Stonelinked:An Overview of my Fantasy Game (long)

[Avalloc]

Hi everyone,

About the Game:
 
 Stonelinked is about a character spending his lifetime conquering a foe much greater than himself.  

 The character when created has been wronged by a Nemesis Creature.  The Nemesis may have slain his/her family or a loved one, destroyed his/her life's work, or forced great suffering on the character in some way. The player writes this into the character's background. The character, as a result of the inflected misery and hardship, has vowed to destroy the nemesis and has preformed a ritual know as Stonelinking.

 Stonelinking result in the character developing traits governed by the traits of the stone he links to. It also, ties him magically to his Nemesis, both character and Nemesis are aware of the other's existence and can summon the other to battle, when within a certain range. The most important feature of the link is, once linked; the character cannot die until he has fulfilled his vow.  This means, of course, until the Nemesis is killed, the character is immortal. Before the moment of death the character retreats body and soul into his stone. He can heal up and overcome any aliment while in stone form. He will surely need this power, for the Nemesis is mighty and will take many a game year to defeat.

Character Creation and the Gems
No dice are rolled to make a Character. The gain all their stats from the gemstone they link to.

There are 51 common stones and 6 rare ones.  

Physical Traits
Health is determined by the real world hardness of the stone.
Attack aptitude is determined by the real world density of the stone.
Protections are determined by how light interacts with the stone.

Metaphysical Traits
Magic Affinity  
Stones have affinity to different magical elements. Amethyst has an affinity to light magic, Aquamarine's affinity is to water magic. Moonstones have an affinity to all 8 magical elements. Most other other stones have only one or two of affinities of varing strength.    

Inner Life
Stones also have an affect on the character mood and state of mind.  Most stones boost ones confidence, happiness and energy levels.  There are a few that actually make their owners more nervous, less happy.  Also, a few stones changes characters psychological, making them compulsive and obsessive, or even anti-social.  

Stones also influence how characters and npcs feel towards each other over time.  Some stone make friends easily, others are easy to fall in love with or garner respect quickly. There are secret benefits to characters being friends or more, the Monarch (GM for a Stonelinked game) will unlock these secrets when they develop and the players can choose to apply them to their characters, by adding them to their character's profile.

Stones also give wisdom to characters. Characters also gain wisdom each game year. Wisdom has only 2 purposes, to remove Guilt and to remove Sorrow.   The Monarch assigns guilt whenever the character breaks a law, uses forbidden weapons or magic, or does something evil, underhanded or just mean.  Sorrow is applied only after a character loses something of paramount importance to them.  Guilt and Sorrow adversely affect performance.

All characters start out decent, but if they work at it they can turn bad. Guilt then has less or no impact.  

Bonuses
Most stones come with a range of special bonuses that affect the characters performance in certain skills or perform amazing phenomenon.
Possible skills affected include: magic, healing, business, sailing, creativity, teaching, etc.
Phenomenons include: increased luck, cause spells to backfire, confuses dragons, theft protection, and more.

Character Development
There are no experience points.  There are no classes or class levels.  The character can work with any number of skills; combat, healing, magic or trade. The Monarch is given a set of guidelines when to advance characters.  Advancement comes from practicing the skill, and game play usage of the skill.  Creative use of the skill will lead to faster advancement.  

Equipment
Material and labour determines the price of equipment.
Common adventure items in game, list how much material goes into them.   A dagger might be made up of 50 coin size units of metal; a sword would be at least 250 coins of metal.  The most common used metal would be iron, but by simple changing the form of money used in the making process you come up with gold, silver or copper daggers.  In the skills section a method for creating game items is given.  Wood and Glass items are also treated as if made up of coin size units of their respective material.

Skills
Wide assortments of skills are given.  The main ones are Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Sneakiness, and Searching.  Gross Motor deals with full body movements, jumping, balance, running. Fine Motor deals with hand-eye coordination. Sneakiness deals with being stealthy and cunning. And searching is included because I figure adventurers do lots of it.  

The other skills cover healing, magic and trade skills.

Creatures

Nemesis
There are only 5 natural Nemesis types, 4 are humanoids of various sizes and strengths. The 5th are dragons.   When humanoids are the sworn Nemesis it is the entire tribe that is sworn against.

The humanoid nemeses are based on different rock types:  Shale, Slate, Phyllite and Mica.  They can be as small as a tribe of a dozen or so, or they could be an entire empire.  The larger they are the more they have in weapons and defensive structures (i.e. castles), they will also have more individual in their population that have above average stats.

Other Creatures one might encounter would be Golems and well really anything.  The Monarch can place golems and spells left over from wars in the world.  The spell system has many features that allow for most any creature you can image.  

Magic
Wizards most create their own spells. It is very difficult to learn how to cast another person's spell, so the caster must craft each spell.  There is a spell profile, fill in the areas of the spell profile sheet, calculate the research/casting cost of the spell, work out how much will power or ingredients you want to use and you have yourself a custom built spell, ready whenever you have gathered enough mental power or ingredients to cast.  And you don't forget it after you cast it.  There are also different methods for creating magical items.

