Turning 30
almost 3 years ago – Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 12:28:11 AM

Hey everyone! Whee, I turned 30 a few days ago. Yay. So moooving on…

We’re nearing the end of July and it’s looking like I’m not done with the theme of “discoverable mechanics”. It’s looking like I’ll need to extend this milestone till August to wrap things up.

In the meantime, let’s do a lightning round of all the stuff done these past two months.

Creature Updates!

Although I’m saving kickstarter funds for fully-rendered art pieces and whatnot, I thought it would be fun to put some of my own personal money into commissioning artwork for the less detailed creatures in the game. They are meant to be “sketches” akin to something you’d find in a handwritten journal.

The one on the left is the Arboreal Grinder I talked about in an update in ages past. The in-progress one on the right is the Hate Monkey, a creature originally envisioned by one of our Discord users Mizako. I thought it was cool and added it in but with my own special twist that hasn’t been rendered in the art yet. Those of you who have played Sekiro might know what horror is going to befall this ape. I'm going to be working with our $5000 tier donator to get a creature done in a similar way, it's the least I can do for them.

These artworks aren’t limited to new creatures though. I’m also adding a bit of personality to the pages of older monsters too. The sketch on the right page below was done by the same artist who did the original piece to the left. Her style is a mix of cartoony and cool in a way I really appreciate.

Just don’t ask how I work with artists.

I’ve also been messing with the formatting of creature statblocks a ton, in case you didn't notice. I’m not sure how much of it will be undone when we actually bring in a professional graphic designer, but I like to think that all this extra thought will pay off.

The List

Here’s the list of mechanics I need to go over, bold is what is done, italicized is nearly done:

--Combat--

Reaction Rolls

Interrupts

Aiming and Wounding

Movement & Positioning (So close but needs a couple touch-ups)

Techniques (Needs Mastered Versions)

Tracking & Ambushing

Chases & Races

Terrain & Environments (Needs an editing pass)

Overpowering the Weak

Advanced Perception (Needs an editing pass)

Advanced Wounds (Needs an editing pass)

--Dreams--

Gaining Humanity

Gaining Corruption (Needs an editing pass)

Nightmares

Drifting

Elder Deities

Occult Spellcasting

--Sanctuary--

Prosperity, Growing your Sanctuary

Renovations (Done, But Need Descriptions)

Decorations (Done, But Need Descriptions)

--Crafting--

Weapons, Bonesmithing

Armor, Bonesmithing (Done, but I want to add armor sets for the Faceless Devourer and the Onex Parasite)

Fleshsmithing (Needs an editing pass)

Ichorsmithing (Needs an editing pass)

--Disciplines and Corrupted Strains--

Body Disciplines

Agility Disciplines (Update Mercenary, Gladiator)

Mind Disciplines

Spirit Disciplines (Update Spy, Socialite)

Corruption Strains

--Extras--

Beast Taming (Needs an editing pass)

Beast Hunters

Tokens of Faith (Needs an editing pass)

Truth Scrivening

Lightning Round

All right, let’s rush through these

We got some updated formatting for what used to be called Initiative and Reactions (now called Reaction Rolls and Interrupts). I’m testing out the name change because calling the turn system "initiative" I think makes people default to D&D style initiative, which is not our style anymore.

Attacks and Weak Points are cleaned up. The weak points section was actually a horrid mash of several different versions for a while that I never got around to cleaning up until now. Whoops.

Oh god, dreams, this section took forever. I have been messing with this for ages trying to get something simple and clean (oh baby, don’t go). In the end I made it fairly hard to get a nightmare. 

Nightmares I think will need a touch of work with some additional playtesting, but I’m happy with how it turned out. You descend a bunch and you become more sensitive to the needs of the Source of the Corruption, whatever that may be. Neat. You get some serious rewards if you obey the Corruption.

Drifting was simplified quite a bit if you’d believe it. The old way made it much harder to meet the Elder Deities. I finally said, “**** it, bring them on baby.” My hope is both Nightmares and Drifting will be ripe for homebrew versions for those who want to mix things up.

Here they arrreee. The Elder Deities actually weren’t changed much, I just wanted to show off their artwork again, cropped as it is.

Occult Spellcasting is the reward you find for being a good little zealot to the Elder Deities.

Sanctuaries got simplified a lot. Paradoxically maybe a bit too much and too little? Whatever. As you create weapons, armor, and unholy fusions to your soul, your society automatically grows.

Here’s a list of cool upgrades to your society you get as it improves. Descriptions still need to be made but I love the flavor on these.

Armor, oh boy armor. To put it bluntly, this section was a dumpsterfire of disorganization and incompleteness before and it took a long time to tidy it up. But I think it looks kinda nice now. There are six armor sets showing above but the total is closer to 30.

All right, that was our lightning round. If I went in-depth I’d destroy everyone’s patience. Just trust me that there was a lot.

