The promised ones – 6. The character sheet and the setting presented through it.
Game Design Log #6
This is my first post of the year, so, Happy new year to all!!
I hope that this year gets somehow better for all of you, your community and loved ones (despite the bleak global landscape).
In this new post, I thought I will discuss a little about a reinterpretation of the trope of the “class”/“job” used in TTRPG as a vehicle for agency, and how, through it, a game tells its players what they are and what they are supposed to be doing while interacting with the rules of the game.
But then I realized that this discussion would be more interesting if I gave you a bit of context about where my game is heading. To put you up to date with the current state of my game (The Promised Ones, which from now on I will call TPO), I will first write a post showing you the latest character sheet, and from there, give you a “tour” through the different aspect of the setting and rules that are interacting within it.
So let's begin!
THE CHARACTER SHEET
So first things first, this is the character sheet in its simple form (I’m still trying to think of a most appealing way to present the information), with a simple summary of what each part of it does/means:
Here you can see many elements interconnected, lines, boxes, and subgroups of objects.
These interconnected portions and lines are here to represent the flow of the will of the player character (PC) toward the different things they can do in the game using the other elements on the character sheet.
I will follow the order from the summary to explain to you what each of these elements on the character sheet means in the context of the game:
1) The great spirit and your name:
This one is the most isolated as an object on the sheet, and the easiest of them all. They are: a) the name of your PC, and b) the name given by mortals to the great spirit to whom your progenitors promised you (who is this great spirit is something that will determine one of your initial skills and the gift you have).
2) Essences (the ways souls are understood in the world):
These are the representation of your physical and metaphysical resilience, and are a categorization that mortals use to represent the four aspects of their souls.
This is crucial on the setting because each great spirit represents a new categorization for the soul (the great spirit essences) and there are plenty of strange creatures in the world which nature is a result of this canonical categorization that once was embodied by the spire (as soul aberration and apparitions).
Essences also represent the strength of your connection to the great spirit for each of these aspects of a soul. As I already discussed in my previous game log entry, essences are invoked in game when doing something that requires a roll, and they will determine who narrates the how of the outcome of an action.
Moreover, they work as attributes and resources at the same time because they can be depleted in time, decreasing by one each time a 1 is rolled on the essence die (d8).
3) WILL (the agency of the PC against the will of the great spirit):
This is a meta-currency that represents your daily emotional and physical energy.
It also allows PCs to fight against the will of the great spirit, which constantly tries to impose its will on the “how” of things the PC does.
This is represented by the mechanics of the essence die, which, when rolled, if its result is lower than the score of the essence the PC is using for their action, then who decides the how of the outcome (in failure or success) is the great spirit. The only way the player can prevent this is by raising the value of the essence die by expending will.
Will also is essential to use the great spirit’s gifts, to increase the number of dice rolled, to empower with magic void artifacts, to overcome the effects of conditions and to transform it into essence when these decreases.
4) Soul fragments (the metaphysics of souls and the task given by the great spirit):
Here we return to the meaning of essences and we reinforce the setting.
Soul fragments are portions of a soul that was fragmented into these four essences, as understood by mortals, and somehow defined by the power of the spire before it shattered.
Soul fragments can be caught by promised ones within them. They can carry up to four soul fragments, one for each essence.
This is crucial for the game because the task given by the great spirits to their promised ones is to bring to them whole souls, reunited from the scattered soul fragments wandering the land.
So this gives to the players a gameable portion of the setting, in which they will be capturing fragments of souls to reunite them into a whole soul, and then they will travel through the dominion of the great spirit to whom they were promised to give to them this soul, and possible by doing this they will be granted with new gifts or magical items (remnants).
This also gives to the player the first on-play-decision they have to make, follow the task given to them by the great spirit or use their ability to collect soul fragments to their own gain or for some of the factions that are interested in gathering these souls (as the soulbank).
5-6) DEATH PEARLS (Coins, XP, setting and a seer tool, all in one):
Death pearls were born before I began to create this game, as an idea to tackle the XP/coin duality of old school d&d, to which being honest, I have not interacted much with as a player (I'd only GMed a few one-shots of Knaves and Into the Odd, and one year-long campaign of Lamentation of the Flame Princes with a bunch of my homebrew in it).
