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Endless Realms FAQ
11 years ago
Since I've been posting tons of art from the game, I figured I should post a little FAQ about it. Please note that I'm not actually part of the development team, so I can't directly answer any of your questions. However, I can direct you to someone who can :)
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Endless Realms website - with race, class, and world info, along with FAQ and contact info
* * * * * * * * * * What is Endless Realms?
Endless Realms is a pen and paper roleplaying game, similar to Dungeons & Dragons, World of Darkness, and Shadowrun. It is designed to be a fantasy game, although it uses a d10 system that could be potentially applied to any setting.
When will it be out?
Since the game is so early in development, Endless Realms is not expected to be published and ready for sale for at least another year or two. After all, the project only started a few months ago!
Who will the game appeal to?
Endless Realms is being designed to appeal to a broad audience: anyone should be able to pick up the rule book, skim it quickly, and be able to play immediately without difficulty, hopefully bringing in new and casual players previously stymied by the complexity of other PnP games. The system will be fast and easy to learn and play, streamlined to allow fast character creation and permitting GMs to easily run spontaneous, on the spot campaigns. However, the system also promises vast customization, allowing new and veteran players alike countless possibilities for roleplaying unique and interesting characters and campaigns, and creating custom classes, races, and monsters, limited only by their imagination.
Why is it called Endless Realms?
The developers are committed to doing their to best to create a game that has "endless" possibilities! They also intend to release a number of different campaign settings, or "realms", from which players can choose.
What kind of system is it?
Endless Realms will have a comparative d10 system, chosen because the developers felt it lowered the influence of random chance without eliminating it entirely, and to allow modifications such as bonuses and penalties on rolls to have a larger impact. The developers feel power should be in the hands of the player, not luck.
What sort of playable races will there be?
The developers wanted to move away from the standard traditional races found in most fantasy games - as such, the only familiar race you can expect to see is Human. All other races will be unique, original species custom-created for Endless Realms, each with their own racial skill sets. While race development is far from complete, so far races include a plant race, animal-based races, and races never seen before, as well as the usual option of Human.
What about bestiary monsters? Can they be playable characters or PC companions?
Absolutely (unless your GM says otherwise, of course)! The developers want it to be easy for a GM or player to create new races, or allow players to use existing bestiary monsters as potential player templates. There will be the ability to have monsters as companion animals, but likely only for select classes.
Speaking of classes, what sort of classes will there be?
Expect to see a combination of old and new classes - some will be familiar fantasy PnP classes, while others will be brand-new. Each class is designed to allow vast customization - do you want your to focus on defensive capabilities and crowd control? Doing mass amounts of damage? Or always having the right skills for those tricky moments in and out of combat? You could have a party of only elementalists, and each would play differently with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Are the bestiary creatures and playable races "open species"? Can I make my own OCs based on them?
Yes, they are open, so you may! The developers would be thrilled to see any original characters you make, and you're welcome to use them for personal enjoyment, or to commission works of your OCs. They ask, however, that no OCs based on Endless Realms creatures or races be used in any commercial form (such as being made available for print).
Like one time a party member of mine rolled a 20 on trying to break down a door and sent it flying anime style halfway across the street. It was funny as hell. haha.
And yeah, despite it sucking when it happens, I'm actually generally in favour of critical misses XD It happens sometimes! I once "critically failed" eating one of those rice wafer things in real life and it broke my tooth :S Don't know how the hell that happened :b
So far it's intriguing and I wish I could see the actual mechanics.
I actually don't know how much you'll like the system, as an optimizer - the whole system works by point-buy, and you while you can buy any abilities/stats you want in general, you don't have enough to buy them all, so you can never expect to be able to do everything the best. But on the plus side, system's designed so you can just change how many points you get to work for the DM/players/specific campaign. So I guess you COULD do something crazy and have everyone doing max damage with max defensive capabilities with max versatility, provided you gave them enough points for it!
Point buy is actually good in most cases for optimization, since it lets single attribute dependency classes build themselves into that one stat with their secondary stat at about half it's value, every time; rolls can swing too easily good or bad as you know for stats. Now, depending on how they handle that, some classes could get silly almost instantly. And given how D&D classically favors being the best at one role (and not all of them), it helps make good classes even better; hence your Save or Die Clerics, super summoner Druids, and God Wizards.
I'm really curious because it's a neat experiment and even if magic is broken the fact that it's modular suggests I can just remove it and run it more like a Whitewolf game or d20 system hybrid gives it some saving grace.
It's good news the system is easy to learn. I don't think I could get my group to really learn say, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Shadowrun, or Cyberpunk.
I'm kind of blown away that they hadn't thought about a true shapeshifter class like what WotC did with the 4e Druid. Even base playable zoanthropes would be fun (difficult to reflect in some aspects) - I've recently worked a lot on making them viable, good options for 3.5e by digging around for rules that could help them, but most the time they still come up short over most straight classes.
Definitely look forward to watching you flesh out the bestiary and character races! :)
Don't worry, I'll have LOTS of stuff to post :b
Is it as simple as "Good, Neutral, Evil" and "Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic," or is is different and possibly more complicated than that?
