The world of Mallus is weak, feeble, and lacking any sort of true scientific vision. You're just the researcher to change that. Get funding, complete the projects assigned to you by your employer, and remember that ethics are for weak-minded fools.
Research and Development Quest [Warhammer Fantasy]
- Thread starter Kaboomatic
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Warhammer Fantasy Research and Development Quest
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Character Sheet
Kaboomatic
Where the Wild Things Are
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Character Sheet
Grabthar The Teacher: It's you. Not really much else to say here.
Current Specialties:
[Mourne Beasts TL 2] [Gut Magic TL 2] [Martial Arts TL 2] [Weaponry TL 3][Pre-Maw Ogres TL 0]
Unique Resources: N/A
Current Quests: N/A
Grabthar The Teacher: It's you. Not really much else to say here.
Current Specialties:
[Mourne Beasts TL 2] [Gut Magic TL 2] [Martial Arts TL 2] [Weaponry TL 3]
Unique Resources: N/A
Current Quests: N/A
Last edited:
Dramatis Personae
Kaboomatic
Where the Wild Things Are
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Skagg Burninator: It's common knowledge in ogre society (or, whatever ogres have that passes for a society) that Firebellies are all fucking insane. Skagg Burninator is perhaps the best example of this, being a Firebelly who, when gifted power over magma and heat, decided that the best use of his new ability was hammering metal into shapes. But, weirdly enough, his crazy paid off. See, Skagg managed to figure out basic metalworking, and nowadays he makes weapons and armor (and also a few rough cannons) for anyone who gives him enough food. Of course, after discovering blasting powder, Skagg went on a week-long rampage through the Mountains that ended after your Tyrant punched him in the gut and decided that he could be useful. Now Skagg works for you, far out of the way of anything important to your Tyrant.
Current Specialties:
[Weaponry TL 2] [Firebelly Magic TL 2]
Unique Resources: N/A
Current Quests: N/A
Loyalty: 8
------------------------
Grak Gardenback: The one thing every Butcher needs is a supply of ingredients. Some Butchers hunt for their own, others have ogres get ingredients for them, but every Butcher has to have some way to get them. Grak Gardenback decided to go another way. See, he knew that plants grow from the ground, so Grak wondered why he couldn't just take the ground along with the plants, eat only a bit of the plant, and have an infinite supply of magic ingredients. Since nobody could give him a good answer, that's exactly what Grak did, taking an old cart, strapping it to his back, and using it to grow plants, for an infinite supply of of plant based spells. Of course, Mourne plants are as dangerous as the animals, and after one of his plants bit a Bruiser, Grak now works for you.
Current Specialties:
[Gut Magic TL 2] [Mourne Plants TL 2]
Unique Resources: N/A
Current Quests: N/A
Loyalty: 4
---------------------------
Grok Speakeasy: Most ogres aren't known as what you could call "great conversationalists. Grok Speakeasy wasn't most ogres though. Rather than the normal manner of Beastpunching favored by tribes, Grok could simply sit and talk at a beast of his choice. And they'd listen. This method of capturing the attention of animals also has some effect on other creatures; as Grok was able to talk a wayward Alchemist that had wandered far from the protections of the Empire into teaching him what he could learn. The alchemist had been enthralled with the fact that Grok could easily get hold of reagents and parts of creatures that would otherwise take whole teams of hunters to bring down, and was capable of harvesting them from living creatures to boot! Unfortunately, after a bit of an incident, Grok ate his teacher. He's been moving from territory to territory, often being forced to leave less because of his own action than because the small menagerie that he's gathered strips the area of food almost as fast as he does. Now your Boss has him working under you.
