u/BlackTorchStudios

Hey y'all, it's Luke with After Eden TTRPG

I've been nose down working on trying to get this playtest packet, the adventure side of it, ready to go so that we can have everything released by the end of May.

But one quick question I wanted to ask the community is in reference to character sheets.

We're looking at the information that's available, and it's looking like we're going to have to go with four character sheets to communicate the information needed: a quick reference page on the front, where all the information that you're going to need to reference on a very frequent basis is going to be for your character; an equipment page; a features page that includes all of the features that you get outside of your class, as well as the projects that you're working on, because projects is going to be a part of our system; and then a class page. We're looking at how we could potentially do a custom page for each class. I know that's going to be a lot of work, but it's what we're looking at.

I wanted to ask:

1. How many pages is too many for you?

2. What are some of the best examples of character sheets that you've used? I know Mothership gets a lot of acclaim.

3. Have you ever had a game that had really great reference guides? We were looking at potentially making combat, exploration, and negotiation reference pages, maybe one of each on the table at any point for people to pick up and use, laminated or whatever.

4. Where, for those of you who have had character sheets made, did you design them yourselves? Were they more artistic or more utilitarian? Did they communicate the feel of the game? Or did you have an artist do it for you?

Any feedback would be appreciated, and I'm looking forward to hear what y'all have to say.

Hey everybody, Luke with After Eden (again, two posts in one day!)

Today, I wanted to talk about ancestry design using orcs as the sharpest example of what we are trying to do. In After Eden, the progenitor ancestries, which are the primary player ancestries, were not created by a single pantheon or from one shared template. Humans, orcs, elves, and dwarves were each created by their own god, in their own god’s image, and each developed in a separate realm with cultures that formed independently from one another. Nox, the default setting of After Eden, is the human realm, previously known as Eden. Many of the other progenitor peoples now live there after fleeing their own realms, but that is something we will talk about another day.

The design goal is to make sure orcs are not humans with tusks, elves are not humans with long ears, and dwarves are not humans with beards and a mining culture stapled onto them. Instead, we want each ancestry to have its own psychological profile shaped by species physiology, divine origin, and independent cultural development. If these peoples were created by different gods, in different realms, under different conditions, then they should not all relate to the world like slightly altered humans.

Orcs are probably the most controversial expression of that design philosophy, and they are the ancestry I want to focus on today. In After Eden, orcs are driven by conflict. Their bodies adapt to challenge, resistance, hardship, and victory. Their physiology is constantly changing in response to what they survive, what they overcome, and what they consume from defeated enemies.

Consuming monsters and dangerous creatures probably is not controversial for most fantasy tables. The more controversial part is that orcs may also consume parts of defeated sapient enemies. That is an intentional piece of the setting, but the goal is not to present orcs as evil by default. For many orcs, refusing to take anything from a worthy enemy after killing them can itself be seen as dishonor. If the enemy was strong enough to challenge you, then part of them is worth carrying forward.

There is an honor culture in many orc societies, but it is not just about glory or violence for its own sake. Orcs pursue challenge because challenge improves them and improves the people around them. Competition, rivalry, combat, endurance, and hardship are not only signs of hatred or ideological opposition. They can also be ways of testing one another, strengthening one another, almost in a roundabout parental or brotherly way. Like when a parent throws their child into a pool to teach them to swim.

As hinted earlier, different orc lineages consume different parts of defeated creatures and understand those parts as windows into different kinds of growth. Some orcs consume flesh, some consume blood, some consume hearts, and some consume minds. Each lineage draws different traits from what it consumes, based on the nature of the creature defeated and the part of that creature taken into the orc’s body.

The other reason orcs need challenge is because their bodies do not only adapt to hardship. They also adapt to stagnation. If an orc does not pursue a life of challenge, danger, pressure, and growth, their body begins to degenerate over time. Their adaptive nature turns inward, overcorrecting in the absence of resistance. This means orc cultures naturally value strength, cunning, resilience, ambition, and a willingness to seek out hardship rather than avoid it.

That is part of why we think orcs will make great player characters, but also great enemies and interesting NPCs. They are built for adventure in a very literal sense. Their biology pushes them toward challenge, their cultures give that challenge meaning, and their lineages give players different ways to express what it means for an orc to overcome something and become changed by it.

Our goal for After Eden is to have a shorter list of ancestries with deeper lineage design, rather than a huge list of options that mostly feel like cosmetic variations. Orcs currently have four different lineages, and we will talk more about the design of the other ancestries as we get closer to releasing the player playtest packet and adventure playtest packet.

I hope you found this interesting. Is this kind of ancestry design a turnoff for you, or does it make the world feel more distinct? How do you handle different peoples, species, races, or ancestries in your own games? Let us know your thoughts, feel free to ask questions, and we will see you in the next one.

Hey everybody, it’s Luke with After Eden TTRPG.

I wanted to see what everyone else has experienced with this. I have an infant daughter, and the past month has been essentially fruitless when it comes to developing the TTRPG because my brainpower has been near zero. Of course, this is happening right when I’m doing a pretty substantial iterative pass based on feedback from many of the contributors here. The joys for being the primary contributor for the project!

I wanted to ask where everyone else finds inspiration to do layout and rewrites when their energy levels are in the tank, especially when the rewrite is substantial enough that it feels like a near-start-from-scratch situation outside of the existing components and structure of your book or packet.

I know this is a temporary problem. After finally getting sleep for the first night in what feels like two weeks, I’m taking a second pass and working on getting this done so we can meet our goal of having both the player and adventure playtest packets out by the end of May.

So I came here to ask: what do you all do when you hit this kind of wall? What resources do you look at? What methods do you use to find the right layout, sift through the correct order, or restructure a messy draft? Or did you pay somebody to help with this?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Onward and upward.