Today I'm gonna be writing up my process and thinking for designing the Extra Advances of New Blood! Actually I'd already done this but then lost my draft which is why this post was rather delayed. Sorry about the wait!

Design Theory

That's right, it's time for a new category! Before even getting to the specific story and design, I want to talk a little bit about the idea of Extra Advances. First of all - Extra Advances are in Spire! These extra advances are small collections of abilities, representing some other notable part of the setting that players might interface with - things like "serving in the city guard" or "having been enlisted in the war" or "being infected with the interdimensional living mantid disease." The idea is you can acquire these specialized abilities, just as long as you've fulfilled the requirements to access them. The text even notes that probably you could just ask your GM to start with access to them. Many of them are pretty mundane, a small number (like that mantid disease) are quite weird, but a good number of them feel to me like they're conceptually equivalent to some of the core classes. Or, another way: there's not, to my eyes, a huge conceptual distinction between how Spire imagines "Extra Advances" versus "Core Classes." 

Practically, many of Spire's Extra Advances probably don't support the core class experience; I'd want something more interesting for the Enlisted; the Vyskant mantid disease probably would need a lot of work to support a whole core class. But some, like the Hellionite, a devotee of the gun religion, or the Luck-Priest of Stolz, or the Chosen of the Hungry Deep (and more!) would probably do just fine. In Spire, your class is kind of just your job. You might have or eventually unlock something kind of magical, but there are lots of ways of being in Spire (the city) that might make a character interesting to play as. Instead of writing all of those up as core classes, with core abilities and a lot of descriptive text, Extra Advances can flesh out the world, giving context to pieces that could be fun or interesting.

In contrast, Heart has rather more strenuous demands of its characters and classes. Classes in Heart represent some connection to power that keeps that character alive in the nightmare red heaven, but they also contain the seed of the character's destruction - every Heart class ends with a handful of ways to die. 

Extra Advances in Heart, then, have an opportunity. Your class is doing the heavy conceptual lifting about how you survive and how you're eventually going to die. Extra Advances can help flesh out the world and give additional options, without having to lift those big weights! There are a few constraints though - since classes in Heart trend towards the more powerful (and their abilities towards being more impactful), Extra Advances probably want to be "competitive," if they're going to cost the same as a core class's advances. And since Heart classes are kind of heavy conceptually and already filled with powerful options, I think it's both less interesting and more potentially problematic to start play with an Extra Advance "unlocked."

That's my high level design thinking, at least! Extra Advances seem like a slam dunk for Heart, in that they can give more context and delicious weirdness to the world in a player facing way. They don't have to support the whole narrative arc of a core class, but I think they do need some strong hook and an appropriate "power level," in a way that the Spire Extra Advances did not.

Design Story

I mentioned previously that starting to conceptualize Beats as "treasure" was a big key in unlocking the final design push for the adventure! I think I would generalize the idea as "treasure is player-facing stuff to get excited about discovering." Once I started thinking about secret beats, I pretty immediately made the connection to Extra Advances and their requirements as fun things to discover.

I wasn't terribly systematic about distributing Extra Advances through the paths of the adventure - since the Landmark design and writing had happened first, the process was mostly going back through previous writing and gauging whether there were any pieces that I thought could be spun out into an exciting and interesting Extra Advance. In the end, I picked six! They did wind up pretty evenly dispersed I think, although two of them are probably only found very late.

A small handful of them came together almost immediately - the Student of Chalcedony, for example, simply flowed out of my head into a nearly complete draft in one go. Others were some of the final pieces of writing before publication; one of them, tied to the deepest mysteries, took me quite a long time - it was tough for me to find "minor ability" scale stuff that felt right! Most common was to get most of the way towards finishing and needing to spend some time iterating out a tricky idea until it felt right.

I decided to keep to three minor advances and two "full" major advances per extra advance, for a total of eight usually, although two each have a zenith, and one has a core. There are also a small few "floating" singleton extra advances here and there, little spells usually. I stole that idea from ARCANA, a neat little fan supplement that's a little tricky to find (but it's on the official discord).