Current Specialties:
[Mourne Beasts TL 2] [Alchemy TL 2]
Unique Resources: N/A
Current Quests: N/A
Loyalty: 4
Current Specialties:
[Weaponry TL 2] [Firebelly Magic TL 2]
Unique Resources: N/A
Current Quests: N/A
Loyalty: 8
------------------------
Grak Gardenback: The one thing every Butcher needs is a supply of ingredients. Some Butchers hunt for their own, others have ogres get ingredients for them, but every Butcher has to have some way to get them. Grak Gardenback decided to go another way. See, he knew that plants grow from the ground, so Grak wondered why he couldn't just take the ground along with the plants, eat only a bit of the plant, and have an infinite supply of magic ingredients. Since nobody could give him a good answer, that's exactly what Grak did, taking an old cart, strapping it to his back, and using it to grow plants, for an infinite supply of of plant based spells. Of course, Mourne plants are as dangerous as the animals, and after one of his plants bit a Bruiser, Grak now works for you.
Current Specialties:
[Gut Magic TL 2] [Mourne Plants TL 2]
Unique Resources: N/A
Current Quests: N/A
Loyalty: 4
---------------------------
Grok Speakeasy: Most ogres aren't known as what you could call "great conversationalists. Grok Speakeasy wasn't most ogres though. Rather than the normal manner of Beastpunching favored by tribes, Grok could simply sit and talk at a beast of his choice. And they'd listen. This method of capturing the attention of animals also has some effect on other creatures; as Grok was able to talk a wayward Alchemist that had wandered far from the protections of the Empire into teaching him what he could learn. The alchemist had been enthralled with the fact that Grok could easily get hold of reagents and parts of creatures that would otherwise take whole teams of hunters to bring down, and was capable of harvesting them from living creatures to boot! Unfortunately, after a bit of an incident, Grok ate his teacher. He's been moving from territory to territory, often being forced to leave less because of his own action than because the small menagerie that he's gathered strips the area of food almost as fast as he does. Now your Boss has him working under you.
Current Specialties:
[Mourne Beasts TL 2] [Alchemy TL 2]
Unique Resources: N/A
Current Quests: N/A
Loyalty: 4
Last edited:
System Mechanics
Kaboomatic
Where the Wild Things Are
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Mechanics:
As the title says, this is where the mechanics of the quest are gonna be detailed. Hopefully it helps yall understand stuff. If not, I'm always open for questions.
Funding:
This is the most important mechanic for you, the players, in the entire quest, so it's going up here.
Funding is the abstracted form of the materials, manpower, slaves, and other stuff needed for experiments and testing.
In other words it's the resource you use to do stuff.
You get a certain amount of funding each turn, with the exact number calculated in the background through a formula I have no intention of sharing with the thread. The general rule of thumb though is that the more results you show, the more funding you get.
Funding is saveable, so if you have excess funding when a turn ends, you'll still have that funding when the next turn comes around. Of course, this does run the risk of your Tyrant seeing that you're accomplishing your goals under budget and deciding that you can live without getting as much funding.
On the other hand, funding doesn't replenish between phases, so funding you spend in the Research Phase isn't available to spend in the Testing or Personal phases.
The main use for funding is bonuses to rolls and extra AP, though I'm currently prototyping a requisition system where you can spend funding to get rare materials, items, or people that might give a bonus to certain actions and unlock new actions. It probably won't be relevant for a while though,
Turns:
Turns are each six months, centered around an objective given to the PC by their Tyrant, and split into three phases, Research, Testing, and Personal.
Projects:
Projects are the things your Tyrant expects you to do in exchange for not eating you.
Of course, it's not as bad as it sounds, mainly because 'ogre' and 'micromanager' might as well be antonyms.
See, the Projects your boss is going to give you don't care about specific methods to accomplish stuff. They're going to be things like 'make my lads harder to kill'. If you want to do so by getting better Gutplates for them, or by creating a Gut Magic spell to toughen their hides, or by beastpunching up some companion beasts that take hits for the lads, then that's up to you. As long as the lads are harder to kill, the Tyrant doesn't care.
