Wheel of Time v1.0

By Kapitalist, in Your Settings

Posted at

Hello all! I've been working on a Wheel of Time setting for Genesys for a while now, and I've got it to a point where I'm ready to share and looking for feedback. For those who are not familiar with the book series, the Wheel of Time is an epic fantasy book series written by Robert Jordan.

I've come up with an approach to handle Channeling, the dominant magic in the setting, but I'm not sure if I'm set on it. Instead of having two magic skills, saidar and saidin, I kept it more generic as "Channeling". I combined it into one skill because both saidar and saidin can accomplish the same feats, with differences that I believed could be described mostly narratively. But I'm not sold on it, and looking for feedback to keep it or split it up.

A problem I ran into was preventing Channeling from being the everything skill. In the books the magic is capable of most of the spell types presented in the core rulebook. But a fun fact about magic users in Wheel of Time is that everyone has their own unique "talents" that allow them to do different things with the same magic. So I ended up giving the base skill access to the Attack, Barrier, Dispel, and Utility spell types, and then locked the rest behind tier 2 and tier 3 talents.

I also separated Illusion magic into it's own spell type. I based it heavily on Conjuration. We see some forms of conjuration in the books, such as summoned items, but very little summoned allies or creatures. But we do see quite a bit of Illusion magic, and I had some new effects I wanted to incorporate. So that's why I made it's own magic type.

A part of the setting I wanted to elevate in some ways was being a Blademaster, so you'll see a bunch of talents with elaborate names, like "Cat Crosses the Courtyard". These are all references to moves or sword styles from the books. I've also covered the basics of being a wolf brother and dream walking through talents. Some of the feedback I'm most interested in is the new talents.

Parts of the setting I didn't cover yet are ta'veren, tel'aran'rhiod, the alternate worlds, the 'fin, and the lesser seen magics, such as tree singing and the True Power. I also didn't do anything for angreal (magic item) creation yet. Ta'veren are interesting, since you could argue that the players are ta'veren by their very nature, or that ta'veren behavior could be covered by the story point pool. So I just left those alone for now. I have some half-formed ideas for some of these.

Finally, be aware that I haven't play tested any of this yet. That's something I hope to do eventually, but my gaming time is somewhat limited. The document is just a google doc. No special formatting to incorporate dice symbols or icons. Putting this into a more professional format is a long term goal.

Here's the link to the google doc: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1E73XAv3p_0UDjaoOEFY1rL-uVGV5QjoF?usp=sharing

May you always find water and shade.

Posted at

I missed this post a year ago. 😞 I'm going to read it. Saidar and Saidin are restricted by the gender of the user. One is only for female and the other is only for male. That make gender a prerequisite for each.

Posted at
11 hours ago, WolfRider said:

I missed this post a year ago. 😞 I'm going to read it. Saidar and Saidin are restricted by the gender of the user. One is only for female and the other is only for male. That make gender a prerequisite for each.

Correct, they are restricted by sex. During my original design work I toyed with Channeling being two skills, i.e. Channeling (Saidin) and Channeling (Saidar). I eventually leaned into just the one Channeling skill. For the most part, Saidin and Saidar can accomplish the same things with some small differences. For example, both Saidin and Saidin can make the Traveling weave, but Saidin describes it as "burning a hole through the pattern" while saidar describes it as "making two places the same". Both sides can put out a fire, but saidin does it by moving the heat somewhere else, while saidar uses air and water to smother it. So for simplicity I combined them into one skill. During character creation a player will determine what sex their character is, which narratively determines which half of the One Power they use.

I haven't completely abandoned the idea of two skills. I'm toying with the idea of an alternative rule set Channeling is split into two, and different talents for each, but that will be down the road.