New Rules Up!

A new version of the big PDF is waiting in the usual place. All the changes I've been blogging about are now in place. Also, I've moved towards making the game more compatible with Fate Core.

Go forth and download! Let me know your thoughts here.

Random character chart

The random character creation charts have been updated. These will be an appendix of the final book, but I decided to it available as a stand alone document.  You can get it at the usual link to the right.

The tables are really fun. While it is possible to create a complete character (with boring aspects) using only the charts, you can still choose to ignore the dice at any point. Let the randomness be a springboard to your imagination!

EDIT: The tier one character checklist is now up as well.

Fate Core

The Fate Core Kickstarter is almost over! It's definitely worth $10 for a huge pile of PDFs.

Cursed World is not going to be Fate Core, exactly. It's built on Fate 2.0, the version that powered Spirit of the Century. But it is influenced by later iterations of Fate. The terminology changes in the upcoming version are mostly inspired by Fate Core, for example.

New Sheet, New Look

The revised character sheet is up. The link is on the right, as usual.

Some of the skill names have been changed, to be in line with Fate Core as much as appropriate. New core rules are on the way with these tweaks, as well as the healing and gear rules I mentioned in my last post.

Note that the sheet has the new font. It has fewer licence restrictions than my previous choice, and it looks great. This will be the look of Cursed World going forward.

Putting the pressure on

My previous design goal documents were mostly about what I didn't like about old school fantasy. So I thought I should write about what I want to keep. Most of all, the feeling of danger.

Too often, that danger came in the form of unexpected, arbitrary death. That's not heroic fantasy, that's "subterranean fantasy fucking Vietnam" The sort of danger I want is more like slow torture. Fate mirrors this idea nicely. Even minor fights can leave a PC limping around with a consequence or two. All I'm doing is broadening the concept.

The Cursed World is a dangerous place, and adventurers are those who venture into the most dangerous parts of it. No one survives these places for long. Supplies dwindle, magic fades, and raw endurance is put to the test. An adventure is also a slowly tightening trap.

Unfortunately, this will require a bit of bookkeeping. After I did a whole post about the terrible bookkeeping that I'm getting rid of, here is some of the acceptable bookkeeping that I'm going to keep.

Your (Cursed) World May Vary

Does D&D have a setting? I don't mean the various official and unofficial settings, I mean just in the core rules. There is at least the core of a setting. The races and monsters are defined. The magic systems assumes a certain metaphysics. The inner and outer planes are assumed to be present. The names of a few archmages are mentioned in the spell list.

This is the approach I'm taking with Cursed World. It's not a fully realized setting, just the seed of one.

The backstory of the fallen empire can justify all sorts of classic tropes. Monsters are everywhere. The land is dotted with dangerous underground underground vaults, rich with treasure. Most of the world speaks a common language. The setting is a mish-mash of real-world cultures from various time periods, allowing plenty of options for players to pull ideas from.

Twelve races are detailed. All of them are taken from the d20 SRD, so should be quite familiar to fantasy gamers. Five of them are PC races, these are the nations that rebelled against the empire. The rest are humanoid "monster" races, that mostly fought for the empire until the end.

There is a pantheon of gods, worshiped all over the world. Seven benevolent gods, two uncaring, and five downright evil. There is also plenty of room for lesser gods, tied to specific cultures. Again, the intention is to give the player built in points of reference, while still allowing as much flexibility as possible.

Multiple types of magic are described. Mechanically they are very similar. Arcane magic is flashy and destructive. Divine magic tends towards healing and protection. Within these two categories, there are a multitude of options for magic-using characters. These imply the existence of wizard academies and clerical orders.

All these things provide a solid framework of fantasy cliches. Pardon me, time-tested genre tropes. But there's still plenty of room for players to make the world their own.

Design Goals, part two

The last post was mostly about world building goals in the last post, so this one is more about game mechanics. Specifically, bookkeeping, and how I want to get rid of it.

Bookkeeping creeps in to a game in a variety of ways, and there are a variety of ways to stop it. Let's look at a few of them, under the cut.

Design Goals, part one

So what sort of game is Cursed World, anyway? While designing it, I had a few goals in mind. The first was to make room for some moral ambiguity alongside old school gaming's good vs evil.

The clear-cut, black and white morality of D&D is both a strength and a weakness. Bright shining heroes facing off against black-hearted foes can make for a great story, but but so many other good stories can't happen in a world where detect evil exists.

The solution is to downplay the cosmic good vs evil struggle. Don't get me wrong, capital-e Evil still exists, but a generic bandit isn't it. Mundane evil is familiar and complicated. Cosmic evil is inhuman and implacable. There's room for both in the same game.

In my notes, I have the phrase "Orcs are people too." This doesn't mean CW orcs are nice, it means that people are often nasty, and you can't tell who's a good guy by the pointyness of their teeth. Goblin heroes are great fun. Elves and dwarves make great villains. A touch of moral ambiguity widens the range of stories that can be told, and that can only be a good thing.

What is Cursed World?

Cursed World is a Dungeons & Dragons homage, but it is not an old school game. It's an attempt at a less tactical, more narrative approach to the familiar tropes.

Every gamer knows D&D. The monsters, spells, and tropes are ingrained in gamer culture. Love or hate it, practically every gamer has played it and had fun with it at some point. But in spite of multiple editions and years of expansion, most veteran gamers consider it dated and primitive.

So why not take what people love about D&D, and modernize it? Rather than re-create the original game like retro-clones do, Cursed World is a complete reconstruction of the dungeon fantasy experience. Outdated concepts have been reexamined. Classic tropes have been polished to a high sheen.

It's an old-school setting without the old school rules. It uses FATE, the state-of-the-art system that powered two Origin award-winning games. But to connect Cursed World to the D&D tradition, it will include quick conversion rules for d20 or Pathfinder monsters and and traps.