Tag: Anima Prime

Seed: Convocation Prime

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Convocation PrimeConvocation 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 2×2 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.

If you have a comment or suggestion, please use the comment section on itch instead of the one here. If you want updated, consider following me there. If you are on the Federation (diaspora, Friendica, etc.) or the Fediverse (Mastodon, Friendica, etc.) you can follow me here. If not, but you are interested in trying a distributed social network that isn’t controlled by corporations, join one (such as an rpg-friendly Mastodon or Diaspora node).

An unofficial Anima Prime 1.5 document

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Back when Google+ was still the best place for tabletop roleplaying discussion, Christian Griffen posted a brief outline of an optional “1.5” version of his excellent game Anima Prime. Since a) the demise of G+ has taken this outline with it and b) Anima Prime is a Creative Commons game, I’ve taken the original text of the game, given it a new layout, and updated it with the 1.5 changes suggested by the author.

The results can be downloaded below, released under the same Creative Commons license as the original. Hopefully, this full version of the 1.5 rules works a bit better than comparing the summary of them from Prime Spiral with the 1.0 text of the game. The files are:

Prime Spiral preview

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LogoA number of years ago, I wrote up some notes on playing in the setting Exalted using the rules of Anima Prime. This snowballed into a long PDF for my gaming group called Exaltation Prime, which I have never released because it is filled with art and IP for which I do not have distribution rights. One of the things I love about Anima Prime, though, is that it uses a Creative Commons license, so I’ve wanted to share the changes and additions I made to build Exaltation Prime in a way that could be legitimately released under the same Creative Commons license.

The result will be Prime Spiral: Extensions and Hacks to Anima Prime. Each chapter will detail a way to hack the rules of Anima Prime, and explain why you may or may not want to do that. It is worth mentioning that, while I’ve been doing all this, Christian Griffen, Anima Prime‘s author, has been releasing his own changes, mostly meant to streamline the game, while the hacks in Prime Spiral mostly serve to make the game more complicated. You’ll need to season to taste.

At the request of Mr. Griffen, I posted a link to the in progress version of Prime Spiral to a G+ thread. I figured I might as well post it here as well:

Prime Spiral noodling.