Devlog #3: Perfumer

Last Week Recap

In the previous week of Ambition development I released playtest material for Pookahs, Investigators, and Deserters.

Pookah Playtest: https://www.patreon.com/posts/pookah-bloodline-116448411

Investigator Playtest Pt. 1 Mastermind & Empath: https://www.patreon.com/posts/investigator-pt-116575380

Deserter Playtest Pt. 1 Heartless & Bastard: https://www.patreon.com/posts/deserter-early-1-116709713

Posts Coming Next Week (Happy Thanksgiving)

Thinks are a little busy with thanksgiving, I am going to aim for 3 posts but it might be a one or two post week.

• The Satyr Bloodline draft is done and 100% coming, that should be dropping as the first post of next week on Thursday.
• The Spellcasting update, still working away at it. Its about 60% done, and needs a big editing pass. Once the spellcasting update is done I am going to start working on the Witch revamp, rewriting and formatting the spellist, and then adding the remaining Witch spells.
  • Once thats done, moving onto developing papercraft mage
• The Satyr art bible, me and Anna (@ofthatilk) have been working hard on designing Satyrs that pull from mythological inspirations and artists like Rose O’Neil’s visuals of fantasy. We’ve gone through several passes but things are still in flux and I am super excited to go into all of the design notes as we arrived at the final design.
  • The next art updates to expect are a pass at props and visuals for the armory, from Me
  • The art bible for the dustborne, from Me
  • The art bible for Pookah, from Anna
• A Devlog with what I’ve been working on longterm with Ambition.

Devlog #3: Perfumer

I wanted to use this Devlog to talk about an upcoming archetype; Perfumer. Perfumer is a bit special, the original 15 archetypes for Ambition were all conceived in April of 2023, they’ve all gone through their changes but their identities have remained pretty consistent even before the core of the game was written. That original list, in order of their conception:

1. Arsenal Fighter (Bulwark)
2. Scout
3. Stance Based Fighter (Nomad)
4. Gunslinger (Sundance)
5. Untamed
6. Standard Bearer (Lionheart)
7. Investigator
8. Witch
9. Papercraft Mage
10. Elemental Caster (Weaver)
11. Oracle
12. The Fool
13. Artificer
14. Deserter
15. The Marked (Accursed)

The Perfumer was conceived in July of 2024, with maybe a soft start in an older game I ran in 5e, pre-Ambition, where a poisoner and a perfumer were the anchor point of a black market in the Rjim. A high society, academic, and amoral duo that was the go to for people that need problems solved without anyone knowing, thriving in the prolonged exposure to secret effects on the body. Back to July, me and Anna were stopping by a perfumery as part of a trip. Fragrance has been a hobby and fascination of both of ours, and spending an evening talking about ingredients, scents, profiles, and how they are built and how they linger was inspiring. It made me realize why I always avoid a design space with alchemists in my writing and more importantly a design opportunity that plays into a lot of the themes of Ambition that I haven’t seen in other writing. Upon returning from that trip Perfumer was conceived.

But What’s Wrong with Alchemists?

The interpretation and execution of what an alchemist “is” has always been a sore spot to me in other TTRPGs. There are two paths that these design spaces follow, both I dislike on the principle of how it shapes a character. Path one is that the alchemical is a recipe book, of magical and non-magical effects that have been discovered and learned over time by trial and error, where there is little care for the combination but instead the outcome. Take two safe materials, it makes poison. Take two harmful materials, it makes a potion. The discovered properties of herbal remedies are a fixed, generational, tutelage wherein you learn of pathology and herbs by the trial and error of your predecessors. This is the bounds of botanical alchemy, what is safe and what isn’t and what combines safely and what doesn’t. There is no artistry or growth, chemistry or curation.

Path 2 is that all alchemy reduces down to the alchemical aether, the true transmutive compound. The philsophers stone. Something that takes a useless base material and transmutes it into wealth, power, healing, etc. I like the historical grounding of this interpretation more but in the context of a character it is so unbelievably boring, trite, and lacking in expression and opportunity. You either are chasing the aether, where-in your alchemy is complete guess work, trial and error, a random number generator to see what two materials make aether (Noita does this, and is the only interpretation of this that I think fits the flavor, fun, and expression well.) Or you have the aether, and the extent of your alchemy is transmuting from useless things into useful things. It lacks craft, artistry, and expression.

Perfumer’s Design Space

Perfumes aren’t poisons nor potions, they do not belong to the alchemical or herbilogical disciplines. Perfumes are wiley and cunning, they effect the mind and body in the undercurrents of our hormonal and pheromonal receptors. They on their own, do not heal or harm but instead alter the brains chemistry, in the place where our unconscious receptors for fear, love, and calm hide. Where our memories of childhood, family, covenant, and trauma take root. A good perfumer is an enabler, a deceiver, a spy, a lover, a traitor, and a master carried along the lingering notes of a settled scent.

The expression of a perfumer in Ambition has a high amount of focus on artistry, craft, and growth in expression. A perfumer isn’t making from a table of set tinctures, they are developing their own recipes from a large set of ingredients. To the extent that two 1st level perfumers are completely distinct in playstyle, expression, and game goals depending on which starting ingredients they included in their recipe book. The combination is more important than the outcome.

Perfumes are composed of four components. A base fragrance, a heart fragrance, a top note, and a bottle. A Perfumers base note and bottle determine how their perfume operates mechanically in all three modes of play. All perfumers can concoct their perfumes into a mist, a cloud, and a balm.

Mist. Misted perfumes use an atomizing flask and their base ingredient is grey amber. Misted perfumes can be applied in a blast, aura, or cone form.

