I have good news for Ostravia; I’ve hit the next step on the road to having Ostravia officially recognized as my honors thesis and as such need only get one more document signed to get everything official. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the busiest weeks of the year for me, so progress otherwise is pretty slow.
So far, my progress this week has mostly been doing the background research and writing on the social structures in Ostravia. There’s been some effort to codify these roles and backgrounds in the Social Combat system, but I’m hesitant to do too much on that before I get around to doing more on character creation and qualities. I still haven’t figured out how each social rank and such will be handled and priced-I want players to feel like choosing something other than a noble is a good idea, but not have too much penalty if they do decide to play a noble. I’m leaning further and further towards a package-based character creation system that allows me to have the ability to differentiate in rank and status.
I’m also considering adding a reputation system into social combat. To a certain degree this becomes redundant with Influence and Legitimacy (Power is impacted to a lesser extent, as it has other uses), but it also means that characters can function differently in other places. On the other hand, word typically travels as fast as a character would, so barring what would perhaps better work for qualities the reputation system does very little.
Unrelatedly, I’m working on something small to do because I like to release something on my birthday each year, and I’m not 100% sure Ostravia will be done in time. We’ll see about it when and if it comes out.