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Ascala Spotlight - Everyday Arcana

 Hello. C J here. I think I’ve figured out the math puzzle I was working on about social themed stories in my card game. I had an idea a while ago about a card game where the player plays story based events contained as a single deck each. Each deck has 20 numbered cards including reprints of the characters who are in the story and they can be played in order or shuffled. This sounds like the best approach to narrative social events in the game. One problem down.

Also I’ve been thinking about the mechanics for the Five Million Strong Quantum Expansion, the Quantum Expansion set in Ascala. I wanted to try to find ways of making everyday tasks and tools into cards with spells, relying on the city Ascala and its theme of industrial magic use to guide the process. Five Million Strong looks to put some of the arcane and the mystic into modern life and its normal actions.

I’ve divided these into five categories and paired them with one of the smaller nations within the continent as a whole and the nation’s gem colour. We have school and job training for Ascala itself (Sapphire), computer use and software for the corporations (Silver), food service and retail for the Interior where they grow crops (Emerald), household economics and chores for the Vantaran Empire (Quartz) and finally online social media and networking for Oiwan (Shadowed).

I thought about dividing the steps of doing retail into individual sets of phrases and ideas. I arrived at four. These are greeting, sales, payment and departure. My other thought was to make one card for the overall tempo of the job, relying on the gem colour and its association with music to put these four ideas into song metre as a spell idea. This is where I am with these but the idea should work well. There are two sets of cards between the Starter Set and there but the planning for them is mostly done and just needs typing up.

C J Mcpherson



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