique and evocative traditions like the ghostly historian Folklorist or the passionate Warrior-Poet, rules for mysterious and magical artifacts called esoterica, an in-depth crafting system, and more!

If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading! I'm so excited about this game, and I hope to share more with everyone soon!

Tìoraidh!

[ruinandrue]

Inkwarren Devlog #1: Magick, Incantations, and Creativity

What's the appeal of magic in a fantasy setting? Is it that magic broadens the possibilities of storytelling by removing the limitations of our world? Do the limits on magic provide an interesting question of what is now possible, if the answer isn't anything? Is it just cool? Well, yeah. All of these! At least I think.

Hi all, Matt here, and I'm back to talk about Inkwarren, and how magick works in my game: what it is in the fiction, what it is in the mechanics, and how magick changes when you try to fit it into tactical combat.

Magic in the Woodland

Magick in Inkwarren is strange, dangerous, and poorly understood. It doesn't inhabit the same realm as other heroic fantasy games-- there are no wizard academies or +1 swords being sold in cities. Magick isn't taboo (your Witch isn't going to be run out of town), but it isn't normal or safe. Magick also requires incantations, which is what 'spells' are in Inkwarren-- echoing words of power that shift reality to your will.

It's best to think of magick like you would a tide. There is push, and there is pull. When you speak an incantation, you are using words of power to harness magick and change reality to your will- but magick always wants something in return. Magick requires sacrifice.

Now, sacrifice isn't always as dramatic as it sounds. Magick-users in the Woodland learn to sacrifice things to magick reflexively when they speak an incantation, because if they don't, the magick bites back and feeds on them instead. A lower strength incantation, like one that senses heartbeats, protects your skin from injury, or hides you from sight for a short while only require something small: a minute of your time, an unimportant memory, a bit of your blood, and similar offerings are very common across the incantations you'll see in the book. Bigger things require bigger sacrifices: if you want to implant a new memory you have to give one of your own of equal or greater importance, if you want to bring back a life you must give yours in return, and the enemies of the woodlanders might perform rituals that take many lives in order for them to take many lives in the same fashion.

So, magick takes time. Unless you've got an incantation down pat (more on that later), you likely can't cast it quickly and without fuss. You have to think about it, because if you rush blindly into an incantation, it could have permanent and devastating effects on your woodlander.

The Six Arcana

Despite magick being poorly understood, there are commonly known to be six important power sources for magick to draw from: these are called Arcana. The Arcana are as follows:

Blood magick manipulates the life force and bodies of living creatures, allowing the user to speak to animals, control plants, and shift their shape.

Bone magick enhances a user's physique and battle capabilities; conjuring protective shields, forming weapons out of force, and protecting the skin with sigils of occult magick.

Chaos magick (which differs from the real world tradition of chaos magic) focuses on energy and natural forces of the world-- turning fire into lightning, water into stone, and using these forms of energy and matter to accomplish a woodlander's goals.

Night magick focuses on shadows, silence, and the mind. Incantations that call upon night magick use shadows as a weapon, invade the mind to read thoughts and push a target's will in a certain direction, and steal voices and ideas from others.

Silver magick focuses on the boundaries between realities, allowing woodlanders to move between locations without travelling, divine the future, and call things from other states of existence.

Spirit magick focuses on the soul, emotion, and the spirits of the dead. Spirit incantations can be used to heal spiritual wounds, communicate with spirits of the dead and of the past, and to sense emotional impressions on beings and objects.

Great! We get how magick works (sort of, but that's the point)

Magick in Gameplay

There is a juxtaposition in how exactly magic should function in tactical fantasy games. Tactical combat requires tactics, which implies some level of thought and choice-- but if magick can do anything, what tactic is there in that? What ends up happening is magic is made into abilities-- you can cast fireball and entangle, but if you want to use fire to heat up a doorknob or use vines to create a bridge, you're out of luck. This makes sense- we want gameplay to flow well between states, and having the tactical, ability-like implementation of magic extend to all aspects of gameplay is good and fine.

