Ame no Woto - The Last Tour

[Five_X]

AMENOWOTO
The Sound of the Rain.
__________________

A letter arrived for you today - courier says it's for your eyes only. You hem your thumb along the edge, breaking the seal and slipping out the contents. You look up briefly, wondering if anyone can see you, then your eyes return to the parchment, reading each line intently.

"The Armed Forces of His Majesty's Government... gradual encroachment of the Salt... unknown lands... scouts report activity aligning with..."

It's a mission. No - an offer. One that you, in your circumstances, accept. Why you? You have your reasons for accepting, but perhaps there's some other reason the office of the king might be interested in you. Misdeeds - or virtues? It's a team being assembled, so the letter says, and you're one of four or five being given this special task. A paying task, of course: supplies free of charge on arrival, and 1,000 crowns to each of you should you come back alive and with information on the Salt.

The Salt? You've heard of it - maybe knew somebody who got sick from it. "Stay away from Seven Towns next July" goes the rumour, but it's just a rumour. According to the letter there's a village of Dalefolk far to the north in the mountains, an especially reclusive group, and they're staying in their land despite the Salt sweeping across the forest they live in. Something no one else has managed to do and survive. Some Dalefolk in Andover claim to have lived in this village once, and they know its leader by name: Elys, a queen or chieftess, who apparently can speak to the trees, and they all live in one great big one that thrives on the Salt. We - the royal we - need to know the truth behind all this. The money's good, and it's a crisp autumn. September 883. The Salt is receding, so the scholars estimate, at least for now. The perfect time - maybe the only time - to investigate this phenomenon.

An address is enclosed: 14 Lawrence Passage, just off the central boulevard of Andover a hundred feet from the river. A quiet place, where you'll meet the others. Another location is included: a dead drop, mapped out in fine ink. The location of your promised supplies. They're trusting you - almost desperate, aren't they? You have three days to make a decision and to prepare. Sounds like you'll be making some new friends soon, and getting some fresh woodland air.

And that last, cryptic sentence: finding the truth of this world, no matter the cost...

---

It's Ame no Woto! Ten years since I started it in the first place here on BL, I'm bringing back the story I was never able to tell in full. It'll be run as an online tabletop game using a virtual tabletop - probably Roll20 - and is heavily based on the rules of D&D 5E.

You play as a mercenary in a post-apocalyptic future in which the world has been reduced to ruins save for a few industrialised cities, plagued by a strange and deadly phenomenon known as the Salt that kills or drives mad all who it touches. It is your job to search for the origins of the Salt, which initially takes you to a forest far to the north of civilisation, where a village of animal-eared people reside in the treetops. Somehow, they've managed to thrive within an area of concentrated Salt even as it continues to spread farther and farther south, threatening life as we know it.

The guiding philosophy of Ame no Woto as an RPG is giving players freedom of choice, and feeling that they're important in the (meta)world of the game. I want to avoid situations where you can't do anything because you don't have any applicable abilities for the situation so you stand around or attack uselessly, or you see other players and feel like they're contributing way more to the game than you. Ame no Woto has no classes, but it has a grand total of 101 perks (not including multi-tier perks) accounting for a huge number of potential playstyles. It works very simply: you level up, and get a perk point, and take a perk. If the game goes on and you feel like your build isn't working or isn't interesting for you, you can take a perk to reset a perk and shift your character's gameplay more to your liking. I also want to make sure balance is as perfect as it can be, so I take any and all suggestions to improve the feel of the game: there's only so much I can consider with my own brain in terms of theory before the reality of gameplay makes things stand out.

If you're interested and make a character sheet, you can PM it to me here on BL, or you can message me on Discord at Five_X [#] 7510. As much as I'd like to have everything concentrated here like the good old days, I have to accept that times have changed: there will be an Ame no Woto Discord server for coordinating availability for sessions. You can even join it if you're not in the game as well; having spectators can be pretty fun, and is one of the main draws I think of play-by-post RPs like the ones here.

Like most D&D games, it'll be for a group of 4-5 players starting at level 1.

What's changed since last time?

I've completely redesigned Ame no Woto from the ground up. That means fleshed-out gameplay mechanics and more fully-realised lore, while still capturing the unique style I wanted to create with this RPG in the first place. Old Ame was burdened most of all by bloated features: there was a specific rule for absolutely everything that no one knew, and whole major gameplay features that even I didn't know how to use (i.e. the Fatigue system, thirst/hunger, encumbrance, so many more). It was a mess that tried to be everything all at once and I'm not sure how it managed to survive as long as it did, in any form. The mechanics for this version of Ame no Woto are almost wholesale copied-and-pasted from D&D 5E, but with classes stripped out and replaced with Ame's dear old perk system, along with some quality-of-life changes to D&D combat based on discussions with fellow players.

The original Ame no Woto's other cardinal sin was its closed, stifling roleplaying system. Trying to hem too closely to its inspirations, Ame was choked by having a rigid military chain of command and little room for player backstories or motivations: the PCs were drafted into a unit and they had to go on adventures and listen to their sergeant. I had a lot of wild ideas that sounded amazing on paper but fell apart when it came to actually playing the game, and by the time I realised it, it was too late.

The third major problem of the old Ame no Woto was that I was terrible at level design and mapmaking, especially with dungeon crawl-type scenarios. I relied strangely heavily on environmental storytelling, and made maps that were much too large and comparatively empty. This is something I've worked to improve, based on my own experiences as a player and through advice from wise D&D elders. No more spending a whole session just moving tokens around hallways.

The full rulebook for Ame no Woto is hosted on Google Sites, right here: https://sites.google.com/view/amenowoto
If you have any questions, please ask away! I look forward to a fun game, and to finally see Ame properly realised. If you want some inspiration, Ame no Woto itself is based most of all on the 2010 anime Sora no Woto, still to this day one of my very favourites. As the title suggests it's also been more recently inspired by Girls Last Tour, as well as Coppelion, Desert Punk, Last Exile, and Otherside Picnic.

[Five_X]

I've finally finished tinkering with the Ame rulebook, and everything is now settled mush as the Ash settles after the Conflagration - praise be. I've made a bunch of minor changes, balance adjustments, and three additions: first is a new Background, the Pauper, for those of you who want to be so poor that people give you free stuff because they feel bad for you. The second addition is a set of six new Perks offering a few new gameplay options; and finally the third is a small new feature: Traits, flavourful options you can (optionally!) choose during character creation to gain small benefits at the price of some small debuffs.

At this point, the rulebook won't change unless there's some egregious balance issue that's brought to my attention. So, I'll be laying down a deadline for sheets: next Saturday at 11:59pm EST - that's Saturday the 6th of August, not this upcoming Saturday. You can send them to me in a PM here, or via Discord. Since this is a tabletop RPG, you don't need to make a super elaborate backstory for your character, just something with a hook, motivations, and some personality. You can go as all-out with it as you want though, I'm not your dad.

To fit with my schedule, once the game starts we'll be playing every other week, at a day and time that works for the group since my days are all flexible. Depending on availability though we can do extra sessions and make it weekly, but I don't want to strain anyone too much, I know a lot of people are also busy. Sessions will last about 3 hours, or whatever feels best for everybody.

With that out of the way, have a fun cosmological diagram of the world of Ame no Woto:

Spoiler:

I look forward to everyone's submissions!