The Frozen Abyss
over 4 years ago – Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 06:59:17 PM

Hey everyone! Like I mentioned in the comments, I was at a local convention called OrcaCon for a few days which was a lot of fun! I've volunteered there in the past as a host for their rpg nights, and it's always great to see people again. 

So let's get to this week's update! 

The past two weeks have been mostly about tying up loose ends and cleaning up portions of the book. So stuff like creature creation instructions, sanctuary updates, and other small things are getting finished up (for example our programmer Jake found some conditions and traits that could use updating). There's still a bit more to go and I'll post the updated rulebook pdf next week. 

So instead of that boring nitty-gritty I thought I'd focus on something exciting this week, the underground wastelands of the Frozen Abyss.

The Folding Landscape

Before diving into the Frozen Abyss itself, you should know a little bit more about the Warrens.

Are you familiar with the term geologic time? On our planet, the deeper you dig into the ground, the older the rocks are. As volcanoes erupt and pile new earth on top of the old, layers and layers of ancient rock develop. Since the composition of the earth has changed slightly many times over the course of millions of years, you can even tell the exact age the rock just by looking at it.

But in the Warrens, there are no regular appearances of volcanoes or fault lines. The earth itself is a living, twisting mass that constantly changes due to some unknown will and thousands of competing forces. Entire civilizations can get folded into the ground, never to be seen again. Kind of.

Nothing ever gets truly destroyed in the Warrens (with a single exception we will leave for another Void-y time), material gets shifted around and sometimes converted. Oftentimes, layers of earth are simply moved, folded underneath the surface as new material rises to the top. 

In other words, the Warrens creates layers too, just like you could see in the Grand Canyon, but the depth of each layer is not restricted by time. Ancient beings or civilizations long preserved below may now rise near the top, or even peek above the surface. Strange, alien places of a different evolutionary time lurk below, each waiting to be discovered.

The Frozen Abyss

If you go down far enough underground, the air will gain a sickly and unnatural chill. Further and further down more of the landscape will turn to ice, until eventually it becomes almost impossible for humans to survive. In these frozen caverns even the Warrens no longer move, and civilizations of a time long past are frozen in time.

This is the domain of the Ur, a species of giants that sought to prevent the end of the world. They froze the Warrens, in an attempt to kill the mysterious lordroots that plague the landscape. Lordroots to the people of the surface are a source of healing, and are the basis for restorative potions. But they are also the harbingers of the apocalypse, something even the Elder Deities fear.

Now even the frost the Ur created begins to melt, and the lordroots they sought to kill mockingly grow in the hearts of their chambers.

Adventures in the Frozen Abyss will allow you to discover their ancient bird artifacts, maybe even secrets to unlock flight. Only arctic creatures wander here now, and perhaps the old shambling remnants of the Ur. Who knows, maybe some found a way to survive after all this time?

Some may think the Ur are a reference to the Chozo from the Metroid series. I think they were more inspired from the Gaoul from Titan AE.

App Tour: The Stage

Okay okay, finally getting to this app tour thing.

So we've had a lot of ambition with creating this app, wanting it to handle a ton of different aspects of the game. In a sense it's actually FIVE apps: a rulebook reference, character creation, a premade adventure, character sheets, and a combat manager.

You will see these sections listed when you boot up the app, and you'll notice we combined character sheets and the combat manager into one section: the stage. Today I'll give a basic overview of the very front of the stage, and we'll dive deeper into each section at later times.

So the stage is broken up into multiple sections, with a character select to the left. When a character is chosen, all of these sections will focus solely on affecting that character. We are currently on the status section, showing the health and conditions of the selected character. If you touch their picture or the "i" info symbol, you will go to their character sheet. If you touch their health bar, you can edit their health.

To the right lists the three types of conditions they can have. "Conditions" are just normal conditions that don't fit in any particular category. "Wounds" are the result of damage that needs to be healed, such as a disabled leg. Finally "Environment" is the effects of the current environment (like it being really dark or poisonous). Environment conditions get applied to everybody when assigned so you don't have to manually apply them for everybody. Adding conditions (pressing those little plus buttons) is actually the section Jake is working on right now.

