10,000 Swords Against Heaven (Chapter 2 spoilers) and some Design Thoughts

the world has ended. its corpse reanimated by the necromancer named neoliberalism and the God named capital.

raise your swords against heaven, wanderers. ultraviolence is the secret nature of God.

10,000 SWORDS AGAINST HEAVEN: an ultraviolent tropical gothic xianxia ttrpg.

The abbreviation I'm thinking of going with for this one is 10kSwords.

Hey everyone! Here's our working, very close to final version of the game coming out. To give you a glimpse to its design, here are some Design Intents that I had with this revision.

Brutal Horror Kungfu. If The Raid had Rama fighting the Ghosts and Demons from The Medium (Thai Horror movie), or if Ip Man fought against the Amygdalas, or if Thunderbolt Fantasy's heroes had them fighting nuke-wracked horrors of Hypercapitalism. I wanted to fuse the three—Spirit Cultivation Kung Fu, Brutal Horror, and Communism—into a beautiful disaster. To that effect, many of the mechanics have been jiggered around, and we now even have a "Sanity" mechanic that works in reverse. You gain Enlightenment and as you do you get more Insane because Sanity means harmony with an insane world.

One will also realize that, like in the progression in a game like Resident Evil or Dead Space or Bloodborne, having characters progress in power in a Horror game will inevitably end in them becoming very strong in the end. This is intended: I wanted the first few levels to have a very OSR-like Survival Horror feel (where choosing your fights is the way to go, and fighting humans is safer than fighting ghosts, demons, and monsters!), but as you grow in Awakening Level, the game gradually turns into a full on Action Dark Fantasy, just like Bloodborne, Devil May Cry, and Dark Souls.

Liquid Steel Ultraviolence, our combat system, starts off pretty gritty and lethal, and enemies play on the same rules as Wanderers do. AL 1 is gritty and might cause multiple Injuries or even Deaths!

I’ve reworked D&D 4e Healing Surges into a survival horror mechanic—Breath is our Qi, Prana, Vital Energy. Whenever you drink a healing item or gain any sort of healing, you Quicken (spend 1 Breath to heal 1/4 max Health + Awakening Stage), which represents you using your internal vital energy to make rapid the innate healing process of the human body. However, every use of this tires your body out, represented by you spending Breath. Breath heals at a rate of 1/week! This means you have a natural deadline when exploring a dungeon or going through areas, and as you go, every enemy feels like a danger because they can force you to use your Breath. At 0 Breath, you cannot heal, and you will die if your Health falls to 0. It threads the line between Action Horror and Survival Horror in the same way Resident Evil and Bloodborne does, I feel.

Enlightenment works as a Sanity mechanic but also measures effectivity of Magick. High Enlightenment affects other High Enlightenment beings much better, while Low Enlightenment Beings might dampen the effect of Magicks against them. It works similarly now to the Faith stat of FFT.

Enlightenment’s main use, however, is collecting Lores. Lores are essentially Mind Items that give you actual pieces of information about the world that can be used to your advantage, used to gain new abilities, and most importantly, know something about a place, person, monster, and so on. Now if you want to know something you the player can actually know it by virtue of having the Lore for it, the Mind Item for it. You gain Enlightenment by learning things and seeing things you’re not supposed to (as well as eating Buddha Eyes and doing tasks for particular people). You spend them at any time to gain Generic, Specialized, and Occult Lores.

Like Real People. One of the main additions is the Attachments system. Inspired mostly by the Intimacies system of Exalted 3e, Attachments is all about learning about someone’s Level 1 to Level 3 Attachments, and appealing to it (or using it to manipulate) to persuade someone, influence someone, or instill an emotion or new attachment onto someone. It creates a very real gameplay loop that somehow allows those players that are not very good at social gameplay to be able to do social gameplay by using Attachments as leverage without having to realize that in real life socially adjusted people use it anyway.

Roll Under. To accentuate the feeling of "boundedness," I took a page from GURPS and crafted a very easy 3d6 roll under Skill System. Not just to accentuate the Horror vibe by having a roll under system, but also for the following reasons:

To "shock" the normal TTRPG player who's used to "get as high as you can!" In the same sense that any Communist literature should at least try to make a person created by Bourgeois Ideology (as all of us are, as we live in a World created by Bourgeois Ideology) rethink their roots.

To make rolling feel "intuitive." Now no waiting for difficulties, just roll under your Skill! It eases a gap in the gameplay. The faster roll results lend themselves well to multiple shifting Adjustments and the multiple attack foundation of the game.

To subvert some tropes of Progression Fantasy/Spirit Cultivation. One of the things I don't like about Progression Fantasy is that, at its core, it feels like a Capitalist Power Fantasy—infinite progress, power means control over others, some people deserve to be stronger than others, and so on. I've been trying to subvert that with God Obliterating Vajra, pulling on shounen tropes of "he gets stronger because of training and help from friends" and "he would've died without her help" which was the vibe of early Naruto, and up to the Buu Saga of Dragon Ball Z (Goku kept dying, and so on. Toriyama's really a slick writer!) In this case, I suppose if you wanted to you could keep trying to get Skill Points to raise Skills and learn Magicks and Technicks but at at certain point there's no reason to anymore and you should perhaps look at your place in the world! There are no higher realms for you to ascend to those have been destroyed or completely invaded or never existed in the first place. That's one part of the ludonarrative design I wanted to highlight.

d6s Only. Growing up in the Philippines, you don’t see any d20s. You only see two things: Mahjong/Monopoly/Snakes & Ladders dice and coins. So I wanted to make a game that only used those: either a d6 or a d2 (a coinflip). Hence why I went with 3d6 roll under—that was also closest to one of my favorite Core Resolution mechanics—the Fading Suns roll under d20.

That's it for now. Attached is the Wanderer Spoiler chapter. Hope you like it, I'm just about to finish the Technicks and Magicks section. The next two will be quick: the Intercessor Guide and the final part: the starting Dungeon, Shrine of the Black Bodhisattva (which you can do in 1-3 sections, depending on how good your players are!)