‘Splinter Cell’ and ‘Far Cry 2’ Developer Launches New TTRPG – ‘Mythmaster RPG’ Now In Beta
Clint Hocking, of Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell fame, has announced and launched a new tabletop RPG, Mythmaster, into a free, open beta.
Clint Hocking is a legendary video game designer. You might know his work from Splinter Cell and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, or Far Cry 2. Maybe from the numerous GDC talks on narrative design he’s given. In fact, if you’ve ever heard one of your indie RPG friends talk about a game’s ludonarrative dissonance (that term comes from Hocking, who was talking about BioShock at the time).
As of today, Hocking is also a tabletop game designer, with the announcement and open beta launch of Mythmaster RPG. Mythmaster is a “complete fantasy tabletop roleplaying game” more than ten years in the making. And you and your friends can start playing it today. Don’t have any friends? That’s okay; you can still play the character generator. No really.
Mythmaster RPG – Crunchy, Satisfying Open Beta
Per Hocking’s announcement, the game is available now. It’s a classless RPG, which means you won’t level up. Instead, you’ll create an extremely customized character by pulling from a set of modular skill fields and spell fields with many, many individual skills contained within them. It is a very crunchy system, but I’m kind of into it. Especially since a lot of the character generation is based on how your life path treats you. A first glance at the system reveals an engine for creating unique, interesting characters whose edges are well-defined – but whose avenues to grow are wide open.
And on Hocking’s website, Click Nothing, he explains the origin story of the game. And how it grew from a simple seven-page ruleset to the more complex web-based engine you’ll find today. Also,
“My first few iterations on the game got me to a set of core rules that was only seven pages long and used only standard six-sided dice. A character could be made in a few minutes, details about skills, spells, weapons and creatures were added on demand, and within a month of the initial idea we were playing. As we played, I would record the rules as we made them up; a rapier did this much damage, a heal spell restored that much health.
The rules started to grow and to accrete some complexity and I landed on a few patterns I really liked. The main one was the 3×3 stat matrix and skills based on attributes calculated from the averaged stats. It was the first formal structure in the game, and it is still the core of how characters work. I feel makes for a good, credible simulation, and that it has an inherent auto-balancing effect on a hybrid random/point-spend character creation system that softens the chaos of pure random, while preventing the degenerate build strategies that plague pure point-spend.”
– Clint Hocking
That’s right! No degenerate point-spend builds here. This is to say that the RPG system Hocking has designed is focused first and foremost on creating characters. Ones that feel like they’ve come out of the world rather than ones that were purpose-built to solve a problem. Creating a character, you’ll end up with strengths and weaknesses and may well end up with more of one than the other.
Your skill points are rolled randomly and the way you improve your character before the start of play is by going through life paths – but it is entirely possible to die within character creation. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Hocking has guidance in the rules for if that happens:
“If a character dies due to a life event during character creation, the Director has the option to offer the player the chance to play the last years of their life. Tell the player they can rewind the clock, but that the ‘die has been cast’ on their fate: sometime in the coming couple of years, they will die by assassination, or by plague, or by whatever ugly end was determined by the regrettable die roll.
The Director’s job then becomes to sternly but fairly kill them in the preordained manner. The Director should neither cheat nor use some arbitrary deus ex machina. Rather, they should work to fully and credibly unravel the events of the character’s inevitable demise. If the players are particularly ingenious, maybe – just maybe – the player whose fate was sealed can survive.”
– Mythmaster RPG
There’s so much more to say about the game. But the best way to really get a feel for it is to head over to the Mythmaster RPG site, which is totally free, and just get your feet wet in the online character creator. All the rules are web-based, so you can go through and get a feel for the World of Tear, check out the Bestiary with more than 170 creatures, or delve deep into the guts of the game itself.
