A tabletop monster hunting rpg where you evolve your character by consuming the creatures you kill.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Still Alive
about 4 years ago
– Thu, May 14, 2020 at 11:42:52 AM
Hey everyone! I've been struggling to keep up with my new day job, so sorry for the lack of updates. I've been exhausted when I've been getting home and haven't had much energy and time to work on the project. That being said, I'm finally getting used to this job (what it is I'm too embarrassed to say), and so I wanted to use this time to give you a progress checklist for the project that will give you an idea as to where we're heading in the future. Today will focus on the book, as the app, besides the adventure, is developed alongside the book and is not influenced very much by me.
There are really 3 big steps to finishing the book:
Finishing the manuscript
Editing/Layout
Additional Artwork
The big hurdle right now is getting the manuscript for the book done. The remaining artwork we need relies on the final layout of the book, and layout of the book relies on the manuscript being done. We're going to be relying on contractors to get the final layout work done, and it's much less expensive to give them the entire finished manuscript instead of asking them to work on a few chapters at a time. When the final layout is done, we will then be able to see what parts of the book will need to be filled with more art and what dimensions they will need to be. It's really easy to overspend on art if you're not careful (especially with the fantastical demands of this particular project).
So let's dive into the manuscript and see how that's going.
The book of Children of the Beast is divided into 5 "book" sections and an introduction. Book 1 focuses on the basics needed to create characters and play the game, book 2 is about mechanics and aspects of the game you discover over the course of play, book 3 is the judge advice section along with advanced and optional rules, book 4 is the lore section, and book 5 is the bestiary.
Introduction - FINISHED
This one took a good while, but I am mostly content with where this section's at. It introduces the absolutely most critical pieces of info you need to play the game, and allows you to create your own sanctuary. You could almost play the game with just the info you learn from the introduction.
The only part I'm still questioning is the opening text here, as I feel it may be a bit too cheesy. But there are higher priority things to worry about.
Book 1 - Entering the Warrens - FINISHED
Chapter 1 – Creating a Hunter - FINISHED
Chapter 2 – Getting Started - FINISHED
Chapter 3 - Combat - FINISHED
This section went through a major restructuring. Both character creation and most of the gameplay rules were finished months ago, but a lot of playtesters had difficulty learning the game straight from the book. I felt a big reason for this is that the game has tons and tons of potential mechanics for you to learn, but a huge portion of them are just not necessary immediately. In fact, I was hoping people would just read the sections that interested them, and not take the whole book as something they needed to learn.
But in the end, even to people who did choose what to read, it just wasn't clear what info was necessary to learn and what wasn't. So now we have two book sections, with this one containing all the necessary mechanics you should learn, and book 2 which contains all the extra mechanics that you can learn as you play. Chapter 2 even includes a section that details when you should read about new mechanics and what discoveries you can make, and I hope that makes the game feel that much more explorable.
Chapter 6 – Inner Occult - FINISHED BUT BEING REFORMATTED
Chapter 7 – Alliances - FINISHED BUT BEING REFORMATTED
Chapter 8 – Death - FINISHED BUT NEEDS EDITING
As said before, this section details all sorts of discoverable mechanics you can learn as you play. Entire chapters had to be rewritten when the great restructuring happened, and parts of it still need cleaning up. But most of the mechanics are there, and it's looking good to me.
Book 3 - Secrets of the Warrens - ROUGH DRAFT
Chapter 8 – Humanity - ROUGH DRAFT
Chapter 9 – The Warrens - ROUGH DRAFT
Chapter 10 – The Drift - ROUGH DRAFT
Chapter 11 – Lower Sludge - ROUGH DRAFT
This is the section being worked on right now. Chapter 9 and 10 are BY FAR the largest of these chapters, as "the Warrens" contains the info on all the environments, the structure of the world, the elder deities, and many other things (expected to be 40-50 pages). "The Drift" contains answers to many mysteries of the world (and raises many others!), including the truth of the elder deities, the nature of death, and the infinite multiverse (expected to be 20-30 pages).
