Seacat 0.67b - Mid-April Update

Hello, dear heroes!

Against all forecasts, water has migrated from the sky above to the ground below here. Good for the plants, food for a mood.

Like a polychrome hen, I often sit and dwell on my documents, trying to make them perfect before releasing them. And here, suddenly, is Friday.

Well, it's not as ready as I wished, but it's starting to look ship shape.

What's New In 0.67b?

• The advancement rules for heroes are back. And a little streamlined.
• The magic rules are all back. Not the spells yet - I'm cleaning them up. There will be ... of course ... one hundred. 20 albums, 5 spells for each veda. Each veda will have a spread, and possibly some mini rules. This will ... take some time. The spells that won't make the cut are getting their own book and will be free, I think. I thought of calling them Apocryphal Seacat Spells, but didn't like the acronym. Someone also suggested calling a thing the "Vome Tome". I love that name, but don't have anything to put in it yet - so if someone beats me to it, you have my blessing.
• More art.
• More typos caught and tweaks tweaked.

The next big chunks I want to / need to revise and write up are:

• sidekicks and pets, plus their advancement. This will partly come from some of the older breve seacat varietals.
• gear and equipment. I'll be collating the equipment from UVG and Red Sky, and cleaning it up a bit. I suspect I'll match the spells - 20 collections of weaponry, 5 for each praxa. 20 collections of tools, 5 for each sidu or social practice.

I'm not super-certain what to do with the advice for the top cat (GM). It might make sense to ... trim that? Turn it into shorter articles or paragrapheins? Not sure yet.

Meanwhile Red Sky

We've had one or two more playtests of social conflicts, using abstract zones to capture movement. Both were very fun, but it definitely shows that the number of zones has to be limited.

This one, rough though it is (and no rights on the art and many typos), worked quite very well because there are only 7 "concepts" to deal with and 3-4 players could move among them very well in play. We were role-playing priest administrators in Ebét in the run-up to the collapse of the city. As a game it was truly eye-openingly good. I'm not yet sure how to even write up the process yet because the testing is still so rough, but the best way to think of this board is as a conceptual map. The different big squares are "zones of concern" between which the characters (may) move on their turn. Each character gets two actions on their turn, and moving is an action, which reduces their efficacy. Essentially - as the priest-administrator has to go deal with an issue they're unfamiliar with, they need time to settle in and figure out what's even going on.

This game was super fun.

The second one I tried dealt with the administrators after the conquest. It was also fun, but suffered a couple of problems.

Specifically, I set up too many problem areas / fields. This made it very hard to focus, and the dice didn't give nice enough prompts.

Additionally, I set up too many tracks for such a loose game. Fewer would have been better.

Finally, in the previous game the end condition was clear, here it was less so. This was my fault for not clarifying the goal was for the administrator to be promoted back to the imperial capital (thus incentivising them to make a show of doing a good job more than necessarily doing a good job).

It was still an incredibly fun game, though.

This all slots into seacat via the social (ba) and metaphysical (ka) conflict rules. My ultimate idea is to replace fully representational battle maps with more abstract maps for physical conflicts, too. For example, a TC might sketch out an actual battle between two armies like so

This creates seven zones where events may take place. Moving to an adjacent zone takes 1 action. The zones are numbered to generate random events from turn to turn. The edges of the battle are split, to simulate an area where events will happen more rarely. The opposing sides could simply battle till one or the other notches up 3 morale-shattering events.

Alternatively, the zones could represent large sections of a dungeon, making it relatively straightforward to turn something like a UVG discovery into the equivalent of a 5–7 room dungeon.

So ... that was a peek behind the curtain into the messy world of trying to board-gameify rpg conflicts using something other than wargames and hexes or squares. :)

Smol Other News

I'm very tempted to launch a small mapping jam, for creating fun retro-futurist maps of places in the anti-canons of the UVG. I don't know quite how itch.io jams work, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. We'll be mulling it over further on the discord.

Also, in some links:

• A UVG campaign concludes after 42 sessions. Fully recapitulated. I am astonished by the stories and humbled to have had a hand in spurring them.
• Here are some really pretty UVG session write ups in Italian.
• An actual play from the SEA. I missed sharing this back when it came out. Oops!
• Finally, a more recent actual play. Enjoy the troikaVG!

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And ... uhh ... that's it for this week, I think.

Oh, right, wait.

If you check out page 4 of the book, you will notice 12 white squares. You may also have seen the characters at the head of this post. So, I'm planning to put some characters and stories there.

And you, gentle reader, may suggest them (harvest them from within the skills and traits and mutations if you need). I won't promise they'll fit right here, but ... I'll sure try.

Let's see if we reach 12 comments on this post!

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Cheers and health, everyone,

—Luka


P.S. - Also warm welcome to everyone who's joined since last time! I should figure out some underhanded very visible and clearly signposted marketing trick to reach 666 heroes this month.