December sure is December

As foretold by the prophecy, I don't have much to show this month. I wanted to show at least a new mechanic for the campaign I have almost finished, but I lost a hard drive to a power outage two days ago and it was the boot drive, so I spent an entire day getting the ex-slave drive in working order and that really took the wind out of my sails so I'm just going to take it easy for a few days and be glad about all the things I didn't lose.

I will regale you with the full tale of my misadventures when things are less sucky. For now, I'll just tell you a little about the new mechanic.

It's a variant of the Reinforcements system. Currently, Reinforcements are both very powerful and very good at supporting PCs, but they do so proactively during their own turns. I want Reinforcements to have reactive abilities that can be used to defend PCs in danger, potentially multiple times per Round, which doesn't really work with their current Reinforcement rules.

It was borne of the campaign's needs. Part of the premise is that the PCs are testing a system that links them to a support unit that provides them with various speed-themed buffs. For lore reasons, I want those buffs to do things that aren't in the rules (like forcing enemies to reroll attacks or teleporting a PC a specific distance). At first, I thought this could be accomplished with a new set of Reinforcement Powers, but it works differently enough that it probably needs to be an alternative system to those.

I'll post the working prototype of that next update. Hopefully by then it'll have a name :V. Given that the more obvious names like Reinforcement and Support are already other things in the system, I might actually go with the in-campaign name. We'll see.

See you next year. Hopefully your end-of-year celebrations are going better than mine.

Gimmick Out.