Last time I made a post about mechanics I talked about the Grid. Now I’m…still talking about The Grid, kind of! But it’s a different one this time.

Home-ship construction is something that had been on our minds since the beginning. Originally it was going to be kicked to the final version! But we had a lot of backer items created that we wanted and so this was a good opportunity to make an initial system out of it.

Hi there! v1.1 of Valiant Horizon is out!

This includes:

• Tweaked Create an Opening downward because it was Too Good By Far.
• Clarification of interaction of inverse with resist/vulnerable (it does the thing you’d expect and reverses the step to do less or more Harm respectively).
• Clarification on if moving to far counts as two near movements for the purpose of anything that cares (yes).
• Clarification on encounter composition and scaling: Upgraded composition to its own page with an example and some extra advice and dedicated an entire page to scaling to make it clear what’s going on there.
• A bunch of enemies stuff.
  • Enemies can no longer use the same ability more than once in a turn.
  • New enemy action type: Prepare, which gives them advantage on their next roll this round.
  • Elites all have 2 abilities to account for the above. This should make them a bit more interesting to play against (and run) at higher tiers especially when they have 3+ actions.
  • Fixed/tweaked a few enemy abilities while I was there.
• Pulled out the most important Narrator advice onto its own page.
• Character sheet is now in the document! As it should have been from the start, frankly.

Until next time!

Stamina is a resource I bolted onto both the RUNE engine and the NULL/CIPHER healthless idea for Valiant Horizon Tactics. It’s a very major change to how a RUNE-like does things.

Notably it’s also not really a Valiant Horizon idea, it’s kind of something that came off of neither game. So what’s up with that? One prior that bears notice is that Stamina was in the earliest Total//Effect prototype version I made: it was going to be like 13th Age recoveries/4E healing surges but also usable for restoring used abilities to form a kind of generic “dungeon attrition” resource. It also made it into VH briefly but I cut it early (like, a month into active development/testing) because it was kind of useless there, as it was only for recovering (which people don’t do enough for it to be worth tracking). So it’s been on my mind for awhile in relation to Valiant Horizon. (It might return in a future Total//Effect game. Who knows, stay tuned.)¹

Hi there!

First off, a little update to this quickstart. A few big changes:

• Gaining your Background doesn’t give you a smattering of Attributes anymore. Instead, you get to grab another Trait. This can be another Profession’s thing, something from things that hint at a less savory Profession, or things that indicate where you came from.
  • To support the latter two categories, there’s 7 more traits now. More Attributes is something you’ll gain by proper leveling later past this level-0 quickstart.
• Escalation and combat have a different interaction. Escalation now adds to all Toughness-coded actions and subtracts from all Focus-coded actions (which was in v3) but crucially, all combat actions are coded to Toughness (melee by default), Reflexes (ranged by default), or Focus (usually “steady aim” style weapons).
  • You’re not trained soldiers by default, you’re regularish people, being good at shooting isn’t a thing that adrenaline helps you with. If it’s something that means your hands have to be steady, it’s probably the opposite! One of those aforementioned Background traits (Combat training) makes it work the old way again: if you ARE a trained soldier, well, that’s a bit different, isn’t it.
• Energy Harm/Resistance no longer exists. Anything that was Energy is now just a gun (laser pistol -> pistol), is now a smaller amount of Hazard Harm (Supercharger used as a weapon), or is now Kinetic (Peacekeeper.)
  • This one is for a handful of reasons: it had a huge overlap with Hazard conceptually and having too many Harm types made getting resist armor a little cheaper. If someone has Kinetic or Ballistic Resist armor now, it means a bit more as a result, and Hazard Resist/Vulnerability is going to come up in combat more as well: if someone has a big laser now, it’s an immediate threat, as a big laser should be in a hard-ish sci-fi setting!

Secondly, a third quickstart has landed, courtesy of the Indie NASA TTRPG Adventures and Sci-Fi One-Shot Jams! Escape from the surface of Europa as the twin forces of corporate maneuvering and corporate malfeasance threaten to squeeze you out.

Hi there!

I added a commentary edition of the game. This is exactly the same as v1.2 except I added 2” of margins on either side and added a bunch of red-text notes, development history, commentary, and self-criticism. Get it in the downloads!

Until next time!