Now we're in the second section, "actions", that you can see highlighted by the yellow bar at the top. Unsurprisingly this lists all the possible actions your character can perform in the game, assuming you aren't performing something wacky and fun. This is also where you can manage your inventory in the items section. The list is scroll-able to show six different categories (with Movement being hidden below the fold).  

This section is most useful if you use the app for combat management, otherwise it's just a handy list of everything you can do. It even shows the action cost for each action, though this version I'm showing you is still using the old concepts of minor (mi) and major (ma) actions which have been changed to actions and special actions respectively.

This 3rd section is for rewards, which is used loosely to mean the section you go to gain or regain stuff. Need to recover health? Go to rewards. Need to buy or gain new items? Go to rewards. Need to level up? You get the idea. We showed it off a little bit the last time we looked at the app when looking at item shops.

The 4th section, AI, is very similar to the action section, except it lists the actions, in order, a creature normally takes in combat. Kinda useless for PCs, but hey. This part isn't done yet so I can't really show it.

The 5th section, tools, is full of little odds and ends that don't fit in any other category. Some are a bit redundant even and may get removed. The first one, "Start Combat", puts the character list to the left in initiative order and gets the app to start tracking actions and rounds. Adding or removing characters from the stage makes them active or inactive, potentially storing them away for later use. If a character or creature is not present in the current situation, there's no need to have them sitting around on the stage or in the middle of combat.

And that's a basic look at the stage! It's our attempt at creating a fluid system for combat and character management, and we think it's pretty neat. We've seen a ton of other rpg apps out there that can get quite confusing and overwrought, so we hope we made the experience more manageable.

I hope 2020 is going well for everybody, or at least better than 2019. I feel like no matter who you are or what affiliations you might have, 2019 seemed like a pretty crap year. So here's to new beginnings!

And with that, I'll see you next time!

The Gray Truth
over 4 years ago – Fri, Jan 03, 2020 at 10:58:13 PM

Hey all! I'm still away for the holidays (getting back tomorrow, Jan 4th) so this week's update will be a little short. In the meantime, I've been working in an experimental lore idea for a chapter called "The Gray Truth" and would love any feedback you guys have for it.

A World of Endless Discovery

By reading Children of the Beast lore, you will come to understand certain deep truths about the nature of the Warrens' reality and the ultimate potential purposes of your hunters. But as you discover more aspects of the Warrens, future plays of the game will contain less mystery and less to discover, which I find a bit of a shame. So for those who become absolutely obsessed with the game and exhaust all there is to offer, I thought it would be interesting to give those players a way to shake things up.

The Gray Truth is a small chapter containing optional alternative lore. The deepest truths of the Warrens are murky and malleable, and if you would like, you can use one of these lore alternatives instead of the standard to change the Warrens' ultimate villains or fundamental forces. You can also use these ideas as a jumping off point for your own version of the truth and create new aspects of the world to discover and use.

The Lower Sludge and the Twin Dreams

Those of you who have read through the current lore draft might be familiar with basics of the Warrens' deeper lore known as the Lower Sludge. The basic (and I mean basic) concept behind it is that the Warrens are a higher level of reality created by the infinite thrumming and swirling of lower layers of reality, sort of how like the characters in video games are composed of binary code. Below the Warrens is the Drift, the world of dreams, while the lowest known layer is called the Lower Sludge. The Lower Sludge is a sea of primordial ooze that is continuously manipulated by the foul Aeonic Beings that dwell on even lower layers of reality. The most powerful forces and enemies created in Children of the Beast are born from the blasphemous contact one can make with these unknowable entities, and one of these forces is  the infectious Corruption.

So if you've had your fun with or want something different than the Aeonic Beings and the Lower Sludge, the Gray Truth provides an alternative to the truth of the Lower Sludge known as the Twin Dreams. 

In the Twin Dreams, the Warrens and the Drift are not different layers of reality, but opposing worlds each created by the dreams of the other. Matter and substance, all life that makes up the dirt and creatures, is the living dreams of the other world, shifting and changing like any other dream would. 