       Blast and Aura. At the start of the perfumers turn increase the area of effect by one (ie blast 1 → blast 2).

Cone. At the start of the perfumers turn increase the width and length of the cone by 1. .

Cloud. Cloud perfumes use a pear shaped flask and their base ingredient is eau de notos, water of the storm wind. Cloud perfumes are applied in lines and roll in a direction of choice. When a cloud perfume moves over a target the perfume settles on them, and the effect of the perfume will last as long as the cloud is active.

Balms. Perfumed balm use a short wide flask and their base ingredient is tallow. Balms can only be applied by touch. Balms have two different effects that change depending on the heart fragrance and top note. The heart fragrances will only effect the target that the balm is applied to, while top notes will only effect the target in proximity of the wearer of the balm. A basic balm’s duration is an entire beat, until a cleanser (a balm made of just tallow) is used, or another perfume is applied.

Heart fragrance and top notes are the direct effects part of a perfume and operate in the same space unless used as a balm or an aura.

Perfumers have four expressions that focus on different applications and ingredients; pheromonal, halcyon, elegance, and delirium. The goal is to have a unique perfume type that each expression can make, pheromonal for example, making smelling salts for strong immediate dosing of engagement focused fragrances.

• Elegance Profile
  • Elegance perfumers are charmers, spies, and the sense data profile of politics and high society. Their perfumes profile contains fragrances and ingredients that make minds vulnerable to suggestion, charm, and play with the boundaries of social cohesion.
• Pheromonal Profile
  • Pheromonal perfumers make concoctions that target the most base human emotions. Fear, rage, and lust. Their palette of fragrances are primal and overwhelm the hormone receptors of adrenaline, fight or flight, and panic.
• Halcyon Profile
  • The scent profile of home, of childhood memories, of meadows, and of times of peace. The Halcyon profile is that of soothing, of resting the heart, and coaxing the mind and body to a calm and focused clarity.
• Deliriant Profile
  • All good Deliriants started as halcyon perfumers. Peace just happens to be the middle-ground of baseline and madness, deliriants just manipulate it further. Instead of hints of memories, they make you exist in memories. They dig up traumas in the form of hallucination, snip the synapse between the real and unreal. Expert use of these fragrances don’t just manipulate the mind, they manipulate reality.

The goal here for Perfumer is that perfumes can be designed to be incredibly strong, high impact, and work secretly without the opportunity for adversaries to make a save against its effects. But, it takes time. Perfumes need to settle, they need time to hijack the olfactory processes, make their way into the chemistry of the mind. The flavor here was exactly where I wanted it to be but it ran into a few mechanical problems that I needed to create new tools in the system to solve (lookin at you spellcasting rework).

Problems:

1. With exclusively perfumes in this format as a mechanic, Perfumers never have to roll dice nor do their effects make enemies roll dice.
2. Their complexity and expression of Perfumer is all frontloaded, your initial choice of fragrances and how you combine them, and what combinations you prep to bring into a scene.

Solving problem 1 has been very engaging, perfumers are a pentacles class meaning they have spells that consume ink. They can use their ink to cast spells from the papercraft spelltable and additionally spend their ink in perfumer exclusive ways to augment their perfumes or tack on a strong immediate effect that requires a save. Perfumers additionally have a unique type of martial weapon they wield, that reinforces their mechanical flavor of combining and spreading small status effects for secret payoffs.

Their option from these perfumer flasks, range from a simple straight forward engagement use to options that can tack on additional complexity but at the cost of upfront power.

Solving problem 2 has been much more difficult, and needs more playtesting. Giving the perfumer more options to use single ingredients that enable complex perfumes has been helpful in playtests, so the aromatic flask or the Perfumed Gloves feature.

1st Level Feature: Perfumed Gloves
Using one of your fragrances you coat a pair of grey amber gloves. These cloves will carry your aromatic very strongly and allow you to apply its effect as if it were a touch spell or a fist weapon attack. You can change your gloves aromatic at the start of a scene.

This offloads the necessity of trigger having to be built into a perfume. The goal of a lot of the Perfumers design space in this regard is building up conditions to cascade into other conditions, or having strong effects require conditions from teammates, other perfumes, or a self-debilitating perfume before working. Palmrose’s charm for instance, is one of the high-power high expression effects of the class, but it requires dizzy 3 to be used. Which means it wants to be paired with anise, requiring another perfume, for both the wearer of the balm and the charmed target to gain dizzy, or for a Witch or Sundance to help with their dizzy focused class features.

With perfumed gloves or an aromatic flask the anise can be the top note of a balm, the heart can be pamplewood to increase Wile for the encounter, and when the target is sufficiently steeped, dizzy, and ready for manipulation a quick strike with a palmrose glove and they are charmed.

Another idea that requires playtesting for lower preparatory complexity but higher gameplay expression is that each subclass gains a limited special fragrance adjacent consumable. Things made from the principles of a perfumer but are distinctly not a perfumer, and these creations are unique to the subclass expression of a perfumer. They can not be made with a perfumer kit, poisoner kit, or alchemy kit. The halcyon profile for instance, being able to a strong but extremely limited support consumable; Kyphi. But between this and expressions unique perfume types I need to see how playtests go, specifically playtests from independent character creation before I decide on whether or not the level of complexity is healthy.

Perfumers are still a decent way out, I think I have their playtest material scheduled for January alongside papercraft mages and weavers. These are my current design musings as I work on creating something new in Ambitions initial design identity, the only class that rose to the level of inspiration and expression to insert itself into Ambitions scope and schedule. I hope you all enjoy and I can’t wait for you to play them!