Wednesday 27 April 2022

Another souls-like heartbreaker to the pile

This is something I had worked on very lowkey whenever an inspiration happened to strike, and roughly a month back I felt like I finally had something solid enough for it to be put through some testing.
Said testing kind of fell through so I'm instead sharing the draft for the game as well as the notes I had prepared for what adventuring the PCs could have gone through in the test game.

The basic idea I had for this little mess of homebrew was to try to write rules for a world rather than make up a new system.
Something relatively modular that could be dropped on top of most roleplaying systems to shift the game towards the type of mood and themes I had in mind for my take on the whole souls-like vibe.

Blogposts without pictures are boring,
hence you get this thing I edited together
I wanted to go pursuing that kind of warm fairytale-like feeling horror, a world where memories work as currency as well as a way to make yourself stronger but will also unavoidably shape you as you claiming memories that aren't yours will ultimately result in you becoming something and someone totally different than the person who you were at the start of your journey.

That being said, the current draft for that "system" can be found here should you wish to see for yourself what I had managed to cobble together:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i17NqpKaWPS7BahEJ98NPKl_g20NC2Fv3WdoxDoQmZk/edit?usp=sharing

Obviously it will still need a lot of messing around with to get it to produce the desired feel. For example currently the Bad Blood idea isn't really doing much unless the PCs are already cleawing through villages worth of people so the treshold for gaining levels of bad blood should probably be lowered significantly.
Another potential idea to make Bad Blood more of an inner struggle between your violent urges and humanity would be to change it to something like this:
"Whenever you consciously cause the death of another self-aware being, roll under your current level of Bad Blood. On a failure, gain a level of Bad Blood."
That would probably lean towards the other extreme, where the PCs would accumulate bad blood way too fast though.

The idea of using solely memories to give the PCs any "advancements" or even special moves and skills was something that I really enjoyed in play both because it was fun to come up with small snippets of lore and special effects to accompany them, but also because with memories I could dictate the speed at which the PCs would get more powerful, as well as in which manner they would get more powerful.

The Adventure Notes

As mentioned, here you can also find the notes I had scrabbled together for myself to run this test game before it completely fell apart due to lack of players:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ae_-8ZmWTckEJd3xTNsWIeW9gur30ZOS4CF8Jq_HaMk/edit?usp=sharing

This will also require me to share the ideaboard I had been slowly gathering for this game over several months so you can get a better idea of what kind of imagery and base ideas I had been working with since the notes were not really written for someone else to run things off of:
https://jamboard.google.com/d/1gchK_8IJU46hn1WHvBVBISkNMf6Q7_5VaUmQHVLJ5q0/edit?usp=sharing

I hope that you will get some use out of these, and if you do I would love to hear what you managed to make or run off of the stuff presented here.

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