Humanity is almost an introduction to the the lore section and provides more details about the species of humans themselves. The Lower Sludge chapter is almost an extension of the Drift chapter, just adding a few more curious twists to make you question the true nature of the world.
These chapters will take a while, but god am I looking forward to commissioning more art for these chapters. I want to see the zero gravity zipline!
Book 4 - Judge's Handbook - IN PROGRESS
Chapter 12 – Gentleman’s Guide to Judging (working title) - RANDOM SCRAWLINGS
Chapter 13 – Creating an Awesome Adventure (working title) - RANDOM SCRAWLINGS
This section is meant to provide a bunch of tools for the judge. Chapter 12 is intended to give guidelines on how to be a good referee of a game, while Chapter 13 is intended to provide our team's personal philosophy for running a cool adventure with great pacing and surprises. Chapter 14 is exactly what it says, a section describing advanced and optional rules. Advanced rules are rules that unlock extra features of the game at the cost of some extra complexity, while optional rules are just neat bonuses you can choose to play with or not.
Finally, chapter 15 is the section I detailed a few months ago, intended to be a section that provides alternative lore for the judge and a few guidelines on creating your own lore, although obviously you don't need to listen to our advice.
Book 5 - Creatures and Beasts - IN PROGRESS
Chapter 16 – Understanding Creatures - WAS FINISHED, BUT NEEDS UPDATING
Chapter 18 – Bestiary - ROUGHLY 10 NON-TEMPLATE MONSTERS TO GO
Chapter 19 – Elder Bestiary - ROUGHLY 5 NON-TEMPLATE MONSTERS TO GO
We've got quite a few creatures left to put in the book (I think about 15-20?), and that number only grew with the decision to add template monsters. Ohhh boy that added a lot of extra development time, but I'm sure you guys will appreciate the expanded monster list. This section also includes rules on playing as creatures.
The Elder Bestiary I'm not sure is a chapter that actually needs to exist, as it's just the "Epic" endgame monsters and could be melded into the bestiary chapter just fine. But with the game's whole theme of exploration and discovery, I feel like stowing away the uber creatures in a hidden final chapter just feels appropriate.
So yeah, still a lot to go, but hopefully you have a better idea of what the book will eventually fully contain. Have a great week!
Layout Progress Continues
about 4 years ago
– Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 10:45:13 PM
Hey everyone! Still making progress on those environment layouts. To be honest the creativity's been a bit low this week, and I've have had to take a bit more rest time than usual. Coming up with dozens upon dozens of random encounters and template monsters in a few weeks time is a bit draining, so I may need to switch to another part of the book after these three layouts are done just so I don't burn out.
Here are a few new creatures being added with these layouts:
Frozen Abyss
Arboreal Grinder - This creature's body is mostly a gaping mouth that contains rows upon rows of rotating teeth. It burrows and grinds through walls of ice like a garbage disposal, boiling the ice out of vents in its back that shoot hot steam. Like a bottom feeder it searches the ice for small bits of organic material to digest. But in the silence of the frozen abyss it can also sneak up on larger prey that would otherwise have heard its grinding mouth from miles away.
Jade Webways
Discordant Ebulon - A bizarre, floating slime that resembles a white blood cell with multitudes of reaching tentacles. Its tentacles are made of a sentient, boiling fluid that reach out towards prey. They burn through the skin of those they touch, injecting the liquid to boil them from the inside out.
Barrow Mire
Husk of Mud - Skeletal chunks of sentient barrow mire may dislodge themselves to take on a new form of life. The chaotic, melded minds of these husks are often pained and irrational, lashing out with a collection of bones and malformed spines. Some may have even been brought to life through parasites that control their wayward motions.
Sorry updates have been so minimal lately, but with every step comes progress. I'll see you all next week!
Conscious Sound & Other Oddities
about 4 years ago
– Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 12:42:58 AM
Hey everyone! Like I said in Friday's update, this week was a bit slow. Started a new day job during all this Covid madness, and it took me some time to adjust.
