On the last Dev Journal we showed how the new Skills will look in the Runed Age 1.3. This time we are talking about the most important part of the Runed Age: the runes.
What’s new with the runes?
Absolutely nothing. Well that’s not entirely true, but the runes, runic arrays and their rules will not be changing in the Runed Age 1.3. All the designs you’ve come up with in your games will still be working exactly the same way in the new Runed Age as in the old. That also means that all the runic arrays from the Journal of Array Design 1, and it’s sequel will work normally as well.
What we will be doing, however, is rewriting how we explain the rules, to make it easier to pick up and start designing your own runic arrays.
Minor additions
Since the Runed Age went on sale, we’ve developed several new runes, and most of these will be making their way into the new 1.3 version. These are runes such as the Rotate rune that we showed off with the Furious Breath array, the Life rune from the Circle of Life array, and the Invert rune from the Effective Solution array. These are all runes that exist within the world of the Runed Age, and so will eventually find their way to the grand city of Middelburg for you to play with.
New Skill Rules
As we talked about in the previous dev journal, two of the new Skills will be majorly involved in all things runes: Logic and Fine-Craft. Logic is all about analysing runic arrays and their effects to determine what’s going on, whodunit, and all that carry on.
Fine-Craft is the new Skill for actually drawing out the runic arrays, and will be the Skill to use for rolling to see how effective it was. So out with rolling your Runes Skill, and in with Fine-Craft.
As with everything else in life, it’s not just that simple. We have some new runic modifiers for the Fine-Craft Skill Check that will come into play in 1.3. I say “new”, but if you’re familiar with Runes of Power, then you already know these modifiers.
Diligence
The first modifier is the Diligence Modifier and it does pretty much what you think it does. It is all about how much effort you put into drawing the array perfectly. The better a runic array is drawn, the better it will work, so being diligent will get you what you need every time.
The Diligence Modifier runs all the way from a +30 if you’re a perfectionist, to a -30 if your runic array is near illegible. How do you know which you are? Well that is the decision the GM will make, based on your roleplay. And speaking of GM decisions…
Suitability
The second modifier at work for your Fine-Craft Check. This modifier says how suitable your array design is for what you want it to do, and like the Diligence modifier runs from +30 for perfectly suitable to -30 for not suitable at all.
Your GM will determine where it falls on that scale, but it is a common sense thing. If you want to take down a stone wall, making an array that said “Contain-Exclude-Wall” would be perfectly suitable for what you want, and you’ll get that +30. If you made a runic array that said “Pull-Heat-Bird” then no, that just won’t work at all.
So between these two Modifiers, you could potentially get up to +60 to your Fine-Craft Skill Check, which is a near certainty that you’ll be succeeding in anything you try to do.
And that’s it for the runes. It’s a short update, but then we are intentionally not changing much about them.
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