Happy New Year and Happy Holidays, Travellers!

2020 is finally behind us. Goodness, it has been a one heck of a trip! This new year holds some exciting things for us here at cloud sprite studios.

However, it has been a tough start to the year for me. Over the break, I lost a dear friend of mine and I haven’t had the creative energies to focus like I did before. I have been taking some time to get my headspace together, and while I’ve still got far to go, I am starting to get back into the rhythm of things.

Oliver has been a great help in this with motivation—especially in regards to keeping up our weekly meetings—and I’ve gotten a lot of support from my family and friends, too. We’re all looking out for each other. Oliver and I have made some good progress on The Forests of Faera, and in this devlog, we’re going to dive into a bit of detail about what you can do as a traveller when playing the game. Let’s get into it!

As you travel through the forests, you will have to overcome all kinds of obstacles. Scaling cliffs, disarming traps, and sneaking past sleeping ogres are all in a day’s work for a traveller such as you. When you are faced with such an obstacle, you must choose how you will try to overcome it: using an ability or weaving a spell. These approaches are always risky or uncertain—there is always a chance that something will go wrong.

Many tabletop roleplaying games have a multitude of statistics, abilities, and customisation options for your character. While this complexity can be fun for many players, we wanted to decomplexify the processes of creating a character and playing the game so that our players would be able to focus more on their adventure than the mechanics. Our goal in creating The Forests of Faera has always been to develop a simple, elegant, and fun system from the ground up, and we feel that this is the best way to do it.

Abilities

Just like all the creatures of Faera, you have three abilities that help you to overcome the obstacles you will face on your travels: your body, mind, and spirit.

• Body is a measure of your agility, balance, natural athleticism, physical power, and poise. It is used in tasks such as threading a needle, lifting a heavy object, evading falling debris, scaling a wall, or swimming against a river.
• Mind is a measure of your common sense, deductive reasoning, intelligence, perception, and wisdom. It is used in tasks such as detecting traps, tracking animals, decyphering cryptic texts, or discerning someone’s true intent.
• Spirit is a measure of your ambition, confidence, empathy, leadership and willpower. It is used in tasks such as praying to a deity, intimidating a guard, tricking a creature, or inspiring others.

When you create your character, you don’t have to worry about numbers. There are no modifiers or +1s to add to your abilities—you choose one of your abilities to be your strength, and another to be your weakness. These will help or hinder you when you use your abilities to overcome the obstacles in your path.

Composure is a measure of the physical ability and mental willpower you need to continue an activity. It is gradually whittled away as you explore the forests. The more composure you have, the easier it will be for you to overcome obstacles by using your abilities.

Runes

All creatures of Faera have an attunement to the ancient magics of the forests. Some extraordinary creatures, however—such as travellers like you—are marked by these magics in the form of glowing runes (often on their scales, skin, or fur). Runes that you may be marked with during your travels:

Runes act as conduits for the ancient magics of the forests and guide the ways that creatures can weave spells. So long as you are marked with a suitable rune, you can weave a spell to attempt to create the magical effect you desire.

Enchantment is a measure of how deeply you have succumbed to the forests’ charms. It is gradually increased as you draw on wild magics to weave spells. As you become more enchanted, the forests mark you with additional runes, and you become able to draw on stronger magics to weave more powerful spells.

Thanks for sticking with us this far!

We’ve made a great amount of progress with finalising the last few sections of the rulebook for The Forests of Faera. We have locked in all of the mechanics of the game, we have been playtesting it for the past six months, and we’re in the process of coalescing our playtest rules into a beautiful rulebook for you. Once it’s ready, you will be able to play our game, and hopefully even place a copy on your bookshelf amongst your favourite games. This process is taking a lot of time, but we strongly believe in our game and how fun it can be!

In our next devlog, we’ll show you how to play The Forests of Faera, and we’ll take a look at some of the interesting mechanics (and rationale) behind the gameplay.

Join the conversation in our cloud sprite studios community Discord.

See you then!

Aaron & Oliver,

cloud sprite studios