This week I was focusing on fleshing out more environment layouts. None of them are done yet, but since the base planning for them was done with the finishing of the glass forest, I'm aiming to output 2-3 by the end of next week. These are the current environments I'm working on, and the big draw for each one.
The Frozen Abyss & Conscious Sound
We've talked about the Frozen Abyss before, but not it's unique living aspect. In fact, it may seem contradictory. Isn't the Frozen Abyss really cold and dead? Isn't that the opposite of a living environment? But oh ho, this is where we get to have some fun.
As you get deeper into the abyss, sound begins to stop. The echoes of footsteps and gasps of breath all cease as sound itself respects the stillness of this place. The noises of voices and movements will only begin again if someone or something actively desires to be heard by another, otherwise the abyss is as silent as empty space.
But the smallest sound carries much farther in a world so quiet. Not only will your hunters have to whisper in the tiniest of breaths, but any sound they do hear might come from something that wants to be found. For the Frozen Abyss is not still, it teems with arboreal life allowed to hide in the silence. And sometimes, the will of the abyss may allow you to hear the noises of those countless creatures.
Barrow Mires & the Sludge of the Dead
Without getting too into the nitty gritty, barrow mires are the result of fallen civilizations that literally collapsed and compressed inward upon themselves. Now all that is left is a strange mud of bones, rotting flesh, and other fetid material.
Mmm, people mud
While traveling through these man-made bogs, your hunters will be able to speak with the melded walls of the dead. But these malformed humans can no longer speak godstongue, so you will need high levels in species-specific languages to actually glean more than a few words from their confused, twisted minds.
We'll be sure to talk more about barrow mires at a later time.
Jade Webways & Crystal Blood
We've also talked a little about these before too, but it won't hurt to go over them again. Jade Webways (still unsure about that name) are essentially the veins of massive, bizarre organisms. You can travel through these veins as if they were underground tunnels, although the walls are made of a translucent jade-like crystal that show a liquid world behind them.
Perhaps calling them "reverse veins" makes more sense
If that liquid, known as crystal blood, ever comes into contact with the air it rapidly solidifies into that same jade-like crystal. This can be used in all sorts of creative uses such as splashing it over someone's feet to freeze them in place or create makeshift bridges. Since the crystal blood flows all around you it is always in easy supply.
You might also find the organs of the organism you are traveling within, and who knows how it might react when those are messed with. These jade creatures are meant to be really alien, so the effects of these organs don't always have to make typical sense. Like stabbing a strange growth might make the crystal blood turn red and deadly hot, or perhaps open a portal to a bile dimension. It really should just be alien and freaky.
So that's the basics of the current environments I'm fleshing out. I'll show you some finished layouts next week!
Sunday Updates
about 4 years ago
– Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 09:48:25 PM
Hey everyone! Sort of a small update update today. I started a new day job this week that is making the standard Friday update schedule a little harder to pull off. So instead future updates will come on Sunday (including this week).
Have a good weekend and I'll see you then!
Living Environments Part 2
about 4 years ago
– Sat, Apr 04, 2020 at 12:41:55 AM
Hey everyone! This week was focused on fleshing out the environment layouts we were discussing last time. The linked pdf below is an example of what I'm trying to accomplish, and we'll discuss it in this week's update. Since this is a deep dive into my thought process, it can get a bit rambly at times. As usual, any feedback is appreciated!
Added a list of new simple creatures using the creature template system
The text may be too small to read in this image, but this is the basic kind of environment layout we're looking at right now
Description & Key Features
The goal of the first page is to provide a nice descriptive framework for an environment, providing enough details to inspire but not too much to constrain. Some may appreciate hyper in-depth looks at parts of a world, but for a core book I can find endless lists of details exhausting.
For this reason I'm not really a huge fan of listing out a bunch of NPCs. It can be a lot to memorize, get wrong, and doesn't typically have much payoff for the average GM even if they get it right. Players love memorable NPCs, but is every member of a 10 person list going to be memorable? It's hard to say.
