This week's build of the game can be found here.
As Iron Halberd gets closer to playtest release, I've mostly been going through and making sure all of the little subsystems are in place. There's a decent amount of moving parts that interact with each other, with a heavy focus on time and inventory management. Let's go down the list!
Crafting
Crafting is the big thing here. It takes some inspiration from Kibblestasty's crafting system for 5e, to give credit where credit's due. It's more of a skeleton to make it easier for the GM to build on than it is a comprehensive list of everything you could craft.
- Most crafting ingredients are given a classification within the system, but are still also listed as whatever they are in-world, and both the classification (e.g. something like 'uncommon monster organ' for the heart of an ogre) and the specific item itself (ogre heart) are relevant.
- Crafting recipes are mostly suggestions, and if the player and GM agree something should work, than it does even if it deviates from what the rules list. This explosive potion's recipe might call for gunpowder, but if you have the gas glands harvested from a fire-breathing dragon, which produce flammable fumes the dragon ignited for its fire breath, that should probably make a perfectly good - no, better - substitute.
- Crafting ingredients are broken down into creature parts, reagents, and ores, which are then classified with a source, type and rarity. Other items can also be used as crafting ingredients, but items whose primary purpose is crafting are classified as those things under the crafting system.
- There's specific recipes and tables to roll on for brewing potions, scribing spell scrolls, repairing and forging weapons/armor/tools, and creating artefacts (aka magic items). The GM is heavily encouraged to use the crafting system more as a foundation for their own ideas than a comprehensive list of craftable items.
Exploration & Downtime
Time outside of combat is measured in dungeon turns & downtime turns. Dungeon turns are 5-10 minutes, downtime turns are a good chunk of the day (you get one per PC at the end of a day after setting up camp, or two if you're staying in a city and not adventuring). Hexcrawling is done on a timescale of downtime turns while dungeon crawling is done on a timescale of dungeon turns. Many other subsystems like crafting and foraging are measured in downtime turns as well.
Dungeon crawling has simplistic rules for light & visibility, differentiating between candle, torch and lantern light with more light meaning a higher chance of being detected in random encounters.
Followers
There's a little minigame for randomly rolling multiple prospective followers whenever the PCs are in town looking to hire. Followers have randomly rolled HP, item slots, starting gear, personality traits and faults. All followers have a fault and they're designed explicitly to make dealing with followers a little more of a hassle than just "you pay me so I'll do what you say". They still generally follow orders, but they might be cowardly, greedy, reckless, argumentative, or otherwise difficult to deal with. It makes each individual follower a bit more than just stats on a page.
I'd like to think it makes the hiring process a bit more interesting, too. Are you gonna take the cheerful dwarf with a hefty 8 hit points, but has a habit of recklessly charging into danger? Or the naive young blacksmith's apprentice who rolled 2 hit points but also happens to own some lockpicks that might come in handy?
XP & Genre
Iron Halberd uses different XP awarding tables based on what tone and direction you want your campaign to have. Currently there's only two: Heroic & treasure hunting. Heroic awards the most XP for helping others while treasure hunting rewards you mostly for discovering loot. Hope to add more.
Magic! (and cool stuff martials can do)
I really enjoyed figuring out this game's magic system, and I'm very happy with the niche it currently occupies. The last thing I wanted is a 5e situation where martials are limited to one niche (killing stuff) while magic-users are just as good at killing stuff and can also fill every other role you could possibly want to fill. So I flipped the script here: Martials are the flexible, versatile characters, while casters are limited to the niche situations their spells cover, the tradeoff for the rare taste of unfathomable arcane power.
The magic and maneuver system here are where the game's DCC and Grave influence is strongest. Everyone uses the same resource, Spirit, for both spells and martial maneuvers. There's no list of codified stuff your martial can do - if you have spirit, you can spend it to do something extra fancy on top of attacking. Disarm, parry, leap from balconies, swing on chandeliers, throw pocket sand, etc. in the same turn that you stab someone with your sword. It's limited only by the player's imagination and what the GM agrees is reasonable (which should be most things!). By design, it's open to whatever a martial might want to do with it. It's reliable, flexible, and covers many situations.
Then there's spells. Spells are unreliable, unpredictable, rigidly specific and rare. But some of the things they can accomplish eclipses the feats of the most skilled warrior - that's the tradeoff for all of those downsides. It's magic, it bends reality, warps minds, stops time, creates, destroys, grants all your wishes, as long as you roll really high on that casting roll and don't turn yourself into a frog or whatever.
Spells can also be cast at-will, without spending any limited resources, albeit with a much smaller casting roll bonus than if you spent spirit. If you would roll 1d12+6, you now roll 1d4+2. Note that a d4 has a much higher chance of rolling a natural 1 and now you see the tradeoff. Casting a spell at-will and having it fail locks you out of casting that spell without spirit for the day, too. I included at-will casting specifically so a caster who rolled a +0 for their Spirit stat would still be viable, but even other than that edge case I think it introduces a neat little gamble.
I also really like the quirks. Some spells have a little quirk table: The first time you cast the spell, if it has a quirk table, you roll to see what your quirk is. And then every time thereafter that you cast the spell, it has that quirk. Quirks range from different aesthetic changes (see what horrible thing your Toxic Cloud spell smells like!) to different mechanical tradeoffs for the spell (your Charm Person spell is big enough to cast over two people at once, but it's now way flashier and harder to hide). Only about a third of spells have quirks so far but I'd like to add more if I think of any.
You can start with, at most, three spells, but that's a rare edge case you'd have to be very lucky to get. You can only ever guarantee yourself one spell at character creation, if you're willing to give up the potential for all your other equipment to not suck.
Spells are also mostly utility. Only about 1/4 of them directly deal damage, while another 1/4 don't do that but still have some reasonable combat use.
Hey, I think we're about done
Yeah, this should probably be enough to run a nice functional game of Iron Halberd. At least as far as I can think of, all the loose ends are tied up that were preventing this from being fully playable, like the last couple spells missing and not having "downtime turn" defined anywhere in the book.
I'll probably throw this thing up on itch soon and spread it around. At time of writing though I'm tired and have a D&D game tomorrow so I'm going to sign off and pass out. If you've been excited for the game, it's playable now, so give it a go (character sheets are linked in last week's post).
