Character Creation, Liveplays, & GenCon

There is just over a week left until we launch! Meanwhile, Gen Con is in full swing. Please keep your questions about Time Without Tide coming, both here and in the Chaosium Discord. Based on everybody’s answers to the latest poll, it’s time to talk about character creation. An honorary mention to second place in the poll, lore and setting details. We promise we'll talk about them soon!

First though, for everybody who wants to see what a game of Time Without Tide looks like in practice, watch David Naylor run an all star cast through a session on the Chaosium YouTube channel. A big thanks to everybody involved.

Also, for anybody attending Gen Con, there are some physical copies of the Quickstart up for grabs. Swing by the Chaosium booth and say hi. 

Let's walk through Delver creation process. Your Delver begins as a blank slate. You add detail to them across a series of steps.

Step 1 - Natural Skills: Of the 6 total skills, three begin with a score of 0 and three begin with a score of 1. You roll a D6 to determine which. As a reminder, the six skills are CULTURE, INDUSTRY, NAVIGATION, SKULDUGGERY, SURVIVAL, and VIOLENCE.

Step 2 - Background: Next, you chose a background. Each background applies a suite of pre-set modifications to your Delver that set them apart from the crowd. Although the exact changes vary, they all balance out in the end. The one thing all backgrounds share is a choice between either +1 to any skill (you decide), or an adaptation.

Here are a few examples of the modifications that backgrounds apply:

Backgrounds affect more than just mechanics. They represent whatever your character did before they became a Delver. This affects how the world sees them, the kind of background knowledge they can expect to draw from, and the sort of life they've lived up until now. It also helps give you a deeper a sense of who they are as a character.

Step 3 - Relay and Registration: Once everybody’s made a Delver, you move onto sorting out your party. As a Delver, you work with a team of other trained specialists. You are unified around your relay, a priceless Decadent artifact that lets you teleport vast distances. Relays, like ships, have names. Most people will know you by your relay’s name. For example, the pre-generated Delvers in the Time Without Tide: Quickstart are the crew of Dowsing Odd.

Here, you talk with your party. You decide who carries your relay. You figure out who's job it is to take care of what. Generally, you'll select your records here, including some basic items and any features you earned during the previous step (by getting a score of 2 in any skill).

Step 4 - Finer Details: Next, it’s time to weave your Delver’s story. The Time Without Tide: Core Rulebook has plenty of background information, fun tables, and story seeds that will help ground you in the setting. You can also come up with your own ideas and collaborate with the rest of the table to interweave your backstories. You don’t have to lock everything in about your Delver immediately. It’s fine to leave things vague and develop them in greater detail as you go. Speaking of which:

The Final Step - Delver Development: Delver Development is the ongoing, final step of character creation. As you play, you earn experience points, which you can spend to improve your Delver. Each point of XP is significant, but it isn't the only way through which your Delver improves. You also earn lunar dust (currency) which you can use to trade for items. Then, there's adaptations. Although adaptations are negative at first, each one has the potential to become positive if you invest some of your hard earned XP into them. 

You spend XP between adventures while your Delver is taking a 3 day safe rest. We'll go into detail about what you can do with your XP when we talk about player options. For now though, here's a very rough guideline. 

Every time you get a point of XP you can:

That's all for today but we'll be back again soon. Given everybody's enthusiasm in our polls about both player options and lore/setting information, we'll aim to discuss those next. If you have a specific question, please send it through to us.

Thanks again to everybody. The countdown continues!

Game Rules!

There are just over two weeks left until our campaign launches! Thank you everyone for sharing your enthusiasm, questions, and support for Time Without Tide.

Last week’s poll favored more information about the game’s rules. We’re going to dive into mechanics for this update, but first here’s some TWT news.

Questions By Lantern Light, a live TWT Q&A hosted by Chaosium’s Bridgett Jeffries, is now available to watch on the Chaosium YouTube channel. It was a blast getting to talk about the game. Thank you to everybody who sent in questions. Remember, you can keep the conversation going by joining us in the Chaosium Discord. We do our best to share links to any other news or media about the game there.

Onto the Rules
Let’s move onto some mechanics. I want to mention that the best way to get a sense of the game is to download the Time Without Tide: Quickstart and take a look for yourself. It’s freely available for anybody who follows the Backerkit campaign. That said, here’s a quick summary.

The Basics
Time Without Tide is at its heart, a D6 dice pool system. When you’re faced with a challenge, you pair one of your traits (BODY, MIND, & WILL) with one of six skills (Culture, Industry, Navigation, Skulduggery, Survival, & Violence). You roll a number of D6s equal to the sum of your score and trait. Each result of a 5 or 6 counts as a mark towards succeeding. Get enough marks and you’ll succeed the test.

So, you combine 3 traits and 6 skills. Easy right? Well, the complexity comes from  combining your traits and skills in interesting ways. Let’s take Skulduggery as an example. 

Every skill pairs differently with each of the traits to cover any challenge you might encounter. There’s plenty of further refinements to these core rules that are discussed more further in the Time Without Tide: Quickstart, but let’s leave that aside for now and skip  ahead to one of the most exciting parts of Time Without Tide, your records.

Records
Records are the elements that make each character unique. Your items, features, or fog-driven adaptations. As you play, you will slowly amass, refine, and develop a collection of different records. Some records are straightforward bonuses to particular activities and test types. Others make you immune to certain type of damage or unlock new kinds of actions. The most powerful  records fundamentally change the way you play the game. 

Not all records are easy to get. Features for example, are reliable. You earn them naturally as your skills increase. Items, less so. You need to find them on your adventures or trade for them with some of the few remaining merchants. Adaptations are utterly chaotic. When you manifest an adaptation (often by taking too much damage during combat) you roll randomly to determine which one. Whatever result you get, it arrives in its malignant form as an explicit hindrance. If you invest your experience into a malignant adaptation, you will unlock its hidden potential over time.

Combat, Travel, & Downtime

There’s lots to do in Time Without Tide. Although all  gameplay builds on the fundamental rules described above, each area has its own unique mechanics too. We’ll talk about these more in future, but for now, here are some quickfire details about a few fan-favorite gameplay areas.

Our Next Update
We'll be back again later this week to talk more about the rules. Please let us know what mechanics you're most interested in learning more about. Until then, keep the light!

First Light

Time Without Tide is here. You can download the Quickstart rules right now and start playing. After close to a decade of total development time, the fog has parted. For us, the Time Without Tide team, it’s surreal.

We’ve got so much more to show across the course of this campaign. We want to talk about everything. We’ll show you how the game works, talk about its development, geek-out about the world, ask you what you want to know, and answer your questions. First of all though, we need to say thanks. To all of you reading this update, all of you following this project, we appreciate you.

You can get further involved in Time Without Tide by joining the conversation on the Chaosium Discord. There’s a dedicated channel there where you can speak directly to the team, as well as with other players. Some channel members are already sharing their wonderful experiences with the Quickstart.

We’ll be back with another update soon where we will talk more about the game. Please tell us what you'd like to hear about! You can vote in our poll to help us determine what to discuss next. Please feel free to expand upon your answer in the comments. For those with absolutely burning questions, please join us on the Chaosium YouTube Channel for a live AMA on July 20th 7pm EDT (a recording will be posted later). Thanks everybody.