Seacat v0.70: a panoply of gears (Patreon)

Dear heroes,

Welcome to very nearly the end of this month of May. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as possible, and that you have been well. If all goes well, many of us should be able to enjoy in-person games again soon, and I for one have to say: it cannot come too soon.

This last year has driven home to me in a way that is hard to overstate how fundamentally role-playing is a social in-person activity.

First, I need to make quite a big announcement.

I'm no longer working on SEACAT alone.

The duckrabbit Saker Tarsos (who made the UVG digital screen) is joining the rainbow unicorn as co-designer and code-lord on the digital side of seacat, affectionately dubbed SRDCAT. I'll still be doing most of the writing and the art, but we're now working together to make it work easily with the electronic tools Saker is building for the game.

We don't have all the details ironed out yet, but our rough goal is that once the seacat main document is ready for release, we'll also be ready to launch a kickstarter to cover development and hosting costs for a full companion app that'll serve as a complete system reference document (SRD), a character and creature generator, and an encounter and UVG-crawling companion, all in one. It'll be light and fast, and work both on mobile and PC—and support plain text (at least) exporting, so whatever you generate will work for you. An electronic servant brain daemon to guide folks through the rambling jungles of seacat.

That said, let's be honest, thanks to your feedback, I haven't been working on seacat alone anyway, and it's only as good and baroque as it is thanks to your excitement and support. Kudos where kudos are well deserved.

Second, the second announcement.

Seacat 0.70

What's new in seacat 0.70?

Names. A section with a series of instructions for inventing UVG-ish names. I plan to add sets of typical names or name stems in an eventual set of factions (yes, penglings, but also some new ones like the hallucinatory kabalithics and double-species plastastics).

Gear. Items. This was a long time coming, but they're finally here. Not all of them yet, but the outline is in place. This was something that I bounced back and forth with Saker a lot, because the idea was to come up with a format that will support the digital inventory, procedural generation, and integrated rolls — so when you add an item to your digital character sheet, you can roll to attack and damage right there in your srdcat, and it takes care of all the attributes and bonuses.

The other thing I'm trying to do with items is to make them ... colourful and baroque. To make them more like spells in D&D than a simple table listing leather, chain, and plate + shield and 34 slightly differentiated polearms. After all, the overview tables already take care of that:

Defensive gear is also starting to get fleshed out, while the other kinds are still embryonic.

Pets & Vehicles & Mounts & Bestiary. Another section that is now starting to grow and take shape. This might be a good place to mention that those of you who are reading this far: your suggestions on creatures from the UVG and Longwinter that you want to see with stats? Tell me! I'll happily stat and even illustrate them.

Hehe. See, a close-reading bonus.

I'm actually very happy with where I am at with this project. It feels like the heaviest lifting of building a functional skeleton or architecture is done, and now I can festoon it with an overabundance of baroque and rococo elements.

Ornate Minimalism

Ok, that's a bit of a joke overgrowing a rough pearl of truth. When I see a minimalist or simple roleplaying game I feel like it provides me with a series of simple mechanics and then tells me, "now you can make up anything you want to do with these three simple algorithms."

The problem I have is that I don't need a series of simple mechanics. I can pick those up anywhere (honestly, a basic 2d6 system works fine for 90% of roleplaying). What I want is a cornucopia of ideas and options both broad and deep enough that I can feel like I can keep playing for as long as I want, forever even (practically, forever is usually about 7–11 sessions in my experience). Of course, I will likely start inventing my own content by session 2, but I want to feel like I don't need to.

That is something the many-layered 5E promises at this point—with hundreds of monsters, a dozen classes, hundreds of spells, and a back catalog of countless adventures, enemies, and challenges, it feels like it could be plumbed forever. Of course, it then gates all these many things behind levels and classes and alignment restrictions, but in theory they are there. Then it further gates everything behind a perfectly-understandable corporate love of protected IP and a desire to create a gaming expanded universe.

My hope with seacat is to provide an un-gated, open jungle of character, item, spell, and adventure options into the psychedelic world of imagination that roleplaying promises.

Will this work?

Will this turn out to be utter folly?

Perhaps ...

... but dangit, I hope it will work. I hope to create a game where a beach barbarian dons a space suit and surfs from space to the surface of a freshly rinsed world on a stolen void thruster.

Because that's the goal. Nothing less than an abject, glorious, screaming, world-thumping gaming song.

:)

Or, barring that, a lot of fun ideas y'all can rip and tear for your own home games! That's also great, I'll just keep my imaginary endless game in my head. :D

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Thank you for reading this far! And a warm welcome to all the new heroes of the stratometaship.

Now, without further adieu [sic] ...

*±*±* 0.70 *±*±*

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—LR—