We come now to the end of our journey. This is the sixth and final step on the Genesys expanded setting creation sheet and focuses on the game mechanics in the setting. That’s right, we’ve gone through more than ten thousand words of material without touching on a single game rule except for how planet sizes affect certain rolls. That’s it. It’s entirely separate from when I first started making Iron Horizons a TTRPG setting.
Genesys RPG Mechanics
At the time, I was trying to use the 5e SRD to make Iron Horizons, and it did not go well. Setting material and mechanics were inextricably intertwined because of how 5e functions. It’s a very structured, black and white, rigid system. Anything that uses the traditional d20 system is going to be similar in that regard, as its resolution mechanic is, at its most basic, a Yes/No system. Either a character’s attempt at something succeeds or it fails. There can be critical successes and critical failures, but those don’t change that the core question is a Yes/No binary. And here at Faerspell, we don’t buy into binaries, especially not in terms of narrative experiences. If you’ve ever played or run a 5e game where a failed roll brought the story to a standstill, you can see how that can be problematic. We’ll take a bit of a digression here to touch on the underlying resolution mechanics of 5e and Genesys to understand the differences in worldbuilding/mechanical integrations.
Everything in 5e is built around increasing the chances of a Yes result or avoiding a No result, the mechanics become critical. Classes, backgrounds, and species (replacing the super sketchy idea of ‘races’) are ways of increasing the chances of a Yes. As a result, they are tied into the mechanics from the beginning. This leads to the classic RPG categorizations of Tank, DPS, Healer, and Crowd Control, in which characters are built to fulfill specific roles within the party. The “fluff,” as I have sometimes seen worldbuilding information called, is built around the mechanical goals.
Genesys does not use a binary resolution mechanic. It uses a pool of dice, split between three sets of paired positive and negative dice, with different symbols representing types of roll results:
- Ability Dice & Difficulty Dice
- Proficiency Dice & Challenge Dice
- Boost Dice & Setback Dice
The symbols on paired dice cancel each other out, with the results including success/failure, advantage/threat, and triumph/despair. The success and failure dynamic are the most foundational since they determine if the action succeeds or not, essentially filling the same role as a D20 roll in 5e.
The advantage and threat results are a separate resource, basically, that determines if there are any additional positive or negative effects. This means you can have successful rolls with negative consequences, failed rolls with positive consequences, and all variations of those two dynamics.
The final set of symbols, triumph and despair, are similar to the critical success and critical failure of 5e, except they are not dependent on a successful or failed roll. That gives us three axes of results for any dice roll: did it succeed, were there positive or negative consequences, and were there extremely positive or extremely negative consequences. Additionally, Advantage can be used to activate certain effects, while extra successes add to the value of the success.
You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned anything regarding classes or species. The reason is because they don’t exist in Genesys. There are Careers, which help determine the cost of improving various skills, and Archetypes, which determine starting characteristics, but that’s about it.
(For a complete collection of all CRB and EPG mechanical items used for Iron Horizons, check out my World Anvil article which includes all Genesys-specific elements necessary to play.)
Archetypes
Iron Horizons is an all-human setting right now, so archetypes will be different versions of humans. That both simplifies things, but also makes it challenging to ensure every player has something that can represent what they want to play.
I appreciate that Genesys uses the term Archetype because it avoids so many of D&D’s problematic elements, but also captures the essence of the idea better. These archetypes are universal, familiar ideas that serve as the foundation for a character. The CRB and EPG have archetypes including laborer, aristocrat, trickster, intellectual, and average human, while different settings add archetypes to represent their genre— including Elves, Dwarves, Revenants, Aliens (of various types), and so on.
I have some ideas for Iron Horizons archetypes. I don’t think they’re necessary at this point, however. Again, we’re focusing on a minimum viable setting, what are the bear bare necessities? While the core archetypes may not be as closely linked to the setting as some might like, they are enough to play at least a short campaign with. When I revisit the project for a full campaign setting, then I’ll create some more specific archetypes.
But for now, let’s not add more to our plate than we already have.
