RLCS - Humans and War of Our Golden Age

Dear heroes,

Welcome to another exciting installment of news from the writing chair. Over here, the monsoon season has arrived in Seoul and with it rain and warm nights and moist air. Truly lovely.

I spent a week visiting friends and family back in Slovenia, then a few days recuperating. Gotta say, traveling about 24 hours door-to-door twice in a week is pretty rough on my system. Now, I've recovered just about enough that it's time to share a few new teasers from OGA.

(I hope this style of sharing, as individual pdfs, rather than as big, compleat books, is ok - I think it highlights each new piece better, but mileage may vary).

Cart of the Circle Sea (CCS)

For the OGA, I'm working on a cycle of more detailed (also political) maps of the Circle Sea area. There's going to be a little trick in them, but I'll reveal that later, once I have all the different lands written up.

Please note those little angel symbols scattered about, creating a surprising likeness of a hex grid. Those are the grand phylakes, mile high Big Divine Objects (BDOs) that have kept the Circle Sea Area (the Garden of yore) relatively safe from invasion by destroying concentrations of weaponry (see attached war pdf for more details). Also, they make for a lovely bit of weird geography.

Traits: Skills and Abilities from Uranium Butterflies

I'm also reassembling the various traits and skills from UB and Breve Seacat (and other things I've written) to create different backgrounds for players to choose from / work with as they level up. These aren't classes than constrain, rather they're optional assemblies of traits and equipment that should make creating a certain archetypal character easier than with UB.

The traits and items are mostly numbered to make random generation easier.

You may imagine that some of this will get tweaked a bit more.

A few folks have mentioned how some of the traits seem "useless or don't have mechanics, while others have very precise mechanical effects."

This is a conscious design choice.

Over years of running games, I've found that sometimes players revel in having a broad, loosely defined trait that lets them invent stuff. Other times, a player is just super happy to assemble a collection of traits that gives them a massive bonus in combat. This might be the same player at different times, or different players at the same table. I've found that giving both play styles room works wonderfully ... so I'm giving both trait types room here.

Humans

Finally, since the Rainbowlands are a human-dominated region, I needed to showcase the different types of humans around.

I think you'll find that section enjoyable.

Note that, when I say "humans", I'm using a typical sci-fi shorthand, where the local sentient phenotype is translated to readers on the Earth of Today as humans. Even though they may be no such thing.

I've done that before - in Longwinter, when writing about the locals, I describe them as humans. Oddly, I don't think anyone's noticed that I actually drew all of them with four eyebrows. *shrug* that's an easter egg for folks who read this far.

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I know I've been coy about these minimalist drawings, but there's a zine in the works with them. No other details yet.

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Other News

The baby remains inbound. All's well. We're getting some new shelving units, hence this week's short update, since now I have to get to work, taking down all our current stuff and making space for the new storage machines.

My back's gonna hurt by day's end.

In other news, UVG 2E has been selling so well, that we're gearing up to prepare a second printing. Thank you for that everyone!

Oh, and my dog says I need to convey her greetings too.

Or, perhaps, she wants me to give her a longer walk.

I'm bad at translating dog. Sorry.

Take care everyone, and more updates soon!

~with care and dice,
Luka

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EDIT: PS: the discord link!https://discord.gg/qxhymxERCP