Adventures are the enemy.
I don't mind the one I'm working on for the Kenoma Quickstart, but I forgot how massively obsessive-compulsive I get about everything being just right when I go to get them done.
There's a lot of stuff left to do, but fortunately I don't have very much in the way of time consumption other than the adventure.
Unfortunately, I swear it's like pulling teeth to get from my outline to a finished product. I'm going to go more minimalistic in the future, but I feel like for a quick-start guide you just need to have it laid out because it might be someone's first time ever playing a game like this and they may not want to jump through hoops to make it work.
If I get enough money, this would probably be something I outsource to people, if I can find someone good enough at it.
However, I have a cool little thing to show off:
That's right, the sample characters do exist!
I'm not 100% happy with the character sheet layout right now, it feels like the text is too close to the lines but I don't know if that's just me obsessing over it or not. I know that when I move it up it seems like there's a lot of white-space, so I've left it at its current spot. I don't want to adjust too many of the text things because some of them are set up like they are for people writing by hand, but when I do a form-fillable version of the sheet I'll probably take some sort of accounting for that in mind.
One thing that will be familiar to anyone who's played Hammercalled are the Talents, but the new Talent system is much more robust. While I'm still struggling to come up with general talents (so many were combat oriented, and Kenoma has very different combat despite it being similar on the surface), I've been able to give a lot of cool things to the factions and origins.
Right now the way it works is that each Faction has a few Talents (or will have a few by the time the core rulebook launches) and each Origin has a few. I'm still fleshing out the Origins; there will be three or four per faction.
Talents interact with the Renown system by giving a way to use a character in ways that are slightly rule-breaking. There are three types:
Automatic talents are what you get for belonging in a faction or taking an origin. They give basic character distinction. D32 has two: Man-Made Horrors (an anti-stress effect) and Bred to Fight a War Unknown (which handles general psionics)
Special talents have some special criteria and aren't normally purchased. D32 has Generation 4 (which details some pariah-related mechanical effects), and most characters won't have any of these. They're one thing GMs can give out as rewards.
Purchased talents cost a number of Talent points. D32's are all psionic in nature: Psionic Relay (which enables instantaneous remote communication), Third Eye (which lets her skim others' senses for information about objects she is aware of, like the card-reading trick associated with ESP), and Intrusion (which lets her truth-test people or get an idea of what they're thinking about).
Talents sometimes open up new Flame spending effects, sometimes they're passive, and sometimes they offer a mix of both.
One thing that walks the line between talents and gear is cybernetics, but that's not written out yet. They have an Acquisition Cost, like Gear, but also a Talent Point cost, representing the need to acclimate to them.
Also not written are ways to get cross-Origin and cross-Faction Talents.
My thought right now is that cross-Origin talents are within grasp, except that you can't just become a pariah, and come at a +1 Talent point cost for members of the faction. Automatic Talents are always quite expensive, with a cost of 3 points +1 for the cross-Origin effect.
Cross-Faction talents are more expensive and require a Renown of at least 30 with the target faction. The basic cost is +2 for a generic Faction talent (5 for the Automatic ones, 3+ for purchased Talents). There is no additional cost for Origin-specific talents from other factions.
Cross-Faction talents
Assuming Kenoma takes off, I have two ideas for content support. Right now we're still working on the quickstart, so we'll see how the actual core rulebook goes, but I think there's some room for expansion.
One would be a setting and character options expansion, or maybe a set of small booklets for this purpose.
The other would be an optional rules/content creation guide that includes the methods I use for making Gear. I could put them in the core rulebook, I suppose, but I don't think it would fit well because I don't want it to be player-facing and I hate when games include a lot of stuff in core rulebooks that isn't for players or the bare necessities for GMs.