The Monarch
Is the GM, he/she works out the details of the world, determines the advancement of the characters, gets to create any monster or magic object they want using the Magic System, and gets to bestow upon the characters Secret Unlockable Skills whenever the character meets the requirements.

Combat
Striking, Block or Evading, then apply damage to weapons, armour and characters or monsters.


Everything uses only 6-sided dice.  The mood of the character affects their performance on all rolls.  

Okay that is it in a nutshell.

Publishing Goal:
I put it up as a PDF on lulu.com.  Once I have polished it a bit more I will release it as a print version as well. I want to get it into DTRPG and RPGNow, someday.  Once it makes enough money I am going to get an ISBN and pay to put it into the distribution channels so it will show up in Amazon.com and other online booksellers. I don't know if I expect lots of business to come from that, but I want to be able to point people to a regular bookseller site, just because.  So I am only looking to the PDF and POD markets at the best.

How My Game is Different
Includes Happiness, Energy, Confidence which affects everything the character does
The GM assigns guilt and sorrow, when appropriate
No gods, religions or belief systems built into the rules.
No rolling up characters, choose stats from 51 archetypes, some with interesting traits like causing confusion in dragons or causing spell directed at them to backfire on the caster. The stone choice isn't permenate, you can switch stones.
No experience point system, how the character plays determines advancement
Magic system allows for creating all kinds of different spells.
All characters, can do any skill, some will just be advantaged at it because of their stone.
Characters can't be killed, because of a magic rite they preformed.
Only 6-sided dice used



Okay, how does it sound so far?

What kind of gamer would most likely be interested in this game?

What questions should I be asking?  

What more should I be telling people about it?

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya,

The most important feature of the link is, once linked; the character cannot die until he has fulfilled his vow. This means, of course, until the Nemesis is killed, the character is immortal. Before the moment of death the character retreats body and soul into his stone. He can heal up and overcome any aliment while in stone form. He will surely need this power, for the Nemesis is mighty and will take many a game year to defeat.

-I want to reread everything you have written so I can comment on all of it.  However, this jumped out at me right away.  The way you have it written means the character can never lose or fail his vow.  Basically, you have guaranteed either a stalemate or a victory for the PC.  Was that intended?  If so, what is at stake since victory is more or less assured?

Peace,

-Troy-

[Adam Dray]

You've definitely piqued my interest. It sounds very interesting and I'd like to see how you designed for the features you described. I'll have to pick it up.

I'm very curious to see how the game plays with multiple players. Is every character in the same situation, each wronged by a Nemesis creature?

[Avalloc]

Adam,

Yes, each character is wrong by a Nemesis.  If the players get together before game they might, for example, all have lived in the same village that was wiped out, and so have the same Nemesis.  

Or they might have different Nemeses and then there might be fighting among the characters as they have similar but different goals they wish to complete.

[Avalloc]

Tory,

"...what is at stake since victory is more or less assured?"

I don't have a straightforward answer for that one yet. What I do have is as follows:

When picking your Nemesis, I talk about picking nemeses based on how long the current round of the game is going to last.  If you know your only playing this round for a year, you have to beat the Nemesis in the year. Of course if a GM extended the end of the round if the group is going strong and not yet complete.  So maybe there is a time constraint that will mean that victory isn't assured.  

I don't go much into the lifespan of characters in the rules, but a GM could limit the time a character has because, I don't actually use the term immortal in the rules, I say they can't be killed. Longevity is a character bonus, so one could assume that you only have as many game years as the life span of the character.  Affecting age is also part of the magic system.   But I don't come out and say, give characters an expiry date and hold them to it.  Does this sound like a good way to increase the stakes in the game?

These ideas don't appear anywhere in the rules, but they are how I envision other GMs handling it.  I sort of envision character having periods of non-protection.  In the process of finishing off a Nemesis, they are encouraged to seek out allies.  Allies will expect help with their own Nemesis once they aid the character in finishing his.  The character is still a Stonelinked with all the stats and skills, but is indebted to help, even though his protection is gone.  If he refuses to help, big guilt penalties assigned, and he has made an enemy.  Or the GM plays a dirty trick on the player; he sets up an adventure like this.  An evil wizard has a magical legendary sword that is perfect for attacking the character's nemesis. The player does something to enrage the wizard; possible kills someone the wizard loves, while on the adventure for the sword.  The wizard kills off the character's Nemesis (the wizard turns out to be insanely powerful) and then goes after the unprotected character.  

I don't know how I should word it so that I get across that a character doesn't need to worry about losing the character,  but I would like to see groups run with unprotected characters after they finish their personal missions, or just move on from nemesis to nemesis enjoying the adventure and only worry about stiff penalties caused by being forced to  switch stones to escape dire situation.

I had a longer post, which had stuff about Breaking and Dusting. Those are methods of escape when forcible confined to stone form. Being confined is kind of a risk that characters do need to worry about.


Sorry to answer the post out of order,  I had a bit of a power problem and had to recover and redo part of this post.

Greg