Expansion - Manuscript Preview #2
3 months ago
– Sun, Sep 08, 2024 at 06:41:48 AM
Hello Ultrasmart backers,
I've got the second section from our draft manuscript for you today! This section is all about Expansion!
In the previous chapter, we covered the core rules of Storypath. While there might be a few tweaks here or name changes there, those rules will generally be the same in any game using Storypath Ultra. They are, if you will, the skeleton for all Storypath games, the foundation they’re all built upon.
Now you might want to expand on them. Maybe you want to make your own Paths, or need to create Edges and powers that give your characters that special spark unique to your vision of the game. Or maybe you want to introduce some more detail to systems like combat or bonds. In this chapter, we’ll talk all about how to expand on the core rules.
If the core rules are the “science” of Storypath, here we move into the “art,” as you fine-tune the rules to work in whatever way you need them to. These suggestions aren’t as hard-and-fast as the core rules, and sometimes consist more about what feels right than what makes the most mathematical sense.
International Shipping – Collected in the Pledge Manager
One quick note about Shipping before we get into the manuscript previews.
First up, it's amazingly expensive to ship, especially from Onyx Path's home base in the US. We get that, but there's not much we can do at this time. Onyx Path is in a difficult space where the company is big enough that they're not saving money by fulfilling out of Rich's garage, but small enough that they can't really set up international partners to handle portions of the fulfillment. So we are where we are - for now.
The best we can do at this point is to plan carefully, advise everyone up front that international shipping will likely be expensive (see our projections on the main page) and only charge what it costs us when the time comes. We’ll be charging for shipping in the Pledge Manager once the books are being printed and we can deal with the actual shipping charges rather than using our best-guesses this far out. If you live outside the US and aren't sure you want the hardcover or other physical items, you can pledge to the PDF tier now and upgrade your pledge in the Pledge Manager once we know the final shipping costs.
DRAFT MANUSCRIPT PREVIEWS - BACKERS ONLY
Remember, thanks to BackerKit magic, these download links are visible to Backers only - you must be logged in and reading this on the website to have access to the manuscript preview links. So, if you're reading this via e-mail, click that "Read The Update" link on the bottom and I'll see you below the title treatment.
BACKERS VOTE ON CONTENT
The first of the included example settings, Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell, not only offers a complete game set in the parallel version of the year 2000, but also illustrates exactly how Story Path was implemented and adjusted.
The Onyx Path team has plans to write two more, and as a backer you'll be able to vote on which ones you prefer.
For the first poll, you'll be voting on a Sci-fi setting example. Your options:
- Cyber-enhanced humans fly corporate-owned starships in search of new life and new financial opportunities.
- Futuristic superheroes fight interdimensional monsters in order to keep them from destabilizing reality.
- An experimental space flight flings the player characters into a distant galaxy full of strange and alien sights.
Voting will run until September 14th at 2:00 PM EST. You must be a backer of this project to vote for this setting.We'll have a second poll running during the final two weeks of the campaign, where backers will be voting on one of the Fantasy Setting options.
Example Setting: Character Creation
3 months ago
– Sat, Sep 07, 2024 at 08:30:24 AM
Hello SP-Ultras,
In our last update, I shared some of the background and details for our example setting,
Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell. Now we're going to see how you'd present some of the Core Rules material for that game, focusing today on Character Creation. Since this is pre-layout, you get some
See Page XX's built right into the manuscript!
Character Creation
Here’s an amended explanation of character creation, revised to work specifically with Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell.
Step One: Concept
The first thing you should do is consider who your character is and what they do. A more specific concept helps when choosing or creating Paths and assigning points. Note that, although all the player characters in Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell are wrestlers, that doesn’t mean they were originally involved in professional wrestling. Here are some example concepts:
- Former police detective who left the force to enact real justice
- Community leader who wrestles demons (literal and personal) to protect the less fortunate
- Rich college kid who lost everything in the Apocalypse and wants to prove their value
- Ex-cultist who realized they were rooting for the wrong side
Example: Michelle is building Natasha Gray. She’s decided Natasha is a former professional wrestler who has been caught up in the war between angels and demons. She chooses “bitter professional wrestler” as Natasha’s concept.