Lists of factions, on the other hand, can be very useful as a jumping off point for certain campaigns. If this core book were only focused on glass forests, I would likely include a faction list for them. But right now I feel nervous trying to do that since it seems like way too much info for a core book to contain, especially if we're aiming for 10 environments.
Anyway, enough about what this section doesn't have.
You may have noticed that gray little box labelled "Key Features". The goal of that area is to provide both an extra super basic overview of the place, as well as note any interesting mechanical additions the environment provides. For glass forests that's the glass language of the trees. In another environment tentatively called the Jade Capillaries, there is a special fluid hidden behind the walls of the place that can harden into a jade-like substance. This can be used by creative hunters to build bridges or trap enemies!
Theoretically, you could just read the key features of a place and be able to run it from there. I hope that's possible!
What Should a Random Encounter Be?
Ugh.
This question hounded me for the past couple weeks. I thought I had an answer, but felt in the end it wasn't enough and got to work on improving it. Because in truth this is a lot trickier than you might expect.
You see, there's a big difference between what I want random encounters to be and what they typically are in rpgs. What they typically are is a list of fights. 1d10 goblins. A crew of interstellar raiders. Some are cute and try to add a bit of story, like "a caravan is being attacked by 1d10 goblins!", but in the end you know what you're here for. Some goblin punching.
I just want to know what the giant dentures are about
Over the years I've been much more interested in situations. Encounters that might turn into a fight, but are more about presenting a problem for your players to deal with. You know, put that good ol-fashioned role-playing into your rpgs!
So the idea was this, roll 1d20 whenever you needed a random encounter. This references a table which has roughly more dangerous encounters on the lower end of the scale while roughly more rewarding encounters are on the higher end of the scale. Each one has about a paragraph of detail that the gm can run with, without getting overly in-depth. The goal after all is to provide interesting situations, not to also predetermine the solutions to those situations.
One encounter has you finding out that a respected member or your home might be part of a death cult, another has you find a garden of screaming potatoes that are actually the half-transformed human heads of some foul gardener. What do you do? I like to think different groups of people will have very different reactions to each of these situations.
So it all sounded great until cold hard reality smacked me in the face. Not every encounter is going to be some big moral dilemma. If the world is as truly dangerous as i claim it to be, sometimes you just find yourself against some angry creatures, you know?
That, and I had no idea what to do if someone rolled the same encounter twice. Reroll I guess. Fact is the boring way of doing random encounters has an advantage in that it is inexhaustible. Sure, it may be mundane to punch 1d10 goblins, but you can always punch 1d10 more goblins.
So I went with a compromise approach. Rolling low will now always trigger a fight, from a list of potential fights. I had some malicious fun with some of these, as I included rare encounters FAR more powerful than a party should typically face (and encountered with a roll of the cursed 6 no less). And if you ever rolled an encounter that you already rolled before? You can choose to just enter another fight. Technically makes the world more dangerous as you play and slowly run out of encounters, but that's certainly not unthematic.
Template Creatures & Tiers
But of course even this solution had its problems. It highlighted a problem with the creature tier difficulty system that I now had to address. Previously, only "boss" creatures (creatures intended to be fought alone) used tiers, while all other creatures were considered tierless or tier 0.
But normal, non-"boss" creatures are intended to get harder the higher level you are, so they needed to use that tier system too. Now "boss" creatures are just labelled as boss creatures, and given extra stats compared to other creatures of their tier to reflect that (By the way, if anybody can suggest a more thematic word than "boss" to reflect these larger creatures I would love to hear it. Sometimes that word feels a bit too gamey to me).
Finally, having a list of random fights to have necessitated a larger creature roster. We don't have the budget or the page count to add another 50 normal creatures to the list, so instead we're now going to have a list of creatures added using the template system we talked about a few updates ago. These are very simple creatures that help fill out parts of the world we might not have been able to otherwise. You have no idea how much I've wanted to add bat-wolves.
*Whew* That felt a lot more rambling than usual, but that's an overview of my thought process when dealing with these sorts of problems. Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you all next week!
