Today I'll be tackling the design of all four callings all at once! Mechanically, there's not as much going on with them,  but I think Callings are a really interesting challenge and opportunity. I wrote on Twitter that "Callings are a really interesting (but kind of tricky!) piece of design - they serve as background, motivation, advancement, and character arc". I've had fun playing with/reinterpreting the core Callings in my own characters, but I've also struggled a little bit with pushing against the limits of them, or hearing folks have a little difficulty with them, so thinking about flexibility and hackability, while making them useful supports was the thing I was shooting for when I first started thinking about writing my own.

Design Story: The calling I went into design pretty certain about was the idea that became the DOPPELGANGER - the idea was, "what if there was a calling you could pick up after your character tragically died?" I'm sure we've all seen the jokes about a D&D character dying unexpectedly, only to be replaced by their identical cousin - it's funny, and kind of a cute concession to the cursed problem of tying a tactical grid-combat system to a beautiful Original Character generator. It doesn't make any "sense", and that's kind of the point - it reaffirms that we're playing a game, and that the important thing is to have fun. But something fun about HEART is - that it actually would make perfect sense down in this nightmare reality warping living dungeon! And it seemed immediately strong enough to support its own Calling, even on its own. 

Second chronologically was HATE, which has a less clear origin, but I think it was looking for an idea that was even more tragic than the core - being so absolutely controlled by your anger struck me as a deeply tragic and kind of resonant, and the Zenith beats are pretty clear.

Third was TRANSFORMATION. I wanted to swing the opposite way - what would a joyous or enthusiastic calling be like? What desire could pull you to the Heart without trepidation? The Heart is usually twinged with horror - but there are sickos (affectionate) who are into that stuff! I know some of them!

The very last was MIRACLE - so late that I was pretty convinced there were only going to be three Callings! But I went on one last think-through - what would make someone give up everything and come to the Heart? My mind went to the normal kind of desperation - someone pushed to the extreme, who has no other choice. The Heart, a place of twisted possibility, is the only out they can imagine.

Both Transformation and Miracle are close to infringing on Enlightenment's territory - all of them are about searching for something that would be impossible in the world above. They're all distinguished via their Beats, but I think it's important too that there are other differences - the Miracle isn't really looking for "knowledge" - they don't need to know how it works, they just need a miracle. Transformation could describe a particularly weird Enlightenment character, but they already know that the Heart can change bodies - the important thing is securing the means. Hate is also fairly close to Revenge, from ICHOR-DROWNED (which is awesome!), but I think that they're also distinct enough to warrant both of them existing - Revenge is going for a more high-drama, Count of Monte Cristo, versus Hate's doomed tragedy, Moby Dick, kind of thing.

With the concepts done, the longest part of design was coming up with different Beats! This took a while, but was a lot of fun. I would say the biggest goal was to provide a variety of "paths" to empower players to feel like they can take the Calling and make their own arc - that you can take the Miracle towards a kind of zealous hope or deeper despair or dark determination, etc. It became a little difficult to avoid overlapping on some of the fictional beats, but getting more specific I think helps to sell them as enticements / inspiration.

Beats might have been the longest, but pretty close were the questions. I wanted to do these right! It's been my experience pretty commonly that these kinds of things are just not very exciting in the long run - they're there to serve a function, to kick the game off without doing the tedious "ehhh how did we all meet up?" kind of stuff, but after the first session, if they fall into the background, that's no big deal. But I still wanted them to be fun! Adventure's question, where you assert a connection to a powerful patron and how you and a teammate have maybe made an enemy of them - that's awesome! So I spent a while agonizing about the gist and then wording about the social questions. 

Quickest and easiest were the abilities. The core Callings set a pretty good baseline for how "impactful" these abilities can be - they can be fun (and some of them are pretty good, like Enlightenment's!), but I think they mostly serve as a way of reinforcing the theme.

Mechanical Considerations: Not too many, and mostly mentioned above. Predominantly making sure the beats aren't too easy or hard to achieve, and the abilities are all in-band with the core playbooks. The ability  space is still pretty wide, in terms of "a small but impactful thing you can do once per session".

Assorted Inspirations: I've had doppelgangers / doubles on my mind for a while - Masks' Joined playbook is one of the ttrpg things at the root of it, I think. Hate maybe traces some inspiration back to an Unknown Armies fan-made adept, about a mage who got their magical powers from never feeling angry, and the conversations I had with my weird friends I played Unknown Armies with about that idea as it turned over in my head (this must have been, like, 2008). Also the Body-Warping rage of Cu Chulainn. Just now thinking about Transformation made me think about Racter, from Shadowrun: Hong Kong. 

Favorite Text: Most of the beats are pretty utilitarian, but that's its own kind of fun. "Get involved in a love triangle" is just a fun thing to write, and I had a lot of fun with that style - "Become embroiled in a haven-wide scandal" or "Start (or ignite) a blood feud" all make me smile. I think probably my favorite line has to be Transformation's ability, PLIABLE FLESH - "Your body is a willing canvas, and you and the Heart will paint a masterpiece"

And that's all the content for NEW BLOOD so far! I'm pretty pleased with how the adventure is shaping up, to the point where it's making me change what I had planned for the ancestry... We'll see which one of those gets released first (almost certainly the ancestry, but hey, who knows).