Hi! I wanted to say thank you for sharing Calypso; and that it became an inspiration for me to create a small journaling/worldbuilding game/rpg for myself. In case you’re interested to take a look, I shared it for free at: https://akavel.itch.io/wanderer All the best to you, and I love your games as pieces of art, they seem to keep being enchanting, seducing, and inspiring to me!
I discovered Cyberforged very recently, and I find especially its oracles absolutely amazing for the genre. Thank you so much for creating them, and putting so much of your experience and work into this expansion!!!
As a side note, browsing the PDF today I wondered: is there a chance you might be able to give the document an “embedded table of contents”? Currently, when I use a PDF reader app to open the ToC/structure of the document, it only shows me a list of page numbers (“Page 1”, “Page 2”, …). It would be really cool if I could browse the titles of the chapters and sections there instead - e.g. for quick jumping into the Oracles, or the Map-Making stuff, etc. On the other hand, a “regular” ToC in the text of the PDF would also be super helpful, especially if I were to print this awesume supplement, for screen-less use.
Anyway - that’s only some wishes; what you did here is already great, even if you never address them, and I suspect you may have some more important things in your life now, so I wish you all the best in them first of all!
I actually ended up adding the Fate moves into the diagram; thanks for the suggestion and inspiration! I put Ask The Oracle in new “Phase 0”, and kinda emphasized parts of Pay The Price in “Phase VI Suffer” a bit more.
Original reply:
As to Pay The Price, as far as I understand it’s referenced from other Moves, so I assumed it doesn’t need a special entry, because it’ll be found through those other Moves. I also mention it near the Suffer Moves section’s title. Does one ever use Pay The Price in some situation other than when explicitly asked so by an outcome of another move? 🤔
As to Ask The Oracle, to me it seems mostly obvious; do you think of an argument that might support adding it somewhere in the diagram for some specific reason? Do you think it is not so obvious?
Notably, I also skipped Legacy Moves and Threshold Moves, as I feel they’re very rarely used and as such don’t need to be on a starter diagram.
On the other hand, recently I’m starting to wonder if I should try and include the Scene Challenges Moves 🤔
I love how this is narratively driven and lightweight, and yet still flavorful. I was especially amazed and impressed by the brilliant idea of spell effect Oracles - so nonobvious, and yet it makes so much sense now that I saw it. I find this supplement a perfect match for the Ironsworn series of games. And then also beautifully typeset, and shared as PWYW, to top it all… what a gem, thank you!
Hi! Starting with a potentially easy editorial issue: in the final “Playing Bladesworn” examples chapter, I noticed three sections with a lot of repetition, that seem accidentally mixed up to me. In particular, I mean pages 35-37, sections “Making it to the Ruins”, “Exploration”, and “Exploring the Ruins”. The middle one (“Exploration”) reads to me like a weird, confusing and unplanned mix between the two others - most notably, it contains many repeated sentences from the first one (“Making it to the Ruins”). Most glaringly, the whole bullet point of: “Set a clock for the wilderness’s dangers…” appears copied verbatim. And, to me at least, it seems out of place in an “Exploration” section. On the other hand, I don’t really understand what’s the difference between “Exploration” vs. “Exploring the Ruins”. Another example, seemingly hinting that this is an editorial error, is the final sentence of “Exploration”: “Let’s start a six-segment tension clock (from Starforged) for our pursuit” - exactly such a clock was already presented at the end of the previous section (“Making it to the Ruins”), while it’s not imaged in the middle section even though it’s mentioned there, as quoted. Thus, I assume this situation is some accident of editing/growing the text of the book; did you maybe mean to cut out the whole “Exploration” section before publishing? Or incorporate some parts of it into the neighboring sections?
Other than that, expanding on my initial notes on reddit, I now re-read the book with some more attention (compared to my initial half-awake skim). I really love the whole “four things” framework to approaching “Face Danger”. It feels surprisingly evocative and immersive to me vs. being distracted by the looming choice of a Move in base IS:SF. In a way, I think I’d like if one day I might maybe manage to marry the two, so as to be able to start immersed in your “Four Steps Framework”, then after completing it, maybe pick a Move from IS:SF and get its mechanical resolution. But, I digress. Just wanted to repeat, that for now, this is the part that captured me the most, and which I’m especially grateful to you for, and for writing and sharing it!
On the other hand, although they seem interesting to me, and feel like there’s “something” to them, for now I admit to being confused and unclear around the Scale-Quality-Potency elements. I mean, with the examples given, I seem to understand the aspects they’re trying to capture (overwhelmed/overwhelming size; better tools/skills; narrowly specific boost/advantage). However, what I don’t seem to understand, is how - after making the analysis - should they affect my gameplay/narration (apart from the single explicitly stated special case of increased/decreased progress ticks). Those elements seem vaguely mentioned in some (not even all, I think?) of the examples in the final chapter, but I still can’t seem to grasp how using them to dissect the scene actually influences the game. Would you maybe consider trying to expand on that aspect? Do you think it could make sense to e.g. take one (or more?) example Move resolutions, and speculatively elaborate on how each of the three dials (Scale-Quality-Potency) could narratively differ in that particular situation, and how would that then impact the gameplay/mechanics/narrative? (Ideally, in a way different than just a dry mechanical increase/decrease of ticks on a Progress clock. I assume those are still primarily intended as narrative tools; or not?)
Cool, I’m super happy it managed to give you some fun! :D thanks for sharing and leaving this comment! :D 💖
I’m really honored and curious what made you persevere and give it a second try, and not just ditch it, if you found the first reading to be a tough one 😅 I highly doubt if I myself would be so patient and generous in your place, so thank you 😅
Also, do you maybe have any thoughts what I could try to do to make the rules easier to swallow? 🤔
After downloading and skimming a Community Copy, do I understand correctly that I actually need a copy of the Liminal Horror game as well to understand how to play it? 🤔
Once you do it, would you be so kind and let me know? I’d love to be pinged about it, so that I can either link to your account, or do it and also re-publish a copy of it here - totally depending on which you prefer and/or you think is better!
(And, just to make sure you don’t miss it, please mark your translation as licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 as well - as far as I understand that’s how the license terms need to be propagated.)
Is there a way you would prefer, and/or you think is better? Regardless, I would love to link to your account once it is done (in any case, whether a copy gets published here or only on your account).
(And, just to make sure you don’t miss it, please mark it as licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 as well - as far as I understand that’s how the license terms need to be propagated.)
Thank you for your kind words, and greetings to you from Poland as well! 🥰
Woohoo! Even choppy, looks *sooo* much cooler than the static screenshots! \^v^/ Which do look nice too, for sure. By the way, I'm curious, are you maybe using the Voxel Quest engine in your game?
