Sinland Games

GM Materials: The Basics

In the past, I've described Dowager as a very 'trad' game: Whatever that word means to you, I say this as a shorthand for "this is a game about mostly heroic characters exploring dangerous places, fighting cool monsters, and collecting interesting rewards." If you've dabbled in any fantasy games before, you already get the gist of this.

I'll be including some advice on running narrative scenes, how to invoke Talent checks, how to answer questions through Intuition, and some notes on the tone and fiction of the setting. In the future, I think this first part is the ideal place to put some guidelines/philosophy on running the game too, but truthfully this is something I'm still working out myself as I run the game too.

GM Materials: Combat and Statblocks

Dowager is a combat-focused game, and though I don't think "crunch" or being rules-heavy is a bad thing, I'd like to make the prep work of designing encounters relatively streamlined and pain-free. As of right now, the bulk of this update will focus on enemy statblocks, how they're constructed, and some advice on how to throw them at players.

Some games in this genre treat enemy NPCs as being built somewhat like player characters, with their own classes and tags, like you might see in Lancer. There's some merit to doing this, as it allows for really tight control over just how difficult encounters can be at every level, though I do feel like it often makes enemies feel a bit generic once you recognize their class mid-battle. Other games, like DnD, will just come up with a few hundred unsorted enemies to fight that are all unique on a surface level but end up reusing boring multi-hit attacks or identical mechanics. It's a pain to go through an enormous bestiary without some basic touchstones, but Dowager's setting (especially in The Sacred & Strange) is tightly focused on a single region of the world, so I think there should be a lot of unique foes that aren't just a collection of tags and templates.

What I've got so far is a bit of a hybrid approach to these too. These names may change in the future, but for now, enemy NPCs have a Creature Type (Humanoid, Beast, Outsider, Automaton, etc) that describes what they are in the fiction, and an Archetype that describes their role and main gimmick in combat.

Creature Types already exist in the game- If you've read through the Companion system contents, your Companions all have one. Creature Types are handy for deciding what you generally want players to run into: Naturally, you'll be looking for Beasts or Chimeras if they're exploring forested wilderness, or you might look for Automatons if you're preparing for an encounter in a crumbling power plant.

Archetypes then serve as a quick shorthand and defining mechanic for enemy NPCs. Enemy NPCs will typically have 1 or 2 Archetypes, and Archetypes can be either Basic or Advanced. Basic Archetypes make up the majority of foes players will encounter, and serve as a tool for the GM to figure out what their table's party is capable of. Enemies that use Basic Archetypes are not individually a terrible threat, but can pose a challenge in numbers, and moreso if they make up a diverse enemy force or play to an environmental advantage.

So, here are some examples of Basic Archetypes to illustrate things:

Agile (Basic): Agile enemies can Move at the start of any other character's Turn, up to a limited number of times each Round.

Goon (Basic): Goon enemies appear in small groups of 2 to 5. When a player passes the end of their Turn to a Goon, any or all of the same Goons on the battlefield will act, usually just making a basic attack.

Haunt (Basic): Haunt enemies can't be chosen when it's time for the GM or a Player to pass their Turn to someone else. Instead, they move once at the start of each Round and take their Turn only when targeted, intentionally or otherwise.

Loner (Basic): Loner enemies gain additional attacks as PCs whittle down an enemy force. The longer a party waits to defeat a Loner, the more dangerous they become.

Patient (Basic): Patient enemies gain Boon or other effects every time another character takes their Turn, until they take their own each Round. They demand attention, and if you do not target them before other enemies, they will attack more viciously.

Advanced Archetypes are reserved for more challenging enemies, and the GM can employ them in small numbers once they've figured out their party's strengths and weaknesses. Advanced Archetypes present more difficult mechanics, and also more focused ones: They target specific strengths a party may or may not have.

So, here are some examples of Advanced Archetypes then:

Barbed (Advanced): Barbed enemies will inflict Automatic damage or a status effect when they are targeted, unless that attack defeats them outright. You will get hurt fighting them, but don't need to worry about whether a powerful attack is wasted or 'overkill' against them.

Dauntless (Advanced): Dauntless enemies will rise back to their feet at the start of the next Round after they are defeated, unless an additional action is taken. Skeletal monsters may need to have their bones attacked again once they are downed, wicked Outsiders may need to be banished with Radiance or Sacred damage.

