Tag: Sean Gomes

Yesterday, while going through my group’s Dropbox, I found ancient design documents from the very first prototype of Uncharted Worlds, back in 2013. Feels like it should be in a museum or something. Should I toss it into a ‘museum’ subfolder in the Preview materials?

Prescience in roleplaying games:

A question about the Bene Gesserit brought up an interesting point about prediction, prophecy and general future sight in roleplaying games. I had been tooling around with a prophetic skill for the Chosen career for a while, but could never quite come up with something that felt right.

The main issue is that prophecy denies both dice rolls and player choice, in-so-far as it assumes a future series of events. Unless the power is “what will happen by the time I finish speaking this sentence”, almost all predictive powers are either rendered useless by player free will and the dice results, or take control of the game.

A possible solution might lie in the Data Points, and leveraging the cryptic, metaphorical nature of prescience. Instead of earning Data Points about a current or past subject through investigation and Assessment, the prophetic Data would be about potential future events like “The moment I die” or “The wrong word spoken” or “Finding true love”. No need to explain what the prophet saw, it doesn’t translate well. But when the moment comes, they’ll know, and be able to spend that Data Point to get + 1 on the roll that could either change what they foresaw, or ensure it comes true.

That said, I’m open to other paths of approach. Also, anyone know of roleplaying games that do prophecy well?

Random design musings:

FBH is still a little while away, but I try to do a little tooling around every so often. I have 2 kinds of Psionic careers (Kinetic, Telepath), 2 Magic careers (Occult, Arcane) and 2 Faith careers (Chosen, Devoted).

Now, each of these have representations in popular sci-fi/space opera media. What I haven’t seen is sci-fi druidic magic. I suppose that being connected to “the land” or to “nature” is quite hard in a starship or space station. I feel like it would require significant lore, just to make it work… which kinda defeats the point of the mix-and-match approach of the Archetype system. Usually the Archetype will take the two careers (Occult Engineer, Clandestine Chosen, Kinetic Technocrat) and explain the how and why that works.

In short, I’m struggling to find a druidic concept that is generic enough that it can be half of an Archetype, rather than dominating the archetype with all its unique baggage.

Now available to purchase on DTRPG. It’s here. It’s official! If you’ve been following but missed the Kickstarter, here’s your chance to grab the pdf. If you know folks who might be interested in your respective communities, please feel free to reshare! Whoooo. What a rush.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/162122/Uncharted-Worlds

Definitely using this as an adventure seed in Carta Galaxia. Rumors of an long dead alien city, on a planet that will soon be torn apart by a nearby star. Just getting to the planet will be hard enough, avoiding the shards of sundered planets, the gravity distortions and radiation storms. Then venturing into ancient, alien ruins (with all the dangers and horrors that might entail) while the planet tears itself apart, contending with hostile rival explorers, followed by the invariable 11th hour escape as the planet breaks apart.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-22/zombie-star-white-dwarf-killing-planets/6873658

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-22/zombie-star-white-dwarf-killing-planets/6873658

Hey. Backers. Check your emails.

From my file of “random stuff to write about in Carta Galaxia”: Popular galactic music styles. It’ll just be a short mention, because I’m not too savvy as far as music goes. But I’m thinking something along the lines of “Galactic News Inserts”, like a news ticker. “Anthrovox music made a big comeback in popularity across the Marchessa cluster and the stations of the Cascade thanks the the combination beat-boxing/throat-singing of the Cascade’s own Ultine Kova. While most people find the un-electronic “natural” human voices of anthrovox to be quaint or strange, Ultine’s new single proved catchy enough to make consumers take a second look.”

Wish I knew more about music-theory, though. Feels like I’m going to make a bunch of silly mistakes or just miss an obvious extrapolation.

So that’s a first. My provincial ISBN was vacc’d by the dirts at the bureau for being repeatedly and un-repentantly anglophone. That’s… not good. I’ll have to go up a step to the Federal level, which utterly and completely blades my plans to publish in the next few days, missing the skinning “deadline” of “end of Sept”.

Urgh. 

On the other hand, the Galactic Cant I’ve been working on is coming along nicely.

Dirt: Planet-bound nobody, annoyance, thing that makes you choke.

Blade: Backstab, undermined, prevented, stopped.

Skin, skinning: Vulnerable, weak, unprotected.

Also, uh, pdf coming very very soon!

I’ve been tucking away fun, setting-specific things for Carta Galaxia, to keep the core game as setting neutral as possible. One of them is insults/swearing. Those who know me know that traditional swearing doesn’t come easy to me. And while I’m sure that the future will still have its “shits” and whatnots, I wanted something a little more unique to the setting. Not “alien”, nonsensical words like mivvons and frak and frell, but oaths who’s etymology you can track. I was a big fan of the Sigil cant/slang from Planescape, where you could see where the root idea came from (Rattle your Bonebox = run your mouth, talk too much)

The four I have so far are Jacksocket (“asshole” with vaguely penetrative cyber-sexual connotations), Vacc (because you never want to be exposed to vacuum, plus it has a nice short four-letter-word exclamation), Vacc Sucker (again, soooorta sexual (?) but used as a “really stupid person” insult) and Plasma Gargler.