Monday, April 03, 2006

Blood and Time: Crunch of Ages

As it stands right now, B&Time is about evenly distributed between fluff (the timeline and section on temporal mechanics discussed here) and crunch.

In terms of crunch, B&Time is light on classes, although it does present three new advanced classes: Anomaly (someone who can manipulate time), the time enforcer (a soldier skilled in weapons of varying time periods) and the temporal historian (a scientist knowledge about the culture and technology of varying time periods).

The meat of the crunch are the weapon and armor lists for the Stone Age (PL 0), Bronze and Iron Age (PL1), Middle Ages (PL 2), the Renaissance (PL 3) and the Industrial Age (PL 4).

In terms of feats what you get are feats to allow characters to be skilled with weapons regardless of progress level. I took the 10 PLs and divided them into three basic periods: Ancient Weapons and Armor cover PL 0-3, Modern PL 4-6 and Futuristic 7-9.

Then there is a specific feat for each PL that represents greater familiarity with a time period, as if you lived there.

Obviously every character will get a period feat and a PL feat as bonus feats.

One thing I like about this system is that its easy to fit existing characters into the current framework with little effort. If a character has the Archaic Weapons feat that can count as Ancient Technology and if he has Personal Firearms that can count as Modern Technology.

Of course this is early in the game, the boss is just starting to look at the draft now, and the playtesters have thrown some additional class ideas my way.

So the crunch might get upped some.

For now though, Im content. I hate writing the same class twice, and since Ive written a lot of classes over the years in my other d20M products, a book like this is going to be relatively class-light.

But since its early in the process, stay tuned for more information as the release gets closer.

Chuck

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