But these worlds do not live in harmony. They each seek to devour the other, to end this recursive dreaming and become "the world that wakes". The Corruption is in fact the creeping evil of the Drift, a taint crafted by the Drift's insidious masters to convert the Warrens into their own landscape. It will be up to your hunters to traverse the mysterious lordroot gateways into the Drift and eradicate its dream demons.

Although there will be no Aeonic Beings to communicate with, the Twin Dreams adds Dream Eggs that can pop up in the landscape. Dream Eggs are bubbles of isolated dreaming that you can enter that are even more volatile than the typical landscape of the Warrens. And since even the Warrens are now a dream, you may be able to come back with oddities you recover from within.

Hopefully with that example you get what this chapter is trying to go for. If I'm being honest, this is the most likely section to get cut from final release. It is one of the least necessary sections in the entire book, and is suited much more for people who have already played a LOT of Children of the Beast. But if you want to see it stay, please let me know! I'll only bother to fully flesh it out if there's an interest for it.

See you all next week! Ended up having a lot less time to work this week than I expected, but once I'm back home it's back to full blast. I'll also get back to app updates next week, sorry for missing this one!

Have an awesome 2020!

Happy Holidays!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 08:37:03 PM

Today's update brings us human and creature templates! These are basic stat setups for you to easily create a party of hunter NPCs or your very own foul creature of the Warrens. They don't cover every type of human or creature that could ever possibly exist, instead they just serve as a baseline that you can take advantage of in any way you want.

Otherwise lore and finalizing Sanctuary rules from last week's draft continue to progress. I expect all of the Sanctuary rules and descriptions to be done by next update, so look forward to that! We're getting close to having all the core rulebook text done, I estimate by the end of February. Then we can start laying it out nicely and commissioning more art to accompany the text.

New Updates

Human and Creature Templates - I honestly want to call these something more flavorful than templates. I liked "Creature Skeletons" but then "Human Skeletons" just seemed off.

For those in the lore, "Sacred Fluids" got changed to "Sacred Ichor" - Little word choice changes like these might become a little common as things develop, and this one deals with a key issue I worry about on occasion. The world of the Warrens has a lot of gross stuff going on in it, but the focus of the game is not to gross you out. This can be difficult to do with the game's subject matter, but I want to do what I can so people don't often feel queasy playing the game.

Creating Custom Creatures and Hunters

I went through a lot of revisions designing these. The biggest hurdle to jump over is that creatures and stats in Children of the Beast are pretty complex (or at least numerous). I didn't want standard fans of the game having to spend several hours designing the stat block for one creature, and I didn't want managing a party of enemy hunters to drown the Judge in stats. A lot of decisions made very early in the game's development revolved around the idea that an app-based game could easily handle these stats, but we've increasingly pivoted away from that line of thinking for multiple reasons that I'm sure I'll get into some day. Ultimately we wanted the game to be manageable and fun to play by hand, even if it ended being on the crunchier side.

So the first idea when designing templates was to essentially create simplified stat blocks for body types. You've got your octopus creature template, your hound creature template, your mollusk creature template, etcetera etcetera. There were several problems with this in my view (least of which was that Octopi are also mollusks). It was very easy to just create tons and tons of these templates. As much as I care about being thorough, I am also aware that I'm working with a page count. I'm not sure I can afford to have the book contain fifty pages of nigh flavorless templates.

But a bigger problem was that for all the space dedicated to these templates, they paradoxically didn't allow for much flexibility. Sure, there were four different difficulties of Octopus, and they had a special Octopus ability, but in the end it was just bland. If the creatures are going to be simple, we should at least allow the Judge who was willing enough to look in this section in the first place an easy way to insert their own personality into the creatures.

This led to a big creature creation section which was way overcomplex, diving into each and every aspect of a creature and forcing the Judge to make tons of seemingly boring decisions that could have drastic ramifications.  "How many phases should a creature have? Oh 5? Well it now gets to act five times every round. Now how evasive should the creature be?"

Even with helpful examples explaining what made a difficult or easier creature, it required a thorough understanding of the entire combat system to be able to attempt to design a balanced creature. I should not expect that from people, though good on you if you manage that.

