It’s been a long Wiki Week! As noted before, the winner for Patreon was Sorcery. The winner for SubscriberStar was House Tan-Shai. I’ve been discussing Sorcery all week, but let me drop the major wiki week updates here and then discuss the design notes after the jump.
Sorcery isn’t a system of magic, it’s a framework of magic. It’s up to you as the GM to provide the details of the structure and details that turn it into a true magic mystem.
Enraged Eggplant
Previously, I introduced the basic essentials of Sorcery and its rules, but rules are just the basis for how the system will run. What makes magic genuinely interesting are the options it opens up, and how those options interact with one another. That is, the spells and the structure.
I’ve talked a lot about my disdain for flexible magic systems, because I tend to believe magic is as defined by its limitations as its options. If you can just up and murder your hated enemy instantly, most people will do just that. If we instead say that to kill an opponent requires knowing their name, or eye contact, and that every time you use magic to kill, there is some sort of “price” you must pay, some karmic scale that must be rebalanced, we start to get some of the interesting choices and “counterplay” that makes a game fun. Limits, thus, allow for interesting gameplay and problem solving.
Okay, but what sort of “gameplay” and “interesting choices” do we want? Since I’m working essentially with a blank slate, I can do whatever I want within the limits of what would be appropriate for the Psi-Wars setting. So, in this post, I’ll lay out some of my design goals and inspirations, so you’ll get a sense of what direction I went with my magic.
Continue reading “The Themes Of Psychic Sorcery”For wiki week, we have a pretty clear winner, though the Lithian Language came in close second, at least on the Patreon poll. Given the extent and difficulty of sorcery, though, I suspect putting it on the wiki will take up the whole week. This may surprise you, dear reader, if you’re not a backer, as I’ve been releasing it monthly for quite some time, which is why the Patrons voted for it.
This is a project I’ve been working on quietly for about half a year now, releasing one “college” of magic a month or so, with minor updates. We’re up to about 6 colleges now, and it’s coherent and settled enough that I feel confident releasing it. This will be a multi-part series. You can click the link below and jump straight through it, or keep reading to learn more about how it works and what I changed.
Link to Psi Wars Sorcery
Continue reading “Introducing: Psychic Sorcery”I want to complain.
I’m winding up Chivare and the last college, Primal Sorcery, which integrates certain aspects of herbalism/alchemy for our Lithian Witches and, pleased with the result, I began to work cautiously on some Wilwatiktan material (an unfortunate computer crash wiped out some of it, alas), and I began to work on poisons when I noticed something.
Poison is crazy.
My GM wouldn’t let me put cyanide on my rapier
Autumn Rain
I began by cataloging all of the various poisons to decide what precise toxins would show up in the Wilwatiktan environment when I noticed that some of these poisons are just insane. Sure, I expected something like Utra-Tech nerve poison to be dangerous. I didn’t expect primitive poisons to be absurd. Does anyone actually read these?
Let me explain what I mean. The Death potion, the most dreadful and terrible poison available to an alchemist, inflicts 4d toxic damage unless you succeed at an HT roll, in which case it’s so bad it still inflicts 2d toxic damage. TO me, this is the benchmark of a dangerous alchemical poison.
Cyanide, by contrast, deals 4d toxic damage with no roll to resist. It is more dangerous than the Death Potion.
I’m not sure what to make of this. Presumably, if you’re investing deeply into malicious forms of alchemy, it’s to trade in more lethal poisons than what one can find in nature. How are we to fix this?
Continue reading “The Problem with Poison”I should get better about posting to the blog when I update the wiki.
We’ve had two wiki weeks since the last update. I’ll just bundle up all the updates here in one spot:
Sidekicks won two months running on Patreon, so there are four more sidekicks for your very low-power Psi-Wars games, or as allies to your PCs.
Other than the doctor, this covers pretty much all the relatively generic sidekicks I have.
Subscribestar chose animal companions in February. This makes me happy, because we finally have some proper bestial allies on the wiki, and I feel like the template I’ve set up to handle this will work well. I’ve focused exclusive on Dog-like aliens, which have their own page now.
(My plan is to follow the Generic Space Bestiary template, and treat look-alike critters as the same animal handling specialty)
I have more. It’s just a matter of getting around to them.
