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View Full Version : Homestead - a magical frontier city-building wilderness exploration system



NichG
2019-12-21, 04:23 AM
I'm going to be starting up a campaign soon with a new homebrew system. The idea here is to focus on exploration and discovery, so much of the system is designed to enable the players to build and invent things - powers, technologies, buildings, etc - as they discover the laws of nature as the first settlers of a new plane of existence. So there aren't so many things in terms of specific moves, inventions, abilities, etc, as the intent is for players to invent as they go.

To support this, the idea is that at any time you can declare that you're just going to try something improvised, stuff like 'I will gather Linear Aspect from this one focus I have and combine it with Fire Aspect from this lantern, and push it out in front of me - what happens?'. An on-the-spot ruling is made as to the mechanics of that, and if you like those mechanics you can spend a 1/session resource (a Schematic Point) to basically write that down on your sheet as something you can do in the future whenever you like/have the resources for it, and you can teach it to others as well. If you don't like the mechanics, you don't spend the point, and if you try that again in the future then something else might happen (maybe you try to 'push' differently, or your Aspect sources have changed, or you use different ratios, etc). In some cases (e.g. based on skills/character build options), you can get to know what the result of your experiment would be before you commit the action or get guidance as to what experiment would get closer to a desired kind of effect.

The balance in design here is, I expect to have some players that will really get into the metaphysics and try exotic stuff, and some players who would rather just play or wing it. So I wanted there to be options which would be more 'I figure something out and get a result based on how well I understand' and options which would be more straightforward in terms of applying something that you acquire. So the different disciplines in the system (Flowcraft, Patterncraft, Imbuing, Alchemy, Geomancy, Invocation, etc) try to span a range of levels of abstraction.

In terms of conflict, another conceit of the system is to center around building up resources 'on the map' as it were, to mirror the settlement building aspects of the game. So most effects require attuning to sources of energy in the local environment, which can then be used to enhance the impact of abilities. A standard attack doesn't work primarily via ablative damage, but works by trying to push a disabling status condition past a certain threshold of passive defense that every character possesses. If you fail to push the status condition, then you fall back to doing a (low) amount of ablative damage that eventually causes the passive defense threshold to become zero. So you're trying to build up resources on the field that will give you enough oomph to one-shot an enemy (but this takes several rounds of build-up) or, if that is unlikely to work or if you can't actually perform that build-up, you can still fall back to chipping away at their ablative defenses. Since the primary mode of ending a conflict is one-shot attacks, there's an extra degree of protection for PCs in the system in the form of a Death Flag (similar to the optional rule in E6).

This is the system in its current form: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Zt-dxm5Rv2yrPdf7f87mL8RvVpl6AycZ

I'm now working on more detailed setting materials - maps, creatures, other settling families, etc.