Now With Magic Powers! And Characters!

I thought it'd be a quick update. Just create some pregenerated characters inspired by the original Dragonlance cast. Throw in some jokes. It'll be fun. 

But then I started looking at the rules and talking to a few people who weren't sure about the traits. Plus I wanted the Persona rules to be more magical. 

Then I really started seriously rereading the old Dragonlance adventures and getting some ideas for writing actual adventure modules for this and things just went off the hook. So what's changed? 

Personas are now called Grinsonas. You have 6 traits- your Identity, your Interests, your Sense of Humor, etc. You can combine this with your persona to do weird magical things. It still uses rules inspired by animeeeeee but I've cleaned them up to work better in this system. They also now serve a distinct function form the stats.

Most importantly for what I want to do with the game, there is an entire section of rules detailing how to solve encounters using humor or heartfelt appeals instead of combat. The game is intended to encourage you to tells joke to marauding monsters or talk to the dark knight about his tough chidlhood if you are so inclined. So I wanted to make that clearer.

I also clarified some of how I want Harm and Saves to work, both in terms of in the moment as well as at the end of a session. Lots of other rules clarifications. This whole part was basically rewritten. Lots of the character creation portion was also clarified.

I added Extra Dice and Bad Dice, which are basically advantage and disadvantage but I liked writing it as getting extra dice or getting bad dice from someone. 

I described the history of the world, named the continents, and described the various cultural groups so you could use them. Instead of "fantasy races" they're all human, just some magically live longer than others.

The Grimsona Fellowship contains 11 pregen characters inspired by the original Dragonlance team. Each has a backstory, relationships to the others, details on what they do during action scenes if you don't have enough players for all of them, rules for how to handle having a ton of characters using a system of Primary and Shared characters and Focus and Background characters. 

There is a lot here in this update and it was supposed to be one of those quick 30 minute projects. I wrote original Dragonspear draft in literally one hour at one am so I didn't expect this to involve research and care. But it kind of had to.

In many ways this is me looking back at Dragonlance and taking what I liked from what, what appealed to me, and trying to create and share a world that we can use to focus on something other than warfare. I want it to be a hopeful game about survign dark times and then discovering joy and h ealing.

But for now, I need to go take a nap.