Finally, Subscribestar tied for March, so I broke the tie in favor of psychokinesis, as I’ve been messing with it a lot. I’ve been updating the major psi pages to remove the pure references to the book and replace them with enough reference material to make your character from the wiki exclusively, if necessary, but not so much as to replace the book. That is, I’ve tried to make it more convenient and consistent without violating copyright (I still want you to buy the books, and you still ultimately need them to know how these abilities work).
I’ve also added much expanded pyro- and cryokinesis to psychokinesis.
Fear Mailanka’s NPCs
Jose Lusitanius
One of my backers, Jose, has repeatedly asked me to talk about how I build combat NPCs in Psi-Wars, how I make them so dangerous, and why the fights, to him, feel as fun as they do. I’ve also had requests for other things, like designing NPCs for social, stealth or investigative interactions, “because everyone knows how to build combat NPCs,” but that’s evidently not true. So I wanted to start early on with some core concepts here, because if you understand these concepts, the rest of the stuff I discuss will make more sense.
Continue reading “Building Combat NPCs in Psi-Wars”I make pretty potent NPCs for my campaigns. I notice this in particular with Psi-Wars (hence my commentary on “But can you make a 1000 point NPC?”), but it’s been true of most settings I run. I cut my teeth on settings like Exalted and chambara games which draw heavily on the overwrought aesthetics of anime and comics and thus favor high octane one-v-one fights, and thus demand high power characters.
But I also run games whose style I term “Secret Agent Games” or sometimes “Strategic Games” rather than the more tactical games often used by D&D game masters and games inspired by them (of course, very veteran DMs, especiall OSR DMs, will note that what I describe as “secret agent play” very much applies to them, and the more “tactical” game is more of a 3e-ism, but I digress. I just want to forestall inevitable “but actually” comments that are perfectly legitimate).
The problem is that in a tactical game, you will use the cool NPCs you create for a fight. As the players progress from encounter to encounter, they will face each set of opponents, who will typically scale worse and worse with each encounter, giving the players a sense of what they will face as they move forward. This is good game design, because this escalation teaches the players what the encounters will look like going forward, and help teach them what they need to do, so the final boss encounter feels like a culmination of the previous encounters. To use a Psi-Wars example, if players fight the Empire, they might face a squad of imperial troopers, then they might face a lone, apprentice Imperial Knight, then they might face a full Imperial knight backed by a squad of Imperial Troopers. The first two encounters prepare them for the final encounter, and they have a sense of what they will face and what tactics they need to use to win. It feels fair and logical.
Strategic play, or “Secret Agent” play doesn’t work like that. In such a game, the faction exists and it has its dragons and forces, like the Imperial Troopers and the Imperial Knight, and likely a variety of other agents, such as a minister that commands these forces, a security agent that investigates intrusions, etc. The players may or may not fight against them. They might join them, they might negotiate with them, they might sneak up on them. The fact that the Empire has a dangerous imperial knight or a secret psychic agent or whatever is a factor in PC strategic calculations. An opposing faction that lacks a powerful champion and lethal forces tends to encourage the players to see a violent encounter with them, as this is more likely to result in success, while a faction who has the Psi-Wars equivalent of Darth Vader and elite Death Troopers at their disposal will tend to encourage negotiation or a stealthy approach, as a direct head-to-head confrontation will result in defeat. Thus, players need to know how dangerous an opposing faction is, and they generally don’t do it with a sequence of small, tactical encounters.
This creates the problem of the sheathed sword. The enemy opposition has their champion who is presumably highly lethal, but that lethality is contained and unused, because to use that lethality invites reprisal and ends the possibility of negotiation. But if that lethality is not advertised, the faction loses out on some of its negotiation leverage. More importantly, as a GM, you need to communicate that lethality to the players without necessarily having the character fight them, especially if the character is supposed to be so lethal. Thus, the point of this post: how do you communicate the lethality of an NPC without, you know, killing the PCS?
Continue reading “Meditations on the Sheathed Sword”I keep forgetting to drop these links. Most of my readers follow the Wiki RSS and so just know in advance when things drop.
So, I’ve done it a little differently this time. Before I would pick one or two of the top results and wikify them, but now I think I’m going to take the top Patreon choice and the top SubscribeStar choice and wikify both. Why the difference? Because Subscribers don’t vote as much because there’s few of them, they can’t see what the Patrons are voting on, and they get a sense that they don’t matter. So now, their voice is weighted equal to the Patrons. Not entirely fair, but it seems more workable that way. At least this way, everyone gets what they want (and they usually tend to align anyway).
