[Amora Game - Kickstarter] the Book of Collective Influence - LIVE


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As you may have seen floating around the board. Our Kickstarter is live.

Alexander "Alex" Augunas
Bradley Crouch
Eric Morton
Mike Myler
Scott Gladstein
Will McCardell
Wayne Canepa
Wojciech "Drejk" Gruchała
Daron Woodson
Greg LaRose

Liber Influxus Communis: the Book of Collective Influence

Theme of the Book
The theme for this compilation of base classes is that of altering your environment, or being altered by it. These designs put that control into the hands of the players with classes that deal with manipulating magic, memories, spirits, and the elements. Some of these classes are mutated by the influences of these outside forces, while others are most adept at surviving them!

Classes
Mystic
Tainted
Medium
Conduit
Mnemonic
Survivor
Demiurge
Metamorph
Warlock

Mechanics?
Stay tuned in the Kickstarter updates.

Designers may give more details if they so wish. Keep it to the minimum as that is what the updates are for. :-)

If you have questions please feel free to ask.
~Greg LaRose
Amora Game


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I'm a man of my word - Pledged.

Any chance of a PoD (Lulu, lightningsource,createspace?) of the final book? I like having the big ones in print...

EDIT:
One note: There already is a Medium class, by Purple Duck Games in Legendary Classes: Covenant Magic. Perhaps rename Eric's class?

Contributor

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I think you have the honor of being Greg's very first backer, Endzeitgeist!


Yep. ^^


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PoD will be an option.
I will bring the topic up to Eric as well :)

And a huge thanks as the first backer. That is the world to me!


Fantastic. Glad to be part of this.

Contributor

Amora Game wrote:
Designers may give more details if they so wish. Keep it to the minimum as that is what the updates are for. :-)

Oh, I so wish. I won't talk about the mechanics, though, since you said that was soon to come. Let's talk about where I got my inspiration for the Mystic, instead!

The Mystic is a class that I've wanted to write for YEARS; it was actually my very first designed class, long before I ever heard of Dario Nardi or Radiance House. Back in those olden days [of 2010], the Mystic originally started as four separate, ridiculously complicated classes. The design process that lead to the Mystic that you will see in The Book of Collective Influence even went parallel to Pact Magic Unbound, Vol 2 at several points in its long and tired history. When Greg approached me about the Kickstarter, the idea had already come a long way and through our discussions, the current iteration was born. Its very similar to my final set of Pre-Amora blueprints, except it was Greg who proposed to bring four despot half-classes together under one name: I decided upon The Mystic early on.

Because Greg so elegantly spoiled it in the previous thread (and I helped!), saying that the Mystic was inspired by Avatar: The Last Airbender is an understatement. The Mystic is a love letter to two of my favorite fantasy worlds just as much as Pact Magic Unbound was a love letter to the binder. When I designed the Mystic, I wanted you to be able to think to yourself, 'This is exactly what [REDACTED] did in that episode!' or 'How did he figure out how to mimic [REDACTED]'s signature attack from that one movie?!"

Spoiler:

And yes, the Mystic is designed to allow you to evoke the themes of Benders and/or Jedi. When designing the Mystic, for each hour I spent working on this class about 20 minutes was spent doing research on various wikis, rewatching episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: Legend of Korra, consulting my copy of d20 Star Wars Saga, and watching scenes from Star Wars: Episodes IV, V, and VI. Paizo has put out some good proxies thus far; now here's a product that is actively trying to invoke those themes, and in my incredibly biased opinion, it succeeds without forcing you to learn hundreds of new rules or memorize pages of new maneuvers.


For whatever that's worth - I'd upgrade immediately to print level, if there was an option.


Ah, geez, so many errors in my little intro. I'm going to blame the fact that Greg asked for it while I had the flu. Still, not a good legacy to leave on kickstarter.com.


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@Greg:

Be sure to pimp this wherever possible - Know Direction, Demiplane of Gaming etc. - this project needs exposure to show people the collaboration of awesome talents!!


