A tabletop RPG set in an ominous space station, home to millions, where stories of struggle and survival are written on a daily basis.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hello Vagabonds!
We are just a stone throw away from the next stretch goal :) with six days away from the end line. I mentioned before there's a Christmas gift incoming—backers will get that today at midnight (UTC).
I wanted to step into a particular theme of Nibiru, one that (if you have been following us for a while) you might be aware of. The game has a system in place to track the physical and mental health of characters, but while the former is very simple and it's designed to discourage people from just killing everything that moves in their path (seriously, don't try, it's quite easy to get killed in Nibiru—and nobody wants to see all those memories ripped to shreds in vain), the latter is a bit more nuanced.
How nuanced? Again, we've brought in someone that's more knowledgeable (that'd be Dave Coulter, one of the people behind the awesome Roleplay Haven club, and a worker in the mental health system) to design Nibiru's mind system.
We've drawn some inspiration from games such as Unknown Armies to try to make our sanity system more thought through—something more than just a downwards spiral. In this system, which generally triggers when characters are faced with a stressing situation, the roll of the dice determines their reaction to the situation itself. It can result in many different scenarios, but in short, failing such roll by a big margin takes you to a breaking point.
A breaking point is representative of a character's tolerance to the situation. When its passed, it marks the character with a particular symptom, which is randomized by rolling two four-sided dice. One of the interesting things of this method of randomization is that it allows us to use the probability curve of the roll to replicate the frequency of occurrence of symptoms. Too complicated? Basically, the roll's results tend to favor common symptoms such as depression and anxiety, rather than schizophrenia and personality disorders.
At the same time, being exceptionally successful when reacting to the stressful situation denotes a mental health issue in itself. Apathy—being detached from violence, from situations of helplessness, and even from the unknown—becomes a problem in itself.
With both kinds of symptoms, you tend to become subject of one particular mechanic. Maybe if you have a recurring memory, every time you evoke one yourself, you run the risk of just copying (and thus, remembering) that same traumatic remembrance that keeps coming back. Maybe if you are detached from violence, every time you exert it, you trigger a breaking point in those who surround you.
There's a lot to unpack with it, and in a way I hope that it helps bring some realism to this particular aspect of role playing games.
With that said, I hope y'all enjoy a very merry Christmas, and remember to open your mail inbox at midnight (or check this space) for your present!
See you around~
Hello Vagabonds!
Just yesterday we were chatting about the dice as they were just unlocked and... BAM! We are more than halfway through to the next stretch goal! Y'all ROCK!
I'm hopeful we can get to the next one by Monday. If you have just hopped into the campaign, the weekend is the absolute BEST time to help us push the campaign. And what better way to do so that while being rewarded with free adventures :)?
We have a written series of adventures called the Chronicles of the Pilgrimage, which you can unlock via social media interaction that helps promote the campaign. You can check it out in one of our past updates, to get involved, here.
Today I wanted to expand a bit on the MEMOs System, and the way in which you can use memories to tell stories. So far, you probably know that you can spend or earn Memory Points and trigger positive/negative memories respectively, and that the significance of those memories depends on the amount of points.
But memories can be engraved on your character through what happens during the adventure too. The "All 4s, All 1s" rule makes it so that both an exceptional success at a roll (or a disastrous failure) may result in a memory, unveiling more strengths and weaknesses about your Vagabond.
There's a series of particular tricks Narrators can pull off to just give memories to player characters. Arriving at a particular place, meeting someone in particular, or any other event of significance during the story could make it so that the Narrator gives everyone a shared memory, entailing that there's something deeper at work uniting the group.
Also, some memories of specially traumatic events might be imprinted in the character's remembrances. Our Mind system (which we'll discuss on Monday) makes it so that mental scars manifest through recollections, giving even more uses of the MEMOs system.
It goes without saying that the MEMOs system could be used for other settings outside Nibiru :) I'm very much looking forward to hear about people tweaking it and using it to tell stories about amnesiacs in fantasy worlds, modern settings, etc.!
