The Bridge Hack: Day 4

Finally got a manageable magic system that follows the constraints of no predefined spells.

Since the mechanic of my game relies on playing cards, some background before the crunchy details.

Any action that has a chance of failure requires you to draw a card to see the result. Once done, the card is placed face down in a discard pile. Physical damage done to a character requires the player to move a number of cards from the draw pile to the discard pile. If, for any reason, the player has no cards left on the draw pile, the character is exhausted. The character can do nothing.

That said, healing of any kind allows the player to take a number of random cards from the discard pile and return them to the draw pile. To make the selection random, the discard pile is shuffled before selecting cards. Cards that move from the discard pile back to the draw pile are placed on the bottom.

Still With Me?

This took longer than I thought. Next post will have the magic system.

    The Bridge Hack: Day 3

The Mythology has effect on characters. The temple system has two branches, the Hendeciad and the Exo. The Hendeciad is comprised of 8 Major Gods and 3 Major Titans. The Exo is a Kwemara, a third type of deity.

Background Story

As far as background, there was a creator god alone in the universe. Removing the 6th, 7th, and 8th digits from its hands and feet, it mixed its own flesh and blood with elements to create the gods.

Gods were created with stone. Titans followed, created with fire. Kwemara, the youngest, were created with water.

The Gods pursued stability and building, the Titans pursued passion and pleasure, the Kwemara pursued knowledge and wisdom.

Feeling unfavored, the Titans rebelled against the creator God. The Gods and Kwemara defended it. As the titans were losing the battle, a desperate titan killed the creator God. The war between the Gods and Titans waged for hundreds of years. The Kwemara retreated to the skies and the sea to mourn.

For the war, the Gods and Titans made servitor races. This is the origin of the various peoples.

When the Kwemara returned and found that the fighting continued, they put a stop to it. Able to reason with the Gods, the Gods had few casualties. The proud Titans, however, were all but annihilated.

The remaining deities made up of Gods and Titans made peace. The Kwemara again retreated to the skies and the sea, but one remained. Exo is the only worshiped Kwemara.

Mechanical Aspects

There are 51 deities and Exo. Each deity is associated with a card. Players are associated with a deity determined by where they fit into the temple system and which deity they take as a personal patron.

For example. A character may be assigned to the God part of the temple. Gods are associated with Clubs. They may choose the God of Luck (as opposed to a Titan or Exo) as a personal deity. The God of Luck is associated with the 7 of Clubs.

In play, drawing a club has a minor boon while drawing the personal deity card has a major boon.

Optional Aspects

Temple politics can be explored as much or as little as players desire. There's no real game need to explore these matters unless it is fun for everyone playing.

    The Bridge Hack: Day 2B

So let's work on the requirements before delving into the magic system:

Rule Requirements:

Your core mechanics cannot involve rolling a die or dice, adding modifiers, and comparing the result to a target difficulty number to determine binary success or failure.

Got the card mechanic approved. Draw a card with a lesser rank than the rank associated with an attribute. Drawing a card that matches the rank and suit of the attribute is a success.

• Your game cannot be directly Powered by the Apocalypse.

I enjoyed playing Dungeon World much more than running it. Since I am not using dice and I am not using yes, but or no, but successes and failures, I should be good on this one, too.

These requirements are meant broadly. Renaming swords to "blades" doesn't get you out of that requirement, and "swords" includes long knives, scimitars, katanas, rapiers, etc. If you're "skirting the line," you're too close. Make something different.

Thematic Requirements:

No swords.

Primary weapons will be sling, bows and arrows, wedges, and glove type things.

No guns of any type.

Drat. Okay, no guns or crossbows. No lasers, either.

No dungeons (or dungeon equivalents, like widespread ruins).

Got it. No dungeons or ruins. I'm also going to avoid ancient cities with old magic relics.

No undead.

Cool.

No demons or devils.

This actually makes worldbuilding easier for me.

No Conan-style barbarians.

CROM COUNT THE DEAD CLICHES!

No elves, dwarves, or halflings/hobbits

• Sentient dolphins that travel on land.
• Fire elementals from another dimension. (They don't look like Fire Elementals, though)
• Half Garuda/Half Human soldiers.
• Constructed beings that are well-adjusted, not created specifically for war, not golems, and accepted members of society.

There's more, but I think I'm good here. No re-skinned elves/dwarves/halflings, either.

The player-characters cannot be generic adventurers for hire.

Player Characters are agents of the Hendeciad, the eleven high priests of the human gods. They may or may not be double agents, also working for the Exo, the 12th god. Worship of Exo is not shunned, but it is rare and misunderstood. The creator God, the progenitor of the human gods and Exo is believed to be dead and therefore is not worshiped.

The Hendeciad controls a lot of resources within larger cities, but are less connected in smaller towns. They have no presence outside a specific region of the continent. The followers of Exo also have resources, but have some presence in lightly explored (and even unexplored) areas.

Character goals are usually associated with deliveries, explorations, or gaining access to mysteries. Characters that work/worship Exo may also work to reconnect different enclaves of Exo worshipers.

The setting cannot be just the standard Medieval Europe environment (peasants, barons, kings, Norman-style castles, horses, wagons, rolling farmland, etc.). It may include some of these individual elements.

No walled cities. Most cities are ruled by Byzantine bureaucracies.

If your game includes monsters, beasts, or other non-sentient opponents, they must be complex and interesting, not just a handful of simple combat stats.

All creatures were created by either the creator god, one of the eleven gods, or Exo. They are defined first by their creator, then by other factors. Combat stats are available, but the Hendeciad are not currently into military conquest.

If your game includes magic, it cannot use discrete, memorized spells with specific effects.

Card based magic system. More than that TBD.

For the purposes of this contest, "fantasy" is not a simulation of the real, actual world in the past, present, or recognizable future. Anything else is fantasy.?

Check. Not a European-ish setting. At least not on purpose.

The game must be playable. Don't submit a game where part of it is still an idea; make something up and throw that into the document. It doesn't need to be polished with all the margins lined up perfectly.?

Playable, eh? Now that will be a challenge. 🙂