Step Two: Angelic Choir (Major Path)
This step and the next involve choosing Paths for your character. In Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell, the most significant Path is the type of angel who bonded with your character, so your Major Path is always your Angelic Choir Path.
Choose from Concordia (an angel of order), Diligentia (angel of strength), Fides (angel of hope), Patientia (angel of fortitude), and Veritas (angel of truth), then apply the following components to your character sheet:
Assign six dots in Skills (as described on p. XX) among any or all of the 3 Skills listed for the Path. No Skill can have more than five dots.
Example: Michelle picks Diligentia as her Angelic Choir Path, which grants dots in the Athletics, Medicine, and Survival Skills. Michelle decides that Natasha has mostly focused on her athletic prowess, although she’s picked up some first aid from her time treating her own injuries, so assigns three dots to Athletics, two to Medicine, and one to Survival.
Assign one dot to every Attribute as a starting base. Then, assign 10 more dots in Attributes. These dots will be specific for the Attribute Arena listed. You cannot have more than five dots in any one Attribute.
Example: After putting one dot in all Attributes, Michelle reads that the Diligentia Path grants 3 Mental dots, 5 Physical dots, and 2 Social dots. For Mental, she assigns one dot to Cunning and two to Resolve. She puts one dot each into Presence and Composure to cover her Social dots, and finally two dots each to Might and Stamina, and one dot in Dexterity.
Assign three dots to Path contacts. These dots can all be spent on one contact or spread across multiple contacts.
Example: Looking over the example contacts, Michelle decides to put one dot in a physical trainer that she works with (she got a major injury that nearly ended her career before the Apocalypse), and two dots in a construction worker that now repairs houses for survivors.
Pick one other player’s character and define a bond rated at 2 (see p. XX) between the two characters. This should be representative of the Path and an opportunity to interact that came from being part of that Path.
Example: Michelle talks to David, who is making another wrestler — Kit Baxter — who used to be an engineer before the end times came. Now they realize they have more in common than they thought, so Michelle takes a positive 2 bond with Kit.
Finally, give the angel a name and personality, inspired by the choir they are a part of.
Example: Michelle decides that Natasha’s angel is called “Isabell,” after an ex-girlfriend of hers that Natasha still has fond memories of. Like the ex-girlfriend, the angel Isabell speaks in a no-nonsense tone that is sometimes so blunt as to be a little hurtful.
Step Three: Minor Paths
A Minor Path defines background elements that make the character who she is. Choose your Before Times and Wrestling Style Paths and apply the following elements for each Path:
Assign three dots in Skills (as described on p. XX) among any or all of the 3 Skills provided. Again, no Skill can have more than five dots.
Example: Michelle picks Warrior and Hardcore as her Minor Paths for Natasha.The Warrior Path grants dots in the Athletics, Ranged Combat, and Survival Skills. Michelle decides that Natasha has learned to survive in The Y2K World and puts all three dots into Survival. Hardcore grants Larceny and Survival in addition to Close Combat. She decides to put two dots in Close Combat and one dot in Larceny.
Assign four dots in Attributes. As with the Major Path, these dots will be specific for the Attribute Arena listed, and you cannot have more than five dots in one Attribute.
Example: The Warrior Path grants Mental 1 and Physical 3, so Amanda assigns one dot to Resolve, two dots to Might, and one dot to Stamina. Hardcore grants Mental 2 and Physical 2, so she assigns one dot to Cunning, one to Resolve, and two dots to Dexterity.
Assign one dot to a Path contact.
Example: Michelle decides to put a dot into a sparring partner contact for Warrior, and a back-alley medic contact for Hardcore.
Pick one other player’s character and define a bond rated at 1 (see p. XX) for each Minor Path.
Example: Michelle needs to create two more bonds. She decides that Natasha and Mercedes used to tag team together before Mercedes turned on her and assigns a level 1 negative bond to Mercedes. Natasha and Tony met at the boxing gym and have been training together casually for a few months, so she assigns a level 1 positive bond to Tony.
Step Four: Angelic Template
Angelic wrestlers have some advantages over other survivors of the Apocalypse, which means these characters have a few additional modifiers.
First, every angelic wrestler starts with one dot of Grace. Grace dots determine both their prerequisite for how many miracles the host knows, and how many points of Grace they can spend on miracles and Graceful Moves. Grace is explained in more detail on p. XX.
