This is the first post on what I assume will be many, many posts on the state of The City Fathers rpg. I'm not entirely sure where this is going to go, but I would like to finish this project.
So, What's All Going To Be In This Game?
The City Fathers is a tabletop role playing game of exceptional quality. It's my own 'riff' on DnD, and I daresay, it's the best one. Chalk that up to arrogance, but I only started RPGs as a hobby in 2014 and tried out over 63 systems before I threw up my hands in deep frustration and just made my own. I spent about six months trying to get people to read it and give me feedback, but I sent copies to about fifteen people, many of them OSR 'names' if you will, established and relatively successful artists and I never heard back from a single one. So, I said fuck it, clawed a group together and ran it from december 2020 to june 2021. Some of this was online, some of this was with people in real life. For the most part, we had some cool campaigns, even if nobody ever left Thimmer. What a shame.
So there's going to be two books, that's the hope. PDF, PoD on DTRPG and PDF on Itch.io. There's just realistically no way to really do RPG books printed in China with the way shipping prices are now. 4k to 20k over a month, it's nuts. Lots of kickstarter people got fucked from that.
So two books. One is going to the basic rules for exploration, combat, and character/class creation. You know this. Some of you have seen it. The other book is going to be the "Domain" book, with lots of lore and story and such.
Okay okay, what's the game like?
The City Fathers Rulebook: Rules for characters, combat and exploration is going to be the first one. It's tentative table of contents will be something like this:
Introduction: What is an RPG and what is TCFRPG? (Polyhedral Dice etc)
Heroic-Level Campaigns
Expedition-Level Campaigns
Domain-Level Campaigns
Character Creation
The Custom Class Generator (Race and Class notes on balance)
Class Features (Dice-Specific and non-dice specific)
Sample Classes (This one confuses people, I might just delete it, they were mostly meant to be examples)
Equipment (pretty simple)
Exploration Rules (One-page)
Combat Rules (One-page, this is an OSR game and you don't need crazy rules for it)
Magic Rules (Acquiring magic affinity, combat spells, ritual spells, gathering spell components)
Advancement Rules
That's going to cover everything you need to make a character, arm them with weapons, customize their class, and get into trouble. There's rules for exploration, stealth, the unique rulings for healing (they're weird) and the slot-based system for encumbrance. Magic rules exist as well, but don't take that to heart, magic is something you earn your way into in this system. But you're meant to earn your way into everything besides what you get from features.
The other book is going to be the domains book, and instead of writing domain rules that can be universally applied, because that fucking sucks, each one of these setting books I write will be a domains book. Setting books are really boring and I hate them, unless they're game-able. One of my biggest frustrations was buying incomplete setting books. Either it's a bible of garbage that's unusable or there's so little content and there's a bit of a wand-wave followed by a ~just make whatever else you need up~ which...no.
Anyway, the table of contents will look something like this:
The City Fathers Domain and Setting Book I: Thimmer, the Rot Behind The Walls
The World As We Believe It (This is just a very brief,
less than 5 pages explanation of the world in the perspective of two different people,
one who lives in Thimmer and one who lives in the world beyond the walls.)
Thimmer, as We Perceive It (Perspective of life in the city from four different perspectives)
Our City Father: (Bootlicking summary of the main "villain" and ruler of Thimmer)
The Magistracies of Thimmer (Crime and Punishment/bestiary)
The Corruptors of Thimmer (Factions, acceptable/bestiary)
Our Gods In Thimmer (Religion and Religious Factions/bestiary)
The Filth of Thimmer (Criminal factions and additional enemies not covered elsewhere)
Hidden Secrets of Thimmer (Magical Spells for this city, rituals/bestiary of spellcasters)
The Thimmer Campaign (general explanation of how I run the campaign,
how you'll play in said campaign, etc. This includes rules for generating your own arbitratum, growing it in size,
waging war on other arbitratums and how to generate them for endless adventuring locations, think a hex generator.)
Shatter Approach (Sample Arbitrarum with three small dungeons)
The Glass Moon (Dungeon, proper-sized)
That should cover everything. Stay tuned! More to come!
- Dicey
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