Rolled 9 (1d14)
Welcome to this thread, Fantasy Craft is one of many games that is based on the same framework as D&D 3.5- but in this case torn down and rebuilt entirely.
The entire game (with many, many toolbox-style options for characters and campaign types) can be found in the core book, and so far there is only one other book (the Adventure Companion, basically a compilation of example settings), as well as a smattering of extra classes (the Call To Arms series) and a preview for the upcoming Spellbound- a book all about niche-style caster instead of the universalist, all-around Mage.
All of these are available to download (and hopefully someone else will post the links as I sadly do not have them); though if you like the game you should definitely buy a physical copy, as Crafty Games is a very small operation which could use as much support as possible.
I've started out with the roll for our character's Species, if anyone would like to create along with me, or just ask questions about how this RPG works, feel free to post.
>>43905659
Here to help
Specifically in the form of the aforementioned dropbox link
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5dkzgw3cn842eyw/AACivEvWTEODXQgsjBPsHv8wa?dl=0
Rolled 1 (1d46)
>>43905659
Rolling Specialty. Were you inspired by me trying this in the last general?
>>43906268
Looks like we have a Pech Acrobat, which seems like a good fit; I was indeed inspired by the character rolling in the last thread. Sadly I may have started this one too late into the night for me to follow through until the end.
>>43906368
The thread can probably be bumped to the morning. Also, typo in the species header. It says roll 1d14, but there are only 12 species
Rolled 10 (1d12)
Class
Rolled 2 + 1 (1d12 + 1)
>43905659
Why a d14 first?
Rolling core.
Rolled 7 + 1 (1d12 + 1)
>>43907740
Messed that up, trying again
Rolled 19 (1d36)
>>43907764
Guess you cant roll different dice.
Got two twelves now, which gave Dwarf Lancer
>>43907784
Dwarf Guardian Lancer
Follow that bushido code.
>>43907723
>>43908676
So far we have an Pech Acrobat Sage, and a Dwarf Guardian Lancer- looks like a good start for the classic four-man party. We already have a dexterous skill-monkey type, and a tanky melee character, so we just need to hopefully roll up a mage (or at least someone with some kind of magical ability), and maybe a more offensive type fighty guy.
On a semi-related note, can anyone think of a reasonable way to roll for the Dwarfaboo's Animal Partner?
>>43907740
That was a typo, I was thinking of the d14 used for class selection as I typed it up.
Rolled 3 (1d12)
Next, character: species.
>>43910768
Dude, the Sage could reasonably fill in most roles in a party. Wildcards are great like that.
Rolled 16 (1d46)
>>43910907
Ooh, an Elf! That means we have a not-halfling, a Dwarf and an Elf, how classic. I wonder what xir specialty will be.
Also there's a decent mount-table on page 170, but like more than half of the results are above our Dwarf's XP allowance as far as Animal Partners go, though we could use it as a endgoal for later career levels.
Rolled 14 (1d46)
Specialty
>>43910968
There's a pretty shallow point to character creation in Fantasy Craft where creating tables to randomly gen is either limiting (and contrary to the ideals of FC) or an immense undertaking to capture the scope that FC allows.
I got a 9, 12, 8. So Pech Criminal Mage. Arcane trickster here I come.
Rolled 3 (1d17)
>>43911031
Class
>>43911128
An Elf Druid Captain. This character is a whole party in itself.
>>43911386
Would it be OK if with everyone if we took this roll: >>43910968 instead of this one: >>43911031 so we can have a Fighter Captain?
Rolled 14 + 1 (1d14 + 1)
>>43905659
Rolling for my own
Rolled 11 + 1 (1d14 + 1)
Rolled 44 (1d46)
>>43911424
Oh whoops that went wrong. Unborn is locked in at least
>>43911441
High rolls fiesta. Unborn peasant best peasant, amirite noblemen :^)
Rolled 10 (1d12)
>>43911456
Aaand that never happened, oh my.
>>43911414
I think druid is more interesting. Think of all the flanking you can do.
So, pals, what's your favorite character that you've playedor want to play? Mine was my keeper/courtier chef that was basically Guy Fieri.
Dwarf Guardian Lancer
Str 14, Dex 10, Con 18, Int 12, Wis 14, Cha 12
____Proficiencies and tricks
Blunt (Forte)
Hurled
Unarmed
Relentless Attack
Shield Block
____Skill Ranks;
2 Impress, 4 Intimidate, 4 Notice (origin), 4 Resolve (origin), 2 Ride, 2 Survival, 2 Tactics
____Feats
Shield Basics, Elusive, Animal Partner
____Interests
Language; Dwarf
Hunting for Sport
Subterranean monsters/creatures
____Forge Stuff
Panache 2
Prudence 1
_100 silver
20 Metal Shield
30 Ogre Mace
8 Grooming Case
More in next post. Also building a large reptile for riding.