Secondly, choose if you want to take a second dot of Grace, or add a dot to your attributes. Some hosts prefer to focus on their inherent talents, while others want to increase the potential their angelic partners offer them.
Example: Michelle feels like Natasha would focus her time after the Apocalypse on getting to know Isabell and assigns a second dot to Grace.
Next, note your Wrestling Style Path Enhancement bonus (p. XX) and take three miracles according to your Angelic Choir Path (p. XX).
Example: Natasha automatically gets the Summon Ring miracle. For her second universal miracle, Michelle chooses Demon Sense, to make sure she isn’t ambushed by sneaky demons or their cultists. Her Angelic Choir Path also gives her access to one Strength miracle. She looks them over and decides on Power from Pain.
Finally, assign a positive 1 bond to your angel, and either a positive 1 bond or a negative 1 bond to the Audience (p. XX).
Example: Natasha was always the most comfortable playing a villain in her former life and decides to continue the trend. She takes a negative 1 bond to the Audience.
Step Five: Finalize Statistics
At this point, the bulk of your character’s life and story has been determined. Now, you can choose to give the character a bit of flavor, determine who she knows, and describe her to the other players at the table.
Add an additional three Skill dots to any Skills on your character, even those that aren’t Path Skills. As before, no Skill can have more than five dots. If the character doesn’t have any dots in Close Combat, one of these dots must be in that Skill.
Example: Michelle looks over all the skills available. Ultimately, however, she decides that Close Combat is going to be the most useful for her, and assigns her three dots in Close Combat.
Record your defenses and Injuries: Your character’s Defense and Integrity are both 1. Your character has 3 Injury Levels made up of 7 Injury boxes.
Record the character’s Initiative. Players roll the higher of either Athletics + Cunning or Empathy + Dexterity. Record this number in the appropriate slot on the character sheet.
Assign tags to your contact dots. Contacts are rated from 1 to 3 and can carry tags that define what they are good at. Each dot a contact has conveys one tag.
Example: Michelle looks back at her contacts. For the one dot in her physical trainer contact, she assigns the tag Mentor. Her construction worker has two dots, so she gives him two tags: Informant and Sneaky. Her sparring partner contact gets the Dangerous tag, and the back-alley medic contact gets Security.
Step Six: Aspirations
Characters start with a single long-term Aspiration and two short-term Aspirations. It’s perfectly fine to start the game without any Aspirations on the character sheet and then fill them in as the players learn more about the plot of the game, and how their characters wish to interact with it.
Example: Michelle thinks for a while about her Aspirations, but aside from wanting to win a match (a great short-term Aspiration for early in the game), she decides she needs to play a bit before she can settle on them. So she starts with two of her Aspirations blank.
Under the Mask: Character Creation
While you don’t need to reprint the character creation rules, the individual steps are relatively short, so there’s not much harm in putting all the character creation rules, both core and unique to your game, in one place for ease of reference. Besides, it allows you to integrate the changes specific to your game, to avoid flipping back and forth between two sets of rules.
You may notice that step four allows the player to choose between an additional dot of Grace or an additional attribute dot. Not all dots on the character sheet are the same, but if you check the advancement chart on p. XX, you’ll notice that an attribute dot and a power dot cost the same amount. So, in this case, it’s possible to offer a choice because either option is equivalent on the final character. You can offer similar equivalent choices, such as awarding characters bonus contact dots in lieu of bonus Skill dots.
Similarly, notice how in step five there’s a requirement to have at least one of the Skill dots go into Close Combat. Since that’s a vital skill for Pinfall in Grace, Body Slams from Hell, you want to make sure no player ends up with no dots in it. If you’ve looked ahead, you’ll see that every Wrestling Style Path has Close Combat as a Path skill, but it’s still possible that players might decide to put zero dots into it. Adding a quick rule here ensures that no player is completely bereft of a vital Skill.
Example Character
Here’s the completed version of “The Empress” Natasha Gray.