Knight (Advanced): Knights fight like PCs, and will single them out one at a time. Knights will take proactive and defensive Reactions when it isn't their Turn, they will Interrupt your Focused actions at every opportunity, they will use items to heal their wounds and empower their weapons.

Leader (Advanced): Leaders make all other enemies stronger by merely existing. Basic enemies under their command may enjoy a Boon bonus every turn, or gain access to an Allostatic-gated ability early. Likewise, when you defeat a Leader, some enemies may be so demoralized that they surrender or retreat.

Titan (Advanced): Titan enemies can never suffer more than two Status Effects at once, and they never suffer more than a single Rank of either. They cannot just be wrestled into submission or wore down through myriad damage-over-time and defense-lowering effects.

As of right now, there are about two dozen Archetypes in my draft, the final number being yet to be determined. There are enough combinations that I can assure you there won't be an enemy statblock for every single one in v0.06, but I will be statting up a variety of the enemies people have fought in the first playtest I ran (and the second I have yet to run).

One of my frustrations when I played Lancer in the past was feeling that some magic was lost when I could identify an enemy by their NPC class and immediately know their full gimmick- Whether it was another mech pilot or some sort of alien flesh monstrosity, it often felt to me that identifying their class made me see each enemy as just an arbitrary skin placed over the statblock. This is partly why I'd still like to have a bestiary of unique foes in Dowager: Even if you identify an enemy as having the Haunt archetype, that could still look very different between a shadowy hellhound or a drone with active camo systems.

GM Materials: Setting Information

Lastly, I'd like to start chipping away at pages of lore and details that expand on the setting of Dowager. People have strong feelings about "lore" in games, and personally I think that the amount is not as important as how it is delivered. The majority (and most important) info about Auld-Aeon and the Golden Cosmos exists in the first few introductory pages and within player options for their Ancestry and Background. The only thing you can be sure a reader will initially connect to in your fantasy game is who they are and what they do in the world, and everything else should come later, if you ask me.

For now, I'll be leaving this section on the smaller side and focused on generating some scenarios: Dowager is a sci-fantasy setting that decidedly leans more in the sci or fantasy direction at different times, so I'd like to include advice like "Here is what a dungeon may look like within the urban megastructure," "Here are some notes on how various institutions interact with normal people in the world," "Here are some plot hooks for everyday problems that may demand your attention," etc.

My favorite setting book I've ever perused is the Dolmenwood setting for OSE: I love the rich details of every town and landmark in its fairly contained little world, I love the random tables to roll on for everything, I love the texture painted with its art and word choice and the depth it goes into with all the different creatures and inhabitants of the setting. It's the gold standard for presenting a setting in TTRPGs if you ask me, and I would certainly like to go into a similar level of detail with Dowager in the long run.

As of v0.05, Dowager is a bit over 250 pages, and I suspect with GM materials and setting information it could easily double. The amount I'd like to include feels staggering, especially with the existing blank tables and flavor text sections in the game, though this is because I think it's important to make sure the game text is complete and refined first before expanding on this side of things. I think the 'meat' of Dowager (player options, rules, GM material) will be done by the end of this year, and throughout 2027 most of my updates will expand on the setting and feature more art.

Other Priorities of Mine...

In no particular order, and no exact promise of when (realistically, this is what I'd like to get done over the June, July, and August updates), here are some other things I'm working on:

Classes are getting a pass. Many of them still reference Resolve (a mechanic I have since removed) and Memory Slots (a mechanic I am changing). Memory Slots were going to function as a second set of Equipment, except you'd equip new abilities and feats during downtime. The thing is, Dowager is balanced around more or less everyone having the same amount of Equipment slots, so I no longer think Memory should mirror that. Instead, I'll be doing a pass such that Master Feats (abilities or otherwise) have a Memory cost of 1-3, and PCs can swap them in and out up to a certain capacity instead.

The Status Effects section needs reformatting. It's just kind of an eyesore, there's too much information on one page and I don't think it's easy or convenient to scroll through.

The Actions List should be redone as well, for the same reason. There's too much on one page.

The Weapons and Equipment section also needs some formatting adjustments, and I'd like to finish and finalize this by the end of the summer.

