Hi! I'm not dead! - 2024 Update

Hello everyone!

So a brief explanation of what's been going down. Long story short? ADHD is a butt, and I apparently have it. So that's been fun. On top of needing to devote more work towards... well... being able to live, plus in addition to trying to figure out what kinds of medications and the like would help, game development has somewhat understandably  been on the back burner; making a post about it more so.

That having been said, I've not stopped working on Umbrus!

Last time I checked in, roughly a year ago, I was working on redesigning the inventory, then the encounters chapters. Well good news! That's been done! Here's what's new and what's changed:

Equipment

The equipment in Umbrus has been redesigned to provide tangible benefits for the player, making what items you want to have more important. This should make your inventory more interesting and meaningful, especially at character creation and between adventures / arcs within your games.  In addition, equipment no longer has an encumbrance value associated with it. I have personally never enjoyed the mathy nature of encumbrance and wanted to look for solutions to this, in order for inventory and carry capacity to still matter, but be less of a hassle for players and be more interesting. The solution I have come up with that has tested well thus far is a new grid-based inventory.

• Each character has, generally, a 5 x 5 space grid that they can fill with items. It's up to the player to determine how best to fit everything into their inventory grid.
  • Your grid size is determined largely by your creature size and Endurance modifier, with certain  character options allowing for a greater number of rows and columns.
• Some items can "stack" in your inventory, allowing for multiple items to take up the same space.
• There are also items that grant additional inventory grids! Some, such as a quiver, are purely for one particular type of equipment (i.e. in this case, arrows and bolts), while others like the trusty brand-neutral extradimensional satchel, simply grant more inventory space.
• Your currency does not take up any slots in your inventory grid.
  • As well, there is space for notation on other items of note that are not part of your inventory that you may want to keep track of.

Encounters

While combat has had little to no significant changes - it was pretty good - there are new rules for skill challenges and social encounters, to provide more meaningful space for drama and challenge beyond simply combat.

Skill challenges are fairly self-explanatory. You have a problem that is not able to be solved by fighting or talking, and have some degree of immediate urgency to solving it. The rules here are non-explicit for specific situations, but rather are more intended to provide a framework for the game master to craft one. This includes what DC's you should set for the skill challenge, how many successes you need, what happens if a player fails a skill check and what happens if the party as a whole fails the challenge. This system should be robust enough that you will be able to use it to craft a nigh-unlimited number of scenarios for dramatic tension of a non-violent kind!

Social encounters on the other hand are a different sort of beast. To quote the book:

"The way a social encounter will play out is fairly simple. The players must first decide upon a goal for the encounter. Next, they attempt to convince the character they are engaging with to do what they want. When a player attempts to forward the party’s goal during the encounter, such as via trying to make a convincing argument, threatening the character, lying to them, or performing some other action, the game master will have them make a skill check. The game master will then note down if that skill check succeeded or failed. When the conversation has run its course, the party will make a final check to determine the result of the encounter."

This system has taken the rather nebulous "Appeal" stat and made it a means of modifying the DC of a social encounter. If the NPC doesn't like you, the DC goes up. If they love you, it'll go down. Likewise, each subject of a social encounter has motivators (values, goals, joys, and hates) and leverages (fears and secrets) that the players can exploit or even run afoul of. All of this combines into a framework that enables game masters to create more interesting, fleshed-out NPCs for the players to interact with, while also making important social scenes  have more substance by encouraging players to learn more about the NPC by various means to be able to exploit their motivators / leverages. Not all conversations need to be a social encounter, but this does provide the means for making something with a bit more drama, if the game master chooses to use it!


So what's next?

I'm still trying to figure out what meds will work for me so while my brain chemicals are still in flux, I do not believe it's a reasonable thing to promise anything. That having been said, I can say with all honesty that I do still want to work on this project, if only to have the exquisite pleasure of BEING DONE. Currently, I am partway through the "Rules of Adventure", creating downtime activities for players (with a neat patron system!). After that, it'll be game master tips, the bestiary, and the lore section.

There will likely be new rules for all of those sections, since most of those sections are either very old and in need of modernization or simply didn't have much substance to begin with in the unformatted book. That having been said, I am considering reducing the scope on the lore chapter. Umbrus and Elarinos were both built simultaneously, and while you are able to play Umbrus in non-official settings (I'm actually using it to play the Call of the Netherdeep module!), I wanted to provide the official setting as much as reasonably possible so that game masters who simply wanted to enjoy the game in the world custom-built with it in mind could do so. I've currently got 20-something major cities(!!!!!) slated for at least half-page write-ups each, which I may cut down on, somewhat. Capitals will likely be enough to go off of for game masters, since most regions will have similar enough cultures, architecture, and civic planning. And to be honest, if I were uncomfortable placing my creative works in the public's hands and losing some degree of control over how it's represented... I probably wouldn't be in the games industry in the first place! Blank spots on the canvas being painted in by individual game masters is perfectly fine and later down the road if I want to flesh out and detail other notable cities for, say, adventure content, that's fine.

Whew! That was a long post. If you made it here to the end, thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed and are excited for what's to come! I'm optimistic about 2024 in ways I have not been for a long, long time.

Love and hugs
Sam "The G stands for Games" G