Week 46 Update

Rogue Souls is now in its pre-launch Kickstarter phase! Please follow & share!

TL;DR While working on UI last week, I did a bunch of design work on integrating magic traditions & spells with languages, cultures, and religions. This week I continued working on UI, and I turned my design focus to combat maneuvers & status effects, conditions, & ailments.

Build & Deployment:

Development:

• Refactored interactions with the hexagon grids so they can interface via keyboard, mouse, and gamepad.

Design: 

• Combat design! I tried my hand at integrating concepts I've picked up from Fighting Games to a turn-based grid system.
  • Borrowing from fundamentals of fencing, I created several attack maneuvers intended to work in an imperfect & overlapping rock-paper-scissors-glue fashion. There is a superficial resemblance to maneuvers from 3e D&D Tome of Battle and 4e power format.
  • Borrowing from footwork fundamentals from various martial arts, I created some different stances and movement types to complement the attack maneuvers.
  • Looking to grappling & wrestling concepts, I revised status effects to represent grabbing & falling, and created some maneuvers that can fit (almost seamlessly!) into the above attack maneuvers.
  • I had a bolt of inspiration when I got around to throws & takedowns, when I realized there was a tremendous overlap in concepts & terminology between grappling, falling, & mounting so I reworked the 3 of them to overlap and use many of the same mechanics & effects.
• Ailment design! I've done a couple passes on status effects and conditions before as they relate to the combat system but this was my first attempt at creating a framework for long-term physical and mental ailments.
  • Ailment vectors! In many a TTRPG, conditions like diseases and status effects occur as a result of injury, whether that's from combat or traps... and very little else. It might be forgivable that chronic conditions aren't prevalent in games about escapism... if this were the 1970s. Since we have information about a wide variety of conditions, it makes sense to alter the game loop to accommodate different means of acquiring ailments.
  • Apart from injury, you have: bacteria, parasites, and fungi which are environmental and can be associated with different biomes. Poisons and prions are typically either too broad or too specific to be associated with a biome and can be associated with specific interactions. Viruses on the other hand, at least in the popular understanding, are something you get from other people. Any time characters visit specific populations they may be exposed to viral infections.
• There was a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff. Cultures, magic, spells, and some history.

Influence:

• Nimble 5e D&D - you should be able to grab a Preview PDF of the rules.

Marketing:

• Kickstarter is now in the pre-launch phase! We're trying to get more people to follow & share so we can raise awareness prior to launch! Please follow & share!