Cinders of the Cataclysm

Health and life

Vacation has come to an end, the queen is buried and I've had a very uneven and chaotic month.

Overall, I'm starting to find my footing at the new position at work and things are slowly starting to ease back into something I can call normalcy.

CD10

While the Celenia 2 [C2D10] campaign is the focus, some work is now going on with [CD10] behind the scenes. Nothing really overt to talk about right, except for a few changes that were published during the month.

A reminder of a few recent changes, as well as a few new ones

• Rule of 9 restored (back to adding +9 instead of +4)
• Excess bonus damage restored.
• Optional rule to cap exploding 9's to only a single instance.
• Damage types removed

That last one might require some explanation, and for full details I will, as always, point you to the changelog on the Beyond Reality Discord.

In essence, CD10 has had four damage types since the very beginning (Slash, Pierce, Blunt, Energy) to allow variety in how you use weapons and choose armors.

However, it became very clear over the course of the two campaigns that I ran to test the system, that damage types had minimal to no impact on the game. Very rarely did a player choose to use a weapon in a "non-highest-number" way, and rarely thought much of picking armors or even opponents based on armor.

So for the enormous complexity of maintaining a 4-type system, versus the minimal impact it has on actual gameplay, it become very obvious that it was not worth it.

So CD10 now only has a single Lethality number for both armors and weapons, simplifying statblocking a whole lot.

C2D10

Tenth session of the pre-alpha campaign is now through and we've had two significant combat conflicts as well as a number of non-combat conflicts go through.

The system works, honestly, marvellously. After the first combat encounter, some changes were made to the way we track health, strain and stress, as it turned out to be rather disconnected and awkward. As always, full explanations and reasonings are on the Discord server, but here's a summary:

A character now has a maximum amount of Strain and Stress, based on talent combinations. Damage is split into Superficial and Critical damage on both trackers. If the tracker is maxed out with Superficial damage, the character becomes Impaired and suffers a -2D10 on every test relevant for the tracker. If the tracker is filled with Critical damage, the character is out forever.

There's a lot more to it than this, but like I said, the full changelog is available on the Discord server.

Foundry

I've decided to learn TypeScript to get around some of the more blaring issues JavaScript suffers and how it erodes my coding standards.

However, that does mean it's going to be a while longer before I get to update CD10 to Foundry V10, because I need to both learn TypeScript and the new type specification need to be finished.

So, unfortunately, it'll be a bit longer. C2D10 meanwhile is progressing fine and I'm starting to run out of things I want to add to the system, which means that it is very rapidly approaching genuinely playable.

Settings

I'm doing pish-posh poking here and there on all settings, but understandably, focus lies on Cinders of the Cataclysm, since that's what we're playing in. However, I'm also very slowly working my way through Dark Shadows in an attempt to get a readable "thread" through the world.

While my worlds are reference documents, meant to be used as a supplement to a printed work, there should also be a readers-digest, an introduction that starts you off at a relevant point and then throws you into the wild with suggestions on where to go next.

That's my current priority.

I am also currently migrating ALL my CSS work to LESS and converting my world's base CSS to LESS files, which will allow me to not only share code between worlds, but also make me less (hah) insane when working with long CSS documents.

It'll allow me to break the CSS down into smaller chunks with more pinpointed targets, minimizing the risk of me accidentally screwing up unrelated parts of the code.