In addition, Projects have a time limit. Something like the above, very general and not super difficult, is going to have maybe a 2-3 turn limit at most. On the other hand, something like 'Make us a mountain destroying something' or 'I want to be able to fight a dragon ogre, make that happen' is going to have a wayyyyyyy bigger time limit, something like 10-15 turns.
You may be asking 'what happens if we don't finish a Project by the time limit?' Well, the answer is that you get a funding cut, a hasher project with a shorter time limit, and you get a tick on the DOOM CLOCK. Three ticks on the DOOM CLOCK and the quest ends.
Research:
The Research phase is where you guys learn lore about the setting IC.
Fluffwise, it's the PC and Hero Units looking into subjects that they think might help their research efforts. Of course, this being academia, if Grabthar and his assistants (and thus the questers) think they can get away with looking into the stuff they find interesting instead of stuff directly related to their work, they're free to do so.
As long as results are provided of course. Otherwise it's a short way into the Tyrant's gullet.
This fluff structure also means that you get Research AP equal to the number of Hero Units you have (Including Grabthar), and that assigning different hero units to the same action might have different results. You probably shouldn't assign a Weaponry and Firebelly-focused Hero unit to figuring out why Dragon Ogre flesh crackles with lightning, for example.
Mechanically, the purpose of the Research phase is mainly to provide insight into which options in the Testing phase are worth pursuing, and also to give info that could lead to better write-ins, which would of course give better bonii. (If that last bit didn't make sense, the tldr is that learning more stuff about the tech trees and the world might lead to more detailed and specific write-ins in the testing phase, and those are obviously going to give better results than the defaults).
There's no 'this makes the numbers go up' in the Research phase, its just a way for me to share lore.
You can do write-ins in the Research phase too. They won't necessarily be better, just more specific, but 'Grabthar researches gunpowder' (what I'd give as a base option) is a lot less helpful than 'Grabthar researches what exactly makes his gunpowder blend volatile instead of just dust', which itself is gonna be less useful than 'Grabthar compares the make up of Cathayan, Imperial, and Ogre blasting powder, figuring out the pros and cons of each along with their composition'.
A good rule of thumb for Research write ins is that if your write in is about 'how to do x' instead of 'why does this thing behave like this' or 'what happens if I do this', then it's a Testing write in, not a Research write in.
Finally, funding. Same rules that apply to the Testing Phase apply here. Five funding gets you an extra AP, you can spend up to 10 funding to boost an action, though unlike in the Testing Phase, this boost isn't a boost to a roll (since there aren't rolls in the Research Phase). Instead, it's a narrative gauge of how much I get to tell you. If you ever put 10 funding on an action, I get to tell you a whole lot about it, maybe reveal a secret or two.
Testing Phase:
The Testing Phase is where you get to actually do stuff.
Mechanically, you get AP equal to your current Hero Unit amount (Including Grabthar), and you can spend it on Goals, single turn research endeavors in which you test out possible ways to fulfill a project.
Taking the previous example of 'Make my lads harder to kill' as a project, a goal might be 'make stronger gutplates' or 'beastpunch some beasts into acting as willing chaff' or 'create a spell to make them tougher'.
Of course, the trick here is that projects aren't going to be completed with a single goal. Maybe the goal isn't as effective as you hoped, maybe it requires more advanced research, maybe it's just a dead end.
Either way, goals are more like the jigsaw pieces that create the finished puzzle. There's multiple goals that can solve a project, and most of the time you're either going to need to complete a huge goal, or synthesize a few goals together.
Here's how synthesis works. When you think you have enough pieces of the puzzle, you can try to put them all together, using the goals that you've completed and the hero units that've completed them and fusing them into a coherent whole.
Mechanically goals have certain 'Experiment Point' (EP) requirements. When you choose goals for the turn and assign hero units to them, I roll a d100 plus or minus modifiers. These modifiers can come about due to hero units, well thought out write ins, environmental factors, or other things.
The final value is then added to the EP of a goal. If the total EP of that goal equals or exceeds its requirement, then the goal is completed.
