Kill your darlings

Yup, I did it again.

Dyson Spells is dead, long live Dyson Spells!

So I've finally stopped burying my head in the sand, and adressed the fact that this was really two projects desperately trying to share the same space, and it wouldn't work in the long-term.

It's rather obvious at this point that I want to write a game about playing space punks toppling oppressive governments, exploitative cults and whatnot, and that will probably happen down the line. But for now, I've split the baby atwixt and I'm focusing on the "wild space fantasy exploration" part!

But what does that mean? How do you make exploration happens in a setting where almost anything goes, possibly including stuff like time travel and galaxy-spanning teleportation? Well, I've found that the simplest way to go about it is

Breaking the world

Dyson Spells now takes place in a world that broke down on its most fundamental level. I'm including a "Creation" thing to allow every gaming group to decide exactly how the world broke down, but the certain thing is that A. whatever great federating forces existed got utterly shattered, and B. the PCs are part of a Colony that more-or-less struggle to survive, and they'll need to go out there and secure new supplies, crops, magic, tech, trade agreements, etc... for the Colony.

... So I'm basically injecting a heavy dose of Fragged Empire in my Starfinder, is what I'm saying.

I've gutted a lot of things from this first version in order to keep the whole thing tightly focused around "jumping to a new system, exploring, bringing back souvenirs, rinse and repeat". Oh, and I got rid of Focus, and reworked the Stats. And the Moves. It's basically a brand new game that built on the DNA of the previous version and gutted all the extraneous stuff. Also added a little thing called Flair - tools, know-hows, magic spells, augmentations, etc... that allow a character to do some interesting space fantasy stuff.

I am a bit dissatisfied with "Establish First Contact", the Basic Charm Move. On the one hand, that's an absolutely perfect, spot-on Move for a game about exploration... on the other, that does mean that most social interactions won't have any "generic" Moves past the first encounter. Which might make Charm a bit weaker than others, but then again I'm getting cold feet at both the idea of having two Charm Moves and replacing Establish First Contact?

I think I did a good job of cutting vocabulary. It was getting messy. I've introduced like a few more things, but they're not mechanical. I'm hoping people won't forget that "mystech" simply means "technology that doesn't rely on the laws of physics but some kind of other laws of reality". Like this is basically technomagic with extra steps.

The Xenoarcheologist glorious comeback!

Yeah!!! Nothing is finished, most everything is either on the backlog or partially written, but I wanted to publish this update with at least one Playbook, sooo there ya go! Ancient alien ruins babyyy

Oh yeah, and with splitting the project in two came the very natural decision to cease that "twin playbooks" foolishness and just. Write good, well-articulated playbooks instead. Special mention to the special advancement which will invariably be at the bottom left of the advancements list on each playbook, and boy am I gonna have fun with those!

What's next?!

I make exactly zero promises as to what's next. Like, there will be something, but it'll probably be mostly updates to eeeverything. Like, what do I do with Threats. Do I just kick them out of the picture altogether? I feel like the combo of Power Through Trouble and Showcase Alternatives should work wonder like in and by itself, but... I don't know. I'd need to playtest that I guess.

See ya next week!