I'd like to finish the remaining Trinket Tables, and expand on the various Ancestries. Even though Ancestry has direct mechanical impact on the game, it's a meaningful choice within the setting. This is an area where I'd like Dowager to be distinguished from other games in the 4e-like tactics side of the hobby: I think there is an assumption many people have that people who like tactics games are less interested in narrative than other RPG players, but I think the opposite is true- Even in rules-heavy games, I see a lot of people create OCs and come up with stories that involve things untouched on by the mechanics and numbers whatsoever.

The next two Classes I'll be adding are the Alchemist and the Artificer: I have half-written drafts for both, but they'll be complete after I give the existing Classes that aforementioned pass. As difficult as it is when you hit a certain scope, I think it's ideal to design most things around the same time: A Class written a year ago is going to inevitably feel different than a Class written two weeks before the game fully releases, so it's a frustrating test of keeping all these different plates spinning.

I think we'll wrap this up here. It's a little daunting looking at how much work remains to be done, but at the same time, I also look back on how much is done so far, and I don't feel like I'm still at the bottom of the mountain anymore. I'm now comfortably in the "falling down will definitely kill me" altitude, and that sort of existentially nerve-wracking fight for survival is where I do my best work.

As an aside, I also really appreciate everyone who supports me on the Sinland Games Patreon and keeps up with the game, even in this incomplete form. I've only had it up for two months at the time of writing, and even as a relatively unknown creator, the support you guys have given me so far has materially improved my life and encouraged me to keep working. If you aren't on there already, six bux will get you the newest copy of this (v0.05 at the time of writing) and any other games I work on in the future. While the money is nice, never hesitate to reach out to me if you'd like to talk or ask about anything or offer feedback, and share word about the game if you know any tactics sickos who might enjoy it.

I will do my best to keep on top of my announced release dates, but please be patient with me if things get a bit rocky this summer. Without oversharing, my family life is rather busy at the moment as we do some home renovations to sell and move to another country hopefully before the end of this year, and you all probably know from experience what a logistical nightmare moving anywhere can be.

These days, the sort of design space I work in is admittedly on the ‘trad’ side: Whatever image that might stir in your head, I’m describing games about adventurous characters exploring dangerous places, fighting cool monsters, and getting rewarded for it. Dungeons & Dragons is obviously the Ur-example of this, but plenty of games outside the mire of pastiche fantasy have trad leanings too: Games in the World of Darkness like Vampire: The Masquerade or Changeling: The Lost (I know that’s Chronicles, shut up) are ostensibly about interpersonal drama and exploring a troubled and supernaturally haunted interiority, but Character Creation still involves picking out super powers and you can play all those games as someone whose only skill is cutting things in half.

Besides the power fantasy (with or without its various prejudices and themes of colonial violence), “trad games” also tend to be big. One of the appeals of these games is having a huge number of classes, an entire hoard of magical items, endless amounts of first-party and homebrewed adventures and settings, and essentially everything you need to turn them into “forever games.” You see this pursuit of bigger numbers, greater scopes, and unlimited, capital-C “Content” in the videogame industry too, where some people will scoff at a product that only promises to eat up 200 hours of the time they have left to cherish on this earth. For people who could never hope to be satisfied by all the riches in Heaven and an extra bag of onion rings, there are whole industries set up to feed their avarice.

Okay, sorry, getting tangential, let’s bring it back. Trad games tend to be big, and I think that’s one of the key reasons you see a lot of indie TTRPG creators shy away from this sort of thing. We’re all small-time artists and writers passing around the same $20-50 between each other, and sometimes we have the opportunity to work together, but the limitations of time, money, and team size mean most people aren’t making something like DnD that has three whole-ass hardcover books just to play the game: Whether as an informed creative choice or a necessity of our limited resources, indie games often focus on a more bespoke, focused experience: Games that tell one kind of story, games where characters have a more defined role than “adventurer”, games that reject cowardice and don’t hide their themes away in subtext.

There are indies creating trad games too, but let me be real with you: I often don’t like them. The prospect of making something with a similar appeal to DnD that isn’t DnD leads a lot of people towards game design that is generic, ‘setting agnostic’ systems that simply offer math and resolution systems and tools for your tool belt to make your own game. I can see the appeal of this for some people: On the GM side, there are a lot of people who love to put all their time into crafting a world and stories within it without committing to simply  making their own game. On the player side, you have a lot of the sort of people I described earlier: People who come into a game interested in how it can wrap around their Original Characters like a warm blanket, rather than contorting them into something uncomfortable and unfamiliar like a straitjacket.