Goals are split into various tiers of difficulty:
Some goals, generally the more difficult ones, will complete a project the moment they're completed, but other goals, generally the easier ones, require synthesis.
Mechanically, Synthesis is a special type of goal. When synthesis is chosen, choose any number of completed goals to synthesize, and then based on a formula I won't share to the thread yet, I'll give you an EP requirement to complete synthesis.
Once that requirement has been met, unless the goals chosen are completely incompatible, the project will most likely be completed. Of course, based on the compatibility of the goals, the end result might be better or worse.
Finally, funding again. The same rules for Research apply here. Five funding to buy an AP, you can spend 1 funding for a +10 to a roll, and you can spend up to 10 funding on a single action.
Personal Phase:
The personal phase is where Grabthar and the hero units do things other than research.
This is going to be more similar to a traditional Ck2 quest mechanically, in that Grabthar and his hero units are going to choose from a list of options on how to spend their free time, and those options are going to have percentage based chances of success, which will be determined by rolls of a d100 plus modifiers.
What actions you can take are going to change from a turn to turn basis but generally, you can expect to see stuff like the following:
Each hero unit has three personal actions, though you the players don't have full control over all of them. The number of actions you control for a hero unit, as well as some other things, is based on their Loyalty.
Loyalty:
Loyalty is a measure of how much your hero units are willing to do for Grabthar. It's measured on a scale from -10 to 10, and split up into multiple tiers, as shown below.
Base Hero Units start at Loyalty 4, and your Student starts at Loyalty 8.
Hero Units gain Loyalty when you let them work on goals they like and give them more freedom, and they lose Loyalty when they work on goals that don't suit them and don't have much freedom.
Finally, going back to the Personal Phase for a second, Funding.
Funding works the exact same as the Testing Phase. Five funding to buy an AP, you can spend 1 funding for a +10 to a roll, and you can spend up to 10 funding on a single action.
And, that's turns and how they work.
Now, let's move to the final bit of mechanics. Luckily, it's a short one, since most stuff is behind the curtain for now.
Tech Levels (TLs)
Tech Levels, also known as TLs, are a measure of how much a Hero Unit knows about a certain broad topic, known as a Tech Tree. Generally, tech trees can be basically anything that I, the QM, want, but there are a few basic rules to them. I won't be telling you these rules right now, mainly because it's really mostly intuition based, and the rules are honestly more guidelines than anything else.
Tech Trees are split into two groups, Core Tech Trees and Personal Tech Trees. The only real difference between the two is that a faction's Core Tech Trees are available to any member of the faction willing to learn, barring outside factors of course, and Personal Tech Trees are generally unique to a Hero Unit and are harder to initially learn.
Now, with that out of the way, let's talk about Tech Levels a bit more.
Fluff wise, I've already said what they are, so I won't cover that again.
Mechanically, TLs are split up into twelve tiers, the lowest being N/A, and then going on a basic 0 to 10 scale.
N/A is where nearly every Tech Tree, even the ones I haven't come up with yet, will start. This is because N/A means you have zero knowledge of this tech tree. At most, you might know it exists.
0 is basic understanding of what a Tech Tree is and the barest of bare knowledge on how to utilize it. Having a Tech Tree at TL 0 is needed to unlock the TL creation action. This is where a faction's Core Trees start if you're a member of that faction and have nothing blocking you from learning it.
Tech Levels 1 through 10 are similar, increasing comprehension and knowledge of the Tech Tree, with 1 being entry level knowledge and going up tol TL 10, full and perfect mastery.
For reference, Nagash is a TL 10 Necromancer. Belakor is a TL 10 Sorcerer. Grungni and Thungni are TL 10 Runecrafters.
TL 10 is bullshit, and reaching it in anything is effectively an unlocked win con.
And I think that's about it.
The rest is either hidden behind the curtain, or not important to yall.
So this has been the-
Well, technically there's one more thing left.
Heretical Tech Tree (Pre-Maw Ogres)
So. This is how the Heretical Tech Tree you have access to works.
