Hey, time for another quick update on the progress of Kenoma. This time I'm going to go into some detail about the gear and talents that are the last major hold-out (other than the adventure, but I feel good about getting that part done).
Changes to Gear
One of the things about Hammercalled as a system is that it was very agnostic and had Gear be a character trait as much as part of the world.
This is not the case in Kenoma, where things are a little more standardized and there is a lot more of a focus on survival which means a lot more focus on the things that you need to survive.
Kenoma is the sort of game where you might need to think about how much stuff you're carrying when you go out on a mission, both in terms of necessities like medical supplies and food and water but also in terms of the weapons and armor you're bringing with you.
Carry too much, and characters lose their ability to naturally heal when on the move, which means that you need to be camping to recover your Flame and your Blood may not recover at all.
The consequences of this are that more is not necessarily better, and there's more of a focus on quality over quantity.
However, this wasn't an issue in Hammercalled, where player characters were just a lot more powerful. I don't really remember how often this came up in Segira, but I think that Segira was enough removed from the gritty element of things that it wasn't much of a thought at the time.
Acquisition
One of the differences between Hammercalled and Kenoma is that characters are likely to actually change their gear around over the course of play instead of upgrading what they have and acquiring new stuff.
This gives rise to an Acquisition mechanic.
Each origin has its own Acquisition rating, which is a direct bonus, and at times set by the GM (typically the start of an adventure), the player characters roll 1d100 and add their Acquisition rating to get an Acquisition Pool.
They can take things until they've used up their Acquisition Pool. This includes ammunition, weapons, some Talents (which represent cybernetic augmentation), and more.
Stuff purchased this way is the PC's to keep, though they may be reprimanded for wasteful disregard of property.
The GM may also issue stuff, like food rations, a minimal supply of ammunition, or mission-critical gear like the guide-machines that enable navigation in the Spire for non-pariahs. Characters also get some starting gear during character creation.
Some items are locked to factions, though this is actually shaping up to be pretty rare as I go through things.
I'm including some rules for making gear, but the more complicated system lends itself more to modification than from-scratch creation of gear because there's just not the same degree of flexibility.
Making Things Distinctive
One of the nice things about Kenoma is that you have a number of factions that each have their own brand identity.
Knight Limited is a mercenary group that's short on staff and risk averse, so expect a lot of light hit-and-run stuff from them, and armor that hits above its weight class. They have a lot of Acquisition, so they burn through ammo and have cool toys (though they also get augmentations without paying Acquisition for them and just spending the requisite Talent points, so they really have cash to flash).
Alcove Group doesn't have distinctive gear brand identity, because they're more middle-man than manufacturer for anything interesting to PCs. What they do make are mostly tools, which are just less mechanically distinctive because most tools have narrative effects that apply situational modifiers rather than interacting with combat or other heavily mechanics-driven systems.
The Expedition watchword is bulky, and they have a greater carry capacity than the other factions to make up for it. They have a laser-tight focus on combat doctrine, so expect spartan efficiency from their gear.
Tantalites are weird. They have parallel gear lists of low-tech practicality and high-tech mad science. Pariahs get a cheap additive-manufacturing derived carbine and a high-tech armored jumpsuit because the lighter-weight gear plays well with their fragile frames. Auditors get reverse-engineered energy weapons and mirrorshades to keep their mystique up. Expect them to make a sacrifice in at least one area for their definitive gear.
Heresiarchs are low-tech, but high-craftsmanship. They're able to roll with punches and get close and personal, so their direct combat repertoire combines brutal melee weapons with shotguns and similar high-caliber weapons.
Contamms get fun gear that has lots of qualities and rarely functions in a straightforward manner. They get things that have lots of alternate uses, combine multiple pieces of gear into one, and are built around durability and survivability. The hardcore passive abilities of the contamms make up for some of the less than stellar damage and protection provided by their gear.
The Character Sheet
Yes, there is an annoying white-space issue below the Renown box. No, I don't have anything to fit in it. I've fiddled with things quite a bit.
One reason I didn't get as much writing as I had hoped done today is that I got the character sheet done. There's an annoying pocket of white-space, but I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I should be able to make sample characters as soon as I have the gear and talents ready to go, and I'm quite excited about this.
The thing that's nice about this is that I now have enough familiarity with Affinity to just go in and make everything fit nice and smoothly the first time, so there's no subtly off bits that will be a pain in the butt down the road (or, at least, none that I can think of; there may have been some oversight somewhere).
I think that the nice thing about doing this was that I've done it enough that there's just a tad of visual flair with a comfortably elegant and minimalistic thing. For the Quickstart the characters are going to be front-and-back, with the actual descriptions of the characters and gear/talent information on one side and the stats and whatnot on this form on the back. That's a tad annoying from a user perspective, but since they'll likely be printing them themselves there won't be as much of a need to worry about the front-and-back bit since you can always just put it on two separate sheets.
One thing that I like about this is that there's a fairly clear compartmentalization to the way the information is represented. You have stuff that's used more outside of the gameplay in the upper right (since faction and origin actually are just used in character creation and advancement), then you have each of the game "layers" in its own spot. I feel like the space allotment is generous enough with the Attributes like Blood and Flame to let the current/max spaces have enough room to be filled in without looking busy, especially because you aren't going to see a lot of big numbers in there.
It's a little more minimalistic in terms of direction and guides than some other character sheets I've done, and I think in the past I've had the philosophy that the character sheet should include a lot of guides for how to run the game built in one way or another.
I'm just not doing that at all here because simple and elegant struck me as the better solution. There's also just more stuff, and Kenoma is built around the idea of having potentially quite long campaigns run in it so I wanted to make sure there was room for plenty of forward advancement (characters start with 6 Specializations and 4-6 Talents, so you have an idea of how much I want to see characters grow!).
Conclusion
I'm probably running a little behind, in part because I just spent longer on things than I thought I would have to, but I'm looking forward to getting Kenoma wrapped up some time soon.
This is more and more feeling like it might be a sort of magnum opus as far as collecting everything I've ever done as a designer and putting it into one collected work. From Street Rats, which was really my first big game even though it's so bad I don't distribute it many places, to my freelancing on Degenesis and my drafts of Exoworld, everything is informing the decisions I'm making and it feels damn good.