Description

Xeno’thre Chronicles is a personal work in progress TTRPG game that focuses on roleplay, combat, and exploration in a land full of long-forgetten history. I use a lot of design and data design skills in this project, gotten a lot of inspirations from both video games and ttrpgs, basiclly, 500% nerd energy put into this project!!!!

This game follows a triditional fantasy art style, but protraits it in a heavy Post-Apocalyptic filter. The core aesthic theme are giant, holy and empty structures, that hints the once glorious world.

At the moment, the focus of designs are the story and the combat gameplay. The school system allows players to build a class, with abilities learned from multiple schools, such as a paladin architype should have abilities from both schools of bless and armory, but one might want it to use ranged weapon instead, therefore instead of armory, they can build their paladin with school of archery! 

School Creation

When designing a school, what I focus on is usually, how can I make this school useful, when players decide to max level here, or just take a few levels and mix it with another class? The approch I toke was a level vs machanic combo curve.

I would usually design schools to start off with features that signify their key gameplay, but is weak without combinations of other same-school machanics, giving the players a taste of what the class feels like, but not enough power to make them only take one level then run to level another school.

After a few levels, abilities starts to combo together and form this school’s main style, this is a point that marks the formation of one complete and useful machanic. Also, a point where players can decide where they want to push further into this school, or start leveling in others. In following levels, I would provide gameplay elements that are less important, small componenets to form a bigger machanic, basiclly telling the player: There is going to be a new power spike coming, but are you willing to endure a few blend levels? Or jump to another school?

The leveling curve follows this struture, where every few levels, a new and strong feature is formed from components that are weak on their own. These features should always be not only useful to this school, but also great when mixed into certain other schools, which is an extreamly difficult task to perform, and requires tons of balancing.

An example: a school I created named School of Sacromancy, with the core theme of: Healing and Reviving. At the very beginning, it can craft an item from the cropse of creatures, called Blood Crystals, its effect is simply to heal. As the Sacromancer levels up, the blood crystal’s effect also strengthens, granting damage boosts when cosumed, healing on hit reviving on death. It becomes a pillar of gamplay for a Sacromancer, as these effect links to others, such as gaining “Resist Death”(Revive with 1 HP on next death) when health reached max, healing and dealing damage on revive, and applying a stackable debuff to nearby targets on revive, making it form a new combo every few levels

The interesting part about this school is you lose max health during level ups, which is horrible for other classes, but becomes more and more effective as you push this school level further. More and more healing and reviving abilities + reduced health makes its return to max health speed quicker, gaining the “Resist Death” buff, and not having to worry about the next death. The rate of max health decrease increases as you level higher, meaning it is completely fine to just take a few levels, learn a bit of the dark arts of healing and reviving. But as one pushes further, they get sunken in deeper and the results are more negative, unless they keep going.

Lore Creation

Suprisingly, lore creation is sometimes better with detailed data instead of words.

I created different factions at start, with basic profiles such as: This kingdom is good at magic, loves war, rich. Then, as I created more and more, they are bound to have conflicts, I would decide how I want these conflicts to resolve, and assign certain data to a faction. When another faction crossed over to conflict with a faction with data, I would calculate what numbers should I give this faction now, to make the outcomes logical.

With this loop, it is quickly that all factions in the world have coorsponding data that mesures not only their military strength, but also population, technology, resources, etc.