Very interesting.

No mention of print, so initially just PDF?

Interior artists are…?

As an aside...

The Medium sounds a lot like the Thaumaturge from the Thunderscape Campaign Setting…

and the Conduit sounds a lot like the Savant from Kobold Quarterly/Kobold Press New Paths Compendium.


Aye. I was also assuming print. Greg, I'd be happy to spend a few hours helping you get your .pdf compatible with a print on demand system. It's one of those things that will help catapult your Kickstarter sales. People are willing to wait for tactile goods (and video games), after all.


I'd be up for print if there is some awesome interior and cover art… Also want to know what the international shipping wold be on that ...


Print so far is the 2K-stretch-goal (which should be easy to accomplish), but generally, yes - shipping etc. would be imho very important. And there are still a lot of people who want print above all else.


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Endzeitgeist wrote:
Print so far is the 2K-stretch-goal (which should be easy to accomplish), but generally, yes - shipping etc. would be imho very important. And there are still a lot of people who want print above all else.

Ah yes. I must have scanned too quick. I'm sure this will easily reach 2k, but the shipping. aieee the shipping, it burns us….


At the end of the day if the stretch goal is not reached, we will be doing a Print on Demand.

Our interior artist so far is Jay Sloan. I will post an update to showcase his work.


Brad, if you need to revise your intro send it to me and I will update it.


Amora Game wrote:
Brad, if you need to revise your intro send it to me and I will update it.

You can do that? I had heard there was a lot of "locked in" stuff on Kickstarter. Would that just be the funding levels, then?

Silver Crusade

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Pledged and looking forward to it.


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Adventure Path Charter Subscriber

I am trying to pledge, but the connection to Amazon seems to be down, at least for me. Is anyone else having issues?

Update: Finally working. Pledged.


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Black Moria wrote:
I am trying to pledge, but the connection to Amazon seems to be down, at least for me. Is anyone else having issues?

Black Moria were you able to get the issue resolved?

As for the Conduit and Medium, I will let the developers handle their descriptions. It's more fun for them to describe them.

Also updates over the next couple of weeks (days) will highlight each class so people have an idea for the beta test when funding is reached.


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Adventure Path Charter Subscriber
Amora Game wrote:
Black Moria wrote:
I am trying to pledge, but the connection to Amazon seems to be down, at least for me. Is anyone else having issues?

Black Moria were you able to get the issue resolved?

Yes. Don't know what the issue was but it resolved itself. Pledged.


Looking forward to this!


With the survivor I decided to take a more roleplaying focused approach.
The background of a survivor is not simply, "I am a tough son of a gun" but "I have lived through a traumatic event and can survive on scraps and still thrive".
Inspiration came from some of the books I read when I was younger like My Side of the Mountain (Jean Craighead George), Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer), and Night (Elie Wiesel) amongst others.
From a roleplaying perspective this adds a lot of angles to play a character from. Are you a freed slave who had to fight for every scrap of food, were you left for dead in the harsh unforgiving reaches of a frigid mountain, or did you get trapped on another plane and were forced to survive for years alone?
The mechanics back this up but I believe we will hold off talking on those for now.


Congratulations on picking up a $75 "here's my class idea" pledge, Greg!

Contributor

Looks like we're gonna have stuff to do after the funding period ends.

:)


And there goes the other "here's my class idea" pledge. I'm going to have to have that as a funding level when I get around to trying kickstarter.

Tch. Looks like he changed his mind. Quick, somebody get in there and ask for something utterly ridiculous!

Forest Guardian Press

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Yeah that was me. I'm looking to pledge at the higher tier for a base class I'm working on that will seriously complement the theme... Just trying to work out if I would still retain rights after the book is done - fairly sure you mentioned something along these lines in the first thread Bradley.

@Greg, sending you a PM


Oceanshieldwolf wrote:


and the Conduit sounds a lot like the Savant from Kobold Quarterly/Kobold Press New Paths Compendium.