But it doesn't have to.

Improvising Magick

Several traditions in Inkwarren are capable of improvising magickal effects: these being the folklorist, goetia, rook, warrior-poet, and witch (roughly half of the total 12 traditions). These traditions will also have special flourishes (narrative abilities) representing rote incantations they know by heart and don't have to improvise, but they may wish to improvise at other times. Before we get into how improvising magick works, let's recap our points from above:

Magick requires sacrifice.

Magick takes time and concentration.

Magick is dangerous.

When you wish to improvise an incantation, you will draw a pentacle, and go through each point to choose five different descriptors:

Your Intent. What you want to happen when you create the effect- unlock the door, hide my footsteps, change my face.

Strength. The Strength of the incantation directly correlates with Effect used for challenge rolls: limited, normal, great, and legendary effect. During the Origin phase of play, your woodlander will be more inexperienced with more powerful magick, and will incur more sacrifices and consequences for incantations that aren't limited strength. That isn't to say they can't attempt-- it'll just be much more dangerous for them.

Sacrifice. What you will give. The higher the Strength, the more you sacrifice. Time, blood, memory, sanity-- whatever you want.

Major Arcana. The primary Arcana you draw from when using the effect. Unlocking a door sounds like chaos, as you pull on the metal to change and unlock, and changing your face might be night, as you shift your features to look like someone else.

Minor Arcana. The secondary Arcana you draw from, which can be the same as your Major Arcana. Unlocking the door might be chaos/night as you tug on shadows to bend the door to your will, and changing your face might be night/blood.

After you decide these five descriptors, you will attempt a challenge roll to create your effects, rolling your dice directly onto your pentacle. Prevailing causes your incantation to go off as intended, but Persevering or Faltering could cause things to go slightly different than what you planned or not right at all. Voila! You have improvised a spell!

Magick in Battle

Magick in Battle is a lot simpler because, well, I didn't reinvent the wheel a whole bunch here! Magick exploits are exploits just like any other, with Root, Bloom, and Duo effects that can the woodlander can use at will. In the fiction, woodlanders can call upon this magick so easily because they are rote incantations, similar to magical flourishes-- in the heat of Battle, a woodlander doesn't have time to improvise, pick sacrifices, and focus their intent. They just rely on what they know! They sacrifice small bits of energy, prepared components, and other minor things they are assumed to have prepared because they're the heroes, and they know what they're doing.

TL;DR in battle, you may not have time to improvise magick and get creative, but outside of battle, you have time to get weird and wacky with the incantations you speak-- if you can pay the cost.

If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading! I'll be posting on this blog semi-regularly as I develop this game, and I appreciate your interest and support!

[ruinandrue]

Introducing Inkwarren: A dark fantasy TTRPG of woodland adventures!

Hi all! I'm Matt, and I am an Atlanta-based indie ttrpg designer currently developing Inkwarren, a dark woodland fantasy TTRPG of swashbuckling tactics and storybook intrigue. Today, I'm going to talk to you about what Inkwarren is, what inspired it, and the design goals I have for the game. Inkwarren is already in preliminary playtests, and I hope to have public playtests sometime in the near future.

What is Inkwarren?

In Inkwarren, players take on the role of woodlanders- animal wanderers of the massive Woodland, who use magick, wits, and weapons to take down foes supernatural and mundane. Your woodlanders' wandering band may be a band of mercenary adventurers, a band of high-spirited rebels, or even a band of scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells just looking for their next score.

One player takes on the role of the Voice in the Dark, a guiding force behind the story that presents challenges, describes consequences, and narrates the actions of the woodlander's foes.

Inkwarren aims to merge modern-style deep narrative rules with exciting, flashy, swashbuckling battles that emphasizes teamwork, movement, and positioning. Character creation is a deep and choice-driven process, that fully contextualizes a woodlander within the world and sets them on a path to a truly memorable story.

