A tabletop monster hunting rpg where you evolve your character by consuming the creatures you kill.
Hey all, life got a bit too in the way for me to make a proper update this week (nothing serious!), and I wanted keep you guys out of the dark. I might post something small over the weekend if I have the time.
Hope everyone's staying cozy, and I'll see you next week!
Hey all! This week involved some light layout work, but mostly I've been planning out how to approach the environment sections of the game. It also gives me a chance to show off the final version of the Frozen Abyss artwork posted earlier.
One of the defining mantras of Children of the Beast is "Everything is Alive", which is meant as a way of subverting expectations of what is and is not a living thinking thing. For example, lanterns in the game are not metal casings to house candles, but living creatures that ignite oils and fats within their stomach, sometimes walking alongside you as a sort of glowing, adorable pet.
But what does this mean for environments? If you told me "the forest is alive!" it would not exactly set my heart aflutter with excitement. To me, something that is cool about a new world you're exploring is cool because it changes how you interact with it. To achieve this with environments, we have to take a different approach here to bring out the unique weirdness of the setting. Environments are static things. We want to bring life to a landscape. What if that landscape was a character itself?
This is a Glass Forest, named after those bio-luminescent spores that float through the air. Those spores are how the trees of the forest communicate with each other, sending silent glowing words by way of the wind. Glass forests are kingdoms ruled by the trees and their towering monarch. Their roots churn the soil and terraform the landscape to suit their desires, and their glowing blood stains their enemies as traitors to the wood. Hunters are viewed as interesting potential tools for the wars of the forest, and if one were to learn their glowing language, one could attempt to ally with the trees or at least prevent deadly misunderstandings. But even the forest has factions, and choosing to ally with one group could upset an entire other portion of the wood, especially the ones seeking to usurp the monarch itself.
So that's the goal with environments in Children of the Beast, they are supposed to be living spaces you can interact with beyond just being a space to walk through, either as a character itself or in some way that uniquely uses the living themes.
The current plan is for each environment to take up a 2 page spread, with about 10 environments total. Each one will feature an illustration, the dive into the environment's details itself, a "key features" section showing off the unique ways you can interact with the place, and a big table of encounters. These tables serve both as a randomized way to find things as you explore, and are a bit more in-depth than just "you find 1d5 bat wolves" to hopefully provide more inspiration for adventure hooks. I'll be sure to show off one of these once I get a sample ready.
But I'm really interested in what people want to see out of these. What kinds of setting details inspire you? How much do you like factions and lists of important NPCs? I know what I like, but it's always helpful getting perspective on how people use setting books for their campaigns. If you have any preferences for what gets you inspired, let me know in the comments and I'll be sure to take a look.
Hey everyone!
I’ve been wrapping up going over the last gameplay mechanics in the rulebook that haven’t been converted to the new format yet, typing up loose ends as I go. This week was focusing on the Sanctuary, Hunter Society, and crafting systems, the last of which had needed tweaking for a while now. Also, I added a few new monsters into the Bestiary, and we’re going to go over a few of those in this week’s update. They are the converted members of the cult of the Crawling Moon, the few who are Faceless!
The cult of faceless moon priests worship the Crawling Moon, an otherworldy entity that brings light to much of the Warrens. They seek to gain the Crawling Moon's approval, and gain its blessing to become one of the faceless.
The few people who are selected by the Crawling Moon readily embrace the changes they soon face. Ascension begins by warping your body and mind into a thin, inhuman frame and a face with no eyes or mouth. Eventually, the head hollows and retreats into the neck, leaving only a needle-like spire of flesh. Their transformation only just begun, these new faceless retreat from society or enter the Warrens to follow the silent calls of their master.
Of the converted members of the faceless cult, few are feared more than the heathens. They are called as such because of their floating masks that depict sinful acts tabooed by society. The Deceiver, the Murderer, the Lecher; they are ruthless hunters who use bizarre occult forces to warp surrounding space, trapping victims in illusory prisons that reflect an inner shadow of their mind.
It was thought that the heathens hunted those they depicted, but it may instead reflect the heathen’s own inner nature, suggested by the brutal and vulgar ways they assault their targets.
