Meltingmoor: Design Preview

 

I.

The world is not right. Where once there stood proud kingdoms, there is now nothing but ice and snow. Where once the nobility protected us, now they slaughter us in droves. And more and more, our children are born with parts not altogether human…

Meltingmoor is my work-in-progress adventure game about mutant treasure hunters exploring a once-frozen, now-thawing gothic frontier in the aftermath of a failed revolution. I am currently playtesting the core rules and working on additional content such as magic items and GM advice.

II.

I think I’ve managed to design a combat system that is lighter, faster, and clearer than that of Into the Odd without sacrificing the random chaos of dice rolls, the players’ ability to make interesting decisions, or the resource-management element of dungeoncrawling.

The lightbulb went off when I realized that I don’t need to track hit points for every individual PC. One HP or “Morale” value for the entire party does the job just fine. If it hits 0, one PC dies and the rest of the party has to flee the dungeon.

I’m sure there is another game out there that does something like this, but I have never seen one. I have seen ultralight and FKR rulesets that omit hit point mechanics, but when they are included, Hits always apply to individual characters.

Every monster (or, sometimes, group of monsters) is described by two numbers: Power and Toughness. Each round of combat, the monster rolls a number of Milton Dice equal to its Power and reduces the party’s Morale by that amount. Then, the PCs can either try to kill the monster (reducing its Toughness) or attempt a risky maneuver to weaken the monster (reducing its Power if the maneuver succeeds or increasing it if it fails). PCs can retreat at any time.

There’s no big list of weapons with different damage dice and different properties because it doesn’t matter what weapons the PCs use: attacking the monster directly always decreases its Toughness by 1. You don’t need randomness on both sides of the fight for it to be chaotic — Milton Dice ensure that there is always plenty of chaos in terms of how much damage the party is taking to its Morale.

III.

Meltingmoor doesn’t stop you from developing your character’s backstory, but background isn’t the focus. Instead, the focus is on who you are now and how you clash with the other characters in your group.

Developing your personality with the table above is the first step of character creation. The choices you make after that are informed by the negative personality trait you chose and the positive trait you were given by another player.

The most important choice is which mutation you start with.

Mutations are a strange new phenomenon in the world of Meltingmoor. An anti-mutant inquisition in the Heartland has forced many mutants to travel to the Bitter Isles and become treasure hunters.

In design terms, the mutations are designed to inspire interesting characters and to invite all players to participate in the kinds of shenanigans that other games restrict to characters with magic items and magic spells.

IV.

Advancement is loosely inspired by Brighter Worlds. Achieving cool things increases your party’s Morale, losing PCs decreases it.

Money is measured in gold pouches — that is, pouches of about a hundred gold coins. No treasure is worth less than one gold pouch; one gold pouch is the equivalent of $10,000 in modern US dollars.

In short, small expenses aren’t tracked. Very little is tracked, in fact… there are no rules for running out of food or light or ammunition here. The PCs always have the basics they need.

You can spend 10 gold pouches to establish an enterprise or 20 gold pouches to repair a castle. Simple rules for warfare, based on the combat system outlined above, are included, but good luck challenging the Heartland.

V.

There are a few more neat things to mention. Random encounters only happen in unexplored rooms, but if the players leave the dungeon, all rooms go back to being “unexplored,” so there’s a real pressure to take risks and keep exploring the dungeon rather than retreating to recover Morale.

Task resolution is based on 2d6 and uses Force, Focus, and Flow as its three attributes. I have shamelessly stolen this from the Lumen SRD because I really like the idea that players are defined not by how strong or dexterous or intelligent they are, but by how they like to approach problems.

I’m working a list of magic items that GMs can include in their dungeons as additional problem-solving tools. I’d like to add faction-tracking rules to the game but I’m still thinking about how to implement them.