I can assure you that it is not. :)

The key phrase here is "channels mystic force", but I'm not going to give away any more than that. ;)

*pulls zipper across mouth*

RPG Superstar 2009 Top 16, 2012 Top 32

Oceanshieldwolf wrote:
The Medium sounds a lot like the Thaumaturge from the Thunderscape Campaign Setting…

While the medium is thematically similar to the thaumaturge, the medium is much more flexible. Players of medium characters get to build spirit companions from scratch instead of picking them off a pre-generated list. In fact, if those players happen to like features of the thaumaturge class, they can design spirit companions that grant access to thaumaturge class features. (More on that later.)

Think of it this way: the thaumaturge is like a sorcerer with summon monster spells; the medium is like a summoner, complete with eidolon.

EDIT: Come to think of it, it's possible to have a medium with access to an actual, non-metaphorical eidolon. Or an animal companion. Or a familiar.


MikeMyler wrote:
Oceanshieldwolf wrote:


and the Conduit sounds a lot like the Savant from Kobold Quarterly/Kobold Press New Paths Compendium.

I can assure you that it is not. :)

The key phrase here is "channels mystic force", but I'm not going to give away any more than that. ;)

*pulls zipper across mouth*

I didn't mean my aside to denigrate it at all, merely mentioning the similarity in the expressed concept. ;)

I'm delighted to hear that they are different - looking at the Savant and finding a different design space (thematic and mechanical) is all part of the research I guess...


The Tainted

This class is based on the idea of a planar taint that seeps into the body of an individual. Though the residual planar energy required to twist a mortal can exist anywhere, it's much more common near places that outsiders use to plane hop to the material plane. As such, it's perfectly possible to meet a middle-aged man who just started exhibiting the taint a few years ago, but a toddler whose hair randomly bursts into flame can also be a thing. Changes do not occur at puberty or some other predetermined age; they simply occur when enough planar energy has been absorbed. As a tainted increases in level, it is assumed that he has been soaking up the stuff like a sponge.

The tainted is designed to be a meta-modular class. That is to say, not only does the class offer extreme customizability to the player, it also offers that same customizability to those who want to rip the class apart and build something entirely new with it. (This, of course, will allow Greg and myself to add expansions to it until the cows come home.) The tainted's source of power is designed to be totally detachable, allowing the class to work with entirely different ability sets. This is particularly important in custom universes that may have different planes, as it allows for different universes and styles of taint. For example, one individual can be tainted by the elements, while another individual has been tainted by the residual planar energies from the last time the devils and archons decided to duke it out on the material plane for a change of pace. The former would have a number of elemental abilities, while the latter would be more alignment-based.

This kickstarter will include one complete cosmology based on the classic Greek elements: fire, water, air, and earth. For variety's sake, positive and negative energy are also included. Every pairing of these six elements, or paraelement, will also have its own ability set, resulting in a grand total of 21 bloodline-sized ability sets.

Before you ask, yes, I'm still working on them. It's big.

The one thing that does worry me is that the class is not going to be an easy one to archetype. While the frontend and the backend are readily detachable, the class features themselves are rather... incredibly specific by necessity. Apologies in advance to Mr. Woodson.

How the class manipulates its source of power will wait for Greg's formal update.


Epic Meepo wrote:
Oceanshieldwolf wrote:
The Medium sounds a lot like the Thaumaturge from the Thunderscape Campaign Setting…

While the medium is thematically similar to the thaumaturge, the medium is much more flexible. Players of medium characters get to build spirit companions from scratch instead of picking them off a pre-generated list. In fact, if those players happen to like features of the thaumaturge class, they can design spirit companions that grant access to thaumaturge class features. (More on that later.)

Think of it this way: the thaumaturge is like a sorcerer with summon monster spells; the medium is like a summoner, complete with eidolon.

