Casual day in Acernos

Now that we have gotten all the serious stuff out of the way (at least for a while), we are going to tell more about the gameplay. Most of the time we are going to use short stories from our campaigns and scenarios as examples for gameplay mechanics and situations.

The story of why you don’t anger the Lady of Mist

In our campaign we had a short war between Agura, god of water and alliance of Lumia, goddess of moon and Morte, god of death. Our player characters are powerful shinigamis who serve the god of death. This scenario takes place during a victory celebration held in Lumia’s capital Umbra. Player characters were invited, because they managed to kill few of Agura’s lords* during the war, however they also made one of Lumia’s ladies* their enemy. One of Lumia’s ex-ladies, Kiku Lady of Mist, is a friend of the player characters and is currently accompanying them. At this point Kaguya, Lady of Moonlight, attacks the player characters with her signature ritual.

Massive white wave of energy discharges across the ballroom and devours dozens of bystanders. The energy wave disintegrates multiple thick stone walls of the gothic castle and rips twenty meters wide and hundreds of meters long crater to floor of the building. One of the player characters manages to avoid the attack, but other one is too slow to react. As Kiku notices one of her friends is going to get hit she uses her own body to shield the player character.

The ritual which would reduce any normal human to ash, only slightly injures the hand which Kiku used to absorb the damage. Then Kiku conjures her katana from the void and proceeds to subdue Kaguya. During next ten seconds of combat Lady of Mist one-sidedly beats Kaguya through a thick stone wall and slashes her half a dozen times with her sword and cuts her right arm cleanly off. Any of these slashes would have been enough to cut a normal human in half or to send a powerful demigod flying.

Gameplay wise this battle took us about half an hour to complete and the combat consisted of three combat rounds with four combatants. Design wise point of this battle was to test combat between one of the most powerful characters in our lore (Lady of Mist) and an average lady (Lady of Moonlight). Even though an average lord is able to single handedly destroy Tentaika’s capital, Rozushito, Kaguya was still easily manhandled by Kiku. This battle also shows how much collateral damage a single attack from a powerful character can cause.

See you next Sunday!

*Lords and ladies are extremely powerful demigods who serve directly under the minor gods. Each minor god has three lords/ladies which means there are a total of nine lords/ladies under a prime god. Morte is an exception as his minor gods have no lords or ladies.