I hope y'all have an awesome weekend—we'll be back on Monday as usual. In the meantime, I'll be preparing your secret Christmas presents ;)
Hello Vagabonds!
The dice are in! That's so cool!!!! You can now see them in the add-on list, as well as the new stretch goal :)
Getting custom dice was one of the things a lot of us were really looking forward to. My number one priority is for each component, mechanic and asset within the game to reflect the themes and aesthetic in mind. Metal is the de-facto texture of the station, and it just so happens that cuneiform numbers are simple enough to have them take the place of arabic numbers, so... here they are!
Also, we chose to make them D12s so that they actually roll (something normal D4s do not do). D12s allow us to have slightly larger print numbers than D4s. Also, normal D4s hurt you when you grab a handful (though some will say that's part of D4s' charm :P).
To get the dice (unless you have a Whisperer Pledge), simply go to your pledge, click on it, and amend the amount to add £12 on top.
Today I felt like talking a bit about the project's current status. At the moment, we have final drafts for all but one chapter, and we are currently editing chapter six (which comprises the rules for the game). We have about 80% of the art, and the layout of the game is already done (so once chapters get edited, they can be put straight into the laid out document).
Then, we do some adjustments, and we are good to show you the pre-proofread versions :) when that time comes, we'll be doing post-editing proofreads, but I'll totally encourage you to tell me if there's any errors of any kind.
The chapters will then be compiled and the PDFs will be sent to everyone. At the same time, we'll have the high res print files, which will be sent to the printer. The printing of the Regional Adventures and the maps will be much faster than the corebook printing, so I expect to have the first ones at the warehouse for packing before the pallets with the corebooks arrive.
Production of the metal dice mold should start in February, and we should get samples on March. If those samples are good (which shouldn't be a problem, since the people we are working with actually happened to have tooling for cuneiform numbers, odd as it may sound), we'll go straight to production of the dice, and we should get those by April. I'll be packing those at home and then moving them to the warehouse.
Hello Vagabonds!
Yesterday was a great day for us; we got a lot of funding in, and we are now just a pledge away from those custom dice :) make sure you check in in a little while, since we'll unlock the next SG as well as enabling the dice add on (the high quality, six metal dice set will be £12).
Given the dice-related news, I want to talk a bit about the task resolution system in Nibiru.
Task resolution (or conflict resolution) is a staple part of RPG mechanics, meant to determine the nature of an event's outcome (generally, players' actions). Whereas in most RPGs you have a series of attributes and skills that might tell you what number you need to roll or how many dice, in Nibiru this is quite simpler. You just grab three dice, you roll them, and if you get a "4" you are successful. But... why?
Part of this is to keep things simple, and part of it is due to the Vagabond's not knowing their capabilities. Three dice is a bit below the average for humans (whom, depending on their skill, roll anything between 1 and 6 dice). As Vagabonds start remembering stuff, uncovering their strengths and weaknesses, you start to learn when is it that you'll roll more dice and when to roll less.
The cool thing about this is that it allows for nigh uninterrupted narration. I as the Narrator can just say "roll to see if you climb up", and the player just rolls three dice. There's nothing more to it (unless the player wishes to toy around with that roll a bit or trigger a memory), so the brevity of the process helps safeguard pacing. Also, rolls are exciting not just because of what's at stake, but also because they are the only moment in which players can choose to trigger a memory.
We chose D4s because their statistics are simple, and for contested rolls (where you add up numbers and compare instead of just looking for "4s") the results are super easy to work with. The players instantly know that a 1, a 2 and a 3 make 6, so overall the same "brevity" we were trying to preserve is kept.
There's also a consideration with regards to what's essential to the game's mechanics. One of the main differences between video games and tabletop games is that the latter ask their players to execute all of the "computational" mechanisms of the game (that is, mechanics that don't exactly enrich the experience, but are required so that the game actually works). Our vision with having a super simple task resolution system was that we wanted to reduce the more computational mechanics to make the bulk of the rules about memory creation and manipulation (the most fun, thematic part!).
These topics are always a bit more dense, but I think it's interesting to know what happens in people's heads when they create a game, so... hope you enjoyed it!