I’ve mentioned in the “What are you working on right now?” topic that I’ve been building an Anima Prime hack for Pokémon-like monster-training play. Convocation Prime is now available. Not sure it is really “done”, but I’ve taken it where I wanted it to go so far.
Questions about its design welcome here.
Congrats on on your book! I’m not sure how much is Anima Prime and how much is unique work, but there’s a lot of detail and options in here. I like pokemon and have read a few other monster-trainer ttrpgs. I think this genre lives or dies on the monsters you can collect, so that was the section I skipped to, and I like the steps you have for building creatures with their facets.
I’d be curious about design challenges you encountered in designing a crunchy combat system, and how that effected the tone you’re going for. I saw in the introduction that you might not recommend this game for kids. Did that translate into “darker” themes as well, or did you stick with the lighter friendly tone of most inspiration sources?
The “maybe not for kids” is really only in reference to the complexity (such as it is) of the conflict system. My particular nine year old can wrap his head around it, but your average seven year old probably can’t, at least not enjoyably.
Tonally, the Larkspur Academy setting is completely kid appropriate, intended to work like the cartoons do, for the most part. In the rules in that setting, it is impossible to cause harm to a student/trainer, and the world is built to allow the “suspiciously unsupervised and naive kids explore the world” thing.
The other settings are a bit more “adult”, but not in a “grim dark” way. You could run a kids game in either of them, but the stakes are a bit higher.