On the last Dev Journal we showed you how to arm your PCs with the very best weapons Middelburg has to offer. For this Dev Journal, we’re showing a change to the most crucial part of the Runed Age: the runic magic rules.

If-Or

Well, when we say “change”, it’s more of an addition. None of the old runic magic rules will change, and no runic array will become obsolete. What we’ve added here is an extra rule that will make your life easier when designing a runic array, and give you more flexibility in how you draw them.

What better way to start than with an example:

On the left here you can see the original Furnace Fist runic array, and the thing that set it apart was how it showed that if you wanted to say Do X if Y or Z, you’d have to draw each IF part separately, since there was never a way to do IF-OR on a single branch of the runic array.

Well, as you can see, now there is. On the right you have the new Furnace Fist and the new bit being added to the rules of the runic arrays: the placeholder locus. This empty locus simply says any of these things CAN fit in here IF they are present. So in this way, you can now say Do X if Y or Z and keep everything on the same branch.

The old Furnace Fist’s notation looks like this: Create Fire if Animal is present, create Fire if Iron is present, create Fire if Stone is present, create Fire if Wood is present.

The new Furnace Fist’s notation with the placeholder locus looks like this: Create Fire if Animal, Iron, Stone or Wood is present.

Now isn’t that just so much more tidy? This new way cuts out a lot of duplication that needs to be done in the old way. Furnace Fist might just have one affecting rune (Create), but imagine if you wanted to link 5 affecting runes through that one branch, and modify them all? You’d have to draw the same thing for each branch, meaning 20 runes plus all the modifications to them all.

So not only will it save you time and patience, but it will also save you space and not clog up the whole runic array with duplicated drawings.


And while we are busy with The Runed Age, you can have your say about what we should work on afterwards by filling out this little survey.

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