I don’t want to yuck anybody’s yum, but needless to say my experiences with freeform RP and TTRPGs have been considerably different. Of course, I’ve got years of positive memories and experiences in both, but with some distance between now and the past, I can see the shape of play more clearly. Being into OCs is, in my experience, a very individualistic sorta hobby: There are entire communities where people share their characters and interact with each other, and people may establish various “roleplay hooks” and social media-like profiles to find one another, but it’s not like a tabletop game. OCs tend to be deeply personal creations, with a blurrier boundary between the character and their creator than, say, a tabletop game where we understand that the world and the story in it don’t exist if we aren’t interacting with each other. There’s no bad or wrong types of fun to be had, it’s just that in practice, characters made for shared game experiences tend to implicitly be made with a kind of social contract in mind, where as none of this is necessary to make and cherish an OC: A lot of people’s OCs live rich tapestries of life and adventures and little bits of lore that only ever exist ephemerally in conversations with friends or on a carrd.co page.

If any of this speaks to your own sensibilities, this is the part of the blog post where I have to make good on the title and twist the knife a little bit. You may think you know what you want most for your character in an RPG, but chances are you don’t. A lot of game designers strive to appeal to this sort of player, and in the trad games space I think the result is that games are often worse for it. In a game like DnD 5e (2024 or whatever the fuck), a big reason for the copious amount of character options is to have something for everybody who’s already made up their mind about the kind of Original Character they want to bring to the game before they’ve even cracked open the book, if reading a game book is part of their plans at all. If every Class in DnD has a natural or fairy-themed subclass, a ‘wizard but worse’ subclass, a nautical or seafaring subclasses, then something like a Paladin can just be a sailor who smites and a Rogue can just be a sailor who backstabs. If the presence of Fire Elves necessitates the existence of Wind, Water, Earth, Electric, Light and Shadow Elves, then what the hell is an ‘Elf’ in the first place?

The natural conclusion of this sort of design seems to be that the more options you offer, the more bland and pastiche the game and its themes will be for it. For a certain kind of player, these options might suffice in letting them play the sort of character they’ve already settled on, and that experience may ultimately be fun and comfortable, but I also think it’s a bit of a waste of the medium- Especially when so much time and money is poured into cooking up this mild-medium salsa. The trad game will affirm that you already know what you want and water itself down endlessly trying to deliver that, while the bespoke indie game will tell you exactly what it’s serving, and along the way you might acquire a new taste you didn’t know you had.

Alright, now that you’ve eaten your vegetables, let’s stop talking about DnD and talk about a good game instead. My ambitious indie heartbreaker, DOWAGER: The Sacred & Strange is, at its core, a trad game in the sense I outlined up above. It’s also a big game game: Each character picks one of 12 different Ancestries, 1-3 of 25 different Backgrounds (with 10 Powers, a devastating Invocation ability, and many more things each), a mix and match of 20 different Classes (with 9 Abilities and various unique Master Feats each), 20 points to spread across 28 different Talents, and whatever they can get their hands on out of 35 Weapons, not counting the unique ones. The game features 540 Trinkets. The Companion System, my take on a ‘build your own pet/summon class’, includes 17 standard Companions that can be customized with a mix of 24 different Traits that give them new Abilities and passive benefits.

It goes without saying that I think Character Creation is a lot of fun, and putting together different ‘builds’ and arrangements of all these options is one of the most enjoyable parts of the game.

In spite of this, I also think Dowager is very much not for everybody. This mountain of Character Options isn’t tailored towards covering every particular niche and flavor of fantasy or sci-fi; around ever corner is a convention of the setting that can potentially sour things for a particular type of player. There are 12 Ancestries, but Ancestry in Dowager does not have mechanics tied to it: Nothing bores me more than sentences like “Elves get +2 Perception because of their big ears,” and so your Ancestry is fundamentally a social construct: It’s what the world and its inhabitants assume about you, who sees you as a peer, who sees you as an outsider.

It’s significant that the humanoid, cat-eared Calians are the most common and numerous folk of Auld-Aeon and that Humans make up a diaspora from the world they ruined. On paper, The Ronin may seem like the ideal background for someone wanting to play a Male Human Fighter character whose only skills lie in wielding a weapon, but being The Ronin and living by the sword is an outlandish and foolhardy choice in a world abundant with firearms and plagued by internet demons. You may step into the game intending to play a straight forward ‘cleric’ type character that wields healing spells, but the Imperial Church and its Inquisitors are foremost concerned with curbing the spread of the Baleful Machine, REVERIE, and the healing power of Thaumaturgy relies on harnessing Radiance, a pyrite-like mineral that induces mania and zealous delusion.