What I finally ended up on was almost a mixture of the two styles. Creatures have a small collection of bodies and attacks to choose from, with some light advice on what each are useful for. A lot of stats are locked in place to reduce decision making and prevent horrendously imbalanced creatures from popping up too easily. Special abilities and effects are left completely up to the Judge, who should hopefully have an idea of what they want to make. It often doesn't take much substance to bring flavor to a creature. 

With this setup I'm hoping it's possible for a Judge to ad hoc reference this page to create a simple creature in the middle of a session. Of course this assumes the Judge has an idea of what type of creature they want and has some familiarity with the system, but it's not a bad thing to hope for.

And as for humans, they had a unique problem in that they often came in parties of unique individuals. Since hunters often have wild corrupted abilities that are meant for only 1 person to track, the idea of tracking four or more of these hunters full repertoire became increasingly intimidating when we playtested. Especially in late-game encounters, I would often spend what felt like useless hours designing an entire party of hunters to fight. And if the party avoided or befriended them, all that work went down the drain. 

Some people relish the opportunity to dedicate their lives to fleshing out their campaign. I do not. If I'm going to be spending days of my life on a single game, I want that time spent to be efficient.

Eventually this led to the idea of leaders and followers. Where one or two guys were really fleshed out, but the others were simple grunts who were all the same. This unexpectedly also became fun for the players, as it allowed one or two personalities to shine instead of the judge juggling between 5 different conversational styles.

In the end though, I still ended up simplifying leaders. There's a lot of fun in building your unique character in Children of the Beast, but creating an NPC shouldn't take an hour. Now there's a simple series of choices you make as you select your leader type and a couple special abilities they have. Like with creatures, I hope a simple party of hunters could conceivably be made ad hoc with this system.

At the very least, I hope both of these creation systems provide a jumping off point for people who want to further customize their game. I also still intend to do a more in-depth creature creation section, but my heart rests easy knowing that these systems exist as a baseline.

And that's it for this week! I'm delaying talking about more app stuff until next time, as I kind of want to switch gears with it. Besides item management not being particularly sexy, I'd rather dive into the app piece by piece and explain all the cool things we've already done with it. Makes it easier to appreciate the current work going into it at least.

I'm going to take next week off as I visit my folks for Christmas. For my family this is also the same week of both my little brother's birthday and my dad's birthday, so it's the most expensive time of year. And considering circumstances, I don't think I could convince my parents that I should be working anyway, heh.

You all have a great end of the year! See you in 2020!

Sanctuaries and App Updates
over 4 years ago – Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 04:33:37 PM

Hey all! We're finally sticking to deadlines, who'da thunk.

On the rulebook end of things I worked primarily on Creature Template and Sanctuary mechanics this week. Creature Templates are just starting to coalesce, but the Sanctuary mechanics are ready to start being shown. Even though they're incomplete, we'd really appreciate feedback on how the Sanctuary mechanics are looking. Since they're new, aspects of them have not been thoroughly playtested. I worry that they still might have too many mechanics for an already mechanics-heavy game, but who knows, people enjoy building their homes. Alex, our graphic designer, is working on a small sheet to write down all Sanctuary related stuff. With any luck we'll be able to show it next week!

New Update

Sanctuary Rules - This also includes the Sanctuary Generator from last update, as I messed up the link back then. Thanks to those of you who pointed it out!

Sanctuary Look

I've had a lot of success in the premade adventure for players to care about developing their home, so expanding on this for broader use is really satisfying.

There are two main things that you can do to help your Sanctuary: Grow its prosperity and grow your hunter's society. 

Growing your prosperity requires you investing silver into your society as a whole. As you do so, your Sanctuary gains more people and reputation as others from farther Sanctuaries realize how prosperous yours has become. This is the main mechanic of prosperity, every level brings special people to your home.

These specialists are random and varied, and can be totally made up by your judge should they ever feel the urge. We provide a table of specialists that can bring a variety of benefits, or sometimes dangers, to your Sanctuary. 

You can also grow your hunter's society by investing in your craftsmen. Every hunter's society starts with a bonesmith, fleshsmith, and an alchemist who each can craft various things for you. By investing into their workshops, you expand their capabilities and also develop your hunter's society, leaving more room for new hunters and personal pets.

