Making Sigil - Dice and Aarakocra

 Hello. C J here. I’m making quick progress on Sigil, my new classic fantasy themed tabletop RPG. With the release of Dungeons and Dragons core rules into the Creative Commons I am going to do my take on the genre. This might be a good product to print and sell at conventions as well. Dungeons and Dragons has a lot to work with and I’m planning frequent production notes here. First up, there are a few mechanical changes I’m making to the core rules.

I’m using a d12 not a d20 because I know how to balance around it better.

Combat relies on the Triptych system. Characters have three actions a turn once a round. Moving their speed, shifting one square and making a basic attack all take one action. Often more powerful attacks or spells require more than one action to perform.

Crafting is done like combat with the character moving items and tools around a workspace in a grid.

Magic is a bit more modular and spells have more options for elements or transformation effects.

I want more real life gender and sexuality in here. I’m adding social combat and I’m seriously working on making the characters and races have actual genders and identities. What happens if an elder red dragon is bisexual?

It looks like I’m going to need a player book, a world design book and a monster book. After that we’ll see about building the cosmology and making plot modules.

Here’s my current project though.

This is an image of an aarakocra. These are bird folk who are good and who are associated with elemental air. Under the new licensing system the original game has I can use this name and their lore as is. I can make an elemental plane of air and populate it with bird folk. I just need to convert them over into my dice engine and really they’re not even the original creatures anymore in any way.

I kind of feel like though I need to do more than just copy their lore and rewrite their stats in my numbers. Like, do these aarakocra have a nation? What do they eat? How do they reproduce? What happens if one is friends with or married to another elemental being or a mortal? Are any of them gay? Do they have favourite colours? I need this thing to feel like it’s mine and not just be another dungeon crawler.

Next up after that is probably addressing how their dragons work in my new setting. I need them to be more than just combat stat blocks if the original company put so much effort into them. If I’m making this game I’m doing it properly.

C J Mcpherson