Their bodies are nigh indestructible, breaking and bending with every strike only to return to their original state moments later. No wound is permanent.
But if you manage to destroy their masks...
The true form of the faceless with the façade of control stripped away. The ascended faceless never actually followed orders, they have become creatures of base instinct. Their masks were attempts by cult leaders to graft some form of reasoning to their actions, with the only emotions powerful enough to sway the creatures coming from those with already broken minds. To those that knew the truth, the whims of the mad and depraved were far preferable to the mindless want.
What does the Crawling Moon want? Whatever it is, it does not desire the faceless. It is a punishment for the foolish, perverted by the cult’s leaders into thinking it a gift. Now the cult unthinkingly follows the wills of those leaders and its blasphemous ascendants.
Faceless Devourers seek little but to consume, filling their cavities with as much thinking flesh as possible. Their internals rapidly integrate enveloped victims into their bodies, healing their wounds as you desperately race to kill them before they can recover.
Getting back to real life, it's certainly been an interesting time lately with that Coronavirus, huh? I live in the Seattle area, and it's been feeling pretty intense seeing so many businesses shut down their offices around here. I'm not worried that much for my own health, if I catch it I likely won't die, but we're all still washing hands and doing what we can so that we don't become vectors and make this situation worse for less fortunate people. It is funny though seeing how many people finding out their jobs can be technically done from home, no matter what their bosses may have said in the past.
Have a great week!
Hey everyone, today’s update brings us a shiny revamped rulebook! A big part of it is a new layout design that brings us a lot closer to what the final design will look like. A lot more care has been put into the typography and two-page spreads, and I’m really excited to see what our layout artist will do with it.
But along with the visual upgrade, huge portions of the rulebook got overhauled to be cleaner. For example, the weapons section used to take up over 10 pages, and has been reduced to two. Many, many rules have been condensed and clarified. And most important to me, the game should be easier to learn now too.
When we originally created this game, we were hoping most people would learn it through the app’s adventure that slowly leads you through all the game’s mechanics. But as time passed, it became clear that we should put just as much care into teaching the game in the book as we did into the app. A big part of the goal in this restructuring was figuring out what rules were necessary for people to learn, and which ones could be learned over the course of many sessions.
So instead of having to learn most of the rules of the game to play, we teach you what you need to know as you create your character, then at the end show you a list of rules you can discover as you play the game. As a fun twist, we attached objectives to each set of rules that you should achieve before reading further, acting as curious little side quests while you journey through your main adventure. Your group should only have to learn rules about aspects of the game they care about! Of course, you can always ignore these objectives and read the entire book anyway. No one’s stopping you.
Here’s a list of all the content/changes included in this update:
· Updated Layout
· Created Discoverable Rules
· New Introduction Section Added
· Created an Advanced/Optional Rules section for unnecessary mechanics
· Our discord member, XenosForever, has done excellent work helping us edit for spelling and grammar
· Shields got Rebalanced
· Sapien’s “Adapatable” is no longer considered a subspecies
· Mass Damage got changed so that it instead automatically targets one random weak point
· Added a term for damage that cannot be resisted: true damage
· You now choose species before discipline during character creation
· Added optional rule where you can two-hand weapons to make them attack faster (suggested by our discord)
· Projectile trait removed
· Found a lore inconsistency with Oracca that got corrected
· Chases/Races added as an optional rule
· …and many other small tweaks
So it should come as little surprise for those who follow our sporadic update schedule that we won’t hit our April release date. We’ve got a ton of work left to do and it will be a while before it’s done. Several things we’ve already talked about influenced the delay, like my broken arm, but I should say that the largest factor was perhaps one of hubris. Put simply, we were hoping that we would be successful enough so that we could set aside time from our day jobs to focus on the project, but that turned out to not be the case. When the rulebook is in the proper state, kickstarter funds will be used for our layout artist, editors, concept artists, manufacturing costs, and various other aspects of the project, but it could not be used for ourselves. We thought we could push through it anyway and work extra hours but that backfired on us hard.
There’s no question we’ll get this project done, but it looks like the road ahead is going to be pretty slow. Our new estimated release date is early 2021. I deeply apologize for this; we’ll continue working as hard as we can.
