Scintilla on Obsidian Portal

Since I’ve started using Obsidian Portal, I’ve been very impressed with the ease of use of wikis. After inputting the basic rules for Unknown Armies for a campaign I’m planning, I realized that a wiki would be a perfect place to catalog and organize the rules for Scintilla.

To that end, I’ve created a campaign on Obsidian Portal for Diamond’s Hope, the first setting I’m developing for the SGS. There’s very little there at the moment, but I’ll be putting up the SGS rules there and keeping them up to date as they change. Feel free to comment there, or back here.

Changing Projects

Not that anyone’s looked at this blog in the last year or so, but those faithful who are also observant will notice some changes in the Projects page. Previous posts also mention things that are no longer represented there. Rather than simply remove all the pages that reference things that no longer exist or have changed names, I thought a single post to bring everything up to date was the way to go. Besides, there’s some good stuff in some of those older posts that is still perfectly valid, even if concepts around them have changed.

• The name of Scintilla is remaining, in direct reference to the base system in development. While not a generic system, per se, the Scintilla system will be the foundation for most (if not all) of my gaming projects. It will be modified as needed for each project, so they’ll all have a similar basis, but the feel of the game should change based on the needs of the setting.
• Diamond’s Hope is the current name for the game that was once Ethereal. Diamond’s Hope is more in tune with my original ideas that sent me down the game design road, both in name and feel. Much of Ethereal will remain, but some ideas and concepts, like the Creation Myth I developed, will be saved for other projects down the line.
• My ambitions for Engel are documented in my Angelic Ambitions post. While any chance of publishing my version of the game rests in the hands of Feder & Schwert, Engel remains one of the prime drives behind developing the Scintilla system, and the first real playtests of the system will likely be in this setting.

System Thoughts

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve posted here. In fact, there’s going to be some serious clean up here soon. The projects have not been abandoned, however. Ideas have been stewing and coming to fruition on the back burner. I’m going to share some thoughts here on the developing Scintilla system here, which I think is fairly unique, yet still easy to grasp (as long as I explain it clearly). Please leave any feedback you may have, questions or comments, it all helps!

The basics of the Scintilla system are pretty simple. A character has Traits and Skills. When performing an action, the player will roll a number of dice (most likely ten-sided dice, but that’s still not definite) equal to the character’s score in an appropriate Trait. For example, if a character has a Prowess Trait of 4, then when determining if his swordblow connects with his enemy, he’ll roll 4 dice, and try to beat a target number based on his opponent’s abilities.

Pretty simple. Find an appropriate Trait, roll that number of dice, beat the target number. Skills make things interesting. I’m debating two different ways of handling them. They are similar in the way they interact with Traits. The only real difference is the scale in which they do so. I’ll present both here, and hopefully illicit some feedback.