FF/ASW: The Golden Spiral Finale

Cast

• Asheal (level 3 ishim wizard)
• Hordac (level 3 tarchon battlemind)
• Waive (level 3 scion nomad)

Summary

Probably hoping to avoid another pointless massacre, Giganteos quickly clarified that the party weren't helimorphosis volunteers, which caused Doctor Lucorum to immediately lose interest and return his focuses back to the tasks at his many hands.

Giganteos explained that this alchemical lab was primarily used to experiment with all the slime excavated from numerous pockets within the First Snail, which resulted in,among other things, healing potions, malleoil, and youth oil. The party decided to continue on, and return after they decided whether to spare the Doctor and his assistants.

After passing across and out of the lab, Giganteous proceeded to guide them to the only other rooms they hadn't already ransacked: the hatchery and garden. Asheal managed to convince Hordac to not incinerate the snails and eggs in the hatchery, and they opted to just skip the garden because from what Giganteos said they were only growing carrots and lettuce (and they'd discovered plenty of food in the dining room).

They returned to Cubopolis (a cube-shaped island filled with gears) and informed the salt-cthon Kloros of their success (their deeds were corroborated by Iodes). Waive and Hordac demanded double the pay, but Kloros informed them that he regrettably only offered what he could provide, just before saying his farewell to Iodes and crumbling into a large pile of salt.

Design & Development

The basic rules for FrankenFourth are basically done: we're just going through a round of closed feedback to see if anyone catches any issues with the rules, and trying to make sure that everything makes sense. If you're interested, leave a comment or email me at antiochcow@gmail.com and I'll share the Google Doc with you.

Need to work on refining the nomad and battlemind (but since they would be in the FrankenFourth version of A Sundered World it's not a high priority right now).

I'm not satisfied with giving nomads power points (though I think it would work "well enough" if we can't find something better). Currently I'm thinking of making them roll a "ripple" die every round to give them a power multiplier (reflecting changing ripples in the fabric of space). It'd start at something like d4, then gradually scale up as you gain more nomad levels.

For example, their teleport power could let them teleport 10 feet * whatever the die value is: if you roll a 3, then you can teleport 30 feet that round, but if you roll a 1, then you only get 10 feet. Obviously this wouldn't be that big of a deal out of combat (just keep waiting and rolling until you get a high enough value), so the big thing would be playtesting this to see if/how these powers can be abused.

(Right now this would be "at-will" stuff, though again they might end up with power points, and depending on how easy it is to recover them the power effects would change.)

During development of the Dungeon World/A Sundered World nomad, Adam (the guy that basically only plays nomads to the point where his character is the art for the nomad section, and makes appearances in other bits of art) kicked around the idea of letting you play with fold and tear currencies, with tear being use for more destructive powers.

We ultimately decided against it, because people didn't want to juggle a bunch of hold currencies all the time, but this time I think we could make it kind-of work. You wouldn't spend points (so far), instead making an Intelligence check: if you succeed then you do whatever it is you wanted to do, but if you fail you'd roll on a table to see what sort of calamity occurs (kind of like wild magic).

Possible uses for tearing the fabric is increasing your "ripple" result on the following round, banishing a creature for a period of time (random duration, reappears in a random spot), creating an an area of "difficult terrain" (or giving allies a speed boost/teleport), stopping someone from moving at all, dealing area-effect damage, or even summoning an entity from outside time and space (not necessarily controllable).

The battlemind is a simpler fix: just need to compare it to the fighter (which I've had to nerf like three times so far), and remove some passive stuff (like the damage bonus) to account for their psychic powers.

Anywho, now that we're finally done with The Golden Spiral Melissa is taking the reins for our next adventure. She's got something planned with time travel and/or temporal anomalies, so I'm rolling up a kytheran chronomancer. Once she's done I'll probably have to run again, and I've got an idea for a vampire adventure that I think is wildly different from the usual fare.

Announcements

If you're curious about FrankenFourth and/or Dungeons & Delvers, you can find public alpha documents here and here respectively.

The Rogue is our latest alternate-addition to the Dungeon World core class roster. If you want something different and/or more flexible than the thief, be sure to check it out!

Just released our second adventure for A Sundered World, The Golden Spiral. If a snail-themed dungeon crawl is your oddly-specific thing, check it out!

By fan demand, we've mashed all of our 10+ Treasure volumes into one big magic item book, making it cheaper and more convenient to buy in print (which you can now do).