Turning 30

Current Mood: "Swimming" by Kero Kero Bonito

Very different than KKB’s usual flavor, “Swimming” tells a story about a childhood experience that is then revisited during adulthood. It’s not only about how things have changed, but how much has eerily stayed the same. There’s a lot going on here with relatively few lyrics, and even the repetition of the chorus has a haunting and beautiful meaning that I don’t often see in songs. It’s a bit sad, a bit optimistic, and I deeply enjoy it.

I didn’t take turning 30 too well. I’m doing fine, thanks for asking, the milestone just has a way of revealing insecurities you’ve been looking away from for a while. It’s made me realize how much has stayed the same in a way I don’t enjoy. I want to work on the project more, and I’m tired of being tied down by other obligations that make it hard to change.

Amid all this mumbling though, I got a package a few days ago. An ebay order made on a whim:

Rampage: World Tour and its sequel, Universal Tour, are about being big city-destroying monsters crushing and eating everything and everyone. It’s extremely repetitive, but kid me really didn’t care. I had way too much fun just being a monster, the kind of fun where after the game ends you pose as a T-Rex and crush an imaginary Lego city (because let’s be real, how many kids actually had enough Lego to make a respectable city? Shit is expensive, sheesh).

I hadn’t booted up my N64 in, gosh, like ten years. There was a bit of anxiety. Taking it out of the closet did not raise my hopes of it working.

But it worked! Hearing that same menu music start up in perfectly the same way it had done decades ago, it can get to you man.

And you know what? Being a giant monster is still a lot of fun. I think with my limited free time the repetition hits a little harder, but the game’s funny and stylish in the same way I enjoyed as a kid. I’m not sure if there’s been anything quite like it since, which is a bit weird to me. I figured more kids would love playing as giant monsters.

What were the creators up to? Did their love of giant movie monsters just up and disappear? The main artist, Brian Colin, apparently tried launching a kickstarter for a sequel to a game of his I never heard of. But otherwise, I can’t find much. I hope they’re doing okay.

Well, despite the ridiculous time this project is taking, I wouldn’t do anything else.  So I did find a way to step forward, at least a little. I’m working four days a week instead of five at my day job as of right now. It’s a financial hit, but the time I’ll get back is just priceless to me. Will this help speed up the project? Dunno, I hope so! Certainly seems reasonable on paper! My day job is not something I’m proud of, and every day spent working there feels like a drain on my soul. So a little less soul drain seems pretty great all around.

Why am I talking about all of this? Why couldn’t I have just said, “I’ve got a bit more time to work on the project now”? I can’t really say. Maybe it’s a way of apologizing for being behind progress projections again.

But I think at the end of the day, what I want to show is the human side to all of this. We’re all human here on this stupid little world. And when you get this book all printed and beautiful in your hands, I want you guys to know that a human made this (well, a lot of humans). Humans with flaws and anxieties, passions and loves.

So, I’m 30 now. Guess I’ll go through this all over again when I’m 40.

“…Swimming, across the sea, the current battles way down below me

Drifting, but holding on. I keep my head up to watch the shore…”

The Theme of June
almost 3 years ago – Mon, May 24, 2021 at 09:26:11 PM

Hey everyone! We're nearing the end of the two months focused on character creation, and it's done! Well save for a couple odds and ends I need to iron out this week, but pretty much done.

Actually, most of the focus this month was on other aspects of the game. There wasn't much left of character creation to do, so I got to work on finalizing more "discoverable mechanics", which is the theme for June and July!

Discoverable Mechanics

For the uninitiated, I'd like to go over what exactly *is* a discoverable mechanic.

Children of the Beast is an exploration game. Well, it's also a creature murder simulator but besides that it's main focus is exploration. I want people to feel like they're exploring a strange new place, with real surprises hidden away to find. It's why I talk about stuff like "mysteries" and "the gray truth", it's all in service to making a world that is reliable and replayable to explore. Although there are many games out there that allow you to explore, I don't think there are many that go out of their way to support it.

One of the ways I try to support this focus on exploration is through mechanics that are found as you play more of the game and do certain things. The Elder Deities that I talk about occasionally are a discoverable mechanic. In fact, you may never discover the Elder Deities if you never bother to explore all the aspects of the game. 

And that's fine! There is much less value in discovering something if one is always expected to find it. That being said, I try to signpost avenues to find discoverable mechanics as best I can. If you've ever played the original Legend of Zelda without a walkthrough, you might know the pain of bombing every tile for hidden doors. 

So discoverable mechanics are parts of the game that are hidden until (or if) you find them. Little reward nuggets for those who explore. Most are also optional, you can purposefully choose not to implement a discovered mechanic you don't like without breaking the game. 

It also allows the game to teach you rules in digestible chunks, rather than throwing an entire book at you to memorize. I think there is great value in having both the players and the Judge not required to grok everything at once.

Sanctuary Updates

One of the discoverable mechanics focuses on upgrading your society found within your Sanctuary. A large part of this month was focused on streamlining and updating this chunk of the game, as it was feeling a bit too complex after a while.

