Hey! I've been squirreling away between midterms working on a fan-made supplement for Anima: Beyond Fantasy. There's been some work in the community with new subsystems (alchemy, for one) and I'd like to reimagine some pretty big parts of the core rules.
This is not a small undertaking. I'm wanting to completely rewrite the class system, for one. I want to add the option for Vancian magic. I want to add on to the existing Psychic disciplines. I want to make a couple of compendiums of monsters, NPCs, and artifacts. Yes, above and beyond what's already offered. But first of all, I want the class system done. It's the biggest, beefiest, most difficult part of this whole project, and it's also got the most potential. Let me explain:
In Anima: Beyond Fantasy, there are twenty classes based on six archetypes. That sounds like a lot of options, but for the most part, they're not too different. Any class can take any role, and the only real difference turns out to be some +5s or so every level, and some things are cheaper for some classes than others. That's not a system I feel reflects Anima's spirit the best. Anima, to me, is all about customizing your character and making the coolest combination of explosions and light shows you can. The Magic, Psychic, Martial Arts, and Ki systems are all incredibly flexible, with literally hundreds of character options between them. The class system, the most integral system to creating your character, has twenty. Sure, you can make new classes, but they're pretty much covered by the twenty base classes. So, I have a proposition.
We take the classes down to six. Fighter, Mystic, Psychic, Novel, Prowler, and Domine. That's it. In the place of +5s and cheaper +s for abilities, we let the players customize those DP costs. They get a point pool to spend on raising their LP, initiative, and other level bonuses, and they can also spend that pool to make primary and secondary abilities cheaper. We give them an extra 25 DP per level. Their DP total can be spent on Primary Abilities, Secondary Abilities, and a third thing - the Class Tree. It's a grove, really, with six trees and four hundred+ nodes. Each node is either a fruit or a leaf, or it is a fork in the branch. Leaves are the +5s from the old system. Fruits are the tips of the branches, and they are class features. Forks are prerequisites for leaves and fruits, and they also happen to look a lot like D&D's feats.
Things like the Arcana Sephirah are integrated into the Class Tree; Predetermined Magic Projection would be forks, and the Avatar ability would be a fruit. With me so far? Feel free to ask for clarification on
any
point. Summoning would be a fork, with more forks for creatures, Incarnations, and the Arcana as forks further down. The idea here is to centralize and map out character options. Even though the Class Tree has six separate trees built in, you can jump between them. Identical abilities are "jumping points", so if you get a +5 to Block in one tree, you can jump to another and continue up that tree. Multiclassing couldn't be easier (compared to standard Anima).
If we can reverse-engineer the process Anima Studios used to make the original 20 classes (I think I've almost cracked it), then we can get started on that system and get a start on this undertaking. So far, I've been translating some D&D SRD stuff to Anima. That's been getting stuck under "Fighter Skills" on the PDF I'm linking too. It's not their final place, and there are going to be plenty more - this is a working document, and everything is subject to change.
Questions? Comments? Strange looks?