Inspirations

Mechanically, Inkwarren borrows from and is inspired by games like Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, Modiphius's Dishonored, ICON, Blades in the Dark, and City of Mist, mixing design trends of modern tactical fantasy games with deep narrative based trends found in other systems. Inkwarren's combat also shares inspiration with the Hades series of games, aiming to emulate the fast-paced action where movement and positioning are just as important as the attacks you use.

Narratively, Inkwarren is inspired by The Secret of NIMH, Dishonored, Redwall, Root, and Hollow Knight. When designing Inkwarren's eponymous setting, I want to evoke the gravitas and melancholy somberness of Hallownest from Hollow Knight, with magic as eldritch and strange as the Outsider's gifts in Dishonored. With this, Inkwarren is still a game about hope, and aims to capture the optimism-despite-adversity and little-heroes-against-great-foes vibes of stories like Redwall or The Secret of NIMH. I have to credit Root for originally giving me the idea to shift my game concept to one where the PCs are little woodland creatures.

Choice, Sacrifice, and Hope

Inkwarren's core mechanic emphasizes choice, intent, and narrative weight. The base 2d10 roll is modified by the woodlander's own Virtues (core strengths like Brawn, Nimbleness, or Insight), combined with a Style to define how they're using that Virtue (such as performing an action Cunningly, Quickly, or Sneakily). Difficulty is measured by Risk and Effect, that assign narrative weight to the severity of consequences a woodlander faces, and how effective they will be if they Prevail.

When woodlanders just don't roll high enough, they don't simply fail- they Falter. Faltering grants Hope, a resource that can be used to Persevere and succeed despite consequences on future challenges. With Hope, failure is never the end- it simply closes one door, and opens another.

Swashbuckling Battles

Inkwarren's Battle system emphasizes movement, positioning, and teamwork. Woodlanders interact with the battlefield through exploits, combat disciplines that have a variety of different effects to use on the field. Exploits have an at-will root effect that can be used as a woodlander's bread and butter, but more powerful effects are always within reach. By using root effects, meeting battle objectives (such as defeating enemies or reaching escape points), and continuing the fight (by ending rounds), woodlanders build Momentum, a shared resource pool by the entire band that can be used to power a woodlander's most powerful abilities. Woodlanders can spend Momentum to use an exploit's powerful bloom effect, or power a duo effect that they can use to combine their abilities with those of another ally. Momentum doesn't deplete until the Battle is over-- use it for quick bursts, or build up to unleash more powerful attacks against your foes!

Other rulesets like charging attacks, staggering mechanics for bosses, climbing on top of larger foes, environments, high ground, and ally turns (that don't clog up combat) also add gravitas, pace, and exciting tactical decisions to make Inkwarren's Battles so engaging.

Sweeping Narrative

Inkwarren's narrative mechanics work to ensure that solving problems outside of Battle carry just as much weight as Battle itself. Inkwarren's narrative ruleset includes:

The Doubt system allows woodlanders to call upon the Voice in the Dark for aid, but at a cost: as the woodlanders build Doubt, the Voice can spend it to increase the danger of the surroundings, unlock new abilities for foes, or act as a mastermind behind the antagonistic forces of the narrative.

Narrative abilities called flourishes that woodlanders can use to interact with the world.

A special character-based tour de force that a woodlander may use to do something truly legendary, although infrequently.

Rest Activities woodlanders may use to Cook Meals, Spar, Entertain, or Pray to give themselves bonuses and restorations for use later.

Wounds to carry over how trials in-combat affect a woodlander after the Battle ends.

Rules for Tongues that establish a woodlander's knowledge of a language with several levels of fluency.

Ties, which are narrative bonds with NPCs woodlanders may use to increase their effect against them, or burn them to ask for a favor.

And So Much More!

Deep character customization for woodlanders, including a Coat mechanic that allows you to play as any little animal your heart desires, unique and evocative traditions like the ghostly historian Folklorist or the passionate Warrior-Poet, rules for mysterious and magical artifacts called esoterica, an in-depth crafting system, and more!

If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading! I'm so excited about this game, and I hope to share more with everyone soon!

Tìoraidh!