It's a Tech Tree, same as any other, but you can't research it or openly do stuff with it, and you very much can't spend funding anywhere near your research into Pre-Maw Ogres because, well, funding comes from the Tyrant and he knows what you do with it, so using the stuff your boss gives you to look into literal heresy is probably a bad idea.
It's also more of a 'Research' Tech Tree, in that it doesn't actually unlock goals, it's more for stuff you can use in write ins (though that's definitely not its main purpose), as well as lore.
It's why I even included heretical trees in the first place, because without an incentive, they'd just sit unused and un-looked into.
That incentive is that the Pre-Maw Ogres Tech Tree is the main way you get to look into lore, and when you reach certain milestones in the Tree, you'll unlock special personal actions that do stuff.
Yeah, I know I'm being vague but I literally can't be any clearer without spoiling the entire quest.
But yeah, the Heretical Tech Tree is in my opinion, worth looking into. Just make sure to do it carefully, eh?
And now, with Turns, Loyalty, Tech Trees, and Heretical Trees covered, we're done, for realsies.
Thanks for bearing with me yall. I hope this mechanics post helps, and if you have any questions, please ask.
As the title says, this is where the mechanics of the quest are gonna be detailed. Hopefully it helps yall understand stuff. If not, I'm always open for questions.
Funding:
This is the most important mechanic for you, the players, in the entire quest, so it's going up here.
Funding is the abstracted form of the materials, manpower, slaves, and other stuff needed for experiments and testing.
In other words it's the resource you use to do stuff.
You get a certain amount of funding each turn, with the exact number calculated in the background through a formula I have no intention of sharing with the thread. The general rule of thumb though is that the more results you show, the more funding you get.
Funding is saveable, so if you have excess funding when a turn ends, you'll still have that funding when the next turn comes around. Of course, this does run the risk of your Tyrant seeing that you're accomplishing your goals under budget and deciding that you can live without getting as much funding.
On the other hand, funding doesn't replenish between phases, so funding you spend in the Research Phase isn't available to spend in the Testing or Personal phases.
The main use for funding is bonuses to rolls and extra AP, though I'm currently prototyping a requisition system where you can spend funding to get rare materials, items, or people that might give a bonus to certain actions and unlock new actions. It probably won't be relevant for a while though,
Turns:
Turns are each six months, centered around an objective given to the PC by their Tyrant, and split into three phases, Research, Testing, and Personal.
Projects:
Projects are the things your Tyrant expects you to do in exchange for not eating you.
Of course, it's not as bad as it sounds, mainly because 'ogre' and 'micromanager' might as well be antonyms.
See, the Projects your boss is going to give you don't care about specific methods to accomplish stuff. They're going to be things like 'make my lads harder to kill'. If you want to do so by getting better Gutplates for them, or by creating a Gut Magic spell to toughen their hides, or by beastpunching up some companion beasts that take hits for the lads, then that's up to you. As long as the lads are harder to kill, the Tyrant doesn't care.
In addition, Projects have a time limit. Something like the above, very general and not super difficult, is going to have maybe a 2-3 turn limit at most. On the other hand, something like 'Make us a mountain destroying something' or 'I want to be able to fight a dragon ogre, make that happen' is going to have a wayyyyyyy bigger time limit, something like 10-15 turns.
You may be asking 'what happens if we don't finish a Project by the time limit?' Well, the answer is that you get a funding cut, a hasher project with a shorter time limit, and you get a tick on the DOOM CLOCK. Three ticks on the DOOM CLOCK and the quest ends.
Research:
The Research phase is where you guys learn lore about the setting IC.
Fluffwise, it's the PC and Hero Units looking into subjects that they think might help their research efforts. Of course, this being academia, if Grabthar and his assistants (and thus the questers) think they can get away with looking into the stuff they find interesting instead of stuff directly related to their work, they're free to do so.
