A Whole Frikkin’ Fantasy Economy (Patreon)

Once again I haven’t posted more spheres when I said I would because the scope of the project grew again. I don’t have a finished sphere, but I do have several new talents in scout and survival, and a unified theory for the crafting spheres (trap, alchemy, tinker, cooking) as well as artificing and vocation.

I mentioned the last couple times about my desire for a game that can scale up or down. If you want to run dungeons and just buy equipment you can; no need to worry about anything else. However, if you want to craft your own equipment or have a background as a miller and you want to mine your own ore and live a Minecraft-style city builder at the table, you should be able to do that, too.

Technically, Pathfinder allowed you to do that with its craft and profession skills, but those were always an afterthought; I am so glad they existed, but it certainly took a lot of house rules or supplements if you wanted to run a game about wilderness survival, owning a business, sailing a ship, building a city, etc.

20 Sub-Games

In its own way, every Guile sphere falls into this system. Each one is, in its own way, a subgame. Not a minigame; that distinction carries importance for me. In a minigame you have to learn new rules that are different from the ones you normally use. In a subgame, you get to choose how deep or shallow to lean into things.

For example, stealth is a subgame; you can have an entire party who ignores it and just charges into fight after fight like gladiators moving through an arena, or you can have one, two, or all players delving into it deeply, making every encounter an ambush and every session a heist. Likewise, running a business is a subgame. You could run a game with no downtime, you could run a game with a week between adventures which one player spends making ‘run a business’ checks, or you could have a game where optimizing your cash flow and taking care of customers is how you fund your adventures in the first place.

Stages of Production

What this means is that spheres has to be able to handle at least a guideline for… everything. Simple enough that no one needs to handle something they don’t want to, but deep enough that if you want to survey the land, mine the ore, smelt it yourself, then forge it into a weapon, then sell it to another adventurer, you absolutely can.

I’ll delve more into this in the next update, but at the moment this means knowing what sphere handles each part of that process.

I’ve added talents to scout for surveying land, as well as talents in survival for shepherding animals, gardening plants, mining ore, and more. I’ll need to add some charts for helping GMs determine where and how many resources are present (they can always decide for themselves, but it’s nice to have guidelines). I’m also working on what Artificery or Vocation talents would be needed to handle all other aspects of making a Survival crafting-based game work.

It’s a lot, but my goodness it’s fun.

More to come, thank you all again for following.