>>43912980
neat
>>43912541
So far I've only GM'd, but probably the most memorable one I've seen played was an unborn Bloodsworn named Taylor Swift who flirted (poorly) with basically everything remotely male (including wyverns) and spent her downtime writing terrible heartbreak/breakup songs.
This was for a one-shot with premade character sheets. The guy took the blank check to fill in name and descriptive details and kind of ran with it.
Someday when I get a chance to play, I'd really like to do a drake Captain whose PL is a little human mage girl he a̶d̶o̶p̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶o̶t̶e̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ is grooming to be his personal herald and emissary to the lesser races. Probably going into Bloodsworntotally not so he can be even more overprotective of his daughter did I say daughter I meant lackey shut up stop looking at me like that I am a proud and noble dragon!
By the way, for anyone interested in buying the books, they've got a Black Friday sale running until this Friday with the core book, Adventure Companion, and Time of High Adventure (the collection of modules) in hardcopy in a bundle for less than what the core book by itself usually costs.
>>43916328
Throw in some bakas and you're golden.
>>43916385
That's awesome
I probably won't have the cash, but if I rustle it up, I'm more than willing to throw it at Crafty
>>43905659
species
Rolled 2 (1d14)
>>43918650
how do I roll dice?
Rolled 3 (1d36)
>>43918712
Dwarf
Rolling for speciality
Rolled 14 (1d17)
>>43918736
Adventurar Dwarf
Rolling for class
>>43918778
Dwarf Adventurer Martial Artist
Str 18, Dex 14, Con 14, Int 12, Wis 11, Cha 11
subpar
So it may be the beer talking, but how hard would it be to convert tome of weeaboo fighting magicto fc?
>>43919663
It seems kinda unnecessary, and it'd be really strong. ToB strikes and maneuvers are balanced around iterative attacks which aren't a thing in FantasyCraft
I guess it probably could work, though. You could tie it into Edge generation and consumption, maybe. I could see wuxia styles working fine as feat trees like the Sword Circle or Dim Mak BMS stuff.
>>43919764
Yea feat trees could do a lot of work, I'm just curious i how well they'd fit.
One problem I know of immediately is how some old feats would interact with the manuvers. Spells by comparison dont have many damage boosting feats
>>43919663
I've thought a lot about it, and really a lot of what makes ToB tick is correcting for design flaws in 3.5 that FC just doesn't have. A lot of it is just "big fat chunk of bonus damage", which is mainly to offset the issue of high-level martials being dependent on full attacks (and therefore not moving) to deal respectable damage. A lot of what's left is stuff to support certain kinds of thematic playstyles, and FC already has a lot of that.
There's still a chunk of maneuvers that you could potentially convert over into feat chains (or maybe expert classes), but it'd be more a matter of "this is a kind of thing FC just doesn't quite support with its current tools". For instance, one thing I've been thinking about is a feat chain to expand on the Triumphant Swing trick, letting you give the healing to allies and improving the amount of healing, as a way of converting the various healing strikes and stances in Devoted Spirit. Or there's the action-granting stuff in White Raven, which feels to me like it'd be best modeled with an expert class focused on getting more out of the Coordinated X feat chain.
>>43921435
Yeah, that's basically the conclusion I came to
Nonetheless, things like the Martial Artist and the Wire-Fu campaign quality make me feel like you could totally do a 'wacky kung fu' expansion on the combat system and have it totally work. You'd just have to figure out proper themes and such
Plus, I think it'd be cool if there were more feats out there that gave generic melee/unarmed attack tricks (as opposed to weapon-specific attack tricks) to liven up Master's Touch I. Master's Touch is always good, but early on it doesn't allow for that much actual mixing simply because most of the big melee combat feats give weapon-specific stuff. I think broadening the field for MT1 would also help make Edgemaster a more appealing class
>>43916385
I would, but I have two of those three books already. What a predicament.
Also has anyone here made there own campaign settings (or used any of the Adventure Companion ones)?
>>43923121
I've got one I'm still brewing. I've got the cosmology and player options all picked out and am right now working on actually building the alignments
The tl;dr is that it's a setting based on Middle Asia, especially Hellenic Middle Asia (the successor kingdoms of Alexander, stuff like Baktria and Parthia, and the like) through a HEAVY dose of Arabic/Sumerian/Kurdish/etc myth.
The primary threat of the setting is a race of Unborn who are actually just djinn capable of animating matter who got sent down into the Underworld for a few centuries in order to go save a dead goddess. Which they did, but now they're trying to get back to Heaven and they're carrying a whole lot of taint with them (and the solidity of the Firmament is damn important, because Heaven is the only thing holding the Sun back from descending to earth looking for said goddess and scorching what's left of civilization right off the map)
>>43905659
>Spellbound
Spellbound never.
