A New Crafting System

Hello, adventurer, welcome in! Today, I want to share a feature that we're developing and that I'm exceedingly excited about.

So excited, that when the barista at my favorite coffee shop asked me how I was doing today, I wanted to respond with, "Have you heard about the new crafting feature I'm developing? It's pretty amazing!"

That's how excited I am about it. But because I don't want to scare people at my favorite coffee shop, I'll channel my excited energy here.

I know for some of you, crafting isn't your thing. But if you enjoy the thrill of monster drops, identifying ingredients, crafting valuable items, or getting that tingly sensation when you discover a new magical recipe, then this post is for you!

Current Crafting Systems

There aren't many official crafting systems, let alone good ones right now! In many TTRPGs, gold or magic items are the only loot worth a second glance.

This feels like a missed opportunity! Harvesting and crafting are staples in many video games because they're fun! Resource management, learning recipes, identifying ingredients, and creating new things are all wonderful player agency activities.

I think it can be a staple in TTRPGs as well. Crafting can upgrade every fight and exploration scene to be even more engaging! Even though combat and exploration in Glyph Wardens are already pretty cool.

It Starts with Good Ingredients

They say that the best recipes all start with the best ingredients. And where do those ingredients come from? The incredibly deep and vibrant world of Anesca, of course!

Anesca isn't just dots on a map and a compendium of mix-matched creatures. It's filled to the brim with complex flora and fauna ecosystems thriving in distinctive locales. You can explore this intricate and magical world to discover creature parts, local flora, and salvageable materials.

Crafting will use a tag and tier system that denotes its properties and potency. This means that most recipes won't be limited to a specific item, but to an item with the property you want to create. Some recipes require specific items, which produce more specific or heightened effects!

Look around for blue-spotted paralytic mushrooms in shady high places, scrounge around the bottom of a barrel for some explosive sludge that reacts with powdered taproot (grenades, anyone?), or harvest the eyeball of the Voidwielder to imbue its chaotic power into your mundane sword.

Enemy stats are so much more than attributes and two lame attacks. In addition to the built-in tactics, stat blocks will include harvestable parts, food sources, and potential predators. This has the added benefit of quickly fleshing out explorable areas, interests, and threats!

So now, you can take some time after battle to pull out the heart of a twilight fox, or climb up to the top of the dion tree to search for sunworm eggs the size of your hand.

Some of these items take skill or specific steps to retrieve, while others just take time. Be careful, though. Time is a resource in Anesca as well, and complications can arise if you take too long in one place!

When you have your ingredients safely in hand, take them back to camp to identify what they do through the experiment, identify, or research activity. Or take a chance and plop it into your nightcap to see if it'll kill you or make you fly!

Crafting, Evolved

So you now know your ingredient properties, and have a recipe to dump them into - great! You can take the easy way out and use the crafting downtime activity to create the desired item from your ingredients, provided you have the required skill level and resources.

Or! Or, if you're either super geeky or incredibly invested in the game world, you can memorize the recipe and tell the Guide (that's the new DM) from memory the steps you take to create it. This, in turn, can level up the item you make! Get it wrong though, and poof goes your ingredients, and maybe you! But yes, we want to reward your geekiness.

It doesn't matter if you take the hard or easy path through crafting. Everyone can rejoice knowing most small items (i.e. poisons, food and small contraptions) don't take days or months to craft! Make them around the campfire during downtime as you joke with your friends about that nightcap that almost killed you. Whoops.

To Summarize...

We talked about how awesome Glyph Wardens' crafting is and that you should definitely tell your friends about it.

You can tell them that enemy loot will include harvestable ingredients. You can also tell them that exploration is even more exciting with all the salvageable items and explosive sludge waiting to be scraped off a barrel.

Then, excite them with the thoughts of combining ingredient properties and potencies to craft super cool, sometimes magical, stuff in just one day! You don't have to tell them about the geeky crafting path. Leave that to yourself and hoard all the item buffs. Insert evil laugh.

Oh yes, the possibilities are (almost) endless, and our excitement for this feature cannot be overstated. We're workshopping the particulars of harvesting and crafting now. Let us know what kind of crafting you want to see in the comments, and we'll see if we can bake it into the game!

See you in the next one!