Convocation Prime is a
medium-weight tabletop roleplaying game about “monster training”, in the
vein of a robust
body of cartoons, games, and franchises. Working from home for
COVID-19 actually made getting this out the door take a lot longer, but
it is now ready. Like all DivNull Seeds, this one isn’t entirely
finished, but it’s as done as it is going to get for now. And, as is
also standard with seeds, part of the purpose was to experiment with
things I haven’t tried before. In particular, this product…
- …is based around trying to leverage some common (but unnoticed) technology for gaming. Specifically, I’ve been interested in how 4-up printing (where you print multiple pages of a document in a 2x2 grid on a single sheet of paper) could be leveraged to build modular character sheets, like creating characters from blocks.
- …is being released on itch.io, which I have never done before. After the demise of G+ (a social network that was unrivaled for makers and players of roleplaying games), a lot of the cutting edge of gaming moved to itch.io, particularly their game jams. I’m late, as usual, to the itch.io party, but we’ll see how it goes.
- …aimed to use entirely open assets (for fonts, art, and the like). This was easier to do than I anticipated, as the quality of fonts available under the Open Font License has improved dramatically since I last checked. (It’s released under a Creative Commons license, like most of the rest of my stuff.)
- …uses the unofficial 1.5 version of the Anima Prime rules as its basis (along with some ideas from Prime Spiral), giving me an opportunity to play with them a bit harder.
- …contains three settings with very different flavor. I wanted to see how flexibly I could stretch the game’s framework to cover divergent tones and approaches to the same genre, using largely the same mechanics. (I rather like the three settings, to be honest.)
- …intended to have commissioned art for a cover. At this I entirely failed.
- …served as an excuse to play this song with my son more often than was, strictly speaking, necessary.
The game is now available for free on itch: Convocation Prime.
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