I want to have my cake and eat it too. I crave the crunch and texture and myriad options of trad games, but I’ve also been immersed in some really good indie shit that, unlike the big commercial products that dominate this hobby, actually have things to say and a specific experience to deliver. Intuitively, it makes sense that offering more options may result in a blander game, and so the burden I’ve taken up in making Dowager is to deliver a game that is simultaneously very big and also very deep. My goal in writing all these options isn’t to cover every flavor or niche of modern fantasy, but to create an immense collage that’s as pleasing to explore under a magnifying glass as it is from ten feet away.

Look: I like big games. I don’t list these on my list of inspirations and media touchstones because I’d rather not needlessly expose innocent people to gacha, but some of my favorite worlds and stories in media come from games like Arknights or Honkai Star Rail. The settings of these games are simultaneously vast and deep (and they’d better be when their creators are effectively putting out a 50,000 word light novel every 4-8 weeks), revolving around a few core concepts but with the room to spread out their story and worldbuilding across dozens of factions, hundreds of characters, endless amounts of side-stories and different playstyles and tones all in a single massive package. On some level, I dream of eventually making something this big: I don’t have any delusions that that is within reach now when I’m making Dowager entirely by myself, nor do I necessarily dream of chasing a scale affordable only through the evil taint of unlimited gambling money income, but the heart knows what it wants, and I want big games.

There’s nothing else I want to make. I crave the thrill of seeing disparate game mechanics come together and watching all their moving parts create something fantastical and unique. At the same time, I also don’t want to water down the end product by fruitlessly trying to appeal to everyone: If you were to wave the blacklight of game design over my work, it would surely glow like a flashbang with the fingerprint of all my aesthetic and thematic sensibilities. No matter how big and daunting this game may sound from the way I describe it, know that the game you see has already waltzed through the cutting room floor a thousand times, and it so pales in comparison to my initial notes that I stupidly ask myself “Is this enough? Won’t people think this is kind of bare-bones?” as I put out a 200+ page draft that’s bigger than most other people’s entire games.

Ideally, I’d like to finish this core book so that one or two dozen fellow sickos can see a narrow slice of my unwisely ambitious vision. As big as the numbers I listed earlier might seem, Dowager becomes more focused with every new paragraph I amend onto it: The Sacred & Strange is a story set in the thematic center of its universe, an ancient capital in a modern world half-buried in ruins, held precariously together by the psychic and social bonds of its people, haunted by the spectre of alienating technologies, and lampshading the absurd role of the adventuring hero in an era of supermarkets, office workers and industrial sprawl.

Before we get into things, let me quickly explain a few key rules and conventions of combat in Dowager:

Every character starts with the same baseline stats. If you’re curious, this is 20 Health, 20 Stamina, and 0 across the board on everything else. When you make a character, you have a choice of a dozen Ancestries, but these do not confer any stat boosts or unique abilities. Every character is similarly capable, and the majority of your stat bonuses will come from your Rank in various Classes.

I do this for a few reasons: I’ll write an article later about Ancestries in general, but it was a conscious choice I made to cut those entirely out of mechanical/build decisions and have all characters be similarly capable as a starting point. Moreover, your stats mostly come from your Class Rank(s) as to eliminate a potential newbie trap: If it’s your first time playing Dowager and you wish to go all in on playing a Gunslinger, then simply taking a few ranks in Gunslinger will give you all the stats you need to do that well, even if you haven’t fully learned what all your stats do yet.

Damage is almost always static, not random. The amount of Damage you deal as a baseline depends on your Weapon of choice: A Broadsword will always Strike for 4 Damage, a Carbine will always Strike for 6 Damage, etc. Class abilities add to this: “Strike +4 Damage” means your Broadsword will reliably hit for 8 Damage when you use that ability.

I do this for two big reasons: First, as my own preference, when I’m playing a game and I hit with an attack but only roll 1 or 2 on a d10, it doesn’t meaningfully feel much different from missing to me. A ‘good attack’ in Dowager is only one good dice roll (to see if you hit) rather than two (to see if you hit and how hard). Second, time: The game is faster when most of your actions only come down to one die roll rather than two.

