Hey arden/tg/uardians, are you pining for an escape to a magical island floating in an endless sea? Do you long for the comfy gameplay of a lite townbuilder (á la The Quiet Year), where you can party your days away in elemental-themed villages? Do you have what it takes, to stand between them and the oncoming darkness?
Because it IS coming. And when it does, it’ll destroy everything you love. Will you stand by, while your home is consumed by the Shadow? Where will you draw the line?
>tf is this
It’s a solo game I made! About super-powerful elemental guardians on a fantasy “spellpunk” island, protecting their villages from eeeeevil things. It’s like if Bionicle somehow got inducted into League of Legends, by way of Exalted.
>wdym, solo game
Like Ironsworn, it’s built from the ground up to be played by just (you). Boasting a dynamic detail-oriented oracle system, consequence-based Roll mechanics, and a radically unique combat minigame; there’s nothing else quite like it (and if there is, please let me know!)
>who can I play as?
An ordinary guy or gal, with extra-ordinary potential. 20 mini-classes let you mix and match to create your perfect character. Carefully manage your Sentiments to kill gods with the power of friendship (or y’know, have a really, really nice picnic). Gain XP through a myriad of ways to reach the pinnacle of elemental might, and kick the Shadow where the sun don’t shine! Meaning, all over.
>ok this sounds cool, but my friends only play dnd-
Solo game, chum. Only you, the system, and your noggin. You could be playing right now. Go, save the island! Feel the power! BE the line!
>inb4 the corporate shills and zombies shit everything up because how dare someone make a homebrew and distribute it for free
Eh, from what I’ve seen this place is far more chill about personal projects than more content-aggregation based sites. Probably because in those places they assume you’re doing it to sell shit and/or funnel traffic.
I'm not gonna read it or even less play it, but you putting more effort into the hobby than all the nogames on /tg/ is commendable.
Well thanks, but weirdly it was only two months of work.
That is, for getting the doc cleaned up. The actual brainstorming/playtesting took three years...
Letting the ideas in your brain congeal into a solid, playable thing and then putting it out there is commendable.
Enjoy your island, anon. You've earned a few months of rest before the shadows come.
Looks pretty neat. I’ve only read through the first ten or so pages but I’m putting it on my list of stuff to try.
Not a fan of a lot of the art, especially on the tiers pages, but you do you.
Bit crusty, innit. Still better than what I would have kludged together though.
If it’s too distracting, there is a version without any at all.
Thanks my dude, I fukkin need it. The post-creative-frenzy low has been immense 😛
I bet there's some interesting takes in your game BUT this is also the gaygiest book I have ever seen so I couldn't read more than a couple pages, sorry. But good job on getting it out there I guess.
There's a version without the artwork if that's the issue
Only read a few parts here and there yet but everything I saw was solid and interesting. Thanks a lot for taking the time to write down your system and sharing it!
Never trust unicode symbols.
That’s a feature, not a bug - they’re d6 bonuses, and filled/black squares are penalties.
Much appreciated! Now I just need to knock the other 5-6 subsystems into shape, and I can die happy.
>That’s a feature, not a bug - they’re d6 bonuses, and filled/black squares are penalties.
Reasonable, and it's not your fault that it looks just like the unicode missing character glyph... but it does and it might put people off if they assume the font broke.
Been looking forward to this, congrats on the release.
AI art, huh? Rules AI written also? Not b***hing, just interested in the process here.
NTA, I don't think ChatGPT can grasp solo roleplaying.
It can't format books either. I'm not saying OP did no work, but you can fudge together quite a bit of AI output into something cohesive as long as you're willing to put in a little elbow grease to cover the seams.
And of course I forget an important doc, the formula reference.
All the text come from my own squishware, both the rules and the flavour. In my experience, easily available AI has a literary style equivalent of corpo art - wet paper towels have more pizzazz. I’m sure someone running GPT4 trained purely on Tolkien and Shakespeare can get some really neat results, but I don’t have the rig for that kind of endeavour.
And not to bash the bots too hard, but I really don’t think it would have been able to figure out these systems before I did. If there’s one thing this process has taught me, it’s that ideas on paper can turn out to be shit when at the table. Ironically, you have to be like GLaDOS - Always. Be. Testing.
I actually have a blogpost coming out tomorrow looking at the development of the combat system, which was quite interesting. It showcases like eight or so variants, and it’s basically just me going steadily insane until it all clicks. I’ll link it when it’s up.
Yeah, unfortunately Kan Liu is a bit out of my budget (£0), but this suffices.
>In my experience, easily available AI has a literary style equivalent of corpo art - wet paper towels have more pizzazz
You're not wrong. First couple times it gets you thinking "wow this has a lot of potential" and then you start noticing the very obvious formatting formula, the way it always structures every reply in the same way unless you painstakingly overload it with guidance to the point that you may as well just write it all yourself. An interesting novelty, but unless they take the moronation gimpsuit off of the AI, it will remain useless.