As long as results are provided of course. Otherwise it's a short way into the Tyrant's gullet.
This fluff structure also means that you get Research AP equal to the number of Hero Units you have (Including Grabthar), and that assigning different hero units to the same action might have different results. You probably shouldn't assign a Weaponry and Firebelly-focused Hero unit to figuring out why Dragon Ogre flesh crackles with lightning, for example.
Mechanically, the purpose of the Research phase is mainly to provide insight into which options in the Testing phase are worth pursuing, and also to give info that could lead to better write-ins, which would of course give better bonii. (If that last bit didn't make sense, the tldr is that learning more stuff about the tech trees and the world might lead to more detailed and specific write-ins in the testing phase, and those are obviously going to give better results than the defaults).
There's no 'this makes the numbers go up' in the Research phase, its just a way for me to share lore.
You can do write-ins in the Research phase too. They won't necessarily be better, just more specific, but 'Grabthar researches gunpowder' (what I'd give as a base option) is a lot less helpful than 'Grabthar researches what exactly makes his gunpowder blend volatile instead of just dust', which itself is gonna be less useful than 'Grabthar compares the make up of Cathayan, Imperial, and Ogre blasting powder, figuring out the pros and cons of each along with their composition'.
A good rule of thumb for Research write ins is that if your write in is about 'how to do x' instead of 'why does this thing behave like this' or 'what happens if I do this', then it's a Testing write in, not a Research write in.
Finally, funding. Same rules that apply to the Testing Phase apply here. Five funding gets you an extra AP, you can spend up to 10 funding to boost an action, though unlike in the Testing Phase, this boost isn't a boost to a roll (since there aren't rolls in the Research Phase). Instead, it's a narrative gauge of how much I get to tell you. If you ever put 10 funding on an action, I get to tell you a whole lot about it, maybe reveal a secret or two.
Testing Phase:
The Testing Phase is where you get to actually do stuff.
Mechanically, you get AP equal to your current Hero Unit amount (Including Grabthar), and you can spend it on Goals, single turn research endeavors in which you test out possible ways to fulfill a project.
Taking the previous example of 'Make my lads harder to kill' as a project, a goal might be 'make stronger gutplates' or 'beastpunch some beasts into acting as willing chaff' or 'create a spell to make them tougher'.
Of course, the trick here is that projects aren't going to be completed with a single goal. Maybe the goal isn't as effective as you hoped, maybe it requires more advanced research, maybe it's just a dead end.
Either way, goals are more like the jigsaw pieces that create the finished puzzle. There's multiple goals that can solve a project, and most of the time you're either going to need to complete a huge goal, or synthesize a few goals together.
Here's how synthesis works. When you think you have enough pieces of the puzzle, you can try to put them all together, using the goals that you've completed and the hero units that've completed them and fusing them into a coherent whole.
Mechanically goals have certain 'Experiment Point' (EP) requirements. When you choose goals for the turn and assign hero units to them, I roll a d100 plus or minus modifiers. These modifiers can come about due to hero units, well thought out write ins, environmental factors, or other things.
The final value is then added to the EP of a goal. If the total EP of that goal equals or exceeds its requirement, then the goal is completed.
Goals are split into various tiers of difficulty:
50 EP Needed: Trivial
100 EP Needed: Easy
200 EP Needed: Average
350 EP Needed: Moderate
500 EP Needed: Difficult
750 EP Needed: Hard
1000 EP Needed: Absurd
1500 EP Needed: Insane
2000 EP Needed: Impossible
100 EP Needed: Easy
200 EP Needed: Average
350 EP Needed: Moderate
500 EP Needed: Difficult
750 EP Needed: Hard
1000 EP Needed: Absurd
1500 EP Needed: Insane
2000 EP Needed: Impossible
Some goals, generally the more difficult ones, will complete a project the moment they're completed, but other goals, generally the easier ones, require synthesis.
