Starting Ancestries (Patreon)

Another big meeting! Actually two big meetings but I can’t spend six hours a day writing updates. 😀

We talked about “what ancestries are going to ship with this book?” Well, there’s no real way to decide that right now because we may discover we have more or fewer pages to devote to this, depending on exactly how many “books” the core product ends up being. But we need some baseline to start with that we believe in. If it turns out we can add more, or need to cut some for space, so be it. We’ll cut in the time of cutting. But this is the time of dreaming!

So we started by making a list of every cool idea we had for a fantasy ancestry. It was a lot. There were a lot of them. And we could have kept going. Some were pulled from existing references to Orden and the Timescape, some were completely new ideas!

At one point we talked about just shipping the game with 30 ancestries. Really ‘30’ was just a placeholder for “an unusually big number.” This would be bad for every reason except it would mean whatever kind of game you wanted to play with this? You’d be able to get way closer with these core rules, than a version with only 12 ancestries. With 30 ancestries out of the box, a new group who wanted to play a Starjammers game and another who wanted to play an Urban Espionage game in Capital would have plenty of cool, unique ancestries to deliver on those flavors.

Really though, the only reason we floated “a LOT” as a possible answer to the “how many ancestries at launch?” was because it meant…we didn’t have to choose! We made a Wish List of ancestries and it was looooong. So “30” sort of became shorthand for “well maybe we don’t need to narrow this down!”

But look, that might be cool, but where are they gonna go?? Are we going to have sixty pages of ancestries in this game? Hey Canada, good news! 30 ancestries! Bad news is: now it costs $700 to ship this book to you.

Cooler heads prevailed and we eventually made some Hard Choices but with Good Reasons. We looked at it like this; we need to provide the Meat And Potatoes ancestries everyone expects that you would assume were on the menu regardless of what kind of game you’re running. Then we want some ancestries that anyone can use! But they fit better in a Vasloria game, or a Capital game, or a Timescape game.

So, Meat & Potatoes. Easy. Humans, Elves (High), Dwarves, Polder, and Orcs. These are the “universal donor” ancestries that would belong in any Tyrants Vanquished campaign, depending.

Humans we already talked about. Dwarves we’re working on and you’ll meet them later this year. Orcs are in Flee, Mortals! and we think they’re a Core Ancestry. In fact I’m promoting them from “a people created by magic” to one of the First Speaking Peoples created by one of the Elder Gods. I just dunno which one yet. Probably one we haven’t met.

Polder are our version of Halflings and we’ve already seen them in the Chain of Acheron. Jason did some art for Angel the Chain’s spymaster. Also Aimsley Pinwhistle in Ratcatchers and Willowby Twobuckle in Strongholds & Followers.

Elves we’ve met but here some explanation is needed. I think High Elves are the Core Elf Ancestry in this book. All elf peoples have a supernatural ability called Glamour that lets them change their appearance. For High Elves, glamor means “they seem beautiful to you.” Whatever you personally view as “the ideal,” that’s how High Elves look to you. So a dwarf who views strength and endurance as virtuous, would see Elves as buff. Still an elf! Just…yolked.

It’s an effect on the mind and I’m not even sure it’s something they control. They don’t decide how they look, they have no idea what you, personally, view as attractive, or ideal. They just behave like a really attractive person and assume you see them as pretty or idealized.

They probably have a whole suite of other abilities, but that’s the core ability.

So our Universal Donors are probably Human, High Elf, Dwarf, Orc, Polder. But we want some new cool stuff in here and we want to support a variety of fantasies. So maybe one ancestry we’d expect to see a lot in Vasloria (aka European Medieval Fantasyland), one or two for Capital, the urban fantasy multiethnic metropolis, and one or two from the Space Fantasy Timescape.

For Vasloria I think maybe all we need are Wode Elves. Wode Elves are our wood elves (“The Word For World Is Wode”) and they can be wherever you want them to be, but there’s a lot of them in Vasloria.

Wode Elves have Glamor just like High Elves, but because they’re the guerilla warfare elves, their glamor gives them some built-in supernatural camouflage. They probably get other stuff! But we know they get that.

Because High Elves have the beauty-glamor that means they can be our Standard Issue Elf everyone sort of expects to find, but that means we’re free to make our Wode Elves a little more interesting visually. We’ve got some concepts kicking around that Dael’s character Llevellys in DUSK used.

That’s probably enough for Vasloria. What about Capital? Well Capital is crazy but not science-fantasy and this seems like a good place for Tieflings as a core ancestry, or whatever we end up calling Tieflings. We already know (or I already know) there’s a large tiefling population in Capital and it helps show off how cosmopolitan Capital is that a character who, to a peasant in Vasloria would be a terrifying devil, might just be a baker in Capital. NBD.