I found this duality very interesting as a designer, and being in my youth a player of World of Darkness's games like Vampire the masquerade (where this concept was absent) I felt that the idea of having some means to guide what a game is about through how you earn XP a very useful one.
From this idea, and my necessity of having a way in which earning XP “makes sense” in a setting I was GMing at that time (using a hack I made of knave with some strokes of Mork borg), I created the Death Pearls: Perl shaped objects found in the brains of the dead, that store some of the knowledge these death beings had on life. These were used as coins because the fey trade with them and also can be consumed to earn XP (a process that can have the side effect of granting “skills/knowledge” or “traumas” to those who consume them).
In TPO the idea remains the same, with the difference that the fey are the great spirits, and the only ones that can earn experiences from the dead through eating death pearls are promised ones.
Other feature that death pearls have in TPO, and that was not present in my first implementation of them, is that promised ones can use them to predict the future, mimicking what Blades in the Dark does with flashbacks, giving the possibility to promised ones to store in themselves the knowledge of the future. Then they can expend death pearls later on in the game, to declare how they prepared to deal with a situation in their present.
This addition is one thing that I was not sure to include in the final text (and I am still far from the final form of the game) but it had some interesting world-building and faction related consequences that I will discuss in a future post.
7) Gifts (the way great spirits lure mortals):
These are the expressions of the powers of the great spirits on mortals. When a promised one becomes aware they are a promised one, by hearing the call of a great spirit, one gift is awakened on them.
In the setting, there are tales of how promised ones become servants of great spirits to earn more of these gifts, and in game this is something that makes a promised one, and their gifts, something to be distrusted by society because most organize groups and communities in the different towns see on the great spirits beings that want to impose their wills on the mortal world.
The gifts a promised one is bestowed with depends on the great spirit to whom they are promised to. To give you a taste of the flavor these have, here are some examples, for five of the seven great spirits known by the mortal world:
Your progenitors promised you to the great spirit of Chaos, Winds and Danger: Olhgar. Example of Olgar’s gift:
Bonded on peril: You can sense when someone is a danger to you, you fill attracted to them. By expending 1 will you can see what will push them to get out of their comfort zone and take a risk.
Your progenitors promised you to the great spirit of Stories, Birds and Rivers: Everia. Example of Everia’s gift:
Meaningful song: You can create a story on the form of a song which will become so catchy that people will forever remember it and feel inclined to share it with anyone they know. You must expend 1 will to create this song.
Your progenitors promised you to the great spirit of Peace, Leaves and Melodies: Serilio. Example of Serilio’s gift:
Hidden on leaves: You can summon leaves to cover your tracks or to cover your body while you are hidden. The leaves will mimic the terrain allowing you to go unnoticed.
You must hold your breath and expend 1 Will to use this gift.
Your progenitors promised you to the great spirit of Tenderness, Caves and Echos: Ivania. Example of Ivania’s gift:
Earth veins: You can sense the veins of the earth. You know were the closest entrances to them are. Caves, ravines, fissures and other geographical accidents attract you as beacons when you search for them. You must cover your eyes with mud while using this gift and expend 1 will. With the mud in your eyes you will sea the landscape on black and white and the geographical accidents as bright stars
Your progenitors promised you to the great spirit of Mystery, Silver and Dance: Dimetria. Example of Dimetria’s gift:
Slippery face: You can erase your presence from the memory of anyone you touch in the forehead. They will forget you, and until the next time the moon hides on the horizon, you will be invisible to them. You must expend 1 will and forget something about yourself.
In the game essences are tethered to the souls of promised ones. If the essence to which these gifts are bound is depleted (reaching a score of 0) then these gifts are unreachable for promised ones. This is another setting-metaphysics portion of game reflected on the character sheet design, where below each essence there is a line that splits in two, showing which gifts are bound to it.
8) Skills (Origins, great spirits, and paths, the many ways in which the setting influences PCs):
Mechanically skills are simple, they have a description, which defines in which circumstances they can be invoked when a roll is needed, and a tracker, which determines how many d6s they add to a roll.
However, how you obtain them and advance them says more about one thing I really desired to be present in some of the games I played and that I decided to include in TPO: a narratively consistent way to gain and advance my character's skills that is codified in the rules of the game.
Initially, in the character creation process, skills can be earned through a) the great spirit to which the character is promised and b) their origin (town where they lived most of their childhood and adolescence).
