Platonic Solid

Last week I blogged about the some aspect cards that I made for my Chronica Feudalis game. So, without further ado, Here they are in PDF format.

In the past I've used index cards for FATE 3.x based games to help everyone keep known aspects straight. Write the aspect on a card and put it out onto the table. Anything that keeps the GM and players from repeating themselves is a good thing. With Chronica Feudalis the blanket term Aspect is not precise enough so I made cards for Aspects, Injuries, Conditions, and Tools. Each card has a number of ranked checkboxes for indicating rank/severity. The photos are from our first game using the cards.

Last night I ran a mini test session where Jip the gnome goblin slayer and his human friend Siggurd are tracked down a party of goblins that were led by a goblin shaman. We approached magic the way we did when playing Middle Earth with Spirit of the Century but with some CF specific tweaking. A magic user's potential casting pool: Skill: (Command or Perform depending on the spell) Tool: (i.e. Magic staff) Aspect: (i.e. Dark Arts D8) Casting a spell costs a point of Ardor and includes invoking the Aspect: Dark Arts D8. Casting was handled much like maneuvers and inflicting conditions. Spells are also able to create tools on the fly. A single success creates a D6 tool, double D8 tool, triple D10 pool just like conditions. As Siggurd's arrows were killing goblins, on the fly the shaman created a magical camouflage cloak D6 that would be crucial for his eventual escape. All the while Jip was sneaking on a flanking maneuver hoping to get close enough to launch an attac...

Last night I received the the ready for print Chronica Feudalis PDF from its author, Jeremy Keller. Immediately I was struck by the cover. The first thing that caught my eye was the worn leather look. My eyes then snapped to the mounted knight set off by the red tint of the background. I'd buy it. The interior art and layout are on par with the cover. The chapter head artwork is by Miguel Santos and the spot illustrations are by the author. There's a peek at the artwork over at the Chronica Feudalis web site .

So far we've statted up ogre chieftans and orcs and they're nasty stuff. But they sit near the top of the scale and do not leave much room for things such as well, dragons. We tried a few different approaches at scaling beyond D20 which is as good as it gets in Chronica Feudalis. D20 perfectly fits the natural world but like I said we're modeling fire breathing creatures here. We tried rolling an extra die with multiple ways of influencing the skills/tools/traits but it didn't feel right so we ditched it for a couple of reasons. First it always felt like we didn't have enough dice. Second and most important, it hurt the clean elegance of the core system. Keeping track of the different types of dice caused undue confusion. What was a fast clean resolution system became cluttered. The next idea was to add flat bonus to anything that was higher in scale than D20. This is what we went with. The next step was to determine how large the bonuses should be. Bonus ...

We started up a side fantasy game using the FATE inspired engine found in Chronica Feudalis . One of our test characters, Jip the gnome teams up with a human named Siggurd on a mission to hunt down an ogre chieftain who has assembled a war host that is about to unleash its wrath on the local human settlements. Ogre Chieftain Vigor: 4 Ardor: 3 Skills: Brawl D20 Fitness D20 Strike D10 Command D8 Sense D6 Everything else D4 Tools: Club D10 Hide armor D6 Aspects: Massively strong D8 Proven by challenge D8 Lumbering D8 We decided that he should have an entourage (Agents in CF parlance) of orcs. We decided to make the appearance of orcs something that is frightening in the setting and not at all common so they always appear as either agents or antagonists. Orc Agent Vigor: 2 Skills: Chase D6 Combat D6 Parley D4 Subterfuge D8 Tools: Orc scimitar D6 Orc bow D8 Quiver D6 Orc armor D8 Club D6 Hobnailed boots D6 Night vision D6 To facilitate writing up an orc protagonist we put together an orc...

I found a really cool game called Chronica Feudalis by Jeremy Keller. The premise of the game is that it was written in the 12th century and just recently has been translated. This sets an implicit evocative tone of the medieval period that really works. Last night my wife and I gave it a whirl... Walter Atwell a town guard was sent to a local village to escort the witness to a crime, a little boy to the magistrate for an upcoming trial. A local outlaw knight doesn't want that happening so he hit the village with his goons and attempted to take the witness hostage if not outright kill him. Awoken from his slumber before the crow of the cock, Walter peers out the window and sees men attempting to set fire to thatched roofs. It's a dreary morning with the swirl of fog and a slight drizzle. Walter slowly opens his window and grabs his long bow. He takes aim at the nearest torch bearer and looses an arrow killing the man instantly. He lays back into the room waiting to see if his ...