Mechanically, Synthesis is a special type of goal. When synthesis is chosen, choose any number of completed goals to synthesize, and then based on a formula I won't share to the thread yet, I'll give you an EP requirement to complete synthesis.
Once that requirement has been met, unless the goals chosen are completely incompatible, the project will most likely be completed. Of course, based on the compatibility of the goals, the end result might be better or worse.
Finally, funding again. The same rules for Research apply here. Five funding to buy an AP, you can spend 1 funding for a +10 to a roll, and you can spend up to 10 funding on a single action.
Personal Phase:
The personal phase is where Grabthar and the hero units do things other than research.
This is going to be more similar to a traditional Ck2 quest mechanically, in that Grabthar and his hero units are going to choose from a list of options on how to spend their free time, and those options are going to have percentage based chances of success, which will be determined by rolls of a d100 plus modifiers.
What actions you can take are going to change from a turn to turn basis but generally, you can expect to see stuff like the following:
- Personal Projects: These are smaller scale projects that a hero unit wants to do on their own free time, stuff like 'expand the garden on my back', 'figure out how to work better with my own personal beast', 'meditate on the secrets of the firebelly', etc. Mechanically these work the exact same as goals work in the Testing Phase. A Personal Project's rewards are always unique but will always have some sort of effect in the Testing or Research phases.
- TL Increase: A hero unit may attempt to increase their TL after completing a certain amount of Goals related to that TL. The amount of EP required for this varies, but for TL 2 to TL 3 it's 300 EP.
- Expeditions: A hero unit can use an action to go on an expedition, searching for a rare material, technique, or being that can be used to give a bonus to certain actions relating to the thing. These expeditions are, unlike the above two action categories, actually decided based on percentage DCs. It sounds vague but trust me it's going to be useful.
- TL Creation: A hero unit can attempt to learn an entirely new tech tree, assuming they meet the prerequisites (relatively arbitrary and decided by me on a case-by-case basis). This requires the Hero unit to first pass a DC based on their familiarity with the tech tree and its difficulty to pick up. If they fail, the action ends there. If they succeed, they roll a d100 plus modifiers to get enough EP to get TL 1 of that tech tree. If they fail at this stage, they can continue the action in their next personal phase, this time skipping the DC entirely and rolling for straight EP. The amount of EP needed varies but is generally between 100 and 200 EP.
- Other Things: This is very much not an exhaustive list of stuff you can do in the Personal Phase, and from time to time things that don't fit in the first four categories will come up. Most of the time, they're going to stick around for 1-2 turns at most, after which the window to take them has closed. Does this mean you should take them over other things? Maybe. Maybe not. It varies, and not all of them are going to be as useful as the more permanent things. Ultimately, it's always going to be subjective.
Each hero unit has three personal actions, though you the players don't have full control over all of them. The number of actions you control for a hero unit, as well as some other things, is based on their Loyalty.
Loyalty:
Loyalty is a measure of how much your hero units are willing to do for Grabthar. It's measured on a scale from -10 to 10, and split up into multiple tiers, as shown below.
-10: This Hero Unit actively tries to kill you.
-9 -> -5: This Hero Unit has a chance to disobey orders in every phase, this chance grows higher the lower the loyalty is.
-4 -> -1: This Hero Unit gains a malus to all rolls, scaling based on how low their loyalty is.
0: You control none of this Hero Unit's Personal Actions.
1 -> 4: You control 1 of this Hero Unit's Personal Actions.
5 -> 9: You control 2 of this Hero Unit's Personal Actions.
10: You control all 3 of this Hero Unit's Personal Actions, and the Hero Unit gives the quest a passive bonus unique to this Hero Unit.
-9 -> -5: This Hero Unit has a chance to disobey orders in every phase, this chance grows higher the lower the loyalty is.
-4 -> -1: This Hero Unit gains a malus to all rolls, scaling based on how low their loyalty is.
0: You control none of this Hero Unit's Personal Actions.
1 -> 4: You control 1 of this Hero Unit's Personal Actions.
