David Chart’s Blog

Personae in roleplaying games have advanced, become better at what they do, since the hobby began. There is room for debate over whether this is necessary for roleplaying in general, but as one of the main themes of Kannagara is personal development, it is clearly necessary for this game. Indeed, advancement should be rather fast,…

At the moment, I think that Kannagara will involve two kinds of ability: knowledges and skills. The distinction is straightforward: knowledges represent what a persona knows, while skills represent what she can do. When creating something, a player will normally roll the persona’s knowledge, and keep the skill. The more you know about a field,…

One important feature of personae is their relationship to the jinja. Kannagara assumes that all personae have a close relationship with a particular jinja, just as Ars Magica assumes that all characters have a close relationship with a particular covenant, and the stories develop around that jinja. There are several different close relationships that a…

Character creation is an important part of any roleplaying game. While it is sometimes thought of as part of preparing to play, it is part of the game in many cases, most notoriously in the original Traveller, where your character could die before character creation finished. For new players, however, character creation often does not…

The development of personae is a very important part of Kannagara. Personae get better at what they do, and gain new abilities. Sometimes, they even transform into something other than what they were. Because this is such an important part of the game, there is an important principle that I want to respect. Any persona,…

The elements of a creation are the concrete features that the players know about, and that allow them to describe the creation in the game world. The elements will, obviously, vary depending on what is being created, but their game-mechanical role will be more constant, and so can be described here. Concepts and embodiments include…

Once you have the inspiration, it is time for the perspiration. Embodying the idea seems to work well as a single action, with the result being compared to the difficulty of the creation. Now, I want revision to be a normal part of creation, so the first result should generally not be high enough to…

What would make good mechanics for creation? The first point is that it is important to make it possible for several personae to cooperate. In the real world, a lot of creation is done by individuals working alone, but even then, not all, or even most, of it. In a game, you must give as…

The products of creation are an important part of the game, so their description does not need to be particularly simple. They are, for example, as important as characters, if a little less important than personae, and so their description could certainly be as complex as a character’s description. In particular, a creation need not…