Each one of them grants them one skill. In the case of the great spirits they are a reflection of the essences the great spirit represents, and in the case of the ones granted by their origin are a reflection of the culture of this town.
The origin's skills come with a small text that says something about the how and why you have developed this skill and is a small space of gameplay through which the setting is introduced (which, for me, is the best way to be introduced to a setting on a TTRPG, through their gameable aspects).
However, after the game starts, there is another way to earn new skills, and this is by fulfilling adventures for the different paths.
Paths are the jobs that promised ones have on the mortal world. These are tied to the special capabilities of promised ones, and are represented by quests or adventures the players can follow.
At the start of a game, players decide as a group which path they will take. For each path there is a set of skills they can learn, and each player can learn a different one.
Paths also give a way to develop skills; if a character has already learned one of the skills of a path, they can take another adventure of the same path to develop that skill instead of earning a new one. There are more things regarding paths that affect the structure of the game, but this is something I will discuss further in the next post.
The paths that promised ones can follow in the game are:
Beggar: You use your special connection with great spirits to negotiate with them on the name of others.
Death’s seer: You use your ability to see the future, by the ingestion of death pearls, to give advice and guidance to others.
Scavenger: As a promised one you have an extra-censorial attraction toward death pearls. You use it by working as a seeker and harvester of death pearl.
Soul Hunter: You use your ability to bind your essences with soul fragments to collect them. You collect this soul fragment to take them to a great spirit, or to sell them to the bank of souls, or help families finding out what happened to a loved one who has disappeared, or simply to calm the suffering of soul aberrations.
Although this sense of advancement in the game is something I wish was codified in the rules of some of the games I played before, I know that other players like the freedom to expend their XP as they wish. That's why it is included in the rules of TPO that the XP that PCs earn with death pearls allows them to advance, and even learn, a skill with which they have no engage in play. This also makes sense in the setting because by eating death pearls they are in direct contact with the knowledge of someone else, someone that could have learned the skill they wish to learn.
9)Void artifacts, remnants, and soulbinds (Threads of the world through the power of objects)
Void artifacts, remnants and soulbinds are all of them, at their core, magical items. Although they are tools to give more possibilities to players, they are totally ingrained in the setting.
Void artifacts are objects that are enchanted by the void (a substance that, when you stop focusing on it, you forget what it looks like or what it is). These objects can become the recipients of the will of a person, and their magical powers are a magical extension of what the object is or is used for.
Remnants are objects with special permanent magical capabilities, they were enchanted by the shattering of the Spire, and they can be collected from the dominions of the great spirit.
Soulbinds are common objects permanently enchanted by a soul fragment, these are produced on the soul forge and are an innovation of the people working on the soulbank.
All of these objects are intertwined with one aspect of the world building, and give some reason for characters to interact with this portion of the world.
Void artifacts will bring them closer to the secrets of the void and can lead them to interact with the void church and the more extremist version of their cult that tries to erase any kind of influence of the great spirits on the world.
Remnants give another incentive for characters to explore the dominions of the great spirit, these ever-changing realms of twisted magic.
Soulbinds will allow characters to interact with the invention of the mortal world and the metaphysics of soul, and will put them in a position of dilemma through the exploration of the secrets behind soul fragments.
10) Conditions (Is all about the will)
Conditions represent the ways in which a character can get emotionally, physically or metaphysically hurt. They also are guides to players to the things that left a mark on their character after they have confronted a test or conflict.
Mechanically, they block the flow of the will of the character.
This can be seen directly from the character sheet, where there are lines that flow from the Will towards the boxes for Gifts, Skills and the magical items. If any of these lines is blocked by a condition, then the only way that a character can use the things connected to that line is by expending 1 Will to bypass the condition. This way to manage “damage” was designed to give more significance to the will of characters and to its importance in the narrative of the game.
This was the tour, I hope you didn’t get dizzy and confused by it.
As a final sneak peek at my design process (or at least of the things that help me when thinking of the game) I let you here some of the illustrations that I had made for it. Some of them are inspired by the works of artists as Oskar Kokoschka or Oskar Klever, some of them are explorations of different mediums, others are studies, but all of them are aimed toward defining the style of the illustrations I will include in the first version of the rules (in the latest version of the game I hope to work with an illustrator). This first version, that I plan to have at the end of this year, is intended to test TPO outside my circle of friends.
Have a great year!