So after the update, upgrading your society works like this. If you bring back creature parts to your society, you can have craftsmen convert the parts into weapons, concoctions, new-and-improved organs and the like. They make these for you for free if you allow them to keep the leftover scrap you have no use for anyway. 

The craftsmen will extract silver from the scrap (a whole 'nother story) and otherwise use the remnant parts to craft buildings and upgrades to your society.

You can choose what they build. Some upgrades do not have mechanics tied to them, but some do. I also wanted to make a neat choice that says something about your society.

If you look closer at the renovations, you will notice they often come in pairs, with both renovations providing the same benefit.

I want each society to feel unique, so this choice is both about what kinds of upgrades and discoveries your group want to make, but also *how* they do it.

The Voice Gallery allows you to discover exotic languages by building a temple-like structure. Hanging on the walls lay the collected faces of strange creatures and peoples your society has found. By communicating with the somehow-still-living faces, you can learn their language and culture.

The Speech Lab, meanwhile, teaches language through brute force. Experimenters will edit your mouth with new shapes and holes, or graft on new speech organs to reproduce the sounds of the wild with perfection.

Both choices are a bit creepy, but I think they make very different statements on how your society accomplishes its goals and what they choose to value. Of course, you can also make up your own building and method to discover the world's secrets!

Other Odds and Ends

I've also been updating how dreams work and updating the formatting to monster statblocks. I could go quite in depth with these, but I'd prefer to keep these updates shorter lately. Put simply though, I've added some flavor to nightmares (now called the Nightmare of the Beast) where you negotiate with the source of the Corruption with a trade. The source (which is referred to as                until given a name) is going to corrupt you further, but it does not take without giving. You will gain corrupted abilities, but you will have to negotiate what parts of your bodies or minds you are giving up. The trade is not optional, but a clever hunter can take advantage of the situation!

Elder Deities are the other side of the dream coin, and that's been coming along well. They give you temporary "spellcasting" that uses their abilities, but they also give you a temporary "Conviction", which suggests how you should act to further please the Deity. It's neat.

I am falling asleep at the keyboard here, but I hope this little bit of progress has proved interesting. June and July will hopefully wrap up the rest of the mechanics in the game! Since the theme will be about these discoverable mechanics, feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I'll post another update to the rulebook at the end of the month after I tie up the last that needs to be done.

Have a great rest of your May!

April Character Creation
about 3 years ago – Sun, May 02, 2021 at 09:53:11 PM

Hey everyone! Like I said in the last update, April and May are centered around finishing up Character Creation. Here’s how all that’s been going so far.

Feedback Updates

First let’s go over changes influenced by you guys. Once again, thanks for all the feedback! Honestly, most of it was positive, but it’s always helpful knowing where a few problem areas are. Here are a few of the things brought up:

Character Sheet Attribute Boxes are Unclear

This one requires a bit of explaining. Your hunter can improve their attributes as you spend skill points on them. Spending skill points allows you to fill in boxes from left to right. Fill in enough boxes and your attribute bonus improves. But someone pointed out it’s a bit unclear when you get the bonus, so I made this small change to the character sheet that I think cleans it up a bit:

Drak’an Abilities Don’t Have Action Costs

You’re right! My bad, they’re all updated to be free reactions, meaning they can be used at any time instantly.

We Would Like More Playable Species

So this one’s an interesting one. There are currently five playable species: Sapiens, Rajahn, Drak’an, Drak’ul, and Oracca. CoB has a lot of secrets, and one of the secrets I wanted players to uncover is a sixth human species which is essentially a race of shapeshifting fish people. But hearing this feedback makes me think I should make this secret species more obvious that it exists, so I’ll include a page in character creation hinting at its existence.

I would like to include a second secret species as well, a race of moth people, but besides the extra playtesting time, all the species art was done by the same wonderful artist, and she doesn’t do commissions anymore unfortunately. Maybe since it’s a secret species I could get away with it being a similar, but different art style, but this is scope creep and I don’t want to get too caught up in that!

Besides moth people though, a secret people can uncover is that every creature in the game can be made a playable species. I know it’s not quite the same, but it’s rad as hell.

Starting Items are Barebones

Currently, your starting items are determined by your background, where you get several “kits” of items. The kits are just lists of items with no descriptions. The table right now is fugly but that’ll be cleaned up:

This one I am a bit hesitant to change (besides visual cleanup). We actually have descriptions of every mundane item in the game, but it takes up a lot of space.

I’m thinking later, when working on the discoverable mechanics in the later months, I can include a “market” section with all the mundane items you can purchase with their descriptions. That way I can have character creation reference that page if you’re curious enough. We’ll see, this one’s a tricky one.

What’s still remaining for character creation?

Not too much!

We are testing out one additional roleplaying mechanic: Convictions. This was actually a mechanic people could discover, but I’m wanting to see how it stands as a base mechanic when you create your hunter.

Species mysteries. These are optional pieces of species lore that can be added as extra flavor to your character’s background, and can be potential sparks for questlines. For example, Oracca reproduce as clones, retaining some of the memories of their parent. So villages of Oracca might all have memories of once being the same person. For a player, they could have lost memories of one of their past selves that continue to haunt them.

