Skip to main content

TTRPG Tuesday: Channelers, I Call It

Hello and welcome back! Another post? So soon? How? Why? Don’t question it.  It’s a TTRPG Tuesday.

Today we’re revisiting the concept a few posts back where I proposed a magic system based on hosting spirits that consume you.  Since then I’ve attended my first Session Zero hangout, as well as a local TTRPG designer meetup here in Chicago, and have been very energized by the conversations I had in those spaces.  Session Zero in particular was great for iterating on the >1 minute’s worth of explanation I had for the magic system (which I’ve dubbed Channelers for the time being), which yielded many realizations, one being that this is inherently more horror-sympathetic of a system in feel and inspo than any of my usual stuff.  But the main exciting thing to come out of that convo, is Philosophies.  These stand in as classes/backgrounds, but have less to do with the combat role of a character (as the Spirits can shape that) and more to do with how the character views Spirits.

Crucially, no one is wrong about Spirits.  So in a typical story about malevolent beings that consume your sense of self, any cultists who worship those entities would eventually be proven to be suckers, manipulated by the Spirits.  In Channelers, what you believe about Spirits shapes how you interact with them and how they can affect you.  So our cultist equivalent, a Spirit-Worshipper, believes that there are some malevolent Spirits, but their Ancestral/Patron Spirit is inherently good - and so it is.  Hosting that particular Spirit will not harm the Channeler; but because the Spirit has nothing to feed on, the benefits are much smaller.

You also have of course the types of characters I initially envisioned, who are like warlocks, balancing a series of potentially deleterious relationships.  But there are also non-believers, who can accept magic but not that it comes from Spirits, and so they channel indiscriminately, paying the normal cost (perhaps even higher) for power that they have greater control over, and without the side effects/benefits.

This needs fleshing out of course, but synapses are firing and we are having a good time.  We’ll see if there’s anything more tangible I can build out of this.  The three Philosophies I’ve laid out so far, and perhaps one or two more? And say five basic Spirits and how the different Philosophies interact with them?

I like this, it feels more asymmetrical.  Off to noodle on this some more, til next time!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for Alice, left for Cat) and thro
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Beliefs as Roles

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the application was rather more literal, which was a fascinat
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Minimum Viable Product for WWDW?

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!
Post a Comment
Read more