Also, I'm glad that we are finally getting some gender diversity in role-playing games.
As far as I can tell, every person who has ever worked on D&D was a guy(hence the women wearing "chainmail bikinis" in the drawings, one big pet peeve of mine from D&D).
... although at least part of that is because, as far as they're concerned, games like RPGs and PnPs are for nnneeeeeeeeeeeeerds and looooooosers! So making a "girlier" DnD still wouldn't help :b
Yeah, that's a big pet peeve of mine, you can tell.
Also, Endless Realms just looks AMAZING, and I cannot wait to see more of it.
Lonely men draw some pervy stuff, I'll tell ya that.
Haven't looked at other games, don't have them kicking around to check.
I'm certainly curious about Monk-types and unarmed/natural attacks, given how badly they were done in 3.5e and how in 4e they had some math issues.
Yea seeing how unarmed/natural attacks work should be interesting also.
I'd say the very core classes they'd require are the Fighter, Wizard, Cleric - basically your classic trinity, but given how the developers seem to want to take the game, they might be less a class and more a chassis like the d20 Modern ones where they're more or less empty slates with "plug-in" parts.
I love it when, in a movie or something, somebody(almost always a woman) with psychic powers just telekinetically wrecks the place, like X-Men's Phoenix, Doctor Who's Bad Wolf, and Stephen King's Carrie(though in that case the book far exceeded the movie).
It's your brain itself that takes the beating then.
Also, with those three examples, it wasn't random. The whole storyline was building up to it in all three cases.
It is 30 in D&D(or, at least in 4th edition; it was way more complicated before then), but is it something different here, or have you not yet been told.
Also, am I talking too much here? Should I slow down a bit, or do you like answering questions(and therefore knowing that there are some big fans of Endless Realms already)?
On that note, I'm told the level cap is 20! And no, you're welcome to ask/comment as much as you'd like!
Will you also eventually draw races(and possibly classes), or just monsters?
Just wondering.
1: Is vampire a monster, a race, or both?
2: Will classes be drawn as well as races and monsters?
3: Do you know when the Endless Realms website might be up?
4: What will magic items be like in Endless Realms(both story-wise and rules-wise)?
2. Yes.
3. No. The web designer the developers had gotten is presently moving or something? So it's running behind schedule.
4. No clue! Will have to ask the developers.
Is there one "basic" world as well without a special theme besides fantasy, like in D&D?
There is a main core world campaign setting, but it will be released as its own separate manual, as there's too much content and would otherwise clutter the main player handbook for those less interested in detailed lore.
Developers are debating whether or not to release campaign settings as compendiums (large, 500+ish page books), or as their own, separate, smaller books with one campaign setting per book. Campaign settings may include new races/creatures, as well as important NPCs, cities, etc.
I wasn't given any details on specific campaign settings they had in mind, nor how many there might be, but hopefully that helps a bit :) They did say they were looking for input on settings players might be interested in, though!
Actually, if you remember the alternate worlds from D&D, they all seem like different times in history rather than actual other worlds. For example, Eberron is a relatively high-tech world that seems like it might occur some hundreds of years after the main campaign setting, whilst Athas from Dark Sun looks more like a post-apocalyptic far-future(partially due to the red giant star replacing our yellow dwarf).
Would the alternate settings of Endless Realms also be connected in some way?
Yes, the various settings of Endless Realms would be connected in the sense that, canonically, they'd all be part of the same multiverse, where basically all realms in existence are connected by the Astral Realm, which ties all of the cosmos together.
If you're asking why not make it into a video game/app or something, it's because the development team doesn't have the manpower, I'm afraid. It would be doable if we got crowdfunding, but since the dev team is independently funding themselves, they want to only do that as last resort - as it is, they can probably afford to fund the entire game (or most of it) so long as it remains a PnP, and plus a PnP is really what they were set on making in the first place.
Also, while the game will have it's own campaign setting, part of the concept is that it's providing a system where you don't NEED to play the developer's own campaign setting - you can make up your own. If it were run off a website where everyone had to play the exact same game, it would defeat the purpose and creative power of making it a PnP.
What sort of RPGs have you played/enjoyed? To be honest, PnPs aren't for everyone, but they're worth a try if you're into tabletop games or RPGs :)
Um, kinda hard to describe what it's like to play D&D or whatever if you've never done it. Have you been part of a guild of friends in an MMO before? Did you enjoy meeting every week (or whenever), and working together to figure out how to defeat bosses and complete other difficult challenges together? D&D is kind of like that, except not in video game form.
Some people play different kinds of campaigns - some are really roleplay heavy, about story and character and plot and the world, while others are really combat heavy, mostly about fighting monsters and getting loot and becoming more powerful, so there's a lot of variety in what a game might be like. It depends on who you're playing with, who's running the game, and what system you're using :) That's the real appeal of PnP, I think. Have you ever thought, "Man, I'd like to play a game with THIS kind of world where you play as THIS kind of character, but no one's made it yet!"? Well, using PnP games, you can :) They basically give you the tools to play your own story/characters in game format.