And besides some general cleanup work, that’s pretty much it! We may be done with character creation early.

Other things I’ve been working on

Since we have several playtest groups going, there are some discoverable mechanics that need quicker attention than others. Lately the one’s I’ve been working on:

Weapon Trait Slots: A simple system to upgrade your weapons. Been turning out pretty cool, but have to be careful to not make these traits too complex.

Supermassive Fireblight Drake: The more I work on this the more I think I can also include rules for making any creature supermassive.

Streamlining the Sanctuary: Right now rules on the Sanctuary are a bit bloated imo. I’m thinking of ways to cut down on unnecessary crunch.

Nightmares, Dreams, & the Drift: Biggest one I was still having trouble with here was making contact with the Elder Deities in the Drift, but I think it’s finally clicking together.

Disciplines and Corrupted Strains updated with Descent: Like I said in the last update, this one’s a time sink, but it’s coming along.

Hope you enjoyed this quick update! See you in a couple weeks.

Timeline and Character Creation
about 3 years ago – Sat, Apr 17, 2021 at 01:21:09 AM

Hey everyone! Fashionably late as ever, the last few updates got a bit out of control in size and scope, and I want to try simplifying things down. Today, let’s focus on details about the project’s overall progress and expected timeline.

But before we get into the nitty gritty, I admit, I got a bit frustrated in the comments when talking about this. I’m proud of the progress that’s been made but getting angry messages is never fun. I do understand though. Communication has been spotty and progress slow as a rock. It’s like, do I even care?

I do care. Way a lot. Crazy amounts. So let’s work together where we can, this project is just as much yours as it is mine. Feedback is like game design fertilizer; it really helps the process go faster.

Right now, the easiest way to do that is by creating some hunters! It is the most stable part of the draft and shouldn’t take you more than half an hour or so.

The Rulebook link is the same: CoB Rulebook  

Character Sheets (now automated!): CoB Hunter Sheets 

Sanctuary Sheets: CoB Sanctuary Sheets 

If you don’t want to read intro stuff, sanctuary and character creation rules start on page 7.

Feedback on this is crazy important. It’s the base upon which a ton of other rules are built upon. Is there too much? What parts are difficult to understand? What did you enjoy the most? 

The Timeline

So first off, why are things taking so long?

Well, besides life, a full-time job, and my mental “quirks”, a lot of effort has been going into streamlining and rewriting rules.

You see, when this project first started, it was envisioned as an app-only ttrpg. Like, with no book. The goal was we could create a ttrpg with a deep ruleset that was easy to use since the app would do all the calculating. The whole team was excited seeing the progress of this idea, but we ran into a big snag, an unfortunate business reality.

No one wants to pay for a full price app.

By “full price”, I mean anything above $10. And even $10 is a stretch. Other similar projects using subscription models instead were deeply unsuccessful unless affiliated with 5e.

We hoped that people would see the value added and be excited enough to give it a shot. But going to conventions and whatnot we found a similar line of feedback: people really did not like getting their pencil and paper taken away.

So roughly a year or so before the kickstarter, we changed course. We could make a book and make the app not mandatory, just a fun extra (which is disappointing just from the sheer manhours of effort we had been putting into it, but hey). I got the rules written down sans lore and creature stats and was feeling pretty good about how long the rest would take to make.

But it became obvious after a while the rules really were meant to have an app companion. There was a lot of raw calculation in. When playtesting without the app we kept track of status boosts and whatnot with poker chips and other knickknacks just to keep things moving. That’s “fine” when playtesting with the designer of the game, but a terrible expectation for everyone else.

That realization was one of many contributors to my big bout of depression I talked about in the first few months of the campaign. I didn’t want to release a shitty game, so there was a lot of work left to do, and I had no idea how much.

Progress really started flowing last year after trying some experimental stuff for fun. Suddenly everything was starting to “click” and I knew what path I had to follow. It was exciting! Also incredibly scary because I had no idea when these revisions would end. But they HAD to be done. A real game was starting to be born here and I wasn’t going to stop it.

So here we are today, and a lot of changes have been made. It’s still a relatively complex game when everything is used, but it’s a mix of complexity and yet free-flowing fun that I truly cherish.

It is funny that this is the course the project took, considering that in this post-covid world having an online only ttrpg might actually be way more accepted now than it would have been previously. But thems are the cosmic dice.

So Really, that Timeline

Right right, of course, *cough*. In truth, I still don’t have a *perfect* picture of what the future holds. In my frustration in the comments I said “1-2 years for the draft to be done”, but with a calmer mind I think I can say that’s way too much.

But that draft does need to be done. It’s kind of the linchpin before a bunch of other pieces can fall into place. We made about $27,000, which was reduced to $24,000 after taxes and kickstarter fees. If this was my personal life, that’d be a fair chunk of change, but for a project of this scope it is quite small. Lancer didn’t get to where it is with that kind of money.

