Part 582 of 10,826 on TTRPG stuff, for no apparent reason.

The latest Kickstarter for Star Anvil’s tabletop treatment of The Secret World was the “North American Sourcebook” which might as well be called the “Illuminati Sourcebook” because North America is where they’re HQ is located. Part of the stretch goals for this drive was a ruleset for Foundry VTT and once I remembered this, it pushed me away from Fantasy Grounds and over into Camp Foundry. I guess if I were working with a rulset that I currently owned for FG I’d run it there, but because I’ve got The Secret World on the brain, and it’s dropping for Foundry At Some Point ™, Foundry is where I’m going to be spending my time.

The other kicker is that the Foundry ruleset is going to be based on Savage Worlds. I knew nothing about Savage Worlds. I apparently owned the rules in FG but never looked at them and certainly never used them so since the TSW VTT treatment is going to use SWADE (Savage Worlds Adventures Deluxe Edition), I have been spending time reading the rules.

I think I like SWADE, at least from what I’ve read. It doesn’t use hard numbers, but die size. For example, your character’s Strength starts with a value of “d4”. When your need to roll Strength, you roll the d4. Values increase by moving from d4 to d6, then d8, d10, and so on until you reach the cap of d12 and then advancement becomes +1, +2, and so on. Each roll needs to beat a “target number” which, by default, is just…4. Roll higher than a 4 and you’re good. Roll less and you’ve failed. Modifiers add or subtract from your die roll so rolling a 4 on a d4 would be a success, but with a -1 penalty you’ve actually rolled a 3. There are other rules, of course, mainly around the role of the PC compared to NPCs (“Wild Cards” versus “Extras”) but this isn’t an enumeration of the ruleset. I just like that the attributes and skills are limited in scope (d4-d12) and are easy to understand.

The Secret World SWADE edition ruleset doesn’t significantly change anything, but merely adds on some “TSW flavor”. It does introduce the concept of “Destinies” which operates much like Sanity in Call of Cthulhu or Psychosis in Cyberpunk, benefiting characters in the short term but ultimately resulting in the GM taking over control of the character because they cross the Ultimate Line. It also adds in the concept of Talismans, which is really just another gear rule.

Right now, in the absence of the actual software for Foundry, I’ve been combing through both the SWADE rulebook and the TSW add-on and taking notes. One of the perennial issues I have with TTRPG rulebooks is how they tend to bury the mechanics in paragraphs which are interspersed throughout the core tome. I cannot remember how many times I’ve read a book, and then forgotten when a specific mechanic was mentioned because it was on page 112, second column, fifth paragraph, third sentence, without fanfare, formatting, or callout. As a result my power-move is to take notes like I’m in a college class, distilling the information with headers and bulletpoints so the information I need, when I need it, is easy to find. I get that TTRPG designers have a lot of mechanics to explain, but would it kill any of them to provide a section of shorthand at the end of the book where everything is laid out for use during actual play? I suspect this is a symptom of the larger problem of “people who know a thing can’t really teach a thing”, and if designers know the rules intimately, they might not understand how to effectively explain it. This has been an issue since I have been reading and playing TTRPGs, so I guess it’s not something that’ll be solved in my lifetime.

But meanwhile, I have also taken the chance of becoming persona non grata by throwing some prompts into Copilot to see what kind of Secret World-themed story outlines it could generate. While the ones I received were kind of generic — two out of three involve a cult, and I only asked for generic synopsis anyway — the app gave me exactly what I asked for, and could really serve as a decent starting point for expanding into a full-blown adventure. Of course, I just this morning saw that the TSW book for SWADE has a section on adventure ideas and even some generators, so I should probably read the books I pay for more often.