Hi. Do you have a change list between versions?
It makes me happy to see you are getting some traction here with your project. I would like to eventually jump into testing but I don’t want to try and go in blind. It needs to be something that really grabs me up front or I won’t follow through.
What is the best place to get an overview for this game? Like images of the setting and summary of the play loop?
I think theme and setting are my two biggest selling points to pursue games.
Just having a read through of the latest whilst my son is in his drum lesson. Is there any extra lore available for true names? Not a term I’ve heard before (other than in the Rumpelstiltskin sense) and I feel they need more of an introduction than what is in the rule book.
Ps. minor point, but the rules are inconsistent if it has a hyphen in or not.
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True Names are supposed to be a bit of a mystery.
It’s inspired by a classic fantasy trope found in stories like A Wizard of Earthsea, The Name of the Wind and others; if you know the true-name of a thing you can wield dominion over it.
In the Ziggurat, they are extra-dimensional beings that live outside of this realm but are often keen to gain access. Depending on the epoch they might be seen as angels, demons, celestials, jinn or elemental spirits. They are akin to the mysterious “machine elves” people see when they are high on DMT and other hallucinogens; at least that is the “look” I’m going for in the card design.
All the playable hero’s possess runic weapons of great renown that can act as vessels for these celestials. They can perform a ritual to temporarily bind a true-name to the weapon and increase its power. Some denizens can be partially possessed by a true-name and gain supernatural abilities as a result.
Mechanically, every hero can bind True Names, although some are better at it than others. Since Ziggurat quests are episodic rather than a persistent campaign, it’s one of the ways heroes gain meaningful progression. True Names need to be discovered and then you have to accumulate enough mastery to bind them.
Master of elements, Gandali bound the maelstrom to the heart of a rune-pocked staff.
Gandali (pictured above in the Bestial Gods quest) is a “wizard”. He starts with two known elementals. But even so, its very rare to bind four true-names in a single sitting – probably the only time I’ve managed it.
PS. I can’t decide what to do about the naming.. so for now its a bit all over the place. The idea was the best approach would come to me… but it hasn’t of yet. It feels like True Name is correct, but I don’t like the capitalisation everywhere.
PPS. There was a lot of lore in the early versions of the rule book but I ended up stripping it all out in a bid to be more concise and technical. It might be time to sprinkle a little bit back in.
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Generally speaking I think that names of animals are common nouns, not proper nouns. E.g dog.
However, proper nouns can help with adjectives in names. E.g. a herring gull is a common gull, but a Herring Gull is not a Common Gull - it’s a different species.
Using lower case also gets complicated when there is a proper noun in the name. E.g. Mediterranean gull.
Many modern style guides advocate only using capitalisation when necessary, but I think it helps elevate the True Name to their proper status.
An interesting read: The Lyons Share: Why English names of species should ALWAYS be capitalised
Sorry if that’s not what you’re after for rules feedback!
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I think that lore would help here, as they are abruptly dropped in as an unusual mechanism.
I get the Earthsea sense that you are going for, that’s what I meant by Rumpelstiltskin. Some people may not. I was surprised to hear on a recent Man Alone video that he didn’t know what a barrow is (in the sense of an ancient burial place). There are probably several hundred within an hour of me, but presumably not any in the US
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@MattBarker I have just finished a Learn To Play guide; a complete walkthrough with worked examples of the entire tutorial quest. It should give you a feel for how the rules come together.; see ziggurat-learn-to-play-v04.pdf
The Learn To Play tutorial is a kind of cut-own and simplified version of a short quest that aims to introduce the rules from simple concepts to more complex scenarios.
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