Finally, you also have the option to buy decorations for your house or renovations for your Sanctuary (such as razorpede buses or a giant statue of yourself). These are the loosest aspects of Sanctuaries, not really having too many mechanics tied to them. They might have incredible consequences, but what those are is up to you! This is also the part least fleshed out in today's update. Creating and editing a list of interesting ideas is time consuming when you're stubborn.

App Watch

A lot of cool progress has been made on the app over the past several months. We've been mostly focusing on character progression and item management lately, which is surprisingly quite the task! We'll take a quick look at one aspect of that: Item Shops, a boring but necessary part of the game.

First off, welcome to the Stage, the part of the app that hosts all of your characters. You can select your characters on the left scrollbar and select from a variety of options regarding that character with those tabs that say "status", "actions", and the like.

 The main point of focus has been the Rewards tab lately, which hosts progression and item options. All the various item shops are located here.

There are quite a few shops, and each one has their own special display of stats. For example armor shops don't need to display attack damage for obvious reasons. We'll take a look at the Weapon Shop.

Many many weapons, each organized into categories so looking through them is somewhat manageable. And yes, for those with good eyes our placeholder icon is a special glitch from a franchise you might just be familiar with.

 Each weapon also has a detail page when you touch their info button. Just gives a more thorough view of each weapon. We'll probably not end up with the budget to have an individual icon for each weapon, but we'll see.

 When you select a weapon to buy, it then brings you to the final page where you set its material, quality, and quantity. And then you're all done! You can also edit the total cost if you're a rebel who doesn't play by the rules.

That's just one shop though, each one required their own special programming and UI since they each have unique stats to display. It arguably would have taken less development time to shove everything into one shop, but that shop would have to display all the types of information at once, becoming ugly as sin. Sometimes you just gotta put in the work! 

And with that, I'll see you all next week!  Next time we'll dive further into the app's item management, and have yet more rulebook progress. Have a great December week!

Back in Time for Christmas
over 4 years ago – Fri, Dec 06, 2019 at 07:23:41 PM

All right! Once again, sorry about the long wait between updates. The switch over to lore-work has involved a lot of note writing and very little tangible material I figured worth posting. But I owe a lot to you guys and should strive to keep you updated more often. The promise of a once-a-week update schedule did turn out to feel pretty daunting and paralyzed me more than it should have. Now that a lot of the note-taking phase is over though, I'll keep it to be a regular thing, Fridays around noon pst. Discord members, you should feel free to pester me with @s if this doesn't happen, I'm always working on something and I need to get in the habit of talking about it more often. If for some reason I won't be able to update (which is likely to happen around Christmas), I'll let you all know beforehand in the kickstarter comments.

All right, let's get to the good stuff!

We've got three pieces of material I'd like to show you guys before we move on to what I've been working on in general. 

New Updates

Draftwork for the Lore of the Warrens - 24 pages, over 10,000 words, and a hell of a lot left to do. This is the most obviously "drafty" work I've ever posted publicly, so you may find some silliness there that isn't normally a part of things I post. A lot of you have looked forward to this, so even though it isn't complete and kinda messy, I hope you enjoy what you find in there.

Updated Rulebook - Same link as before, but updated to reflect typo corrections and suggestions by our lovely discord community. Thanks guys!

Sanctuary Generator - Essentially a simple table that allows you to generate your own horrible god for your home base! This is part of a new introduction section that I have still yet to finish, so it doesn't have instructions, but I'm sure y'all can figure it out.

Other Developments

So one reason things have been taking so long is I've been (somewhat irresponsibly) been jumping from mini-project to mini-project. Here's how the progress on each of those is going.

Lore

I am an extremely picky person when it comes to game development. This has its upsides and downsides as I'm sure you've all seen. But I swear, my inner diva comes out when it comes to lore. Because to be honest? I hate most lore in games.