Skills & Careers
Skills and careers are tied together in Genesys. In Genesys, a career, essentially, is a pre-made package of skills and a small ability (???) that gives the character something distinctive. There’s nothing like class features in 5e, as character progression is based on increasing skills rather than unlocking new abilities (which fall under Talents). Particularly interesting observation is that careers don’t even make it onto the sheet. It’s only skills.
Genesys has a fairly extensive list of skills and a decent number of career options. I will be using the Careers from the CRB and EPG to put together a list of skills and careers with small tweaks. I won’t talk much about careers because they are relatively minor at this point, but I’ll include the list of careers for clarity.
Career List
- Entertainer
- Explorer
- Fighter Pilot
- Hacker*
- Healer
- Leader
- Mad Scientist (Swap alchemy for Science skill)
- Scoundrel
- Socialite
- Soldier
- Starship Captain
- Tradesperson
This sheet specifically has spaces to create new skills.
I won’t create any major new skills for this project, but in the future, I can see this being useful. For the minimum viable setting, I might make some adjustments to the Knowledge skills to make them fit the setting, but nothing beyond that. Sadly, knowledge skills are some of the most difficult ones to parse out. Partially because I’m not the most knowledgeable about Science Things and I certainly haven’t created a comprehensive Encyclopedia of All Knowledge for Iron Horizons.
My next TTRPG project will be a fantasy setting, either in Genesys or Legends in the Mist, and if I do the setting I’ve been considering, then I would be dealing with more archetypes and skills. For now, let’s take a look at the Genesys skills. Fortunately, these are relatively simple—name, description, what is covered by the skill, and what is not covered by the skill. If you’ve run any of the Edge of the Empire/Age of Rebellion/Force & Destiny games, you probably ran into a circumstance where you had to figure out which skill to use (Cool vs Vigilance, anyone?).
For the most part, the Genesys book covers all the skills I can imagine using. I might add Knowledge (Commerce) in a more complete setting guide considering how important trade is, and perhaps Knowledge (Home Sectors), Knowledge (Free Colonies), Knowledge (Diskward Marches). Maybe even further ahead, a skill touching on strategy or military leadership if I go the route of first edition Stars Without Number and include campaign sourcebooks based on different themes.
I did include the Mad Scientist career, but changed out the Alchemy skill for one more relevant to the setting, just because that seems apt for a setting in which people decided that bending space-time to traverse dimensions without some sort of shield was an appropriate decision. Plus, it pays homage to the early space opera and pulp sci-fi that I really enjoyed in the past (and played a not-insignificant role in influencing Iron Horizons).
*A Note on the Computers skill and Hacker career: If you read the earlier post on technology and tropes, you’re probably wondering why I included Hacker as a career option and Computers as a skill. Iron Horizons is an analog setting with no internet or digital technologies. Analog computers are the primary device within the setting, including both electric and mechanical computers.
I don’t really understand how these computers work (I barely understand how digital computers work). My understanding was that computers needed to be coded manually, they lacked access credentials because access was physical, and that they didn’t use code like digital computers. However, Iron Horizons has an additional four centuries of analog computing development, so I expect the machines are quite complex and can have issues.
I see no reason why there wouldn’t be some version of hacking, and analog computers do need skill to use. In a fuller version of the setting guide, I might enhance the hacker career with skills like stealth or skullduggery, since hacking would require physical access to the machine (I imagine it would be something like from the original James Bond or Man from U.N.C.L.E stories and involve a variety of methods of gaining access to a secure facility).
Talents
Talents are one of my favorite parts of Genesys but, in this case, also the most complicated. As mentioned earlier, I view these as the equivalent to feats (both individual feats and class features) in D&D 5e. What these all have in common is that they are an option that gives players a mechanical bonus for specific actions, generally making them better at (usually) some aspect of their character’s role. In Genesys, they can add Boost die for higher chances of success, making skills count as career skills (and thus making them cheaper to improve), modify the outcomes of rolls or mechanical processes, or even sometimes allowing for an automatic success at what would otherwise require a roll.
