That will be within the DOMAIIN(S)

I think it was already time that I compiled a little text that describes the DOMAIINS game and what I've done this time. So buckle up, this is gonna suck harder than before!

So what is the deal this time?!

Well RETVRN I guess? I mean I've pulled out the early 2008 documents and went trough them, re-re-reread the Domains Horror Roleplaying System and also finally got a bit more mature as a trpg game developer.

Which brought me to a more focused and, in my mind, purer form of expression that I've achieved with this design.

From the initial idea off to the execution, DOMAIINS has been trying to no longer emulate the games it's been born from, but now tries to emulate the experience. Hence the new "horror experience" tag instead of the "ttrpg" tag.

Furthermore any and ALL mentions of "ttrpg", in the current working document for DOMAIINS, have been removed. I no longer intend to call my games ttrpgs. It's a game. And I'm steadfast in that as I try to make people play my game as it's intended and to at least once try to achieve the experience I strived to perfect within the rules.

Now what does that mean for the rules?

d6 as the base dice

condensing the aptitudes into: Modulates the story outside, modulates the story inside, modulates the story in others

character and story progress tied

reworked and focused on WHAT makes an ARC

added more of my thalassophobia to the game writing

rulebook focus on writing with my own art and a more "natural reading" type of writing.

How does that translate into the actual writing and design? Well first off I rebalanced the "numbers" to be lower but keep the same chances of success and failure as I migrated form d10 to d6, trying to make the game more accessible and easier to get.

Secondly the 5 aptitudes from the first game were fused into three (well four but that later) aptitudes that govern the way you as the player have your character shape the story:

CORPUS - External interactions between the character and the story world. Things that the character physically "moves" in the world.

ANIMUS - Internal interactions between the character and the story world. Things that the character mentally "navigates" in the world.

SPIRITUS - Social interactions between the character and the story world. Things that the character has OTHERS do in the world.

These aptitudes, along with IMMO (Hidden fourth one, well not hidden) have a scale of 1-5 which corresponds to the dots found on most dice we have here.

Now off to the thalassophobia part. Some of you, who know latin might notice that the fourth aptitude is called "depth". As in diving depth. Well yeah, I used the nomenclature such as "dives" and "depth", almost everything "mystical" in the game rules has naval or water based descriptions (Hadal, Abyssal, etc).

Now all of that is written in a more casual, more technical way of writing. Less what you've seen so far in a ttrpg manual, and more what you'd expect out of a cookbook or technical documentation.

Which gives a more casual approach to reading the rules and understanding them.

But also this is a shift in focus towards the stuff I was looking for and what I was actually delighted to find in the current Japanese TRPG scene:

Cheap affordable and small books with limited illustrations that get the rules to the table as fast and as compact as possible.

And that brings me to the final point, and that is the new pricing model I want to bring to my "company". This new model reflects how much I value my own work and how much I think my work is worth. Which would be 15€ per game, plus the needed overhead. So meaning the game will still be 15€ per release for the digital version and the physical version will cost those 15€ plus print costs AND shipping handled separately to that cost. In the end I am hoping to get the book out for 20€ per physical book. Not more.

All in all, I think this is a good fresh start with the new legal shit I've been dealing with, and a show of growth both as a designer and as a "professional".