Devlog #6: Majula, Witches, & Spellcasting Update

December Recap

Sorry for the lack of updates in December. Between holiday traveling and an emergency vet visit for Mister Micah Misto I had to pause content updates on the game. His recovery has been going great and he’s at the point where he needs less and less supervision which means I can more consistently get back into the swing of things.

During December I also completed Majula, a system agnostic downtime TTRPG for Crystal the Fool’s Souls-Lite TTRPG Jam. Majula is a downtime TTRPG that is experimenting with the concepts I want to eventually use for Ambitions central downtime mechanic. It still needs a little bit of writing and a lot of layout work for me to consider it finished but I am really happy with the shape of the core mechanic.

ALSO DURING DECEMBER. I completed the spellcasting update! Well, 99% completed it, all that remains are the rules for the card casters; Oracle and Accursed. Since cards are an entirely new subsystem that isn’t going to be explored until v0.3.0 those sections are incomplete. Everything else is ready to ship.

I’m still deciding on how I want to make the spellcasting update content available. It seems like a weird thing for a Patreon post or something I want to do layouts on right now. But the new witch stuff can’t be contextualized without it, neither can the upcoming archetypes. It might get its own post and then be attached to future updates.

Speaking of! Witch, there's a lot of cool Witch stuff to talk about it.

Posts Coming Next Week

Last devlog I talked a lot about the new priorities, and I am going to include the updated version of that here for posterity because its mostly the same. I am moving to a slower release cadence though of a post on Thursday and a devpost on Monday until a lot of the structural, non-content focused stuff is done for the next draft.

• Things nearest on the horizon are
  • Spellcasting Updated
  • Sphinx Bloodline Playtest
  • Human Bloodline Playtest
  • Witch Rework Playtest
  • Sundance Rework Playtest
  • Perfumer Playtest
  • Satyr Art Bible
  • Armory Art Pass
  • Dustborne Art Pass
  • Spell update

Devlog #6: Spellcasting and Witches

Spellcasting

With the spellcasting update the rules for spellcasting are about 4x as long as they used to be. For good reason, the previous ruleset could not support what I would like to do in this design space and it harbored a lot of the verbiage of fantasy-fare games that I wanted removed from Ambition. The new rules are also full of flavor and create new design spaces that upcoming mechanics can use as foundation.

What is spellcasting in Ambition?

The arcane forms are language. A stories lesser form, a metaphors realization, or the pressure of archetype on culture. The essence of spellcasting stems from a “re-”, redefining, reshaping, reimagining, or restructuring of the rules that language has already set forth on Imbrier. Witch’s respond to this base language of creation with spite, Papercraft Mages redefine the arcane with ink, Weavers reshape the mothers natural language with materia, and Oracles restructure the narrative of fate and destiny with cards.

What are the arcane forms?

Spells, cantrips, and rituals. This trinity of spellcasting expression is known as the arcane forms; a set of different techniques that allows the myriad to wield and shape the arcane, the named, and the nameless.

A spell is a magical expressions of magnitude that draw upon a casters arcane reservoir. Some spells can be magnified to a higher magnitude increasing its power along with its cost.

A cantrip is a weaker innate magical expression that is cast without expending arcane reservoir. A cantrip only requires its caster wield an athame and meet spellcraft requirements.

A ritual is a magical expression that can only be used during downtime, requires the efforts of more than one caster, and need a large amount of arcane reservoir to be expended to cast.

How do you cast spells in Ambition?

Each part of an arcane form’s composition is required to cast the arcane form, missing a single piece of that composition makes the arcane form impossible to wield.

A caster requires.

• The innate knowledge, practice, or gift required to wield a spell
• Arcane Reservoir to fuel the spell
• An Athame to channel the spell
• The Spellcraft to compose the spell

What is an Arcane Reservoir?

Arcane reservoir is a resource that is spent to cast spells, rituals, and use certain archetype features. All wands and pentacles archetypes have their own arcane reservoir and each individual arcane reservoir has their own unique peculiarities that distinguishes it from the rest. When casting a spell you consume an amount of arcane reservoir equal to the spells magnitude.

What is an Athame?

An athame is the tool used to transform arcane reservoir into power. The most ancient athame is the witch sickle but in contemporary casting there are several that the different wands and pentacles disciplines can use. Wands, staffs, spellpistols, crossroad torches, brushes, and orbs are most common.

What is Spellcraft?

Spellcraft is the compositional language of an arcane form, the process required to wield its power. It is the instrument used to play a specific chord, the type of brush held while painting, or the chisel wielded while sculpting. An arcane form can not be cast or maintained if the requirements of its spellcraft can not be met. Each arcane form has a built in set of conditions that prevent a caster from casting the spell or stopping the spell from being used. Affirmation spellcraft for example requires the caster to be able to speak for the spell to be casted while inscription spellcraft require that its canvas remain intact for the spell to be maintained.

What are the design goals of this system?

One of Ambitions principle design goals is that archetypes break the standard bounds of their shared core mechanic. Ambition doesn’t have swordfighters that are a slave to the strike system, it has Bulwarks that break the multi-action penalty through weapon swapping, and Deserters who break the weapon size requirements with their ultra-violent weapons. Investigators and Lionhearts are slaves to the strike system because their archetypes express power through other mechanics and modes of play. Swords archetypes are so good at using weapons they literally don’t play by the same rules as weapon using archetypes.

This needs to be true for wands archetypes and their relationship with the spellcasting system as well. Wands require Ambition to have enough levers to make their mechanical expression expressive while Pentacle archetypes are bound by the rules of the spellcasting system. This leads to a slightly different kind of design quandary, what makes wands archetypes different from each other? There is a texture difference between how a Deserter and a Bulwark play, their turns feel meaningfully different in a very fundamental way. How can I achieve that with spellcasters?