The player experience, thus, depends almost entirely on your GM. A "bad" GM will force players to make choices they don't want to or wouldn't make so that the GM can play out his/her story, or will try to work against the players ("It's my bad guys versus the players! I want to screw you guys over!"), when the real job of the GM is to facilitate the players' fun, whatever that might be.
Is that just within a class, though?
During character creation, I believe the player can choose something like one vice/virtue, and there may be a system to get more later. Also during character creation, I'm not sure if they're using a point-buy system for choosing main stats, which I believe are permanently static for the rest of the game.
I think so, yes. When you level as, say, a Barbarian, there are three class abilities you can choose from - you pick one of them. So a level 20 Barbarian will have 20 different abilities, which is likely to be different from someone else's level 20 Barbarian. For example, at level 1, you can pick 1A, 1B, or 1C. Then at level 2, you can pick 2A, 2B, or 2C, and so on. Abilities may be active or passive.
Keep in mind I don't know much about the actual system, and it's liable to change as it develops, so you can't take anything I say as terribly authoritative.
Do you know if this will have boards and miniatures? If so, what will it be like(such as, for example, will it be squares or hexagons as board spaces)?
Might Endless Realms have something like that? Or would players need to supply their own game tokens?
And yes, I do like the hexagon thing. Much closer to real movement than squares, without having to go into the uneven realm of diagonal movement.
In my experience, tokens and boards are unnecessary, but then, our DM doesn't like using boards, finds 2D squares/hexes too restrictive, and would rather us just imagine what is around us based on what he tells us and to move/act accordingly.
We've had combats with 5+ enemies, 5 players, and 10 NPCs and it worked out painlessly. We've also done swarm/mob combat with 30+ combatants, and it also was really painless.
Not to say grids aren't useful. They really are, and can be a lot of fun. Just sometimes, once you get used to not needing them, they seem kinda limiting. "What if I want to climb a nearby wall and snipe from there?" "What if I want to push over these tables to create a barricade?" Having to literally put everything on a grid meticulously can slow combat down, and we already take long enough in combat without moving pieces around on a grid XD Combat typically takes us at least 2 hours an encounter, no matter how simple XD
Any idea if there is going to be a price tag or not?
Just wondering that's all.
Love your artwork for it
It's been around 2 years after this journal was written and it mentions the release in about 2 years.
Are there more informations about the system on the web apart from this journal?
The only pages shown after typing "Endless Realms" in Google feature your marvelous artwork, but I'm actually searching for a Kickstarter page or something alike. If the system should have commercial success, maybe one of the developers should create a website for marketing purposes.
What makes the world of Endless Realms special? What is the twist?
There are dozens of generic fantasy worlds out there, but I would like to know, what would make me want to play in the Endless Realms.
What makes the rules of Endless Realms special?
Again, there are dozens of easy universal roleplaying systems out there (Fate, Savage Worlds, Dungeonslayers, ...), so why should I play with / learn this D10 system? Is it universal or world dependant?
What sets Endless Realms in a whole apart from Numenera?
Numenera is my favorite roleplaying system at the moment and also very popular in general. It also features easy rules, non-human races (plants, animals, aliens), easy rules to create monsters, a sheer endless combination of "classes", a D20 system with risk reduction, ...
Why should I buy / learn / play a new system with fewer potential players, which covers the exact same niche?
No offense taken, I agree entirely - I used to nag the team about getting a website running (since they really shouldn't be relying on me when I'm not part of the team), but they just never get around to it and I stopped bothering to try about a year back.
But yeah, I'm not on the development team or part of the company, I'm just the artist, haha. I'll let the team know about your comments/questions, since I don't have the necessary information to answer anything.
A few years ago a team member of a German PnP RPG developer team was asked the exact same question (What sets your RPG apart from the rest?). Since the RPG's world was very generic (it's basically EDO fantasy with an additional wolf race), he wasn't prepared for this question and considered it mean. That's why I excused myself beforehand, although it's a natural question considering there are many RPG systems out there.
Furry races? Many systems have them. The ones in this game seem to be rather better evolved than some, but still...
Why not just attempt a supplement to an already existing and popular system - ahh, huge licensing fees, copyrights, et all ad nauseum - So, what's the hook with this one? Can the dice system be converted to other systems for those that prefer them (i.e. use the D20 core rather than d10)?
And it's been 'a couple years' since you made this journal - where is this game, anyway?
It's good that they took the primary questions people are asking, verbatim, and answered them as best they could tho the answer to the first question was far from satisfying.
There is something to note;
We are currently in a balancing & testing phase. We are a small development team of three people, so making changes -
They're going to discover pretty quickly, as every major game developer and publisher has learned, that the moment the material is released the hundreds or thousands of players are going to find minutiae that they overlooked - because they're only three people after all - and use them to full advantage, though some may point this out for future correction. They should get more eyes on the material and, if possible, more hands throwing dice to find the holes. Closed alpha.
I saw that they were doing this on a small scale at some local convention. They should try to find people at other cons to run these alpha test sessions to find more holes before they try to send their material to press.
However, I might be wrong, so I'll ask!