“The Empress” Natasha Gray
Concept: Bitter professional wrestler
Angelic Choir: Diligentia
Before Times: Warrior
Wrestling Style: Hardcore
Wrestling Style Bonus: +1 Enhancement to purchase Hardcore Moves
Skills: Athletics (Angelic, Before Times) •••, Close Combat (Wrestling Style) •••••, Larceny (Wrestling Style) •, Medicine (Angelic) ••, Ranged Combat (Before Times), Survival (Angelic, Before Times, Wrestling Style) ••••
Attributes: Intellect •, Cunning •••, Resolve •••••; Might •••••, Dexterity ••••, Stamina ••••; Presence ••, Manipulation •, Composure ••
Contacts: Angelic Choir: Henry, physical trainer • (mentor), Frankie Walker, construction worker •• (informant, sneaky); Before Times: Genevieve Dupont, sparring partner • (dangerous); Wrestling Style: Spider, back-alley medic • (security)
Short-Term Aspiration: To win a match
Short-Term Aspiration: To be determined
Long-Term Aspiration: To be determined
Grace: 2
Miracles: Demon Sense, Power from Pain, Summon Ring
Bonds: Kit Baxter (positive) ••, Mercedes (negative) •, Tony (positive) •, Isabell (positive; Angelic bond) •, Audience (negative) •
Under the Mask: Example Player Characters
Providing some example player characters does a few things for your game. First, if a player wants to just jump into the game, it’s great to be able to hand them a character so they can start playing. Secondly, it illustrates to the player what a correctly constructed character looks like, so they can double-check to make sure they didn’t miss anything. Finally, as the person making the setting, they help you to make sure you didn’t miss anything while compiling all the rules you want to use in your game.
Again, this is just a portion of the rules and systems in our example chapter. Backers will have access to the full draft version before the campaign is over, but we'll be seeing a lot from
Pinfall from Grace as we delve into each bit of the Storypath Ultra system. Tomorrow, backers will get access to the next section of the manuscript, which is all about Expansion of the rules and new options, and then on Monday we'll see those options in action as we explore some Angelic Choir Paths for our example setting.
This is the kind of stuff that will be created in our two additional example settings, a Sci-Fi game and a Fantasy game. As a reminder, voting is going on right now to determine the theme and direction for the Science Fiction example setting.
For the first poll, you're be voting on a Sci-fi setting example. Your options:
- Cyber-enhanced humans fly corporate-owned starships in search of new life and new financial opportunities.
- Futuristic superheroes fight interdimensional monsters in order to keep them from destabilizing reality.
- An experimental space flight flings the player characters into a distant galaxy full of strange and alien sights.
Example Setting: Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell
3 months ago
– Thu, Sep 05, 2024 at 07:03:16 AM
Hello Pathwalkers! Greetings Ultranughts! Salutations, Librarians!
From our first update,
backers have access to the
chapters from the draft manuscript. Chapter 1 is the biggie, of course - it's the
Core Rules for
Storypath Ultra! If you haven't checked them out yet, you can find all of the updates in the
Community section linked at the
top of the Crowdfunding page.
Of course, these rules are the
how of the game. The
where/what/who/why comes when you add them to a setting.
The Storypath Ultra Core Manual will come with three example games - settings plus rules - to showcase how to put your rules options together with your setting. They won’t spell out absolutely everything, but each of them will be a complete game to run for your players. Some room will be left for you to adjust and expand to suit your own taste.
Backers are voting on example setting #2 and #3 during this campaign (
you know that already! - Make sure you vote!)
The first example setting is
Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell, which showcases alternative history, supernatural player characters, and a way to add more granularity to combat. Unlike the other chapters, this one also contains a variety of “Under the Mask” sidebars, explaining some of the design decisions of this setting to better illustrate how to create your own Storypath game.
As backers are introduced to new sections of the manuscript, I'll be sharing a few sneak peeks from
Pinfall from Grace to serve as examples of the options in action. To set that up, let's dive into the set up for the game...
The Match of the Millennium!
I do things my way. I don’t do things to make people happy or appease them.
- Maxwell Jacob Friedman
Through the ruins of the city walked the ruins of a woman. A year ago, wrestling announcers perched at a folding table might have called Natasha Gray an “empress” when she walked to the ring, but that was before the demons came and the whole world went to hell, literally. Now she wasn’t the empress of anything. Not even her own mind.
<Have we arrived yet, mortal?> The alien, beautiful voice resonated in her skull. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as it did the first time Natasha touched the glowing brand, but the voice was still strangely seductive, like a sore tooth she couldn’t stop probing with her tongue.