So I do have to be careful with those funds, and I’ve been waiting to spend them so that I don’t waste money on improperly sized art, editing or laying out sections that get entirely rewritten, and all manner of unexpected waste. There’s always going to be some amount of finagling and mistake correction, but I want to reduce that as much as possible. We have over 100 pieces of artwork for Children of the Beast already, but for a 3-400 page book it’s going to need more. That Oraskur piece I so dearly love? That cost about $800 all told, and that was relatively cheap.

So we’re going to have to focus more on more budget friendly artwork if we still want a respectable final art count. Art quality for the project is still quite high so I have to be quite careful on how to approach this without having half a book filled with ugly art. I’m pooling my own personal money for this too.

But anyway! *cough* Yes, timeline. For now, the main thing I can focus on is the timeline of the draft. Here’s a rough idea of what to expect:

April and May

Mainly focused on Hunter/Sanctuary Creation and make sure the base gameplay is solid. There’s also more work to do on the transition between a base rules character and adding discoverable rules.

June and July

Focusing on the remaining discoverable rules. A lot of these are in a working state, but need to be overviewed and updated to make sure they fit within current design goals.

The biggest time sinks here are the “classes”: The Humanity-based Disciplines and the Corruption-based Mutations. The 24 Disciplines are nearly done and reaching a good state, but the 7 Mutations need a lot of work and playtesting done to fit the new descent system. Each Mutation has 3x the work that a single discipline does, so we’re roughly halfway done here right now.

August and September

Focusing on the beasts and the equipment made from them. Wanting to add a lot of simpler beasts to the game to complement the more complex ones. Also need to figure out and playtest the supergiant Fireblight Drake stretch goal. Got some ideas for this but may be difficult to test in an ideal environment, as it is a very very late-game creature.

October, November, and December

It’s time to sit down and fill in the rest of the lore. With everything else in the game hopefully pretty stable by this point, less work will be wasted on lore that isn’t relevant or that needs to be tweaked. Work on the app has been on hiatus while rules are being updated, but around here work can likely start again.

January and February 2022

If there’s decent time remaining, I would like to write a solid Judge guide. It’s not necessary, but I’ve already got a lot of notes built up over the years on how to present this.

This is a rough guess, as I usually don’t focus on one particular thing exclusively for an extended period of time, even if I wanted to! There’s a lot of moving parts, and sometimes you find a piece of the game that needs to be nailed down before another can fit snugly into place.

That being said, I want to use these months as also a guidelines for myself on how to engage with you guys, heck, even the discord. By giving focus to these times I can ask you guys to join me in the theme of the month (bi-month?). If we can have discussions about these themes as they come, that would be really exciting for me personally, and I hope we can have a more engaged style of communication here.

Anyway, we’re starting to verge into “too long” territory, so I’ll stop here for now. Please please please take a look at creating those characters, it should be pretty fun!

Have a great one y’all

Lore & Mysteries: Part 1
over 3 years ago – Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 07:57:17 AM

Whoo, so long 2020! Hope you all gained some refreshing holiday memories, even within the confines of the pandemic and other national issues. My holidays were profoundly stressful from my day job, leaving me a tired husk that looks forward to a calmer January/February.

So today we’re onward to lore! This is the first half of the lore update focusing on what I’m currently calling world catalysts, which are essentially the factions of the world you can use for the game. I’ve been flip-flopping on the name a lot, so one thing you could do to help me is after reading this update, vote in a poll at the bottom to help me choose a name for these beings and peoples.

Oh, and here’s a link to the latest rulebook, I forgot to include it in the last couple updates.

SECRET CHILDREN OF THE BEAST

A Look at Lore Design

Working on the background and lore detail of Children of the Beast has been a long, drawn-out process. If you care, here’s a basic look at my thought process when approaching lore.

I’ve mentioned in previous updates that I’m not the biggest fan of huge sections of raw world detail, at least in a core book. I prefer content that has high usability, in other words content that makes it clear and straightforward how to use it without a large amount of extra work.

Also, raw world detail is often prescriptive: it states how the world must be. It’s not to say you can’t change facts about the world, but it can be often unclear what you can change without breaking something critical. For how complex Children of the Beast is from its systems, I want the world to be largely thematic, so that if you understand the feel of the world you should be able to run an “authentic” Children of the Beast experience.

But even with that intent, it’s easy to say that the deeper lore isn’t necessary to play while still having lackluster execution. For example, if we write a cute piece of lore that says “everybody rides elephants when travelling”, that has vast implications if we're not careful. Besides raising questions like “how do these societies support all these goddamned elephants”, it's lore that would change the shape of your games if it was left out or not. It would also have ramifications for many other pieces of lore. If I write about cults, we should mention something about their elephants. When writing about beasts or beings of the world, we may have to write how they react to the presence of elephants. If we didn’t, it starts making the elephants feel invisible, which is bizarre, because it’s literally masses of goddamned elephants.

