Brute Force: System Development

What have I been up to since finished Spear of Destiny? Lots and lots of stuff.

Firstly, Soundbooth completed recording of the Warsinger audiobook. I finished proofing it a couple of days ago. Now we just have last minute tweaks left to do, and after that, we'll submit it to the store. Finally! 

It's taken a while because Soundbooth are a busy little studio run by a small team who puts heart and soul into their work. Justin Thomas James composes original music for each Archemi title, and I can say without hesitation that the music for Warsinger is easily the best out of any of the books so far.

While that's in the pipeline, I've been working my butt off on Brute Force and the gaming systems that underpin the story of Noodles, Goober, and Angel. What does that entail, you may ask? Well, a lot of work in Excel:

Most people in my readership either loved Pokemon when they were a kid and/or still love it as an adult, but feel it is just a bit too... well... aimed at kids and young teens. I'm trying to out a system that still has the fast-paced pleasurable strategy inherent in type-matching combat games (Pokemon, Yi-Gi-Oh, Magic the Gathering) while being a bit more mature and relevant to the plot-heavy format of a novel. 

The system in Brute Force uses the basic rock-paper-scissors format inherent in any type-matching combat/magic system, except that you're playing RPS with two hands. 

Every Gladiator (Trainer) can master two Legions: one Greater and one Lesser. GLs are your main combat tanks. LLs are support and DPS legions, which ideally augment a GLs strengths, covers its weaknesses, or both.

Every Legion has one Prime Elemental characteristic, and two Mundane Elemental characteristics. The Prime Element is intangible/intrinsic to the Legion. A Body-element Legion is going to be a bestial fighter of some kind, grounded n their physical form (and physical stats). A Spirit Legion is going to be a special ability-focused Legion, probably amorphous and willful, like a Djinn. A Mind Legion is often humanoid in shape, clever and cunning, but not necessarily very physically powerful.

The Mundane Elements are your more familiar roster of elemental matchups. I've decided on 12 for Brute Force: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Metal, Acid, Psionic, Poison, Holy, Dark, Plant and Blood.

All Gladiators are physically of the Blood element, but they embody their own Prime element depending on their personality. They don't get any special powers from this, but it affects their stats and reflects their training/combat style.

Most average/low tier trainers try to play an elemental min-max strategy, but smarter trainers realize that synergy between their Legions and between individual movesets is more important than higher damage from enhanced elemental attacks.

Every Legion has a unique Elemental sigil. The elements are all signified by alchemical symbols in the game's system, and Legions have a Sigil diagram on their sheet that looks rather like this:

These are the main MC Legion pair in Brute Force. See if you can spot why they're a good team!