>>43923222
What races/class options are OK'd/banned and what campaign qualities are in place, if you don't mind my asking?Also nice trips.
>>43923245
Spellbound eventually.
>>43923261
Well, it's more 'explicitly whitelisted' vs 'gimme a good reason' rather than ok'd/banned, but so far race-wise, I'm using most races with a short list of common variant feats
So most common races and feats:
Human (Elemental Heritage, Saurian Blood + appropriate Saurian feats)
Saurian (Dragon-Tailed, Desert Clutch, Rock Clutch)
Dwarf (Jewel-Born, Dune-Born)
Elf (Spider Nation, Tiger Nation)
Ogre (Fire Brave, Stone Brave)
Pech (Drift-Wind Folk)
Unborn (Elemental Heritage, Special Construction: Brass or Clay)
The other races are allowed but I haven't really written them into the setting yet or considered what their role might be. World's a big place though.
>>43923432
Sorcery in the setting is based, fluff-wise, on commanding the mercurial spirits of the djinn, so Sorcery is Ubiquitous (almost everyone knows a few common tricks to get djinn to help you out of a jam) but also Wild (Djinn have some room to interpret their orders, which can lead to some unusual effects)
Other than that I haven't really picked many out, although my personal leaning would be to also throw in Fast Proficiencies (more fortes and tricks means more access to cool combat abilities, and also helps Unborn deal with their limited proficiencies easier - they're a common race) and then season to taste, although the general approach leans towards high power but dramatic options like Bold Heroes and Deadly Combat and what have you. The setting's designed to be pretty pulpy by default.
So why do you guys play a system with so much nitty gritty bookkeeping difficulty where you need to look up the rules every 3 seconds when you could play something that could just be easily abstracted by a GM and save everyone a lot of time and effort?
Serious question, by the way.
>>43921435
True, but there are some homebrew things I've seen for ToB that basically go "You split into multiple copies of yourself and control the field. This isn't magic, you're just that damn fast" and makes me wonder if that'd even be alright as feats.
>>43923624
Well, for one, I have a pretty good memory for rules so after reading the book a couple times over I really only have to reference it pretty rarely unless I'm picking a new feat or something
Plus, I like the granularity. It's satisfying when combat happens because you get to make tactical decisions that are meaningful and affect your chances of victory or defeat. Some people like games with a lot of gameplay. I actually really like rules-light stuff - I'm a big fan of FATE and the Marvel Universe RPG, which are both really light, but Fantasy Craft's character creation and NPC design are games unto themselves.
>>43923624
It's not really that bookkeeping/rules-intensive. It's on the crunchy end of the spectrum, sure, but it's frankly less fiddly than 3.5/PF, and not much worse than a lot of other popular games out there. It admittedly looks like a tangled mess when you first try reading through the book, but that's just because the core book's layout is atrocious and bits are scattered around all over, often without even a page reference of where to look when they're mentioned somewhere else. Once you actually make it through and put all the pieces together, it really ends up being a pretty smooth and intuitive system.
As for why I like more crunchy games over rules-light stuff like FATE or what have you, I like having the fluff grounded on a consistent framework of evocative mechanics. It's so much more satisfying when the game validates the description of your character's actions/abilities with mechanics that clearly correspond to that specific sort of effect, rather than most everything being exactly the same in game terms, just described differently. It's the integral interlocking of the roleplaying and the game as a united whole that really appeals to me. And doubly so when the mechanics are detailed enough to be evocative of their intended effect, but still simple and flexible enough to be refluffed as several various other things, as is the case in Fantasy Craft.
>>43923624
Sometimes I feel like rules light, sometimes I just want to bust out something rules heavy and go from there. My first rpg was D&D 3.5e, and it instilled a love for crunch (but I no longer like 3.5e at all), but I've also learned how fun rules light systems can be.
I like both, it depends on the mood I'm in.
>>43923667
Some of the higher-end ToB stuff would definitely need to be higher-level class abilities, not feats. You could maybe fit something like what you describe in a Supremacy feat, if it cost a bunch of Edge and was fairly limited in duration, area you can cover, and what you can do with it. Maybe. A less limited effect would probably have to be in a class (or perhaps an upper Step of a Path).