Okay, now hate is a strong word. I just don't find most lore to be useful. It often struggles to be relevant in games, often only being relevant to people who like reading cool stories about the things they love as they catch little easter eggs in gameplay when they can (I'm looking at you Destiny 1 & 2). So I suppose lore itself isn't the thing I dislike, it's the way it's used. And I think a lot of tabletop rpgs have done really cool things to integrate lore more cleanly into how the game is played. I want to try to do the best I can to make Warrens lore easy to follow and relevant for both the person running the game and the players. A tall order perhaps, when deeper sections of the game deal with unknowable eldritch entities.

So a lot of my time has been spent doing research lately. Learning how certain games communicate their themes and organize the tons and tons of worldstuffs they have. One particularly neat example is from a small indie rpg called Kagegami High, which is about high school anime girls in a school run by conspiratorial murder cults. In this school of the weird and unexplained, "anything can happen". But when anything can happen, I find most GMs struggle to come up with interesting ideas, caught in a suffocating web of choice. So Kagegami High comes up with a few thematic anchors to tie people to the type of weirdness it wants. And my favorite is "spiders". Everything runs on spiders. The cafeteria is divided between "schoolgirls" and "spiders", there is a spider student council, and mysterious hall spiders patrol the classrooms. It's great, it's funny, ties the feel of the world together, and allows the gm to have a fallback: when in doubt, spiders. 

I don't claim to be the best at this, but I hope as the game develops you will notice these attempts at thematic anchors and gameplay principles. To describe the weirdness of the Warrens, the three principles I've decided on are:

1. Everything is Alive

2. The Warrens Thoughts Can Become Reality

3. The Warrens Want to Become a Part of You

And speaking of deep lore, there is always Glorantha.

Sanctuaries

When we playtest the game, we often play with our premade adventure that comes in the app. And in that adventure, you can use money and supplies to upgrade your Sanctuary and make it a stronger home. I should have realized when writing the rulebook that this should be a core part of the system, not a one-off part of a single adventure.

So I've been developing a more in-depth system for Sanctuaries. The first piece of which you can find in that Sanctuary Generator I've uploaded. The goal is for it to be simple mechanically, but very thematically rewarding. You may get some mechanical benefits, but most will center around roleplay and in-world benefits. Everybody loves making a mansion.

New Introduction

I've also been working on the introduction to the book, the piece that contains all the starting, summarized info you need. Honestly, summarizing can be incredibly difficult when you have so much you would love to talk about, but I decided to work on explaining the two key focuses of the game:

Are you an Explorer or a Hunter?

Children of the Beast isn't a narrative game, but it does try to tell a story. I like to think that choosing to interact with the world, learn its secrets, befriend weird creatures, and in doing so learn more about your character, to be the Explorer side of the game. 

Obviously, murder and tactical combat are the name of the game for the Hunter side, but it's also about mastery, about learning how to squeeze the absolute most usefulness out of a mechanic. Also obviously, EVERYONE plays hunters, but that doesn't mean they actually have to kill things. And when they do, they should try to be the best they can at it.

These two sides aren't mutually exclusive, but they do tend to be strong indicators of your group's preferred playstyle. Kudos if you manage to successfully straddle both, you'll benefit from it, but both of these perspectives should be equally valid.

Creature Templates

I've been stalling a bit at uploading the rest of the creature's from my notes (the current count is roughly a third of the total), but one reason I've been doing so is to work on what I call template creatures. In other words, frameworks of stats for you to base your own custom creatures off of.

It's been an interesting problem, as I'm not satisfied with the frameworks being solely based on difficulty (weak creature, hard creature, really hard creature, oh boy!). I prefer identifying key roles monsters tend to play (4E D&D, for all its flaws, did really well at this). No matter what roles I choose, some ideas will still be limited by the system, but I hope it provides a framework for some real experimentation.

Oh, and these templates also include ones for human/hunter encounters. Having to create and manage a fully leveled group of hunters for a fight sounds like a pain in the ass both before and during a session, so I hope the guidelines will work as something more manageable. The current idea is to have you make 1 or more unique leaders, while having lesser grunts fill in other roles of the hunting party.

And that's it! Thanks for all your kind words from before, I'm getting back into the swing of things. Next update next week I'd like to take a little time to look at app progress, because those boys have done a lot!