In a few cases, writing the Extra Advance clicked something about the world into place - the ambulatory mushrooms of the Royal Taster became part of the writeup of Rotgrave, and writing up the Student of Chalcedony helped inspire some ideas to punch up the Pillars Pilgrimage delve.

It's pretty rare that I need to totally scrap an idea, once it's moved from concepting into rough draft form, but this happened several times with the Extra Advances! Mostly for one of the secret ones. I attribute this mostly to the small amount of working space I'd given myself - I wanted them to be fairly short, which meant there wasn't room for abilities that didn't pull their weight!

Mechanical Considerations

Designing the abilities was largely the same as designing for the three classes I wrote - a minor ability I think should have something conditionally or provisionally useful, and a major ability can be a little narrow, but should be something you're excited to pull the trigger on. I erred on the side of making these Extra Advances slightly more "powerful" but a little narrower. Not that gauging power level is particularly objective in Heart! But I wanted the abilities to have a little oomph - after all, in New Blood's paradigm, players have to jump through a couple hoops to get the abilities anyway.  If they weren't "secret," and their requirements were easier, they'd probably be slightly less "powerful!" But as I said before, I think you can only go so far in that direction before they start to not really fit inside the usable design space.

The minor abilities mostly conform to Heart's pattern - get a skill or domain and a little ability. Between the three minor abilities each Extra Advance gets in New Blood, usually it's one skill and one domain, and then the third ability is something slightly more powerful, but not quite enough to be a major ability. The thinking there was that it might not always feel great to pick up a minor ability if you've already got the skill or domain it's offering; sure, you get a Knack for doubling up, and you get the little ability of the minor advance! But it might not feel as impactful as opening up a new skill. In that sense, these minor abilities might be not very appealing either, since they don't give a skill or domain, but the hope is that they're interesting enough to make a case for themselves.

Some mechanical consideration was given to the question of which skill/s or domain/s should each Extra Advance get - on the one hand, with limited space, there isn't a lot of room for much besides the expected. The Surgeon Priest gets Mend, for example. I agonized for a little while on whether it was acceptable for the Royal Taster to have its granted skills overlap with the Myco-Alchemist's.

The other big consideration was that I wanted each Extra Advance to feel like distinct from extant classes. Again, I didn't give myself a lot of canvas for these, and there isn't a lot of unclaimed mechanical design space, at least insofar as the dice mechanic is concerned. Largely this plays out in the major abilities, but that "extra" little minor ability I think goes a long way - both the Surgeon Priest and the Student of Chalcedony get little minor abilities about healing people, but they wind up feeling very different, I think.

Favorite Text

A lot of my favorite writing went into the two secret Extra Advances... Well, I guess if you've made it all the way here, you can see them. Turn back now if you don't want spoilers!

Secret Extra Advance #1 - the Chimeric Convert. Both of these "secrets" were awfully fun to write for, in particular because I felt like I hit on a pretty strong idea of the voice for each. The Chimeric Convert is kind of reverential, but also a little direct - it's one of the places the text directly addresses the reader. The CC gets a core ability, which involves a random mutation table - this was one of the final pieces to come together! Hopefully it turned out fun - I often feel a little let down by random tables like it. But it was a lot of fun to fill it with examples of real biology - one result has your body creating iron sulfide deposits, like the scaly footed gastropod.

Secret Extra Advance #2 - the Metaphysical Biologist. To be honest, this last Extra Advance might only be for me - it is some of the most on my bullshit I think I have ever been. One of its abilities is named after a term coined by Stephen Jay Gould. Here's the flavor text for their Zenith ability: Hidden behind every formula, every proof, every diagram, lurking in the depths of their arguments and obscured by several layers of code, you have discerned the secret hope of the metaphysical biologists. It is not enough that it’s possible for an idea to live; it must also be able to die.

With that, I think I've said just about everything about the process of writing New Blood! It was a lot of fun, and I'm really proud of the design work (and other work!) that went into it, and I'm kind of psyched to keep writing... This past week I started wondering about designing another class even. Well, if I do start writing another one, you'll know where to find it. Thanks for reading along!