Well, If I am honest, over the summer my inspiration for Secrets of Arn kind of dwindled. Then life got in the way and the project just say on the back burner simmering for a bit. I also got distracted by a few other projects as you do.
It was not until I sat down to start working on my "Appendix N" for Secrets of Arn that the inspiration started to come trickling back. I just started with a list of movies which had me thinking, "I need to re-watch some of these" and so I did.
Though, what really burst the dam was my two recent conversations with Jeff Berry. I always deeply enjoy my conversations with him and just talking about history and sharing stories had my mind going in a million directions at once.
This resulted in me taking some time to work on the project, lose some sleep, hitting the books, and going over everything I have written so far.
Our conversations reiterated over and over again to keep it simple and to keep things moving as fast as possible and in as real time as possible. He also explained how basically the importance of die rolls come down to success or failure with a base chance of 50/50 and you adjust from there as needed.
UPDATE REGARDING PROBABILITY: A few people reached out to me to let me know that I got my probability wrong. I probably used anydice wrong and for complicated things, it is not exactly user friendly. Anyway, the updated percentages for looking for a single success (that is probably where I went wrong) are 1d6/33%, 2d6/66%, and 3d6/70%. The only big changes were in the latter two, but I like the probability better.
I guess I should of mentioned this first, but I adjusted character
creation as well. The character creation questions have been dropped
down to five, adjusted and called tags (this is one of the areas where
boons can be utilized). The fifth tag is actually a character flaw as no one is perfect - the flaw can be called in for a boon but the Referee can call it in for a setback if the flaw makes since in the fiction. There are additional questions that deal with
equipment and what not. I think this adjustment has created a more focused character creation process. This process ends up producing characters that are tied into the game mechanically and have a cleaner narrative focus.
Speaking of character creation, the characters special ability tag now has some expanded examples.
I have also had to make some tough design decisions in the invisible rule book section of the project.
Goodbye Priests
The players first tag choice during character creation is basically a choice of class and initially I had Priest as an option. After some careful consideration I decided to remove this option as the roots of the fantasy hobby did not have them and I feel like being a Priest is more of a vocation then anything else. I also did not want to deal with divine magic in my design as well as I wanted to remove magical healing outside of some not so effective healing herbs. This keeps hits as more of a resource management and retreat a positive tactic as natural healing is slow.
Hello Silver Standard
Initially, I was doing my best to avoid any type of coin counting and I created what I thought was a pretty intuitive narrative treasure system using treasure points to abstract wealth above and beyond basic necessities. Though, after thinking about it and reading historical sources I am going with the silver standard and various prices have been adjusted to match the silver standard directly. Some things were not multiplied for fiction reasons. In addition, I made it a point to state that coin in actual circulation is low and the treasure table reflects this.
In addition to the above, outside of a limited selection of potions and scrolls, magical items cannot be bought, should be rare, should be weird, and be useful in various situations. The writing and procedures reflects this.
Those Dang Upstart Wizards and their Fireballs
Historically games had a low magic focus and Blackmoor specifically attempted to avoid dealing with magic on the player character side. This is why each character had a unique ability. This was the approach I was going to take because lets face it, from both a fiction and a game design point of view, magic can be tricky - especially on the balance side. Though, I was recently told the story of how magic really came into the lime and that story goes something like this during a session:
"I cast fireball" said the World's first Wizard (Peter Gaylord)
"Wait what?" asked the Arneson.
"I cast fireball, that is what wizards do." said the Wizards first Wizard (Peter Gaylord)
That is when the Arneson decided they needed rules for magic and because of these dang upstart wizards, I figured it would be important to get ahead of the fireball so to speak. In addition to this, I personally love the idea of the classic wizard like Gandolf, Merlin, and Rincewind. With all the trappings of the pointy hats, spell books, and handful of parkour tricks. I also really like the idea of how the magic create tattoos on a wizard and these arcane tattoos grow as the wizards power grow. Thus, this is what I decided to base my idea of wizards off of.
I also knew if I was going to include magic, I wanted it powerful and limited in various aspects but I did not want to rely on the classic Vatican magic because (SPOILER ALERT) Secrets of Arn has no levels. So, to keep the classic feel going, I carefully selected 14 well known wizard spells and I added two spells that could be considered on the divine side (Banish and Speak with the Dead). Then I added a system to constrict the usage of spells and within these limitations, if a wizard is lucky, they may be able to cast the same spell a couple of times per day. Wizards also only start with one spell and yes fireball is one of 16 spells.
Monsters, Oh My!
I was originally just going to include a simple monster generator that can be used for all kinds of adversaries and leave it at that. Though, in the end I decided that I am going to include some sample monsters for quick use. This decision came about after I adjusted character creation as now adversaries may have access to tags and how some special abilities may allow a save. I am still going to include the monster generator but a typical entry in the final product is going to look like this:
Name (# of Hits)
Brief Description
Tags:
Equipment:
Advancement
As I stated previously, there is no level system built into Secrets of Arn. This is because traditionally there was not a level system as we know it today in modern games and a lot of the advancement happened organically by the characters moving up into social status, influence, power, and wealth. This is commonly known as domain play where characters become lords, ladies, generals, and the like. These characters when the reach the height of social power are usually retired as they are to important to go around "thumping bandits" and new characters are created to go on adventures but the original characters remain alive as NPC's that the player can occasionally slip back into to make decisions in the realm.
With that being said, I wanted to create an option for advancement to show some type of personal growth but once again I wanted to keep it limited and avoid bean counting. Advancements are based on amount of sessions participated in, a character can gain a max number of 9 advancements, and the choices when taking an advancement include gaining hits (to a certain number), learning a new skill that is not related the characters tags, and the ability to learn a new spell.
An important thing to note about skills is that they are not combat oriented and are more vocation an role play focused.
The advancement rulings are not going to be placed in the Invisible rule book section, they are going to be placed in the procedure section.
Encumbrance
Resource management is an important aspect of gaming for me and was an important aspect for the founders. I think this is in an aspect that become over complicated and I did not want to mess with math in dealing with item weight and the like. So, I decided on something simple. All characters have twelve backpack slots and all equipment take a single slot. This includes things like a single torch, a bundle of arrows, and so on. Characters can also carry (that are not included in one of the twelve slots) are a small personal items such jewelry or a pipe with tobacco. This is in addition to a coin purse that can hold up to 250 coins. if more coins are carried, they take up a backpack slot for every increment of 250. If a character decides to carry more then 12 items, all physical actions are completed at a setback.
That is all for now...the work continues.
