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Soul Light · update

Soul Light, another "new-generation" crunchier fantasy roll/keep ttrpg

By Aaron (@draedis)

Hello all! I am Aaron, normally known as Draedis in online spaces. I have been working on a new system for the better part of 2 years now, and after a lot of internal designing and showing it to friends, I want to start more publicly documenting the progress somewhere to also get some people's thoughts as I start getting closer to getting to a first draft that will be playable. But without further adieu, here is a short blurb about Soul Light: Soul Light is intended to fit in the crunchier fantasy ttrpg space. I've pulled a lot of inspiration from games like Legend of the Five Rings, Age of Wonders 4, Path of Exile, and Pathfinder, with some smatterings of things inspired by mechanics in other games. The game is meant to be oriented towards heroic or villainous fantasy, where progression is broken up across their equipment with a more sophisticated enchantment/crafting system, the 16 levels of player character progression, and the abilities they acquire across those 16 levels. Characters have 3 Attributes, know in-lore as Vis Flavors, and cover the typical Body, Mind, Spirit/Personality spread, and are known in-lore as Corpulence, Conduit, and Calmness respectively. Each Vis Flavor has 5 Skills associated with them, and they are the following:

Corpulence

Endurance
Power
Speed
Stealth
Skullduggery

Conduit

Calculation
Recognition
Perception
Operation
Creation

Calmness

Deceit
Recovery
Willpower
Ritualism
Transformation

How rolls are done in the system is that you have a value for each Vis Flavor and Skill, and you roll a number of d6s equal to the Vis Flavor value and keep a number of dice equal to the Skill value. If the Skill is higher than the Vis Flavor value, then you simple add 1 for each point the Skill is higher than the Vis Flavor, e.g. is I have a Corpulence of 3 but a Power of 4, I would roll and keep 3d6 and add a flat 1 on top. There is also a Base Vis Power modifier that is added to all rolls to give more power verticality to the game. I plan on giving updates multiple times a week, though probably shorter than this post here. Next time I will talk about Diplomacy, my answer to a more interesting social mechanic than "roll X to find out if the GM will let you convince the guard to let you through."

Thanks for reading,

Aaron/Draedis

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  1. Mirko(@digitalhobbit)

    Thanks for sharing! That roll and keep mechanic sounds pretty unique. But other than Pathfinder, I'm not really familiar with any of the games that inspired you. Do any of them use a similar mechanic?

    1. Aaron(@draedis)

      It is definitely an uncommon one! Legend of the Five Rings is the only “popular” one that I’ve found that uses a similar one. I plan on making a post on why/how I came to the mechanic, but the very short version is that I wanted characters who specialize in something to be reliably good at that thing. It also obfuscates the probabilities just enough where it encourages (most) players to not think about the numbers as much and just got with what they think their character is good at.

    2. Mirko(@digitalhobbit)

      Ah, nice. Being reliably good at something seems like a great goal.

      I've never played or read L5R, but I know many people love it.