Silliness aside, this means world detail that affects other lore or is prevalent enough becomes a required piece of lore. Required lore needs to be used sparingly. For example, a required piece of lore we do have is that humans have sanctuaries and god creatures that guard them. I enjoy this bit of world detail because your personal sanctuary and god creature is the first thing you create when you start a game. It draws you in to a bit of the world’s strangeness and establishes something personal to tie you to the game. If we don’t have so much required lore that it starts feeling like reading homework, it can be an essential part of the experience.

So for the optional lore that does exist within the core book, I wanted it to accomplish three goals as best as possible:

1. High Usability – It should be clear and straightforward how to use any chunk of lore

2. Be Descriptive Not Prescriptive – Any optional piece of lore should be self-contained and can be added to the game as additional flavor, and should not be required to understand the world

3. As Personal as Possible – The world’s details and secrets should be relevant to your hunters and be easy to personalize.

That last goal is an extra push from myself. It means two things (so maybe it’s two goals?). First, it should be easy for players (not the judge) to enjoy any lore during the game. Second,I’m trying to build in some fun tools to make your own unique experience. For me, that’s often random tables, as boy do I love rolling on random tables filled with cool stuff. When you create your sanctuary and god creature for example, you can roll on a bunch of tables to see what unique place and god you’ve got. Our discord campaign has a god creature that’s a “bolt-zapping worm beast that has a vocal personality”, and the veteran campaign has a “Many-numbered bird beast that gives utterances that penetrate deep into your mind”. That last one we decided was like a cloud of crows each individually cawing a horrible truth. But I guess villagers just get used to it after a while.

Now, I’m not saying every piece of lore follows these goals perfectly. They are ideals to strive for but in the end what matters is the basic-ass question “is it fun and cool”. Of course, all this philosophizing goes completely out the window when writing a splat book, but eh, that’s not what we’re doing here.

To try to reach these goals I broke lore up into three distinct types: Catalysts, Mysteries, and Environments. We’ve already touched upon environments, so in this giganta-update I want to focus on how the Catalysts and Mysteries are turning out.

What are Catalysts?

Catalysts are powerful groups or individual beings that are active forces your group will run into multiple times during your campaign. The goal of these is to have a couple your judge chooses to use for your campaign that will interact with the main plot, even if the catalyst groups themselves aren’t the main problem you hunters have to solve. Perhaps your hunters will ally with them, or perhaps a catalyst will ally with the main threat to your hunters. Relationships can change over the course of the campaign and I hope by providing these, they will be a neat way to add relatively easy and unique flavor and drama to your games. Most catalysts are designed to be at least somewhat morally gray or conflicted, so that it's conceivable to form and break relationships as your game progresses.

Relating Catalysts to the lore design goals I mentioned earlier…

1. Catalysts are easy to pick and choose favorites, just select from a list.

2. Catalysts are self-contained, most do not reference other catalysts. Though I admit I do cheat a bit with this at times, referencing other lore that is not necessary to fully understand.

3. Catalysts are personal since your combination of them will likely be unique for your campaign. That being said, not all Catalysts have random tables to use for an aspect of them. For some it just doesn’t fit!

Now a part of the world lore is that there are different levels of reality, and some catalysts originate from these deeper levels. To use the lower level catalysts, your judge will need to read up on what that layer of reality is, so they are categorized separately from other catalysts (Of course when I try to make things easy I just make them weird again! Such is life).

Here is the complete list of Catalysts that I’m working on for the core book. There are over 30, so I’m only going to do an overview of a couple and give a basic description of the rest. There’s a lot here, and some of them are in flux as I continue to work on them, so I don’t want to spend an eternity going over each one. Though in future updates I’d love to!

World Catalysts

Beings and peoples that exist in the Warrens, the plane of reality of humans. No additional reading material required.

The Faceless

A group known for their practice of extracting memories from others. These memories are collected in a liquid form and added to grand libraries, where they are either copied or injected into curious members. Strenuous training is required to endure the acts of memory extraction and injection, as the process of removing or adding to one’s mind can cause great strain to one’s sense of identity. The group earns its name from those that have gone too far, as their fractured personalities begin to warp their physical form.

Many members of the faceless are scholars seeking to learn wisdom from the annals of memory, but there are just as many others using the group to forward their own selfish goals. As much as information itself can be a powerful tool, some of these selfish members use forced memory extraction, which can leave victims as husks of their former selves ready to have their minds replaced with subservient thoughts.

Meanwhile others seek to gain power over the source of their memory altering instruments: an entity known as the Crawling Moon. It appears as a celestial body that quite literally crawls across the sky with gossamer strands of light. Those that seek to control it are often fools, but not without cunning and powers of their own.

One such fool we provide is the Mhariva, a many-armed creature that has learned to communicate with a being of sub-reality. Using a specialized fungal dye, the Mhariva can inscribe the being’s undulating language upon others. So long as the Mhariva retains their relationship with this being, these words become instructions that allow the Mhariva to have greater control of their subjects, and perhaps someday, the Crawling Moon itself.

