Itinerant Royalty Errands

What?

cf https://joshg.itch.io/interstellar-errands

Summary

• There's a hexmap with a half-dozen countries and different terrains
• There's a pool of like 30 zodiac signs/tarot cards
• Characters have like 30-40 skills that go 1-100
• Characters have a couple ongoing projects (maybe two slots, they can choose how many to fill and what type they are)
• Characters have a current job
• Each round is a season, you get 20 turns
• A turn is a draw from a deck
• You get a deck made up of: cards based on your job x hex (work events), cards based on your hex (travel events), cards based just on your job (lifepath events)
• Card encounters are like threats at http://apocalypse-world.com/ApocalypseWorldBasicRefbook2ndEd.pdf I think
  • You encounter a MAZE in the FOREST (nature: to trap, to frustrate passage). Signifiers: HOUND, SCORPION. Default skill: STRENGTH
    • The player can decide what it means and pick a skill (or spend an extra turn to skip it) to roll and then there's a space to write some commentary about the encounter. If they roll, win or lose, they get +1 xp of the default skill. If they win they get some reward based on difficulty and if they lose they have a penalty based on same.
    • The player can pay an intervention to explain why they can use a different skill here
• At the end of the season you can write a letter to somebody else in the game (you get +5 skill or project xp for that).
• Rewards:
  • skill xp: 1 xp normally = +1 skill point - if it's a key skill for the current job, it's +3 skill points (can be targeted at one skill, at a skill, or totally free)
  • project xp: advance within the current project stage
  • project resource A, B, C: get some resource needed for current project (need to pay these to advance the stage)
  • money: this is basically another currency (heh), there are probably ways to exchange it
  • job meter refill: add points up to max in a meter associated with current job
  • job meter increase: increase the max in a meter
  • job tool: tool you can use in your current job
  • travel points (if you're traveling)
  • artifact
  • royalty
  • leaders only:
    • +morale
    • +people
    • +training
  • a fragment of any of the above: fragments can be traded in for the thing when you accumulate enough
  • a quest start for any of the above: quests are multi-card sequences that eventually give a particular reward
• Penalties:
  • Opposite of any of those rewards
  • Incur a debt
  • Forced job switch
  • Forced movement
  • Death
    • In this game you get a couple lives, if you lose one you incur a "scar" which you describe and it's a permanent marker on your sheet, but it's not death death until you're out of lives
• interventions: players get, I dunno, 2 a season (old ones are lost). there are places they can pay an intervention, where they say what they want to happen and why and it gets handed off to another player for final arbitration. stuff you can ask for interventions is like to swap a skill in the check, get a particular quest or other reward, do extra work on a project, resolve a project, convert resources at a different rate, travel at a different rate. you can offer to pay additional stuff if it helps - anything you can take as a penalty. the person acting as GM sees your stuff, sets the difficulty and makes the roll for you, then selects and writes up what happens
• signifiers: there are these 30-40 zodiac signs or whatever (everway has 36). which initially have a name and a number. over time people can add additional signifiers/commentary to them - associating them with events or characters or places or organizations or artifacts or whatever

Turns

On your turn you can pick from a couple actions: Main, Project, Travel, Camp

• Main deck includes job cards, hex cards, project cards, lifepath cards
• Project deck includes project cards, hex cards, lifepath cards
• Travel deck includes travel cards, hex cards, trade cards, lifepath cards
• Camp deck includes camp cards, trade cards, lifepath cards

Of those cards:

• Job cards are challenges about doing your job (robbing merchants as a bandit or whatever), they can be simple or tactical
  • Simple look like "You encounter a MAZE in the FOREST (nature: to trap, to frustrate passage). Signifiers: HOUND, SCORPION. Default skill: STRENGTH" as above
  • Tactical have tags on the challenges and the area and you can do stuff with it somehow
• Hex cards are challenges about the area (hex type + country) and look like job cards otherwise
• Project cards are advancement in, issues arising in, or changes in one of your current projects. Some are simple challenges and some are just this thing happens (and some are "this is a choice, do you want it?"); rewards are oriented towards project xp but sometimes other stuff
• Lifepath cards are opportunities to shift jobs, challenges weighted to morale, or chances to promote/demote in your current hierarchy (something like, "if you have at least 30 morale, you become senior bandit")
• Travel cards are challenges about traveling, with rewards weighted to travel points. Some are this thing happens and some are choices.
• Trade cards are opportunities to exchange resources and design new encounters

Challenges

Challenges are rated easy, medium, hard, very hard. Based on skill + difficulty + randomness, the outcome is like failure, partial success, success, extra success. Those translate in most cases into full penalty, half penalty and full reward, full reward, extra reward, where the size of the penalty and reward are based on the difficulty.

• Difficulty for job challenges is based on your job
• Difficulty for hex challenges is based on the hex - stuff farther from cities is more dangerous (?)