I guess I spoke too soon when I said that the Gamecraft 2.0 skill list was final. I did a little tinkering, and decided to take out the Survival skill. When I created the skill list, I wanted each skill to be general enough to cover a wide variety of uses. For example, Awareness covers virtually everything having to do with sensory perception (or extrasensory perception), including things like danger sense, tracking, and crime scene investigation. Survival was just too . . . narrow. It coved finding food and shelter, both in wilderness and settled environments, but that just seemed like it was too limited in utility, and in practice, playtesters didn’t really use Survival all that much. So, I dropped it. But that left me with eight skills, and that seemed like too few. Nine was a good sweet spot, and I designed character creation around nine skills; any fewer and I’d have to re-examine character creation, and I’m actually quite pleased with how it works now. So that begged the question, what should I replace it with?

While answering that question, I came up with and discarded a number of options. The main problem with virtually every single one was that, while they each covered things that the other skills didn’t, they weren’t universally applicable to different settings. A realistic modern urban setting doesn’t need a Magic skill, and a high-flying Wuxia setting has little use for Pilot or Drive. So what then? The answer was staring me in the face: Skill X.

Simply put, Skill X is a create-your-own-skill slot. The idea is that, when you create a setting for use with Gamecraft 2.0, you decide what Skill X is, and tailor it to the needs of your setting. In a fantasy campaign, you might have Magic, while in a cyberpunk setting you could have a Cyberspace skill. If you want the Survival skill back, it would probably be pretty useful in a post-apocalyptic wastelands-type game, or some other setting where living off the land and finding shelter is important. I’ve already decided that, for Wild Blue, Skill X is Sorcery, and this decision allowed me to create a much better, more flexible magic system than I had originally designed.

This is sort of a double-purpose post. First, I just wanted to let everyone know that Gamecraft 2.0 is pretty much done (though it needs some playtesting yet), and that I’m working on the setting that I’m going to bundle with it, which I’m calling Wild Blue. Wild Blue is a setting that I initially explored in my NaNoWriMo novel (which I’ll try to get published eventually), and one I’ve been toying with in my head for a while. It has various influences, from traditional fantasy to western to high seas adventure. At any rate, one of the things that I’m going to include in the setting is a list of some common idioms of the Demesne (the name of the territory that the game takes place in).

Which brings me to my second reason for this post. An idiom that I’ve recently come up with for the setting is “walking widdershins”. Originally this term referred to a ceremony used to get into a Quick, a sort of pocket sub-reality that the Folk dwell in (more on the Folk in a later post, possibly). In that ceremony, you find the Folktree bonded to that Quick and you walk counter-clockwise–or widdershins–around it thirteen times. Upon completion of the thirteenth revolution, you step into the Quick. Now, I said that this was the original meaning of the idiom; common parlance has distorted it significantly. The train of thought goes that the only people who would want to get into a Quick would be those not in their right mind or the Folk, themselves (who are, according to the people of the Demesne, not in their right mind). Over time, the term “walking widdershins” came to mean that someone was not in their right mind, and is now used to describe anything from mild eccentricity to full-blown dementia, depending on context and tone. Usage: “I wouldn’t go up to Faircroft Manor. Lord Faircroft’s been walking widdershins since his wife died.”