Sounds good. I'm liking the more information too. ;)

I had a concept similar to the Thaumaturge/Medium (entering a soulflare tent and becoming embodied by an ancestral spirit) since my 1e Campaign Setting (you can tell it was 1e because there was a d100 randomly generated list of class and level).

I tried unsuccessfully to insert the concept into a few adventure pitches for Midgard Tales, but folks weren't interested.

When I first saw the thaumaturge I almost had a fit. I hope the medium makes me choke also... ;)

Maybe I should find a similar class to all these classes and get all the authors out here throwing tidbits... ;)


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Good luck with that one.

Advocates

Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Maps Subscriber

Oh, right, yeah, I'm that first $75er. I'll send Amora Game/Greg my concept in a minute or so.


Always with the quips Master McCardell...

No word on the Demiurge then?


Hmm let's see now, the Demiurge. [Attempts to pierce the veil through benighted perception]

Sounds nothing like an artificer. In a Perfect World, Cheapy would come along and tell us just what the Perfect World concept is all about. A Perfect World of Concepts made real by the sounds of it. At any rate it sounds fun and intriguing.


Well...


Oceanshieldwolf wrote:

Hmm let's see now, the Demiurge. [Attempts to pierce the veil through benighted perception]

Sounds nothing like an artificer. In a Perfect World, Cheapy would come along and tell us just what the Perfect World concept is all about. A Perfect World of Concepts made real by the sounds of it. At any rate it sounds fun and intriguing.

Mate, you just gave me another class idea. Keep talking.


Why don't you just trawl through my posts. I've got plenty of them... ;)

Contributor

Interjection Games wrote:
The one thing that does worry me is that the class is not going to be an easy one to archetype. While the frontend and the backend are readily detachable, the class features themselves are rather... incredibly specific by necessity. Apologies in advance to Mr. Woodson.

That's okay; the Sorcerer is pretty much the same way with its bloodlines function; you COULD trade bloodline powers out, but its usually with varying success for most bloodlines.

@Oceanwolf: I didn't design any truly "new" mechanics with the Mystic because I wanted it to be friendly and intuitive to GMs and Players alike because I'm tried to emulate two extremely popular character concepts. That said, I've seen people ask for exactly what the Mystic does mechanically on the forums several times before.


@Alexander Augunas: I understand. There is something to be said for using existing mechanics, tried and true mechanics, in new ways.


@Greg/Amora:

Will the top two pledge tiers classes' also be archetyped by Daron Woodson as well?

Is it your intention that they essentially will be four new Base classes added to the current nine?


Oceanshieldwolf wrote:

@Greg/Amora:

Will the top two pledge tiers classes' also be archetyped by Daron Woodson as well?

Is it your intention that they essentially will be four new Base classes added to the current nine?

Those that have PM'd me, I have responded.

Reward Level: Yes the 4 top tier will be added to the book.

Archetypes: If the talented Mr. Woodson is able to come up with archetypes (I have no doubt in his wondrous abilities) yes, it was the initial idea.

He is also acting as one of the editors, so it will depend on his workload for the project.


I wish I had $75.

Sigh....

I'll have to see just what I can pledge, though.


Cheapy wrote:
Well...

Okaaaaay. Well after starting to read that mine eyes glazed over - I hope the Demiurge is a lot more fun than Plato's Theory of Forms. If you throw in plenty of Diogenes on the other hand it could really rock...


Are you implying that there're things more fun than Plato's Theory of Forms? I'm not sure that's even possible.

I'll talk more about it later. No reason to give up the game so soon :-)


Cheapy wrote:

Are you implying that there're things more fun than Plato's Theory of Forms? I'm not sure that's even possible.

I'll talk more about it later. No reason to give up the game so soon :-)

*groan*

My inner nominalist just had a fit...


Love this idea. I just kicked in...

Advocates

Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Maps Subscriber

Given the discussion of Platonic Dialogue, someone will have to remind me to try and make a Tainted archetype based on Timaeus, most likely called the Sickening Dreamer. Oh, so much geometric power! Hehehe...

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