“No, Isabell” she said aloud, rubbing the symbol of an angel’s wing that had appeared on her hand weeks ago. “Stop asking.”
<But I sense the enemy is near,> the voice Natasha called “Isabell” insisted. <We should prepare to do battle.>
Natasha started to reply when she realized she was standing in front of what was once a large shopping mall. Through the broken glass doors, she could see most of the storefronts had already been looted. It was only maybe six months since the Y2K problem wrecked computers all over the world, but she’d pissed off enough crowds in bingo halls and gymnasiums to know how fast people can destroy a place when they’re angry and scared, so she wasn’t surprised most of the commercial places were like this.
But this desiccated husk of capitalism isn’t what drew her attention. It was the red-skinned demon wearing a black-and-white striped shirt.
“Welcome, mortal!” the demon proclaimed, as if projecting its voice over a roaring crowd of spectators that weren’t there. It used its elongated tongue to lick its eyebrows before continuing. “Today’s match is one for the ages!”
“Typical booker,” she muttered, shrugging off her trench coat. “Always rushing into things.”
If the demon heard her comments, it ignored them and turned to look at the air around them. “Featuring the challenger, Natasha ‘The Empress’ Gray!”
From the empty air, Natasha could hear boos and jeers from an invisible crowd. She nodded and raised her middle finger in the air, partially at the non-existence audience, but mostly at the small demon. She was used to playing the heel.
At this, the demon pointed behind itself, at an entire wrestling ring that had incongruously been summoned in the middle of a wrecked and broken parking lot. Inside the ring was a towering purple monster with thick ram’s horns on its head and (bafflingly) wearing a black unitard.
The small demon — the referee, Natasha reminded herself — smiled and continued its speech. “And her opponent! It is the ravager of souls! The wrecker of dreams! It is the indigo assassin… Ornar the Obstacle!”
<I did warn you,> Isabell said inside her mind.
Natasha clenched her fists, noticing the brand of the wing on her hand glowed with a piercing white light as she did so. “Stop being such a know-it-all angel and help me pin this monster,” she muttered, slipping a pair of silver knuckles into her boot.
It’s the year 2000, and Y2K was far worse than everyone feared. Not only did it dismantle the computerized infrastructure of the modern world, but it also turned out to be the harbinger for the capital-A Apocalypse… guess the end of the world scenarios were double-booked. Six hundred and sixty-six evil creatures (what you humans call “demons”) invaded the world and took over, establishing a myriad of small fiefdoms, elaborate schemes, and criminal organizations. As a result, Earth has turned into a hellhole, and its resale value is plummeting.
We, the forces opposing them, plan to oust the demons — people like to call us “angels,” and that word works as well as any other. After joining with the souls of humans willing to fight back, our representative brokered a deal with our demonic antagonists: allow us to fight each evil creature in single combat, and if the forces of good manage to defeat all 666, the demons will leave the Earth for good. The demons agreed, but on one condition: such conflicts must be conducted using the method they thought humans most value for conflicts between good and evil. We agreed.
Turns out, that’s professional wrestling. And the demons get to control the referee.
You, my spiritual companion, are a wrestler wandering the world in search of demonic opponents. You’re armed only with your natural athleticism and the powers invested in you by me, your angelic partner — powers you didn’t ask for and can’t entirely control, so sorry about that. It’s up to both of us to take back the Earth, one body slam at a time.
Under the Mask: Setting Fiction
Writing fiction for your setting isn’t a requirement, but it can help Storyguides get a better feel for the tone and action they’re going for. Players can also find it useful, along with a short, punchy description of the setting (the kind of text you’d find on the back cover of a published Storypath rulebook). Writing that section “in voice,” as if a character from the world were talking, can also help to cement the feel of the setting in a reader’s mind.
In the Year 2000
Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hellis an alternative historical setting. It takes place in the year 2000, but a version of that year very different from the one in our history.
Two Apocalypses
It all started with a small bit of computer code back in the 1990s. The Y2K (short for “year 2000”) Problem stemmed from the way dates were programmed into many computer systems and software applications. To save memory and storage space, programmers would represent the year in a date with the last two digits instead of the full four, so 1998 would be “98.” But when the year 2000 loomed, “00” could be misinterpreted as 1900 instead of 2000.
