#Shorn of everything I thought I knew, I raise my #head to the #infinite sky. A sinking sun causes it to #blush. By the wayside, #aster's purple intensifies before the day goes to #rest. The echo of the #crunch fades while I let go of #opinion.

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@FrostPoem
@tanweerdar
@StuartBrknJohns

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#whistpr #mpotd #brknshards #vss365 #vssnature #MastoPrompt #MicroPrompt #rise365
#WritingCommunity
2023-09-18

So a while ago I said I was going to share some lore notes for the #tabletop setting I’ve been at work on, #Shorn. I’m hard at work on this in conjunction with the Triptych #RPG system. Triptych will be an open system once I feel like it’s in a finished enough state, but Triptych is designed to work in a very modular way with a simple player-provided setting, or “Riff.” Shorn is the most elaborate Riff I’m working on to really show how detailed Riffs can get and to have for playtesting later. The worldbuilding has gotten a bit out of control but it’ll be ready to share in full eventually.

It’s a bit of an indirect introduction, but I’ll start with the namesake at the root of this crumbling world.

One feature of the modern city of Kismet which haunts its residents throughout their day to day lives is the bottomless maw that resides where the jewel of the city, the alchemy district, once lay. This physical incarnation of oblivion, swallowing the sea where the city center once busily conducted its most ingenius feats of creation, is now crisscrossed by a delicate lattice of thin suspended bridges which connects what remains of the city. The heart of this pit, created within seconds of the creation of the Alkahest, marks the beginning of the Shorn, a spiderweb of cracks in time and space which now permeate the whole of known reality. While the mass center of the Shorn is universally considered to be too dangerous to traverse, followers of The Fractal were eventually able to bridge the further reaches and paths of this veil through a practice known as Shornwalk. The Shornwalk is a careful ritual requiring a great deal of concentration, foreknowledge and communication between those performing it and the outside world. Fractaleers use a special hand cut set of whistles called a Screechkit to communicate with crew and to navigate the occluded paths that allow a safe escape from the Shorn. They accomplish this feat using sound ranges and echoes. Those most practiced in the traversal of the Shorn are known as *Veilwalkers* and are able to reproduce many of these sounds by mouth alone, but whistles can still be necessary to measure harmonics across multiple ranges at once.

So I’ve been long at work on a #tabletop RPG system called Triptych, a slow burn project that gets attention whenever I feel like I’ve thoroughly thought a mechanical idea through. Triptych is designed to be lightweight and modular, independent from any specific setting so a GM easily can tailor it to fit their worldbuilding needs. It is dependent on GM Fiat and not heavy on details- more emphasis is on quickly understanding the few core rules and trusting your party to work out edge cases than turning every little detail into a thorough mechanical rubric.

Most importantly, Triptych is meant to be very quick and intuitive to learn, both for experienced tabletop players and those who have never touched the genre before. The crowd Triptych is trying to reach are those new players who see their friends spinning up a session and have always wanted to try tabletop, but don’t want to feel like they’re slowing the group down by reading the rules while everyone else is rolling character sheets. There are a few ways I try to accomplish this, and most of them depend on a rule of 3. The core rule set is meant to fit on 3 pages that can easily be copied or passed around the table during session. It covers 3 core systems of simplified gameplay which act as a fairly minimal framework for weaving a story and having fun. Creating a character involves splitting their traits by a rule of 3, which determines specialized skill checks available to them. On the GM side as well, adapting a setting to this system involves 3 basic pieces arranged into a riff. The riff can be as sprawling and interesting as the GM wants, and even include auxiliary mechanical systems specific to the setting if their world calls for it. Simple to learn should not mean restrictive in application.

I plan to release Triptych for free once I feel like it’s finished, along with a few sample riffs that make it easy to try out. I chose 3 common themes for the release riffs. Two of them, the space SciFi settting and the zombie setting, are intentionally very simple and interpretive, the details merely something for a party to shape something unique around. The third setting, fantasy, is another matter entirely. At this point I’ve spent more time on the fantasy setting than the core system. I’m going all out on this riff to show just how far you can extend this system if you want to invest the time as a GM into it. This is also because I’m having a lot of fun building this world and the secret war that takes place within it, the sort of occult laden old world apocalyptic alchemypunk setting I’ve had floating in my head for probably half my lifetime at this point.

While the final iteration of this riff isn’t ready yet, I want to start dropping breadcrumbs and bouncing story concepts off the outside world, even if they arent always totally finalized yet. The #TriptychRPG system is getting close to the point where I’m ready to test it more extensively in the world with the other 2 riffs, but this setting is going to take longer than originally planned since it’s the one I’m using to give the system a sense of identity. As a result in the future I’ll probably post some chunks of lore with the tag #Shorn to see if others are as interested to make a character in this world as I am to build it.