> have a blogpost coming out tomorrow looking at the development of the combat
It’s up:
>empaitirkosu.wordpress.com/2023/08/17/dev-stuff-eight-combat-systems-that-didnt-make-the-cut/
Impressive, OP. It strikes me as too derivative of 5e's aesthetic, but I can certainly appreciate the effort and enthusiasm. I downloaded this for a rainy day, but I already walk away inspired.
This was fa/tg/uy project? I've had your wordpress site bookmarked for months and I have not for the life of me been able recall where I first came across it. Anyway congrats on getting it finished
Out of curiosity, what did you use for formatting this OP?
Gdocs, which is why the index only has links instead of actual page numbers. Because apparently dynamic elements are too fancy for google..
Should be able to! I’ve played it with a team of 5, so it’s not solo-exclusive. Couple of pointers though:
>when travelling as a group, Arrive At A New Location once; doing it for each character can make things a little too chaotic. Any detail generated goes to whoever makes most sense to notice it.
>Share a threat list. You’re going to have a wider spread of stat bonuses (and special abilities), so the trade-off is that you have less individual mulligans to fall back on.
Your book looks really good. I'm making my own self-published wargame rulebook. How did you figure out the best way to stylize and format your pages? I can't seem to bridge the gap between white Word background and organized book. What software did you use?Any pointers?
> How did you figure out the best way to stylize and format your pages?
I didn’t, I used the worst way; dropping images straight into google docs, instead of using proper software like Indesign or Affinity.
What did help was making rough sketches of how I wanted it to look, see picrel. They’re little more than ms paint doodles, but even that first step towards actualising it helped a bunch.
> you familiar with Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine/Nobilis/Glitch?
Yep, and Wisher Theurgist Fatalist. I think the same author worked on the excellent social system for Ex3e, which I took heavy inspiration from (and which led to the whole Sentiments mechanic in PoET). Very avant-garde stuff.
>Gdocs, which is why the index only has links instead of actual page numbers. Because apparently dynamic elements are too fancy for google..
there's ways to get google to give page numbers on the index
I managed to do it for college work but I already forgot how lol
The table of contents, yes, but not the index. I suppose you could theoretically re-arrange the entries alphabetically after generating them.. But even then dynamic page links are still unsupported: So unless you want to do what I did and manually input each reference in the text, I’d go with a better tool.
Can my wife and I play it together?
Hey, Good job OP. It looks interesting. I think you know your graphic design is still at a beginner level but it looks good for a single man $0 project.
It's funny you should mention Exalted, because while I'm not wild about it I do like your art better than Exalted 3e's current standard of art. Just like I like how your setting feels more sincere and unapologetic about being a superhuman demigod than Exalted 3e currently does. Frick Exalted 3e is what I'm saying, 2e is where the hype was at and 1e at least got the ball rolling.
Also just to make sure I've gotten two Empyean examples right, am I to understand than becoming a demigod is something a PC can attempt on their own with sufficient magic, but actually willing a god into existence is something that takes a group effort just to try?
Exalted seemed like a godsend (pun intended) until I tried reading the system.
The difficulty guidelines are supposed to be for all Attempts, not just for group ones. I should probably put Group Attempts in its own little box, to make the separation more distinct..
Yeah, welcome to basically everyone's experience with Exalted. Cool fricking premise, then you found out you need a degree in accountancy to make sense of the combat system, THEN you find out the most recent iteration of the game is run by cloutchasers desperately trying to run away from the original premise of ancient mythology seen through the lens of hammy anime cliches out of secondhand embarrassment-depriving the whole thing of it's original charm.
And yeah, that sounds like a good idea. This whole thing really does remind me more of Godbound than Exalted tbh. If you haven't already I'd strongly recommend checking it out-unless you already have, which would explain a lot. The resemblance between a few things is uncanny.
Actually out of curiosity you familiar with Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine/Nobilis/Glitch? I just realised the first one is what the cover page's art reminded me of, even if it's quite a different system.
good job for writing and publishing your game, but I stopped reading at "spellpunk"
Wait, aren't you the fella who came up with MUNE? I think I ran into your blog a couple years ago, good to see this finalized. I'll give it a read later, you had me at Bionicle.
That”s me! PoET is a far cry from MUNE (terrible acronyms aside), but it does have some pretty neat innovations for solo stuff. Details are especially cool, and I find myself missing them when using other systems.
Yeah, I'm bumping, frick you. /tg/ needs more SOVLful passion projects and less bait and culture war shit.
Cheers my dude
Awesome, I’d love to hear how it goes!
I Will try to play it this weekend and tell You later
you need to get a drawing of a chick with bigger breasts on your cover if you want /tg/ to pay more attention.