It seems like a minor problem, but this small detail caused errors in millions of computations, such as financial calculations and data storage, resulting in malfunctioning software. Essential systems, like those used by banks, utilities, and government agencies, relied on accurate data, so when these systems failed to recognize the correct year, there were disruptions and failures.
In your history, the history of the person reading this, the most significant problems were averted with massive worldwide efforts to update and correct the underlying code before January 1, 2000. However, in the world of Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell (we’ll call it The Y2K World for clarity), everyone was distracted by a completely different problem: the demons of the Apocalypse.
That is, “demons” are what humans called them, because they sure felt a lot like something from the Bible: Strange spirits appearing and inspiring chaos just as civilization was falling apart. These spirits took over the bodies of six hundred and sixty-six humans, changed them into strange and powerful monsters, and proceeded to give civilization the last shove it needed to topple over.
Most computerized technology ceased working. Major organizations, corporations, and governments lost everything overnight. Financial markets collapsed, and airplanes ceased working (in a few cases, even falling out of the sky when critical systems failed). Oil couldn’t be shipped anywhere, and nuclear reactors ceased working. People died on an unprecedented scale, and it didn’t seem like anyone could stop what everyone assumed was the end of the world.
Throw in rampaging demons and devilishly clever villains, and it wasn’t long before all of civilization was devastated. Now, anything that used a hard drive or a computer chip is dead. Anything that uses electricity or gasoline will work for a while, but eventually the resources to power them will be used up. Currency is worthless, with trade and barter being the only ways left of exchanging goods. Everything has devolved to a technology level of around the mid-20th century, and a societal level more like that of the Middle Ages. And everyone is either armed or knows someone who is, to protect themselves from the human and demonic monsters that dominate what’s left of the planet.
But unbeknownst to most anyone, a different collection of six hundred and sixty-six spirits also appeared at the same time. Unlike the demons, these spirits initially possessed objects rather than people, manifesting as glowing sigils. A human who touched the sigil could communicate with the spirit within, and they would ask the human a single question: “Do you want to save the world?” Those that agreed became possessed by what are now called “angels.”
The angels, like their demonic counterparts, changed the humans they possessed, but in different ways. For one, they didn’t take complete control of their minds, instead preferring to coexist with their human hosts. For another, rather than turning them bodily into monsters, the angels preferred to simply accentuate their host’s form, making it stronger, faster, more attractive, and giving them a keener mind. These (sometimes reluctant) warriors are the only people with the power and know-how to stop the demonic invasion.
The Negotiation
Once both armies had their recruits and the battle lines were drawn, the leader of the angels and the leader of the demons met to discuss terms. Neither side claims to know the name of their respective leader, but both sides agree that, whomever the leaders are, a meeting did happen.
The leader of the angels was the one who got the demons to agree to single combat, and to the condition that if the angelic humans defeated all six hundred and sixty-six opponents, the demons would leave humanity in peace and never return. Granted, given how things evolved, “single combat” is a bit of a misnomer. In truth, the conditions are more complex: The forces on each side must contain an equal number of warriors, each combatant must be a human host to an angelic or demonic spirit (not an unpossessed human), and the size of each force can’t exceed a specific number.
The leader of the demons that required the conflicts to not only adhere to a strict code of honor but said code of honor must be something drawn from the ethos of humanity. Further, they demanded that if they beat the angelic hosts six hundred and sixty-six times, the angels would leave the world to the depravations of the demon invaders.
This was a particularly clever trick, because it wasn’t until after the condition was agreed to that the leader of the angels realized they weren’t bound to the
rules of professional wrestling, but to the
code of honor of it. And in professional wrestling, the villains of each conflict don’t have any honor at all.
So, these are just some sneak peeks - some excerpts - from our example setting, which we'll see in full in our final manuscript preview on September 23rd. But we'll be visiting this setting many times over the next weeks to showcase some of the possible Paths, some Miracles that characters become capable of, some Relics that characters may gain access to, how matches work, and Storyguide Characters.
Before all of that, we'll get a peek at some of the Character Creation rules for this setting on Saturday.
#SPU
Setting Examples and Stretching Goals
3 months ago
– Wed, Sep 04, 2024 at 06:25:01 AM
Hello Spunky Supporters!