Arcane reservoir. The resource management and its set of boons and conditions is different between each wands archetype and their mirrored pentacle archetype. Witches and Untamed use spite, Papercraft Mage and Perfumer use ink, Weaver and Artificer use materia, and Oracle and the Accursed use cards. Witches, papercraft mages, weavers, and oracles break the rules of their system in some way, while the untamed, perfumer, artificer, and accursed abide by them.

Each reservoir having its own verbiage, granularity, and passive mechanic is more core to the texture of how an archetype expresses than just a spell list. The rest of the spellcasting rules compliment this design goal, each arcane reservoir has a different set of athames and spellcraft associated with them.

This difference in play pattern is crucial to the system design of Ambition. Witches are different from other wands archetypes because they use spite, they are different from untamed because they break the rules that the untamed must follow. Witch familiars can cast and maintain spells for them while the untamed's familiar can not. Witches can cast spells without an athame by turning it into a hex while the untamed can not.

What are the cool things this system lets me do?

The choices that you make about the character you play matter in Ambition. When you play a Witch you might have adjacent similarities to other spellcasters, but first and foremost you are a witch, most of what you can do is something no other archetype can. When you play your next wands character, you are getting a new and novel experience and not just a slightly redressed one.

The act of spellcasting is more grounded, flavorful, and personal to the character you are playing. The narrative and tonal gamefeel of a Witch casting a Seven Spoke Bloodletting next to a Papercraft Mage painting a Seven Stroke Fox Fire is juicier than 7th level bloodletting and 7th level fox fire before any distinction from auxiliary mechanics are made.

You are more than your spell list. There isn’t an archetype in Ambition that is defined by just having a big or versatile spell list. All wands archetypes do, what matters more is the way your archetype casts spells, how your arcane reservoir changes how spells work, and how your archetype breaks spellcasting rules. Papercraft Mages being able to use different inks for the arcane reservoirs to change the fundamental properties of their spells allows them to spellcast in a fundamentally different way than other wands archetypes and perfumer. Its not just that you have a certain spell, but the unique ways your archetype can use it.

Its simpler and more elegant when it comes to choosing spells, leveling, and managing resources. You don’t have to manage a variety of slots you just have to manage how much reservoir you have, and because its easier to manage how much power is associated with a spellcasters resource spellcasting doesn’t have to be all or nothing when it comes to resource management. In Ambition all spellcasters regain some arcane reservoir at the end of every scene, giving the caster the ability to be a little more freeform and covet their spells less while also not frequently refreshing strong effects limited by high cost.

Witch Rework

With the new spellcasting system in the bag its time to fix a lot of the first draft issues with Witch. The goals of the Witch rework are:

• Integrate the new spellcasting rules and anchor features into them
• Reduce the wordiness and complicated nature of 1st level Witch
• Cut and streamline a bunch of mechanics that don’t show up frequently in play
• Remove and replace Wisp witch and reduce complexity
• Retool and rebalance 1st and 2nd level chosen features
• Touch up Witch’s flavor
• Make familiars more core to witch as an expression
• Rework expressions
• Rewrite spells

Goals 1-6 have already been completed! As a point of comparison here is the old core first level feature for witch versus its new core first level feature.

Woah! Its 1/6th the amount of text. It also showcases the new expressions. Pact of the Crossroads, Pact of Vertigo, and (sort of) Pact of the Whisper.

Witch Expressions

Pact of the Crossroads is a completely new expression that is focused on a more traditional take for Witch. This is going to be the simplest of the five expressions and act as a good point of access for dipping ones toes into the spellcasting mechanics of Ambition.

Pact of Vertigo is a Witch whose power comes from a bitter vengeful icon, who blames the myriad for heaven falling.

Pact of the Whisper has been reworked away from its previous unseelie flavor and into something stranger and cosmic. The reverberations of inheritor language off of the walls of the cosmos, returning to Imbrier and finding your voice to inhabit.

Pact of the Tower, my beloved Gunwitch is getting moved off of the main document and into its own supplement. Gunwitch breaks every single rule of spellcasting in a way that is very inelegant to accommodate in the core witch rules, it creates a lot of extra verbiage and confusion on every single core feature just to support one expression. So instead of the Witch archetype carrying that burden of Gunwitches unique spellcasting rules they are going to have their own supplement so all of their rules can be localized. This by itself reduces Witches wordcount by almost a third.

Cut Mechanics and 1st and 2nd Level.

To make some design room for witch to do cool things with the new spellcasting rules some mechanics have been cut or moved. Curses, Hexes, 1st Level Familiars, and Witch Sight have been retooled or completely removed from Witch.

Curses were in a very awkward place. They were too strong to be usable, they had cool moments but they showed up once every 12+ sessions. Each expression having its own set of curses also made developing an already taxed design space more challenging. All curses have been cut, some may return as high level witch spell.

Hexes have a much cooler, more powerful place they can exist in with the new spellcasting update. They are currently shoved in awkwardly at 2nd level. They are going to show up in a different form at a later level.

1st level familiar being your expressions familiar has been removed. Instead every single witch gets an embryonic familiar that becomes the familiar or your expression at 3rd level.

Witch sight is very cool, its base form is still a core witch feature. It will have features that modify it in the future but each expression having their own witch sight was too much and took up too much of witches design space. Witch sight as a strong tribunal tool to coax out other characters disposition, voices, and allegiances remains but each expression specific witch sight has been removed and because of that extra design space I could beef up witch sight to do a little more at base.

1st and 2nd Level Feature Teaser

Lastly here is a reworked 1st level feature and a brand new 2nd level feature, as a treat!