There are a lot of them across the various Genesys sourcebooks. The list I’ve been looking at has 342 separate talents spread across all the books and, unlike 5e, they are not locked behind character class. Instead, talents are acquired by spending experience points, with cost determined by the talent rank (how powerful it is). Unlike Edge of the Empire’s talent trees, which created a very structured experience for the many career specializations, Genesys uses a more free form talent pyramid in which higher tiers of talents can be only added once a certain number of lower tier talents have been met. This results in needing more low-level tier talents to gain access to the higher-level ones (which also have higher experience point ranks).
Lots of player choice here, which I appreciate, but also lots more GM prep if you decide to change things around or make new ones. For that reason, we won’t dive into this too deeply. I’ll point out what the sheet includes for it so that you know what you’re getting into it, but I’ll otherwise be relying on the talents from the CRB and EPG.
So, you can see there’s five elements to a talent. The first is the talent’s name, followed by its tier (1-5).
Then, it has its Activation. I didn’t touch on the combat system in these posts, because this isn’t meant to be a Genesys system mechanical exploration. In Genesys, there are a variety of types of things a character can do on their turn while in initiative: Action, Maneuver, Incidental, and, for Talents, Passive. Passive simply means the effects of the Talent are permanent and are always in effect.
An Action is the biggest thing a character can attempt, usually something like attacking an enemy or trying some complex task. A Maneuver is less intensive than an Attack, and typically includes something like moving or activating a talent.
Generally speaking, players only have one attack and one maneuver per turn, but there are exceptions to this and mechanics that adjust this. An Incidental is something even less extensive than moving. These are going to be very basic, quick, and easy things. For Talents with incidental activation, these are going to be very easy roll modifications, or changing which skill a roll requires. Not usually something done by the character, per se.
After that, it asks if the Talent is ranked or not. By ranked, in this case, it means the benefits stack. So if a talent is ranked, taking it multiple times will increase the effects on a roll. Individually, these are pretty small benefits, but with two or three ranks, that can make a huge difference.
Finally, we have Description. It’s in this box that the effects of the talent, a description of what actually happens in the narrative, and any prerequisite requirements are listed. Not overly complicated, as far as a TTRPG mechanic goes, but there are a lot of elements that go into it. What tier does it go into (changes the experience point cost), how often can it be used, what does it cost to use? That’s a lot of balancing on the mechanical side that I’m trying to not mess with for a minimally viable setting.
Conclusion
So, yeah. That’s it. We have completed the expanded setting creation sheet from beginning to end. It’s not that complicated, other than at the end where it begins to involve game mechanics, and I think it works nicely for a minimum viable setting. It has the meta elements of the world (tropes, theme, technology), the geographic and social contexts, as well as the mechanical elements.
I probably wouldn’t want to do a long campaign with the information included on this sheet, but for a short campaign of four or five sessions, I think there are enough hooks for me to put together a strong story without having to leave the star system.
Even if you’re not using Genesys, I still think you could get a lot of value from going through this worksheet. Its full potential definitely comes from the explanations in the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide, with all of the associated tables. Using those tables, you could probably cook up a setting in an hour at most. It wouldn’t be a very big setting, but I think it could even work well for an OSR-style game that has a smaller scale world built into it already. It wouldn’t hurt to use it for a West Marches either, I think. One region in the “Building a World” step could be the starting town, with the other regions essentially being the equivalent of surrounding hexes.
Exploration would be a little more difficult to do with only this information, but that can be fleshed out later on, I think, as the initial hexes get fully explored. I would perhaps not use this sheet if you’re doing a space opera or sci-fi setting, unless you’re content with the single biome worlds and hopping between planets. Since Iron Horizons is a bit grimier than the typical space opera setting, it finds itself awkwardly situated between the smaller settings of hard sci-fi and the grandeur of traditional space opera, which makes it difficult to fit it into a worksheet designed to be generic and universal.
I found this process to be helpful in understanding how Genesys approaches worldbuilding as a game system and the interaction between mechanics and narrative. I appreciated how it started with the narrative elements and only included mechanics at the end, rather than trying to fit narrative into the game mechanics.
Definitely give it a go if you haven’t! I’d be curious to see what you come up with and I’m always looking for more Genesys material. There’s a pretty decent r/Genesysrpg community as well as a solidly active Discord community. Stop in and chat with everyone sometime!
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