I said I'd have an example affinity tree today, but it was a rough day at work and I'm just about ready to drop, so I want to talk about some of the work that I'm doing on Hammercalled to make it ready for the Rules Reference 2.0 once Segira and Hwaet get done. I'm also going to dig up something I did years ago (2014, according to Dropbox, but I think it's actually from 2012) for comparison.

The idea behind a modular Hammercalled is not necessarily that you're going to be able to make a Hammercalled-lite. I'm going to do that sometime as an experiment, but it won't be based off of the standard modular ruleset, just a hyper-focused reinterpretation of what exists.

Rather, the idea behind it is that you can layer on specific rules to fit your setting and feel. For instance, the downtime rules in Segira are very different from what I would put in a high fantasy game (in the interest of full disclosure, I've loved "You're magically right back at full health as soon as we move back into narrative time" as an approach since Open Legend, and I'm aware that Hammercalled has few concessions to anything else in its core rules right now).

What does Modular Really Mean

Really, the key thing for Hammercalled being modular for me means having an alternate way to play. The idea behind this will really show in Genship Exiles, which eschews a lot of the more traditional ways of doing things while keeping others; we get rid of attributes and specializations for affinities and roles (this will confuse people poking at the rules reference to no end; they won't be called affinities in the rules reference to prevent an association with affinity trees, but they won't be renamed in Genship Exiles because I've committed to them already).

It's about keeping to a design philosophy of keeping individual parts simple with very clearly delineated interfaces.

A great example of this is how we handle dice rolls. Rolling dice involves a target number and margin. You can alter either of those with any number of systems, so long as the rules remain comprehensible. You can add new things from the dice rolls, like caring about doubles for something you want to happen 1/10 (or 1/100) of the time, so long as you are, again, keeping the rules comprehensible.

It's not that you're going to make something entirely different from Hammercalled. You can hack it quite a bit if you want (for instance, you could do an Earthdawn-esque steps dice pool instead of a d100 system, and calculate margin based on how much a character succeeds), and so long as you keep in mind what you're interfacing with you should still be able to have most things just work (though maybe not as intended).

D20M, My Earlier Attempt

Back in the day, before I started Loreshaper Games, I had an idea for a game based on a modular d20-based system (distinct from Wizards of the Coast's d20 system, but I'm not good at naming things).

The idea was to split everything into as many documents as possible and have you just use whichever you needed.

I playtested this and it went okay, but I think the system was always a little flawed from the get-go for a number of reasons. Later, the D20M system would show up as an influence in my game Street Rats, which was also critically flawed from its foundation, my first "finished" full-length game.

Here's a Dropbox link to all the stuff: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kbpx54318jmp6mw/AACWLaybDx_iQOgU8qYXBRWga?dl=0

It includes basic rules and a sample adventure, and you can probably tell that I was a giant fan of Dredd because of the setting and how that all played out.

The site leads to a dead link, but this was all of D20M that got finished anyway. I'm not sure I ever followed through on the website; you can thank my lazy college years for that!

The Orchestra universe is also something that eventually turned into Street Rats, though it was originally a sort of quasi-supernatural setting with Lovecraftian elements and those were removed for a more traditional cyberpunk feel in Street Rats. I created a StoryNexus IF story for it back in the day, though it was never fully finished due to a mixture of system issues, the challenge of writing good IF, and the fact that I was a lazy college student.

The real flaw of D20M is that it was just too complicated (it wasn't complicated at all compared to some other games, but it made itself more complicated than it had to be) and didn't benefit from being split up in any meaningful way.

Yeah, you can use whatever rules you need, but they're scattered in a bunch of theoretically independent pieces. Basically, there's no benefit to doing it this way instead of just having optional rules in a main rulebook, like GURPS does.

Wrapping Up

Basically, I'm trying to keep Hammercalled relatively clean of entanglements so that I can work on it more easily, but also so I can do interesting things with it. Right now I think it's coming along well in that way.