The top choice for Patrons was Psychometabolism, and it’s up. I might change how I handle rare powers, because they seem rather difficult to find or navigate to, and so most people don’t even realize they exist. But I’ll leave that for another time.
The top SubscribeStar choice was Heavy Weapons, so the Special Weapons and Heavy Weapons have been added to the Weapons page. There’s some little changes that may still need to be made, but at least the core of the material is there.
Finally, as a bonus, I’ve added House Korenno. They’re not especially important, which is why they’re important. I wanted to have a house that highlighted what a minor house might look like, because I notice most people treat my houses as “important” but still want to add some minor house or two, and House Korenno will help guide them through that process.
That’s all the major updates for the wiki this month. See you again for wiki week next month!
Don’t forget to breathe
The Nameless Monk, Forbidden Kingdom
Alright, the Keleni Breathing post is out and available to all Fellow Travelers ($3+) on both Patreon and SubscribeStar. Thank you for your patience! I wanted to discuss some design notes and hype it up a bit. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed writing it up.
Some additional notes on the breathing styles. Most martial artists in the Psi-Wars setting will probably study “external” styles first and foremost, so I would treat Keleni styles as advanced topics. They are worked examples of what “Trained by a Master” looks like in Psi-Wars. Second, I wouldn’t treat these like a menu, where characters go through a kung fu brochure, pick out the one they want, and then trundle off to that specific mountain temple to learn that specific style. I would treat them as scattered pieces of lore. There may be many Keleni monks who know the Keleni Breathing foundation, but few who know any of the more advanced concepts. If a deeper tradition exists, it’s likely the only one on the world. Some of the styles might not be known, or may be in the process of being discovered, or perhaps there is a mixed tradition, such as one style as a more advanced option to another style. You can just toss it in as a one-off power up on a scary NPC (to quote one of my players from Dhim “That’s one pissed off gelgathim“), or you can make it central to a kung fu-oriented campaign. The styles are designed to interact and you can mix and match, though a character with a couple of martial arts styles and a deep study of two Keleni breathing styles will easily run you 500 to 700 points. These are advanced characters!
Deciding where and how to use such styles can say a lot about the setting and its traditions. In my campaigns, I have Rage-Breathing available in the Stygian Veil, taught by a captured Keleni masters to some fighters who have converted to True Communion in the Pit, including one Terahastro, an elite pitfighter and former gangster. The rebellion on Covenant is led by a Prophet and has all sorts of fun factors, but they almost certainly have a Keleni Breathing master somewhere, though probably not a member of the rebellion (yet?). They either know Mountain Breathing or Celestial Breathing, possibly both as a single tradition. Dream-Breathing is probably known to the Dark Vigil chapter on Samsara, which they use with the power granted to them by their psychoactive tattoos. But these are just suggestions. You can decide how and where you want to use them. They are, after all, powerful kung fu secrets. While I’ve not required any “secrets” perks, it might be valid to treat certain power-ups as rare enough to require a perk to learn them.
In any case, enjoy, and thank you as always for supporting this project.
Finally, we always gotta have an evil style, the one stolen from the heroes, the one the elders of the style never want to talk about, the forbidden dark side that the desperate hero embraces and doesn’t realize turns him into the villain until too late.
Or, at least, it’s how I originally conceived of Rage-Breathing. It evolved considerably, and became perhaps the most detailed and my personal favorite (though, man, the amount of work it took). It’s certainly a style that Ranathim (and Krokuta and even humans) can use better than Keleni, but it’s not that Keleni don’t have a lot of bottled rage. It’s not evil, really, it’s about tapping into something primal, instinctive, and dangerous to push ones body to the brink. If Celestial Breathing owes a debt to Dragon Ball Z and this entire thing to Demon Slayers, Rage Breathing draws from Kengan Ashura (though it does borrow one concept from Dragon Ball Super that we will touch on).
Rage Breathing is built around the heart chakra (probably more intensely than any other style is built around a chakra) and is inspired by the element of fire, hence my fire demon picture there. It’s also a rather involved style, so let’s dive in.
Continue reading “Keleni Breathing IV – Rage Breathing”
Mailanka's Musing 