Everyone spends the same resource to use their Abilities. All characters have Stamina (SP), and regardless of whether you fight with a sword, firearm, spells, psychic powers, or any combination of those, your Abilities cost Stamina to use. When you are out of Stamina, you can continue fighting, but every deduction to your SP will hit your Health (HP) instead. You can make a basic attack with your Weapon at no SP cost, generally Stamina isn’t very scarce.

I do this for a big reason: Rather than playing a game of pure attrition around daily abilities where you know your character is fully spent when they’re used, Stamina gives you more granular, moment-to-moment control of how hard you want to fight. Your Stamina isn’t bullets in a revolver, it’s your foot on a gas pedal. Even when you’re out, you can gamble burning down your Health to finish off a powerful enemy before they kill you.

…Of course, some Abilities also have a number of Dots that do set a hard limit on how often they can be used between resting- But this is a unique feature of some Classes, not a core feature of all of them.

I’m listing these out up front because generally, these are things that apply to everyone playing the game and every class that you can play as. There are exceptions: The Fighter adds various amounts of d4s to their abilities’ damage because they’re wild and reckless, Submachine Guns will Shoot for 3d4 damage instead of a static number because they’re inaccurate. Exceptions like this allow for unique playstyles that deviate from the baseline rules, and can cater to people with different preferences: Like I said, I personally don’t like rolling for damage, but there are ways to build for that in Dowager if you’re someone who does.

Next, let me lay out a design goal: When I make a new Class, these are the things actively on my mind before, during, and afterwards. While I have plenty of different goals, let’s just focus on a big one for this blog post.

I want it to feel rewarding regardless of how thin or wide you spread your Classes. There are currently 16 Classes in Dowager (20 when the game is complete) with three Ranks each. When you make your character, you have 3 points to spend on Ranks, so you can immediately lock in to a single Class or dip into others. In some games, like Dungeons & Dragons, you are typically only ever playing one Class and dipping into others is a messy affair. In other games, like Lancer, it’s expected you invest in many different Classes (Licenses, I guess) because each one caps out at a low number. I want to design Dowager around letting you do either and get something fun out of it.

Alright: That’s a lot of preamble, so let’s bust out a screenshot and I’ll show you some examples of what I’m talking about.

This is the Vanguard, one of two classes in the Guardian role: If you prefer videogame terminology, this is a ‘tank’ Class: The Vanguard is meant to fight on the front lines, endure powerful attacks, and control enemy NPCs to protect their more fragile allies. In Dowager, every Rank you take in a Class confers a stat bonus and three Abilities. When you take Ranks in Vanguard, you’ll get a lot of Health (HP) and Armor, as well as Evasion (EVA) and Endurance (END) to protect yourself against mostly physical attackers.

When it comes to Classes’ various Ranks, I generally follow a loose template:

Rank 1 will usually give you a basic, low Stamina attack, a useful Sub Action or Reaction, or a valuable Passive ability that gears you into a particular playstyle.

Rank 2 will usually give you a new ‘bread and butter’ attack or two, or introduce a new mechanic that the rest of the Class builds around.

Rank 3 will always give you something big and fantastic: A strong passive bonus that changes your playstyle significantly, a devastating attack with a heavy cost associated, a “panic button” you can press in reaction when enemies push you into a desperate position.

Importantly, Rank 1, 2, and 3 Abilities always cost 2, 4, and 6 Stamina across all Classes.

When it comes to my goal of letting people focus or spread their Class Ranks as they like, you could think of each level like this: Rank 1 is the dip option, Rank 2 is when you become that class, and Rank 3 is when you go all in.

At Rank 1, the Vanguard already encourages a ‘tanky’ playstyle: Beatdown rewards you with a harder melee attack if you go after enemies that are targeting your allies; Topple gives you a means of making an enemy more vulnerable to other characters’ attacks, and Grit gives you a helpful status effect and damage reduction when you’re taking a beating. Even if you only take a single Rank in Vanguard, these already reflect playing a more tough and scrappy character.

At Rank 2, Sunder allows you to inflict a rare and potent status effect (Armor Break) on foes; Intervene further encourages you to launch yourself into the fray and prevent powerful Focused attacks from going off via Interruption; Guard allows you to force an enemy to target you instead of an ally. At this Rank, you already have more than enough tools to lean into your role effectively: You can think of the Class as ‘fully online’, and it’s here where you’ll want to consider branching out into something else, or leaning further into this playstyle.