Azazi

Swarms of floating lights that resemble our world’s myth of the will-o-wisp. These spirits float through wherever it is deeply dark, whether in overgrown forests or undisturbed fleshtunnels. Their light gives off a high-pitched whine imperceptible to aged ears. But that noise is not due to the light. The Azazi’s true physical form resembles a lipless, wide-toothed mouth perpetually screaming, and this screaming is both the source of the high-pitched sound and the light they produce. When threatened, these mouths will swarm together around their foe and dig in their teeth. The resonations produce such heat that their victims can melt when exposed to enough swarming Azazi.

Despite their true, mouthy appearance and cruel method of attack, most Azazi are peaceful by nature and quite intelligent. But they are a confused people, finding themselves guarding the nests of other creatures with their lives or being taken advantage of by others with strong wills without a rational sense as to why they do so. Whatever a swarm of Azazi put their mind to, however, they stick to almost fanatically until a more interesting purpose catches their fancy.

Their erratic sense of purpose stems from their origin: they are the physical manifestations of a long dead god’s decaying mind. Somewhere beneath the earth within a swirling pool of light lies the rotten remains of this beastly creature. Bubbles of light sprout from its skull as its lingering consciousness becomes ever smaller. All Azazi know of this pool and where to find it, but it is a sacred and dangerous place, filled with thousands of freshly born and easily spooked Azazi.

Mudmen

Mudmen are creatures caught in between the sacred states of solid and liquid, and so believe themselves to be the punished remnants of whatever created them. Most share a powerful self-hatred that expresses as great anger, depression, ambivalence, and in some rare instances a disturbing degree of motivation. Mudmen societies usually revolve around blaming a singular entity for their problems and doing everything they can to either attack or subvert that foe, whether it be real or imagined.

Unfortunately for them, they do not tend to possess gifted minds or talent (or perhaps their emotions cloud what potential they may have), so their plans are basic and often ineffective at accomplishing whatever they intended to achieve.

But the mudmens’ physical properties wreak havoc even despite their self-fulfilling prophecies of failure. Whatever liquid they touch converts into mud, and regrettably for most life we are not complete solids. Those touched by them watch pieces of themselves imperfectly dissolve into brown sludge. Legions of mudmen leave behind trails of muddy wake, and when they reside within the great mires they call home, they are practically invincible, reforming in seconds after being destroyed. Mudmen never consciously realize this power, almost as if admitting their strength would shatter their own sense of themselves. Instead, they cause chaos through incompetence, halfway converting creatures, hillsides, and sanctuaries into slumped, squishy mounds.

Glazeem

Glazeem are a form of proto-life born from the mercury blood of a mountainous Uldabeast. They resemble a blue-tinted slime with eyeballs that float and pop like perpetual bubbles within them. Survival for a Glazeem requires the slime to force itself inside another creature’s body. As the Glazeem gains control over the victim’s faculties, it digests them from the inside in a slow process that will take several months. Although first shambling like a zombie, eventually the Glazeem’s new body will feel perfectly natural to move. It will then return to its society where a diverse collection of other taken forms is gathered.

Although their means of nourishment are ghoulish, their species is kind and open-minded. The taking over of bodies is seen as a sad, but necessary ritual, and they give thanks to those they take. A Glazeem cannot leave their body until it deteriorates, so they use it as an opportunity to experience the world in a different way, with some Glazeem debating long nights over the advantages and disadvantages of being an octopus-like creature or a monkey.

But as easy as it is to generalize the positive, there are less savory Glazeem who seek a form of “racial purity”. Whether this means taking bodies by force, killing non-Glazeem unworthy of being taken, or attempting to evolve their capabilities to something deadlier, the reputation of these hated members destroys most human attempts at sympathy.

Sareesh

A race of shapeshifting fish people that were betrayed countless times in the past by the Drak’an and other humans. They can shapeshift into those they have devoured, allowing them to infiltrate societies and disrupt their leadership. They have ways of changing the shape of others as well, allowing them to convert overthrown societies or the gods that protect them.

The Purge

An infectious fungus that takes over creatures and repurposes them into fungal workers. They often spread and attack in mindless hordes when it rains, as the water washes away their underground means of communicating with their central home. Despite this, their central mind is intelligent and can be reasoned with when the rains have stopped.

Maneaters

The name given to hunters of hunters, the greatest prey of all. They devour other children of the beast and steal their abilities, often becoming the closest to mutate into abominations.

Elder Cults – Cults based off of the four Elder Deities

Cinder Knights

Transformed knights with an absolute sense of morality that burned a literal flame within them until they became walking bodies of ash. They are directed by their cloaks of living smoke born from their burned away personalities.

Bo

A group that has made their bodies vessels for the void, allowing themselves to open their brains and bring others to the void’s nothingness. Some members have advanced to a stage akin to trees with vacuous mouths that drain the surrounding area of thought.

There are two other elder cults that I’m not happy with and am still working on.

