As people may be aware, I've been working on my Hammercalled Roleplaying Game system for almost a year now, and I've been trying to make it as good a core for playing in any setting as you can find anywhere.
One of the issues with multi-genre games in general is that while you can do a lot of things in a well-designed system, you can also find specific cases that you just aren't able to cover.
For instance, the default Hammercalled setup is one in which there is no wealth system or dedicated magic system. It's not that these things don't exist, they're just not mechanically implemented. Something like the Always Prepared talent can be a product of a character's immense wealth, and magic is intended to be handled as gear.
The reason for this is fairly simple, and it goes to principles within the system.
In Hammercalled, I have three systems that manage the storytelling:
- Numbers-driven play via Attributes, Specializations, some Talents, and Gear
- Resource-driven play via Wounds, Stamina, Destiny, and Wear
- Narrative-driven play via Destiny, some Talents, and storytelling guidelines
The numbers-driven side of the game is designed to be a scaling foundation for other systems from the ground up.
This is one of the first and most important points to consider when working on a setting for Hammercalled. The world of Unsung Gods has a number of different elements that just aren't easily represented in Hammercalled, but there are a few ways that this can be worked around.
For starters, Hammercalled doesn't natively support playing as characters of a particular species or unique background that offers special powers. In Unsung Gods, my method for overcoming this is very simple; the player characters simply have the opportunity to choose a race and then purchase appropriate talents, many of which break some of Hammercalled's rules for core talents (mostly things that would offer too many wildly unbalanced interactions if made universally available, or that allow extremes on the numerical side).
For instance, Dwarves get the Inheritor talent that allows them to choose one piece of gear and never suffer Wear for it (only applicable for gear without the Unreliable or Limited Supply qualities).
This would not fit into the core Hammercalled experience, because it is a radical shift to the balance of resource-driven play, and it does allow some of the qualities, like Automatic for ranged weapons, which are absent in the Unsung Gods system, to have an exponentially more beneficial effect.
However, in settings we also open up more room for talents to have narrative roles. For instance, one could add a talent that says that a character can call upon a band of NPCs to reflect their role. It's also possible for a talent to have a power that doesn't interact with the mechanical systems at all (or bypasses them) and instead allows for other things to happen.
That's not something we're really putting in the core Hammercalled Rules Reference, but it is something that I want to make clear is encouraged and entirely within the realm of good design, assuming that you accept that the goal of good design is to encourage narratives to unfold.
A lot of the new systems in Unsung Gods, especially those related to backgrounds and species, are intended to push people into certain ways of play to encourage character diversification. What we've found in more basic playtesting is that there's nothing that really forces people to one path in Hammercalled (being good at combat is a relatively low investment versus many other games, and utility characters can be incredibly effective because the system encourages them to build their own tools and tricks).
However, adding these additional systems has created characters who further reflect a particular style of play or an archetype, and a lot of players are willing to forego some of the more common paths of development in favor of the new paths that get opened up in this way.
I think that Unsung Gods has almost as many talents as the core Hammercalled experience, and part of what enables that is that these talents aren't universally accessible; if a member of one particular species can get a bonus melee attack, that's pretty powerful but if it's one combat bonus out of many (and other species may have synergistic melee attack bonuses while this one does not) and has associated costs it's not game-breaking.
One thing that I want to stress is that I consider many highly complex things to be unsuitable for the rules reference. It's not that they're necessarily inappropriate for Hammercalled games in general, just not something that I necessarily want to burden people with having to be prepared for all at once. Because settings tend to eschew certain parts of the rules reference, their added elements can be a little more significant.
A final point I want to talk about for the Unsung Gods setting is that it adds mechanics for magic. I've left out magic for the core Rules Reference. Most magic can be emulated using Gear and narrative style, but even if it can't I don't want to make the Rules Reference a universal catch-all but rather a more focused core.
Unsung Gods has a number of different magical systems, tying into the world of Othenar that it evolved out of, including divine magic, spellsongs, Kithik psionics, sorcery, occult rituals, and artificers who create magic out of patterns. Eventually, many of these systems will see themselves transposed into the Hammercalled mechanics.
Right now the most important one that I'm working toward is Kithik psionics; the artificers that my players are currently playing in my home campaign are well-managed by the Gear system, and two of my players have unlocked the system.
The primary way that the psionics system interfaces with Hammercalled in an unusual way is that it's much more resource dependent. The general rule of Hammercalled is that (short-term) resources should only be spent in a pinch: if you are taking damage you lose Stamina or Wounds, if you want to automatically succeed, you use Destiny, and to prioritize attack or defense in combat you use Adrenalin.
Psionics takes that and messes with it; it's inspired by thaumaturgy in the old Tales of Middle Earth roguelike and the magical system of the Two Worlds series of games, where a variety of elements are combined to create potent magical spells.
I'm probably going to post more about this once it's done; it's going to eventually be up on the Unsung Gods page that I linked to above, but in general it provides a rich and deep set of mechanics, a new XP sink, and interacts with player resources differently than extant mechanics.
The nice thing about the way that Hammercalled is set up is that there are neat points of interaction: the psionic abilities can interact with the existing systems (like Wounds, Wear, and so forth), without requiring a lot of extra effort.
It's a narrow implementation plugging into a broad ecosystem.
This means that you have leeway going forward to make changes and, further, to expect that things are going to stay relatively similar; for instance, the Velan special ability that gives them a bonus attack (mentioned in passing above) was written before the Adrenalin overhaul and a lot of other changes to the combat system, but it's still valid without any changes because it was able to tie into that resource economy.