At Rank 3, Gigantic Heave is effectively a long-range football tackle where you can cover a lot of ground and position an enemy far away; Punishing Strike allows you to deal incredible damage if your foes have neglected to chip away at your Armor in favor of your more fragile peers; Unbreakable allows you to simply shrug off an entire attack, albeit at the steep cost of a lot of Stamina and a Dot, both of which must be regained separately during Downtime. Your third Rank is always nice, but never strictly required: Not every character needs to have a big super attack that consumes all their resources or a powerful passive bonus that requires three whole Ranks of investment just to obtain.

If you’re still with me, you can see how this Class achieves the goal I set out- Whether you invest just a bit or a lot into Vanguard as a ‘tank’ class, you are going to be more ‘tanky’ on the field. You might’ve caught something in the above screenshot I’ve been dancing around, however: In the top right, you’ll notice that there’s a stat bonus associated with Ranks 4 and 5 as well, but you only have three ranks of Vanguard abilities to work with. I should also mention off-hand that another of my design goals is to have a variety of simple and complex options for players to cater to their different preferred levels of crunch: I’d consider the Vanguard to be on the simpler end of that spectrum, so let’s look at a more complex Class as we get into Master Feats.

This is the Runesmith, one of four Classes in the Striker role: That means they’re also a frontline fighter, albeit focused more on dealing damage rather than mitigating powerful foes. I won’t break down every single ability again like with the Vanguard, but in essence, the Runesmith uses magic to empower their physical melee attacks and cast spells across the battlefield.

The Runesmith also has a unique central mechanic: Runes. You can only have a single Rune active at once, but they’re activated with a quick and simple Sub Action (of which you have two, every turn) and are essentially ‘modes’ you can toggle to adjust your fighting style to best suit whatever trouble you land in. At first Rank, Rune: Growth makes you grow very large and Rune: Thorns pricks enemies with magical damage just for approaching you. Both of these could be very handy if you find yourself fighting in tight quarters! Alternatively, all the way at third Rank, Rune: Indomitable effectively turns you into a backup tanking role, while Rune: Demonbuster makes you incredibly deadly to a few specific enemy types.

Classes in Dowager don’t just have their main Abilities, hower: They also have Master Feats, which are acquired with the same points you’d spend on Class Ranks, and you only need Rank 1 in any Class to start picking up Master Feats.

To start off, every Class has a straight forward Class Mastery Feat that raises them to Rank 4 or 5. If you are already happy with your arsenal or abilities and don’t want to make your life more complicated, this is the nice and simple option. Achieving 4th or 5th Rank will give you another stat increase, and some Classes’ Abilities use your overall Rank to scale their effects. For the Runesmith, a higher Rank means more damage from Rune: Thorns, greater momentum from their Wind Tunnel spell, a more punishing bite applied from Null Strike, and more.

Master Feats aren’t limited to just raising your Rank, however: They can confer entirely new abilities, passive effects, or augmentations to your existing abilities.

For the Runesmith, the majority of their Master Feats (at least as of right now) lean into their core mechanic: More Runes! For the relatively low investment of 1 Runesmith Rank and a single Master Feat, any character can wield Rune: Nightmare and summon a spectral steed at will. This creature isn’t considered a separate Unit from yourself, it simply makes you an incredibly mobile fighter that can cover huge distances.

If you aren’t in need of new abilities and just want more out of the Runesmith’s main kit, Rune Pairing is an incredibly valuable passive ability: You can have two Runes active at once instead of just one. Pairing together Rune: Growth and Rune: Indomitable allows you to be an immovable gatekeeper in any tight corridor, or pairing together Rune: Demonbuster and Rune: Stellafire allow you to smite wayward spirits and internet demons with explosive force.

In the end, there’s a wealth of rewards and incentives to go all in on one Class or branch out into others, and Master Feats encourage both. A Class that may have already been tempting as a single Rank dip may be even more enticing with the passive and active abilities that that Rank opens up to you, but your playstyle will never become needlessly more or less complicated than you prefer: As much as I’m marketing Dowager as a game by and for tactics sickos, I think there’s room for the girl who just wants to do one thing really well and guy who wants to have a dozen different abilities and effects that synergize together to play in the same party.