Dear readers,
I come bearing big news. Like the post says on its tin, Anno Amagium is being adapted into a digitally-augmented, tabletop role-playing game. It will be hosted on a platform called Echelon, and we are hoping to have a playable public beta by Q4 2025. It will be the first game hosted on Echelon, which will eventually serve as a publishing haven and live service platform for independent, original tabletop RPGs.
The less-awesome news is that the fiction drought of Anno Amagium will be continuing for… a while. Rest assured, the story is not over by a long shot. In fact, it’s kind of frustrating because we’ve really only reached the end of the beginning. Or rather, we’ve finally reached the series’ proper beginning, as it was originally conceived. But brass tacks is, my monetization strategy was always a long odds gamble, and a pay-what-you-want approach to fiction isn’t enough to put bread on the table, unless your name starts with “Brandon” and ends with “Sanderson.”
So I have started a company: To Whit Ventures. It has a shiny new website and everything. With said company, we are building the Echelon VTT, which will eventually host Anno Amagium: The RPG and a catalogue of other digitally adapted titles. There are more details in today’s accompanying patron post, but truth be told I’m tired of writing about business stuff, and I would much rather talk about what makes Anno Amagium: The RPG special in a nutshell.
As one would (hopefully) expect, the core conceit of the Anno Amagium RPG is that players will be adopting the role of Amagiate Peacekeepers as they hunt monsters, solve crimes, and rescue people. (That’s not to say that players can’t be asfalis characters, though they are generally a little trickier to incorporate, and those options will be fleshed out in greater detail after the core game is a healthy position, but my alpha campaign has a few characters who don’t fit the standard amagiate mold.)
As a quick aside, the alpha campaign is set in Dalhart, a small town in the northern panhandle of the Republic of Texas, just a couple years before the events of the most recent episodes of Anno Amagium. Our party of heroes consists of a grizzled veteran detective, a half-fae woman of oni parentage, an ex-professional baseball player-turned-peacekeeper, a pretty boy with a penchant for odd weaponry and animathurgy, a CIC agent with amnesia, and a reporter from our Earth who has literally been Isekai’d into the world of Anno Amagium. Oh. And Mack: an asfalis scrapyard artist who has been possessed by a grimoire filled with forbidden magic. If people are interested in hearing more about this ragtag rabble of unlikely heroes, I may try to include a couple short episodes covering select shenanigans from their campaign.
In terms of mechanics, the overwhelming majority of a character’s math boil down to four core Attributes: Arms (inherent physical abilities – strength, stamina, flexibility), Gears (trained physical abilities – technique, mechanical competence, muscle memory), Masks (inherent mental abilities – wit, imagination, force of personality), and Tomes (Trained mental abilities – analytical abilities, attention span, erudition). To use magic, or martial techniques, characters draw from an ability deck that modifies these core stats (and secondary attributes derived from the cardinal attributes). And this is where digital augmentation is necessary; manually updating stats after using each ability has proven plodding, but when automated, the system is smooth and satisfying.
Combat works on an Action Point system rather than a “main action,” “move action,” “bonus action,” “other non-bonus, non-main, weird action” system, because the former strikes me as simultaneously cleaner and more versatile than D&D’s approach. The magic system also does things very differently. Instead of subtracting energy from some nebulous pool of mana, or a number of predetermined slots, characters gradually gain Exus as they cast spells. Exus influences, augments, or sometimes prohibits the use of magic, but like in the web serial, exus is also a potentially devastating font of power that can harm players who draw too deeply from that well. Additionally, characters have access to a number of anima (limited by their licenses), which can be used to cast powerful contracts.
Characters will gradually level up, gaining more health, better stats, and superior ability cards, but the core building mechanic is based on discrete blocks of passives, skills, spells and other abilities called Curriculum rather than traditional RPG classes. Curriculums are purchased with Credits, which are awarded after characters complete missions or meet other milestones. An example of a Curriculum would be a specific type of elemental magic, or training with a given weapon, or something that unlocks new resources and mechanics like a barbarian’s rage.
The other major aspect of character building is the Traits system, which are similar to Perks from Fallout, or Feats from D&D, except I have endeavored to make them either extremely characterful, or extremely good. Like, as game-breakingly stupid as Luck of the Far Realms, Sentinel, etc. Finally, we are also building an extremely diverse arsenal of weaponry to choose from. Like, swords and guns are fine, sure, but we’ve also got telekinetic aerial silks, sympathy dolls, gunblades, and many other anime-AF weapons.
The goal of the system is to give players powerful, deeply personalized characters straight out of the gate. An average Level 1 Anno Amagium character has about as much power and optionality as a 5th level D&D spellcaster. As such, Anno Amagium has a slightly steeper learning curve than most D20 games, but my party has gamers of every TTRPG experience level, and people have been able to learn both the core system and the general ropes of roleplaying simultaneously.
There are more features than what has been discussed here, but hopefully this is enough to provide a good idea of what the game looks like in broad strokes. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, I highly recommend you subscribe to Echelon’s mailing list, as I will be providing periodic development updates for the game and Echelon as a whole.
As always, if you have questions or comments, feel free to reach out to via the Anno Amagium Discord.
Until next time!
-Hank