As promised forever ago in the last update, it’s time I dive into Chases and how Children of the Beast handles them.
So, I love the idea of Chases. Action movies do a wonderful job of depicting fast paced scenes with multiple explosions lighting up the background for a well-choreographed chase. But in my experience with a fair number of roleplaying games, Chases are extremely slow affairs, often without many interesting choices beyond “roll more to try to move faster”. That, and often Chases boil down to one or two fast members of the party *actually* chasing their quarry while the others lag behind, taking their turns of finding out how much they suck at chases.
This led to me having a couple goals in mind:
1. Chases should be fast paced. Most should be over in 5-15 minutes
2. Everyone should feel a part of the chase, even if they suck at running
3. Make interesting decisions while you’re chasing
For the first and second goal, I decided to make your hunters roll as a group. Everyone rolls together on a group athletics check and sees how the group as a whole advances. Everyone contributes in a group skill check, and this also cuts out huge swaths of time by not taking individual turns. If you had a five player group for example, you could have five rounds of a group chase happen roughly in the same amount of time as a single round where everybody takes turns.
For the third goal, I implemented a second phase to each round where the group will need to handle either obstacles, shortcuts, or situations. Each of these contains a choice that must be made beyond absent-mindedly rolling another skill check.
Obstacles are events that might impede your progress, like a boulder blocking a path or an unfortunately placed acid-spewing mollusk. You can choose to either safely avoid the obstacle and lose some distance on your quarry, or you could take the obstacle head on. If you fail, the distance you lose is much worse, but if you succeed you ignore it entirely, maybe even advance farther if you roll well enough.
Shortcuts are risky opportunities for you to gain on your quarry. Ignoring the shortcut has no consequences but taking the shortcut can either make you gain or lose distance depending on how well you do. Not too different from obstacles fundamentally, but flavor-wise they’re pretty different.
Situations are essentially obstacles or shortcuts where the way through them is not straightforward. When you would try to bypass a boulder obstacle, your judge would tell you to roll an Athletics check. A situation doesn’t have the judge tell you what you should roll, *you* must come up with a solution to the problem.
For example, your path could end up being blocked by a surprise parade of elderly Rajahni women. You could barge through them but knocking these aging folks over could have unexpected consequences, especially if this is your hometown! Your group will have to decide how to approach the situation, and each member of the party can perform a different action to help the group forward. These can be a lot of improvisational fun, but since people can perform individual actions (even if the group as a whole still moves forward) it’s likely not a smart idea to have too many of these in a row if you want to keep things pace-y.
It’s important to note that your quarry does not roll during any of this. Instead, they are a goal you are trying to reach by a certain number of rounds. This may seem odd at first. After all, shouldn’t a chase be over when either the hunters catch up or the quarry runs far enough away? While it’s true that a chase could end when a quarry manages to, say, get 100 ft away, it runs into a couple problems.
1. It’s not narratively satisfying
If you end up failing to catch up with your quarry using that system, that’s it. End of story. They got away. Although true to life, it’s not very exciting.
Ending after a certain number of rounds is supposed to show when your quarry has reached someplace where it is no longer possible or safe to continue pursuing them through a chase. Maybe the quarry reached its den, where its angry mother waits. What if the fugitive you were pursuing reached their safehouse, and now you will have to find another way in.
Point is, the story doesn’t end when they escape, just new consequences arise.
2. It can seriously drag
If both you and your quarry are roughly equal in skill, you both should on average not get any closer or farther away from each other. Making most chases “whoever has the better athletics skill wins”. We don’t need our chases to be like games of Monopoly.
So, in short, Chases in Children of the Beast are when your group works together to track down a quarry, avoiding obstacles and taking shortcuts all in an attempt to reach their target before time runs out. Sounds exciting to me.
Hey everyone! By the looks of things I won't be quite done with the latest updates to the pdf by tomorrow, and I'm off travelling again this weekend.
In the meantime, I thought it would be neat to show off the next piece of progress on the Frozen Abyss artwork I showed off last week. It's coming along!
You all have a great weekend. Next week we'll dive into chases, as the rules for them are in included as part of the next pdf update! They're pretty simple, but it took a lot of playtesting to get a version of them that actually felt fun.