Mechs?! In my Mechfinder?! More likely than you expect
8 months ago
– Mon, Mar 25, 2024 at 06:52:45 PM
Hello everyone! It's James Beck once again with another update for Mechfinder: Universe of Mech and Magic! So much has happened since last month and I'm super excited to announce some of these updates!
Freelancers!
Our freelancers have started turning in work! This means that we have new content to put into the book for new NPC's, a few new creatures, mech skill feats for Pathfinder 2e (currently converting to the 5e portion), new templates such as mech, bionic, kaiju, and morphed! We are currently reviewing freelancers' work as we continue to build out the book.
Internal Work?
We have been hard at work for the author's side of things as well as getting art for different sections of the book. I have started to work on v13.0 of the mechfinder core rulebook (this houses all written material/gives me an idea of how many pages we have left). This also allows me to see different layouts and presentations for the final book. I have moved the AI Companions section like 3 times now and I really like where they're at right now.
For those with a more mechanical mind, we have a new archetype to announce! The Thrown-Together archetype is for pilots who are praying their mech doesn't destroy itself as it's built with whatever they can find. This is to give a Millennium Falcon/Delorean feel to your mech. It's got fun feat names such as "I Need That!", "Oops, a Piece Fell Off", and "I Have a Spare Part for That!" I also went in and tuned up the Kaiju Disciple archetype to now allow GMs to let their players play with a kaiju influence or even transform into a kaiju when a combat starts (there are some notes about when it's appropriate to allow this change and how to handle it mechanically). In addition, we gave a kaiju option to the animal instinct barbarian and a kaiju bloodline to sorcerers. I also went in and tuned the AI Cultivator and AI Caller archetypes to allow for player options/AI interactions.
If this all wasn't enough for you we have even more! We have expanded the weapons section to now have more melee and ranged options. We sadly lost a few combination items to the OGL (I'll talk about the OGL vs ORC in a minute, I want to keep on a happy note of announcing new things! We also wrote a new kaiju named the Hellbender Salamander. The Hellbender Salamander has animus ore (fiendish ore unique to Arvaxim) in its body that allows it to devastate a group of mechs with its hellbreath! The art for it is amazing and I'll include the sketches below. We've also added more deities! That's right! We're now up to 13 deities that Arvaxim primarily worships, each with a fun theme and stories attached to them. I'm particularly proud of Kadishua, deity of protection and loss. This allowed me to bring a new view to handling death and mourning. I also wrote about how death is handled with a plane called the graveyard (I don't have the rights to Pharasma or the boneyard) with the tower. The tower is where souls go as a transition into the afterlife but it's not always perfect and some souls are forced back to the universe through magic (that's how we get undead!) I also have been writing a few NPC's for GM's to use in their storytelling as well as my own notes on how to run Mechfinder from my personal experience playing it every week (shout out to my players who just hit level 6 and got startled by an AI relic).
We also have anti-mech weapons now! These act closely to siege weapons and can be used by either teams of 10 or mechs (the equivalent of 10 people). These are ginormous weapons that are used against kaiju and other similarly themed threats. I finished converting it to 5e today in between college classes (sadly college work still comes before everything else and that includes Mechfinder/Pathfinder work T_T).
I'm going to be meeting with the team a bit more often depending on my schedule to bounce some ideas I have off of them. I'm going to be taking a deeper look at creature types and how to provide the best descriptions for GM's to use existing creatures from either Monster Core or Monster Manual in their Mechfinder game. I had a fun encounter the other night with a manticore that had been drinking too much of the engrowth serum that it grew to kaiju size. It became the beast of a flavored mech (used the Ettin stat block because it was a boss fight). We're super excited to see if there's anything from Howl of the Wild or Player Core 2 that we can put on our current creatures such as new spells for hackers/drone swarm masters.
In addition to ALL of that, we are currently reviewing planets/places to visit in Arvaxim. A fun part of my job recently has been restructuring the planets to allow our freelancers to go in and add to them. I like our new structure for them and I hope you will to once they're out of the editing room.
But Where's Playtest 3?!
James! I hear you cry! When can I see some of this content?! Great question person, might I also state that you look amazing today. Playtest 3 is currently in the works (actually doing the layout tonight and tomorrow). This is going to be showing off the AI Companions for Pathfinder 2e/D&D 5e. It is currently being discussed if we can add the anti-mech weapons to this playtest as well if we feel like it's good enough to be sent out to y'all. I hope in early early April you'll get playtest 3 because AI Companions were a fun challenge to write and I want to know how people feel about companions that are in your mech instead of on the battlefield with you.
How are archetypes being introduced to 5e?
This is a conversation that we're having. Some archetypes are going to be converted to subclasses for 5e where we can get the most thematic with it. For instance, the Thrown-Together is being converted to a Roguish Archetype because I felt that it'd best suit the rogue play style of catching people off guard. A few other archetypes such as the AI Cultivator/AI Caller are going to be harder to determine where we ideally want to see them (ranger/wizard respectively). I don't want to say anything is set in stone yet but we are going to make sure that you're getting high-quality work regardless of which game you play.
Foundry?
Surprise! We brought on a Foundry team member early on in the project to help determine how much we can do right now. It turns out that I'm not the best foundry developer (learned how to program foundry so we could playtest things) but our amazing freelancer is and they've already done so much for us. I could not be happier to have them on the team! This will hopefully allow for a smaller release window between the final product and foundry integration. We're stacking the book with as much as we can and so if we can get ahead of the curve then I'm happy.
Pathfinder 2e OGL vs ORC
A fun question for developers everywhere that's working on Pathfinder 2e material right now. To sum it up, we're going to break some stuff into a "final book" and an "extra add-on book" that'd be completely free. We started writing Mechfinder before the remaster was announced and we love the remaster over here. There is content however that we can't use that we wrote initially such as combination weapons, access to certain spells, access to certain feats, etc. We're going to compile all of the content that we had to cut due to the OGL vs ORC license debate into a free digital product that will come with any order of the PDF. This is so you, the consumer, doesn't lose any of the material we have written already. This will also happen with the 5e side as well but only for content that will be in the additional content book. For example, the combination weapon Zeepo gun (gravity gun!) will be in the additional OGL content add-on. While this isn't ideal, this allows us to keep to our promise of keeping the book ORC compatible and give you even more content. We can also swap out spells for spells we thought would be more thematically appropriate on certain creatures or even write full variants for them! This topic is complex and ever-shifting as the remaster comes out so we might change some things around or update as we go along.
I want to end this update with a special thank you to everyone who has supported the project. This has been a giant love letter to magic, mechs, and the many daydreams I've had of combining the two. Arvaxim allows me to explore so many awesome planets and themes that I feel would be fun to share with others. Without the support PJ Megaw, Aburey Knotts, Andrew Hooper, Victoria Sullivan, and many others, I don't think we'd be as along as we are now. Below are art pieces and sketches that is going to be added to Mechfinder! Have a great day and may it be filled with magic and mechs!