The Custodians

A wormlike hivemind that devours the memories of the dead. The worms retain the knowledge of countless ages and will often aid those that bring them an interesting meal.

Uldabeasts

Mountain-range sized creatures whose mere presence distorts the landscape. Their blood creates primitive forms of life that shape entirely new environments.

Recondites - Powerful beings that will each have a small entry within the book. To fully flesh them out will require an entire expansion.

Aos, the Eternal Engine

A true dragon that expels the energy created from its twin Zel. The amount of energy expelled constantly rises as Zel’s rift grows wider, and eventually may obliterate the world.

Alagast, the One in White

A mysterious being that all life unconsciously knows and bows to out of primitive fear. Followers use the judgment of Alagast as an absolute force that no will can stop.

Arteris, the Ravenous Hive

A massive insect that harbors within it countless species of insectoid life that buzz and slither in cacophonous harmony. Followers take in some of these children to become hives themselves.

Doma, the Obsidian Arbiter

Leader of the Elder Deity Tardren’s shadow enforcement. It acts as an extrajudicial force against those that betray Tardren in a way that extends past his values of good and evil.

Kasglamesh, the Exarch of Bile

An immortal being stuck in an endless cycle of rotting away and unceasing pain. It has come to view this process as beautiful, and its followers adopt this dogma of suffering as pure and righteous.

Goiya, the Maestro of Form

A being that sings the songs of creation that resonate with the primitive consciousness that makes up the world. Creates and converts new life to find the perfect music.

Ji of True Knowledge and Lezos

An artificial being created by the genius madman Lezos. By connecting oneself to the Ji of True Knowledge, one connects themselves to all others connected to it.

O, He Without Face

A being that long ago lost most of its brain, and now believes that all others are simply extensions of itself. Followers seek to convert others to the mind of O, or as they put it “make them realize the truth”.

Orgos, the Rejector of Being

Sibling of O, Orgos has difficulty believing in anything but itself, not even trusting its own perceptions. It has the power to make true things false, and erase pieces of existence it has encountered. Followers convince Orgos that they are pieces of him so that they can use this power of rejection for themselves.

Zel, the Insatiable Furnace

A true dragon thsat is the manifestation of a rift in reality that sucks in all matter and converts it to energy, which is then used by its twin Aos. The rift within it grows wider and wider, and eventually may eat the world.

Deep Catalysts 

Beings that exist in the sub-reality of the Drift, the dream world.

The Crawling Moon

A mysterious floating entity worshipped by many, it is the shadow of a dream being’s mind. Those it loves it turns into stars that can grow alongside it, and those it hates it turns into faceless creatures or gives them gifts that will ultimately lead to their destruction.

True Elder Deities - When they show their true colors

True Tardren

The judgmental Elder Deity of Light and Morality has gone insane attempting to stop the inevitable death of the universe. Continues to try countless foolish methods to prevent the end which get untold amounts of humans and beasts killed.

True Ordega

The silent Elder Deity of Knowledge and Void internally claims that she has gone silent because they see no solution to the death of the universe, but in reality talks constantly to followers she wants to toy with out of boredom.

True Oraskur

The motherly Elder Deity of Life and Death embraces the death of the universe as an opportunity to discover the ultimate lifeform. Is the progenitor of a multi-dimensional war of specially bred super mutants.

True Yaj

The paradoxical Elder Deity of Luck and Destiny has become nihilistic in response to the death of the universe, now so desperate they see countless patterns where there are none and forces their “revelations” upon their followers.

Benevulze the Spiral Thing

An answer to the source of iron, the lifeless metal. Basically a big eldritch horror dude that can curse your group so that spirals they encounter become pieces of Benevulze.

Aeonic Catalysts 

Beings that exist in the sub-reality of the Lower Sludge, the deepest known origin of all things.

Aeonic Corruption

The standard answer to the source of the Corruption, this thing is an indescribable horror of sub-reality who’s body is leaking into the Warrens as the Corruption. You defeat the indescribable horror in part by finding ways to describe it. Kinda meta, hella experimental, can’t wait to see how it turns out.

Keepers

A collection of entities whose goal is to restore their own view of order to the Warrens. Something in reality is broken and they’re going to fix it unless you stop them. Can you defeat the cosmic elevator repairman?

*Whew!* Quite a lot there. Next time we’ll focus on mysteries, which you can think of as plot outlines judges can use to create a framework for their campaign.

Finally, a way to help me out would be to voice your opinion on the naming of Catalysts. Is Catalyst too wordy, should I be more straightforward? The reason I was drawn to Catalyst is that I wanted something that sounded unique, cool, and that could categorize both large groups of people and singular powerful entities. But I’d love to hear your thoughts!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/X9RSHQZ

Of course, you can always voice your opinion in the comments, though I admit I’ve been pretty absent from there lately. I genuinely do not enjoy upsetting people I care about and after the last batch of shenanigans it’s been harder to handle my anxiety enough to answer some of the harsher voices. Give me some time, I do read them.

Have a great 2021! May it be slightly less insane.