SO DETAILED. excellent UX, so intuitive to swap between filters by clicking on the words! delightful lovely.
nuclearobelisk
Creator of
Recent community posts
Under the slot-based conversion on pg. 26, cantrips aren't a thing. If that's breaking for your game, dispense with the "spells’ levels are equal to the number of words in the spell" rule, and use the table on pg. 15 as a guide for leveling your spells.
The Detriment Rule (pg. 42) can get you more resonance out of a spell outside of the harmonics; there are ways to optimize your harmonics up to the levels described by the chart on pg. 15, but the Detriment Rule is an easy way to do it without sweating too much over them.
1 . Call it a CC BY-SA license.
2. The words I printed in the book are meant to be used as examples, but I'd be careful about allowing synonyms with no constraints, as that could potentially drastically affect how players approach harmonics. I would allow only "synonyms" that significantly increase the specificity of the word listed, so Insect -> Bee would be fine but Flame -> Blaze would be a little dicey. Beyond that, players could be allowed to rename their spells however they like so long as that name doesn't affect the underlying words used or the "flavor" they evoke. Like, if a player wanted to say that the spell made from (i.e. harmonics were calculated from) the words "flame" and "beam" is called "Blaze Beam" because it sounds cooler, that's fine.
3. It's true that d4's are optimal for most implementations of spell damage (more accurately, when seeking to maximize the average roll total to harmony ratio). The Detriment Rule is the main reason for other die sizes' inclusion in the damage tree. In general, this tree will vary greatly in use case from system to system, just because HP/player resource systems in general vary pretty widely.
Probably 3-5 players and a GM for a traditionally structured game (i.e. some folks getting together in person/on a call and playing a several-hours session), but depending on your organizational structure I imagine you could manage a lot more! I'm pretty confident that the shot for shot structure of the game could handle asynchronous play over Discord or something, which would really open up the field in terms of player counts, though there isn't explicit inbuilt support for it in the text of the zine.
Thanks! And you're right that that description is inconsistent: you'd remove dice when A) the sum of the result is less than the spell's resonance (you'd remove all the dice in this case) or B) when the result on a single die is higher than the average roll for whatever die you're using (you'd just remove that die in this case). That said, the content of the engine doesn't particularly care whether you use "higher than average" or "lower than average" in case B. I would recommend the former over the latter in cases where your implementation/interpretation of some of the resonance trees is scaling other effects off the result of the casting roll.




















