Parallel Rules and BIND

I want contradictory things for BIND, so I’ve been trying to do both. And I have finally made it work…I think.

The Oneshot Campaign

Escape from the Goblin Horde started with a notion to make a one-shot introduction to BIND, and soon grew far too large to really call itself a ‘one-shot’.

I fixed this with toggles everywhere. Compile the book normally, and it’ll output a one-shot adventure, with one dungeon level, a summary of the rules, and helpful tips for new GMs littered at the foot of half the pages. But if you flip the toggle and compile it again, you’ll find a longer adventure, with no help about the rules, and two stories to the dungeon.

Simple Rules

The rules now comfortably fit on about three pages. If someone wants to know equipment prices, they can find that in a handout in adventure modules - not the rules. The adventure modules also provide random encounters and pre-generated characters, so the rules don’t need any kind of character creation. Knacks and spells come listed on these character sheets, nobody needs to look these things up.

And of course, for those who want a little more meat, the full rule-book exists, with standards on how to represent medicinal abilities, and how many rations people need per day.

Magic

The magic system contains perhaps the biggest divide, and honestly I’m quite proud of it, or I will be if I ever finish it. But first, I must explain the problem I want to solve.

Reading through A,D&D as a kid (I always return to the broken promises of adventure that game made) I saw the ‘Familiar’ spell. It seemed exciting and exotic - a wizard with a pet rat, or toad, which could help with this or that, as the familiars had a modicum of sentience. And then we had the higher-level version: ‘Homunculus’, which created a little monster to serve the mage. This seemed exotic and full of possibilities at first, but like all the A,D&D spells soon begged the question ‘why?’. Magic seemed arbitrary and random, because it all derived from Gygax and Arneson picking up random bits of mythology, strained through films, and given an overview and some numbers.

I want BIND’s magic system to fix this problem (and I really feel like it is a problem and makes other problems) by introducing a two-layer magic system. The basic spells will still seem random and arbitrary, in fact probably more so. (A spell to turn air putrid might also turn fires green, or an illusion spell could also mark the surrounding earth with written letters.) But underneath all that, the books have a system which creates these bizarre spells. And underneath that, the spell-creation system derives from Aristotelian Metaphysics. And under that…well Aristotle spoke nonsense, but it feels intuitive, and does a fine job of representing a European fantasy setting.

This second-layer has given me a lot of the free reign I wanted to make complex systems. It’s optional, so people don’t need to use it. It doesn’t need to hold the rest of the system back, because the base-layer can present people with some easy-to-use, pre-made spells.