Some of the non-homebrew stuff in ToB would also qualify. For example, the Ring of Fire and Salamander Charge maneuvers would probably need to be
On the other hand, some of the higher-level maneuvers would fit just fine in feats...provided you properly account for the fact that a lot of the higher-level maneuvers have the level they do because of 3.5 design philosophy elements that FC simply doesn't have. For instance, the Burning Blade, Searing Blade, Inferno Blade, and Burning Brand maneuvers, as well as the Fiery Assault stance, could all be represented in a single feat (or perhaps stance) that lets your attacks deal fire damage. The two games have totally different ideas about the role of exotic damage types and how to give out damage bonuses. Similarly, Diamond Nightmare Blade, Ruby Nightmare Blade, and (Greater) Insightful Strike could probably all be rolled into a single trick that gives some (modest, appropriate to the standard for feats in FC) damage bonus based on your Resolve skill in some way.
In other words, like most things in 3.5, converting it to FC would be more a matter of capturing the conceptual idea rather than translating the mechanics, because the mecahnical frameworks and assumptions of the two systems are so radically different.
Okay, so I'm planning to start running Fantasy Craft again because it is my favorite system. I've run up against two issues in creating crunch for my setting.
1. Magic is a dangerous tool that will eventually drive the user mad. As such, I'm using Corrupting Magic as a permanent quality. But I also like how CoC let the PCs gain magical ability on the fly. They just have to give up sanity and feel the world slipping away in order to gain an upper hand against terrible monsters.
So how do I do that in a d20 system like Fantasy Craft?
2. Fantasy Craft does not have Industrial-era technology rules, but the setting has emerging late Industrial-era tech as it is being reverse-engineered from the ruins that the main city is built upon.
I was thinking of using GURPS stat blocks for TL5 (Industrial-era) equipment and just doing some minor conversions (i.e. 20 one-second handle item actions are replaced by 7 three-second handle item actions in the case of muskets).
Finally, I want those items to be rare. I was thinking of making them into a sort of "Magic Item" and using the Magic Item rules in Fantasy Craft for them, so as to not give any player a chance to break the balance just because he has a revolver with a speedloader.
How feasible is this? Will the GURPS equipment be unbalanced in any way?
>>43924098
For the "magic on the fly" bit, is that supposed to be permanently gaining an ability, or just a one-time thing?
If the latter, you could probably just do it as something like "You may gain a grade of Tainted to gain 4 bonus action dice, which may immediately be spent on a Narrative Control benefit." Since otherwise the analysis paralysis you'd get from using actual spells could get pretty obnoxious, even with the relatively short grimoire presently available.
Permanent abilities would probably have to use spells, though. Which woulld likely mean you'd have to either suck it up and deal with the analysis paralysis, or make the specifics of the power gained be up to the GM to choose, letting you prepare a suitable shortlist in advance so you can quickly pick something appropriate when a player asks to take the devil's bargain.
As for Industrial-era tech, I'm not familiar with GURPS, but I have seen some homebrew for more advanced guns here: http://sletchweb.wikidot.com/equipment
(I believe the accuracy, recoil, and mode columns have to do with porting in some of Spycraft's more detailed gun mechaincs, but you should be fine to ignore those.)
They're definitely a fair sight stronger than existing guns, but shouldn't be too problematic if they're handled as Prizes. At least no more problematic than Prizes always have the potential to be, anyway.
>>43924264
I figure it would be a permanent ability, but that's a really good idea to go off a short, maybe randomized, list. Like if they found a book of magic, it probably wouldn't let them CHOOSE what spell they learn they would just learn the spell as written in the book.
That sletchweb link is going to be very useful, thank you. GURPS and Iron Kingdoms (another potential source) are so far off from FC that it was going to be something of a pain to convert.
And yeah, having a gun that can be reloaded with 1/2 or 1 handle item action instead of 7 is definitely a bit unbalancing, so I think treating them as Prizes will be the right way to go.
>tfw playing a Conjurer
>Still no Spellbound
Have you sent your application to Crafty as a dollar-a-year-man, yet?
Spellbound needs you.
>>43926463
>>43924561
Why the fuck don't they just release the parts that are finished already? Surely one or two of the pdf's must be finished by now.
>>43926463
Spellbound needs manpower more than it needs money.
I mean, they need money too, because the reason they can't spare enough manpower to polish off Spellbound in a timely manner is because of other projects necessary to keep the company afloat. But mainly they just don't have enough people to dedicate both to Spellbound and to the projects they're working on as major strategic priorities. Unless we could throw enough money their way for them to hire a guy purely for Spellbound, it's not goinig to do any good. And even then, it wouldn't help much because any new hires would need to be trained in the Crafty way of doing things and caught up to speed on the Spellbound project, which still ties up manpower that has other priorities to work on and takes time.
>>43928987
>Spellbound needs manpower more than it needs money.
Ergo, Crafty hiring a dollar-a-year-man.
>>43929054
Ah, I misunderstood that as a donation pledge thing, my bad.
Though still, that leaves the training issue nonetheless. And I imagine it still needs to a final look-over by one or both of the head honchos before release, and they're busy guys. It's gonna be a fair amount of wait regardless.