And people like Devil-kin as an ancestry. Judge! Great devil-kin PC. But what else? We need more than one ancestry to really show off how normal weird is in Capital.

Well, we got an entire district in Capital, Villa Caramia, almost entirely populated by Undead after the Lilac Night. And one of the first NPCs the Chain of Acheron met when they got off the boat was Reginald Orfeo, esq., the Revenant Lawyer for House Alvaro. So…how about Revenants as a playable ancestry? Intelligent undead! Basically, zombiebois.

Yeah that would do it! I mean we can all come up with a dozen ancestries appropriate to Capital but that’s the problem. We need to pick “the first ones.” We’d love nothing more than to make new ancestries for y’all for the next 20 years but we have to start someone and “Tieflings and Undead” certainly makes Capital interesting! And of course you get elves, dwarves, humans, orcs, and polder there as well.

That leaves the rest of the multiverse, the Timescape. Let’s have some Science Fantasy ancestries! Well, it seemed like the Kuran’zoi aka the TIME RAIDERS were a no brainer here as many of us love them to an almost unhealthy degree and they’re sort of the poster children for the Timescape as they are raiders of many worlds.

Then we need one more? Maybe two more? You met, or read about, Proteans and Memonek in the Illrigger product. They might be good candidates for inclusion in the core rules.

Proteans are the dominant ancestry on Primordius, the Sea of Eternal Change, the plane of uttermost chaos. We don’t know a lot about them except they embody chaos. They can change shape. But not like a lycanthrope or a doppelganger. More like weird mutants who can make new limbs and organs at a moment’s notice.

You haven’t seen the new Weapon System, I’ll write that up for y’all next week probably but, spoilers, it’s this:

I can’t explain all this right now but you probably get it. As a rule, weapons aren’t about How Much Damage, they’re about fighting style. Don’t read too much into this, it’s a big revision to how weapons work and it seems good, but it is by no means final.

However, if we go down this route, you can imagine that maybe the Proteans can mutate their limbs as a maneuver (i.e. something they can do every round) and this round their left arm is a shield, next round it’s like a dagger.

Does that sound cool? It does to me! And you might think “wow that’s overpowered.” But is it? I mean, can’t any character just…switch weapons? Totally normal thing for a PC to do. Some opportunity cost, but not more than a maneuver. And maybe Proteans can’t pick ANY weapon type, just two or three? Improved with advancement or titles? We’ll see.

But it SOUNDS cool! 😀

Meanwhile, the Memonek are the dominant ancestry on Axiom, the plane of Uttermost Law. Sobriquet pending. They’re machine-people but not like “robot people,” they look like really expensive Art Nouveau robots with amazing fashion sense. No idea what kind of ancestral abilities these folks get.

We also have the Omnivok described in the Valok write-up posted right here on this Patreon. They are ALSO “machine people” but…different. They might be more like Replicants where they can pass for human. Or they might be something else entirely, but one thing we like is they might be able to pass for human which means visually they might not be as interesting as the Memonek, so we decided we’d meet these folks later. Not core!

The Memonek and Proteans are popular in the Timescape, but almost unheard of on Orden. Does this book need both the Memonek and the Proteans given that we absolutely want the Time Raiders? I dunno, let’s see how the list looks:

Humans

Elves, High

Elves, Wode

Dwarves

Orcs

Polder

Tiefling

Revenant

Time Raider

Memonek

Protean

That’s pretty good! Eleven Ancestries? Maybe we could go to 12? Throw the Hakaan in there? That’s something I should have mentioned in yesterday’s update; the Hakaan are not anywhere near as populous as humans or dwarves, orcs, or elves. We didn’t use them as a benchmark yesterday because they’re common (they’re not), we started with them because they represented “this is about as powerful as a PC ancestry can be in this world.”

Now, you are IMMEDIATELY going to gasp and shout; “Wait, hang on. No [obvious missing ancestry]??” Well, we don’t know! Maybe, yeah, whatever you’re thinking of isn’t in the core rules. But I think whatever ancestry you’re imagining, we’ll get there. They just might not be in the core set. We started with a list of THIRTY and that was only because we ran out of whiteboard.

There’s a constant tension in these meetings between “put EVERY COOL IDEA we have in here, we may never get another chance!” And focusing on a list of deliverables we think we can actually get done and not send the core rules into the stratosphere page-count (and therefore WEIGHT) wise. So it may be we ship with more, or different ancestries, but this feels like a good list. Some classics, some new-classics, and some actually new things.

Wait. Hang on…no Dragonfolk in the core set?? There’s been a critical error! Where’s the dry erase pen?!