Ancestries and Operators

The MCDM team is all together at our HQ, which means we’re here planning future Draw Steel goodness. Matt said, “Hey! Someone should update the Patrons about what we talked about today because it’s really cool.” Something (probably my childhood) compelled me to volunteer, so I, your James Introcaso, get the honor of sharing with you what we talked about during our first meeting this week.

A Couple New Ancestries

If you’ve been following along for a bit, you know that we’re currently working on six new ancestries for player character heroes—gnomes, radenwights, goblins, shadow elves, faeries, and skarjj. But, since the ancestries are going to be released alongside or at least close to Crack the Sun, we decided to include two more playable peoples who MIGHT have a part to play in that adventure. We’re not sure, but they might!

First up is the gol. If you’ve been following Matt’s work for a while, you may already know a bit about these folks. Gol are humans … sorta! They’re different ancestries, but not totally different species. Gol are built. Think CONAN (the barbarian, not the comedian). We also know that they embrace chaos and live in harmony with nature rather than trying to tame it and settle it the way humans do.

After talking about what Gol are about, we got to thinking about their mechanical traits. We know they’re innately strong, so we might give them access to some existing traits, like Stand Tough. We also know they’re closely related to humans, so we will likely borrow a trait or two from the human list, like Perseverance. Easy!

But, a new ancestry can’t just be all stuff we’ve already created. The gol have to have some stuff that is their own, including at least one Signature Trait. The idea that gol innately embrace and are connected to chaos is what makes them more than just “muscular humans,” so we leaned into that. Humans have Resist the Unnatural, which basically means that they can reduce incoming damage from a magic or psionic ability. What if gol had something like Embrace the Unnatural, which allowed them to gain surges whenever they took similar damage? They’re absorbing that energy and it’s empowering them! In order, magic and chaos are connected, so it makes sense for magic to empower gol.

Speaking of embracing chaos, how about once per encounter when you gain your heroic resource at the start of your turn, instead of the normal “gain 2” or “roll 1d3” you roll 1d6 for a little more swinginess! And hey, if you roll a 1, we’ll give you a surge too, to help cut the sting. There might be another trait too that builds off this one and allows you to also give each nearby ally a resource if you roll a 4, 5, or 6 when you make the once-per-encounter d6 roll.

We came up with some other chaos and strength themed ideas before moving on to our next new ancestry, the heliox! These elementals live on the sun (NBD), and are made of sun stuff. In the timescape, the sun is the source of all seven elements (air, earth, water, rot, green, void, and fire … a lot of fire), and the heliox are made of sun stuff. So the heliox themselves have a lot of elemental traits and are connected not just to one but ALL the elements. The signature trait is the most exciting thing to come out of that conversation. A heliox embodies one element at a time and can choose to change the element they embody during a respite. What does it mean to embody an element? We’re not 100% sure yet. However, they can’t go back to an element they have already embodied until they cycle through the rest! Expect heliox to be able to do a lot of other elemental-themed things, like maybe having their heads explode with fire!

After the meeting, it’s going to be Willy’s job to make sure we actually get some cool traits to look at. They’ve already started the work!

Culture and Religion

After a light lunch, we got back to work talking about the other ancestries. We’ve already dished on their traits, but we had to talk about their cultures and religions. Many of these other ancestries are found in Equinox. We had already talked about shadow elves last week in a different meeting, and determined that the evil shadow elves worship a group of celestials who are abstracting—that is to say they are melting away. As their bodies fade, so too do their minds, and these once-sound celestials become more extreme and wicked in their ideologies, demanding the worst of their worshippers.

As we were talking about gnomes and faeries and skarjj, we determined that given how much smaller Equinox is than Orden and that many of the shadow elf cities within the realm are cosmopolitan, it is likely that the other ancestries would venerate gods from the same pantheon as the shadow elves. It’s just that the gods venerated by these ancestries have already abstracted, and did so quickly, instead of trying to remain in Equinox and do harm as they struggled to survive.

Gods aren’t the only factor here! We had to talk about the cultures of one ancestry in particular. Skarjj, our dragonfly folk, live up in the clouds on floating lilypads. They’re essentially like British World War I pilots—brave, heroic, chivalrous, and the best dang flyers in the timescape. The skarjj honor those who die bravely and are willing to put their lives on the line against evil shadow elves to protect their people and others. They honor their cultural heroes by wearing talismans around their necks. And when a skarjj dies (or “flies over the horizon” as they say), they are buried in the ground with a seed that becomes a tree. Only in death do most skarjj touch the ground, for they love flying so much.

Hello Operator

After talking ancestries, we shifted gears to the operator. Matt is eager to get the class into production and Willy has some time in his schedule, so we started laying it out how we thought it might work.

We had a lot of discussions about the operator’s frame (their mech suit). The initial pitch in the meeting was that the operator could pick a custom frame that had four sections—head, chest, arms, and legs—and that each frame would assign a number of hard points to each section. The hard points would determine which routines an operator could put into each section. The operator would also have a static resource called power, which they could allocate to their routines to give them a boost. This fixed number meant that you could divert power from your legs to your chest on one round and then from your chest to your arms or head or back to your legs on another. It’s the “All to Shields” starship fantasy! Or you could spread the power around evenly. This would likely be in addition to a more typical Heroic Resource.

We could see that things were getting a little complicated, so we decided to examine our assumptions. It might be possible to cut out some of these resources and simplify things while still giving people the feel of piloting a mech. First, what if your frame didn’t have routines. Instead, your frame would be like your subclass and give you access to abilities related to the frame. Want to go faster? Instead of trying to find the right routine, instead of using the right routine, powering it up, and then allocating power, just use the Must Go Faster ability.

That revelation brought us to the idea that maybe power IS a more typical resource. You don’t need to be constantly diverting around AND have a Heroic Resource. Instead, you could have an ability that costs power and is called All Power to Shields, and you’d get the same effect. So what makes the operator’s Heroic Resource special? Well, we’re still talking about it, but Djordi had an excellent idea that we want to try. Essentially, the operator can spend some of their Heroic Resource that they don’t have, similar to the talent going into clarity debt with strained. However, whenever they do this during a battle, they gain heat. As heat is gained, the operator risks suffering more and more debuffs.

There’s one other issue with the operator that we knew we had to solve, which is, if your suit gives you a big boost to Stamina and fighting prowess, what happens when you get caught in a fight outside of it? Can you call it to you like Iron Man, or do you need to run and hop into it? We’re still dishing on this. On one hand, it’s cool to call it and means you’ll never be without it when you really need it. On the other hand, you’re unlikely to be caught outside of it more than once or twice a campaign, and that could be a fun challenge! It may be that you can call your frame to you, but you need to be of a level higher than 1. We agreed we need to see what the operator looks like out of the suit first to know.

We’ve got more cool meetings coming up! Can’t wait to share it with you.

—James