Well, these first 19 hours have been awesome. Not only have we funded the book, we've gathered more than 500 backers and are helping decide on the direction of our second Sci-Fi example setting for the final version!
As one of the benefits of backing during the early days of this quick campaign, YOU get to have your vote counted to help decide what the subject/theme of the second example setting will be.
For this first poll, our Sci-Fi options are:
- Cyber-enhanced humans fly corporate-owned starships in search of new life and new financial opportunities.
- Futuristic superheroes fight interdimensional monsters in order to keep them from destabilizing reality.
- An experimental space flight flings the player characters into a distant galaxy full of strange and alien sights.
I'll stress that nothing has been written for this second setting yet, and that these themes/concepts have been left as pretty general umbrellas to hold a lot of ideas that may come to the developers and writers when they begin putting this section together. We're helping by providing a direction.
I just mention that because I've seen some amazing discussion about the possibilities within each concept, but also some disappointment that "voting for Futuristic Superheroes means we won't get the starship rules that would have come with the first option!" Or "we won't get cyber-enhancement rules if we vote for option three!" The only thing I can say, at this point in time, nothing is off the table and the team will take our direction and come up with lots of cool stuff.
Right now, we've got "Lost in a Distant Galaxy" just squeaking into the lead, with Cyber-enhanced humans fly starships right behind, and
I'll note that we've only had 212 votes so far, so that means fewer than half of our backers have voted.
Voting will run until September 14th at 2:00 PM EST. You must be a backer of this project to vote for this setting.
Personally, I'm a big fan of all of those ideas and was initially looking at "Lost in a distant galaxy" because I could see running that kind of game with my group. And then someone suggested "Futuristic Superheroes fight monsters" could be about building a team of teenage science ninjas with individual vehicles and bird-themed costumes and now I'm wavering. The good news is that you can change your vote as often as you like... right up until the September 14th end point.
And, here's an idea. If the setting direction you're rooting for doesn't end up winning and you fear that some cool ideas and concepts you were really looking forward to won't be available...
Well, it's time for some Stretch Goal talk!
As we increase the overall funding and support for the project, we’re able to add additional resources to the project, expand the rewards listed, and add in new offers and opportunities. Each Stretch Goal will have a target that, once reached, will add a project to the reward list for backers of the relevant Stretch Goal path. Whenever we achieve a stretch goal, the image will be updated to reflect the achievement.
At $30,000 in Funding - COMMUNITY CONTENT PROGRAM - Onyx Path will expedite adding Storypath Ultra material to the Storypath Nexus Community Content Program.
The
StoryPath Nexus is Onyx Path's imprint that allows you — the StoryPath community — to create and sell self-published material for StoryPath RPGs like the second edition of the Scion and Trinity roleplaying games. You can offer your work for free, set a price, or make it pay-what-you-want. They’ll give you some resources to help you out, and a marketplace for other Storypath fans to use.
At this time, the Nexus is open for certain parts of the Scion second edition setting, some eras within the Trinity Continuum, and They Came from Beneath the Sea! There's still a lot of games to be opened up and added, but all of that takes time as the Onyx Path legal brains figure out what's allowed and build assets to help you.
If we hit this Stretch Goal, that will push Storypath Ultra to the front part of the line, getting SPU systems and assets available to Content Creators so they can build material for all of us to use.
You can read more about Storypath Nexus <here> Beyond that, we'll have a few milestone markers to help us track our pace and give the team time to get the wording right on our next set of Stretch Goals!
At $35,000 in Funding - DIGITAL WALLPAPER - Sensational SPU artwork will be used to create a wallpaper for your computer desktop. This digital wallpaper will be added to the rewards list of all backers supporting this project.
At $38,000 in Funding – STORYPATH ULTRA SHIRT ON REDBUBBLE – A Storypath Ultra-themed Backer shirt will be hosted on Onyx Path’s Redbubble store for a limited time. Only backers will be notified when the shirt becomes available for purchase.
So remember to vote! Share ideas about your setting preferences in the comments or on Discord, and let's continue to spread the word and see if we can't get those Stretch Goals unlocked!
Tomorrow - We'll get a peek at the first example setting from the book with some Pinfall from Grace fiction!
#SPU
