New Releases: October 2009

[Da' Vane]

The hylian race has been updated, so that it conforms with the new races system. The hylian is primarily a generalist by nature, able to do pretty much anything, and as such demonstrates many of the features seen by the wanderer class, such as versatility and unrestricted bonus feats.

In addition they have two new abilities (in need of testing):

Secondary Training allows the hylian to gain the trained class features of one or more base classes, allowing them to essentially multiclass for free without dedicating actual character levels. Since most races have one or more classes the "emulate" to provide a theme for advancement, this ability essentually allows the hylians to tailor the hylian class features to represent the theme they wish. Yes, you can emulate a wizzrobe and gain access to spellcasting if you choose to do so. The restriction here is that the chosen base class(es) must be those which the character does NOT already possess. When in doubt, I'd recommend having this feature emulate the wanderer class to just further enhance the hylian's generalist nature.

Rounded Abilities provides additional permanent ponuses to the hylian's lowest ability scores. This needs testing, because this is an additional +10 ability points, on top of those the characters already get through the Ability Score increase feature. If this feature is balanced, then races can look towards having ability score improvements as racial features without sacrificing the customization of the race.

Also, as an aside, the wanderer has also gained the Skilled feature as a class feature, at the same rate as the hylian, so that their class skill points increase as their versatility feature provides more class skills. The Academic doesn't have this feature though - they already have Focused Learning which provides less points (suitable for the lower versatility rate) but the bonus applies to any class, and includes a one time bonus every time it improves (giving the academic even more skill points to use that level).

Until next time... have fun with the hylians!

[Da' Vane]

A behind the scenes update of some of the items entries, and the inclusion of two new items for your games. These all revolve around the invulnerability quality, which has been updated.

Originally, the invulnerability quality provided increased damage reduction for armor - however, we already have the masterwork (protection) quality to do this, at comparable costs for masterwork (defense) armor already commonly seen. However, these have been given a slight tweak - it now provides a somewhat significant DR independant of the armor, which can be bypassed by magic. It is fairly potent, with DR +5/magic for invulnerability +1 armor, and +30/magic for invulnerability +6 armor, with armguards, headgear, and footwear following the similar pattern. This means a character fully decked out in invulnerability +1 protection would gain DR +10/magic, which a character fully decked out in invulnerability +6 protection would gain DR +60/magic.

Thematically, invulnerability armor can be described to project a forcefield which stacks with armor (unlike the spell, mage armor), in order to improve it's integrity and damage absorption abilties.

This needs to be thoroughly tested, because if this form of damage reduction is not enough to differentiate invulnerability armor from normal magical armor, then this quality is likely to be dropped entirely.

[Da' Vane]

As an update, October has been a pretty poor month for updates as you can see, due to significant disruption in my personal life, and this looks set to continue into the main part of November as well. However, it should be resolved by Christmas, allowing for a return to former productivity in the New Year if things go well.

Alongside this, the UK/European release date for Spirit Tracks has been released as 11/12/2009 - so with a bit of luck I should be able to play this by Christmas, and have worked out the basics for evolving the setting by the New Year.

The gameplay screenshots show that it'll be just like PH in the main part, with the train transport section being the most significant gameplay change. This looks to combine the 'rail shooter' segments of sailing in PH, with a puzzle-based aspect of switching points, commonly seen in the various dungeons of the 2d games. It certainly looks interesting, and as a fan of the PH style of games, I'm almost certain I'll enjoy it!

Until next time...