5 -> 9: You control 2 of this Hero Unit's Personal Actions.
10: You control all 3 of this Hero Unit's Personal Actions, and the Hero Unit gives the quest a passive bonus unique to this Hero Unit.
Base Hero Units start at Loyalty 4, and your Student starts at Loyalty 8.
Hero Units gain Loyalty when you let them work on goals they like and give them more freedom, and they lose Loyalty when they work on goals that don't suit them and don't have much freedom.
Finally, going back to the Personal Phase for a second, Funding.
Funding works the exact same as the Testing Phase. Five funding to buy an AP, you can spend 1 funding for a +10 to a roll, and you can spend up to 10 funding on a single action.
And, that's turns and how they work.
Now, let's move to the final bit of mechanics. Luckily, it's a short one, since most stuff is behind the curtain for now.
Tech Levels (TLs)
Tech Levels, also known as TLs, are a measure of how much a Hero Unit knows about a certain broad topic, known as a Tech Tree. Generally, tech trees can be basically anything that I, the QM, want, but there are a few basic rules to them. I won't be telling you these rules right now, mainly because it's really mostly intuition based, and the rules are honestly more guidelines than anything else.
Tech Trees are split into two groups, Core Tech Trees and Personal Tech Trees. The only real difference between the two is that a faction's Core Tech Trees are available to any member of the faction willing to learn, barring outside factors of course, and Personal Tech Trees are generally unique to a Hero Unit and are harder to initially learn.
Now, with that out of the way, let's talk about Tech Levels a bit more.
Fluff wise, I've already said what they are, so I won't cover that again.
Mechanically, TLs are split up into twelve tiers, the lowest being N/A, and then going on a basic 0 to 10 scale.
N/A is where nearly every Tech Tree, even the ones I haven't come up with yet, will start. This is because N/A means you have zero knowledge of this tech tree. At most, you might know it exists.
0 is basic understanding of what a Tech Tree is and the barest of bare knowledge on how to utilize it. Having a Tech Tree at TL 0 is needed to unlock the TL creation action. This is where a faction's Core Trees start if you're a member of that faction and have nothing blocking you from learning it.
Tech Levels 1 through 10 are similar, increasing comprehension and knowledge of the Tech Tree, with 1 being entry level knowledge and going up tol TL 10, full and perfect mastery.
For reference, Nagash is a TL 10 Necromancer. Belakor is a TL 10 Sorcerer. Grungni and Thungni are TL 10 Runecrafters.
TL 10 is bullshit, and reaching it in anything is effectively an unlocked win con.
And I think that's about it.
The rest is either hidden behind the curtain, or not important to yall.
So this has been the-
Well, technically there's one more thing left.
Heretical Tech Tree (Pre-Maw Ogres)
So. This is how the Heretical Tech Tree you have access to works.
It's a Tech Tree, same as any other, but you can't research it or openly do stuff with it, and you very much can't spend funding anywhere near your research into Pre-Maw Ogres because, well, funding comes from the Tyrant and he knows what you do with it, so using the stuff your boss gives you to look into literal heresy is probably a bad idea.
It's also more of a 'Research' Tech Tree, in that it doesn't actually unlock goals, it's more for stuff you can use in write ins (though that's definitely not its main purpose), as well as lore.
It's why I even included heretical trees in the first place, because without an incentive, they'd just sit unused and un-looked into.
That incentive is that the Pre-Maw Ogres Tech Tree is the main way you get to look into lore, and when you reach certain milestones in the Tree, you'll unlock special personal actions that do stuff.
Yeah, I know I'm being vague but I literally can't be any clearer without spoiling the entire quest.
But yeah, the Heretical Tech Tree is in my opinion, worth looking into. Just make sure to do it carefully, eh?
And now, with Turns, Loyalty, Tech Trees, and Heretical Trees covered, we're done, for realsies.
Thanks for bearing with me yall. I hope this mechanics post helps, and if you have any questions, please ask.
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