Ostravia: Gothic Fantasy Roleplaying

[kylesgames]

So I've been working on a little project for the past few months now, and I figured I'd announce it here to get some ideas kicking back and forth.

Ostravia is a super-fast roleplaying game built on a one-roll system set in a splinter-state of medieval Poland. With a focus on history, Ostravia provides an interesting setting and is an attempt to align tabletop roleplaying games with more realistic medieval societies. However, it has fantasy elements; where medieval society and culture ends the wilderness is filled with pagans who worship dark gods, monsters who stalk the night, and other such threats.

For those familiar with the Orchestra reboot I was working on a while back, Ostravia was originally going to be a quick branching off to a fantasy setting to let me quickly develop a prototype for the system, but wound up growing and expanding into the point where it has become my college honors thesis. Many of the mechanics are the same, to the point where they fit the medieval setting, but Ostravia is a much darker, more grim setting.

The game is high-lethality and high-speed; every possible action is built to be completed in a single roll, but there's also care given to keep the number of variables in play manageable so that the game doesn't become incomprehensibly complex for the sake of a single roll. The core of Ostravia is the same as the core of Orchestra; do stuff other than combat just as well as combat is done, and it includes a discrete Social Combat mechanic, intended to not only emulate medieval social structures but also allow players to find engaging, meaningful play styles outside of traditional combat. The high lethality of combat also raises the point that other actions are usually the best path; if you don't want to try to treat a sword wound and make sure it doesn't become infected, you should probably sneak into the castle instead of trying to barge in the front door.

[Evil Scientist]

As a minor history buff and a sucker for the region in question, I'm looking forward to this project! Any updates on your progress? It's also interesting to see how you end up incorporating fantasy elements into it. Will it be similar to, say, Ars Magica (setting-wise)?

[kylesgames]

Sorry I've fallen off the radar. It's still in work, but I've been moving it further from the fantasy and more in the realism. The mechanics are the same, though.

More importantly, I've been working on making a digital version of it in PHP. This is, for me as a "non-coder" type, a somewhat noteworthy endeavor. The implementation of the game rules is going to be full-fledged, however (except those bits that I'm not implementing because of the static/dynamic content conflict; I don't include social interaction functions because I'm narrating every encounter myself), and I hope to release them some time after I'm done enough with the digital version to get them polished up.