_{(This is a companion piece to Gila RPGs/Spencer Campbell’s recent stream about healthless TTRPGs, which is well worth your time if you have an hour to spend and goes into VH tactics a little itself, because the original impetus was based on his idea of healthless TTRPGs prior to this video. It would probably also be good to be a little familiar with RUNE! But I think everything makes enough sense if you aren’t.)}

Hi there! I made a big update to how Liminal Void works! You can see some previews of what I did in my newsletter post here. The big changes are:

• Static Assets from Profession/Background are out, attribute spending is in.
  • You have 3 Attributes, of which a Profession gives you 5 and a Background gives you 3 more. You can spend them to use them as Assets and regain them by taking various painkillers and stimulants and supplements, which is probably extremely healthy and good for you.
  • The previous ones that basically just always gave you +advantage bonuses were not really in keeping with the rest of the game’s “constant attrition” vibe, and these ones better answer the question of “why don’t they apply to combat rolls” (because now they can, if you want!)
• Tools and Weapons work completely differently.
  • Some tools still have some low-key combat stuff but it’s not much. Mostly they’re just…well, tools. All of them have a capital-A Ability - kind of like a PbtA move or something - that highlights a specific thing that tool was designed for. You can also just spend Charges use them as incidental Assets as before too.
  • Weapons are a bit less uniform as far as 1-ammo/3-ammo spends. There’s a generic “Fire” action now and all of them call out how it’s used in addition to having (usually) 2 moves. In general they feel a little closer to like, actual weapons instead of things that give you powers.
  • Instead of 3 Ammo/Charge abilities, we now have the concept of Let Loose. This represents stuff where you push your tool’s battery to the limit or hold down on that gun’s trigger a little too long to do something stronger - use that exoskeleton to do a hulk-leap, bore through a metal wall with your drill, spray and pray with your PDW, etc. You spend a random amount of charges/ammo (d6), which can explode (on a 1-2, so you’re spending at least 3) and disable your weapon/tool if you’re super unlucky.
• I updated the two scenarios to match (and the second scenario, The Graveyard Buckle, has been combined into this page). Because I took the liberty of licensing the incredible Victor Merino’s sci-fi portraits last summer for commercial use, Escape from CICP-1 now looks a LOT better too - all of those names in the module have faces now!
• A relayout!

Hope you enjoy. Let me know if you give it a shot!

Hi there! v1.1 is here! It brings a few major changes:

Formatting

• Increased page size slightly.
• Various typo-fixes.
• Tightening up of layout.

Combat Rules

• Missiles.
  • Deploy now states the deployment range for missiles (0-1).
  • Direct now lets you move 8 missiles by default instead of 5.
  • Direct now states clearly when missiles count as “armed” (i.e. when they automatically attack if their target gets within range 0).
  • Missiles are now slightly easier to shoot down by default (3+ instead of 4+).
• Disabled is now a called out thing that Electronic Warfare weaponry does (alongside Damaged and Destroyed), and explicitly states its interaction with crits.
• The interaction between armor and crits is now explicitly stated.
• Electric is now Shock, because while Electronic and Electric are in fact different words, we have been hard pressed to convince anyone of this.
• By default average encounter difficulty is stated, and Scavengers and INFINITY now have a 1-6 roll-table from which to construct encounters with them.
• Added a little more clarification about Zones/Ranges and added a second note in the Combat section to make all grids public information.
• Tackle lost its +/- for size difference but has a crit effect now.

Frames/Builds

Mechs

Just about everything except Light//Nerve had some kind of Frame or Build tweak. This is because Light//Nerve was born perfect and doesn’t need anything changed about her.

Valiant Horizon v1.0 is finally out! Some big changes:

• 12 incredible illustrations by Charlotte Laskowski!
• Editing and revision by Marx Shepherd!

And some smaller ones:

• Swarm enemies don’t exist anymore and Prime enemies are a bit different.
• Relationship rolls are now reversed so high rolls are good.
• Various little fixes, typos, and tweaks.

Thanks so much to everyone who backed the game! I’ll have news about a season pass soon. And for everyone’s generosity, I added one community copy for everyone who bought it (and a few more on top).

Hi there! Last class overview devlog, because after these two we’re out of core classes! Introducing the final two, Tactician and Windmagus. Just in time for the full release on January 23rd!

The Tactician

From the start, I wanted one full-support class - not just for mechanical reasons, but thematically, I wanted someone whose almost exclusive role was to support and boost allies. As mentioned in the Commander overview, I’ve had the idea of Tactician via 36th Way Weigh the Odds Commander via 13th Age Commander via 4E warlord in my head for awhile, and I knew I wanted something like it here - so tying it to full-support made sense. I styled it as kind of the “brains of the operation” or the “puppetmaster” - a lot of its abilities focus on planning, logic, tactics, strategy, or unexpected preparedness.