Designer’s Notes: The Fifth Attribute

The Fifth Attribute began life in my campaign “The Awakening” in mid-2014. I wanted a way to tie in all the supernatural powers of that campaign setting along with a few campaign features to make a working cohesive framework. It took me the better part of a month to write it and I began with a jumping off point from GURPS Thaumatology’s Base 10 Magery. It saw use in my campaign and then I put it away when I switched to another of my settings to run. Finally, in September 2015 I decided to use it for Patreon. I’d gotten lots of feedback when I ran it so I revised it again to make it run smoother. Patreon did the same thing and when I decided I wanted to submit it to Pyramid it had seen over two dozen eyes, actual play, more brainstorming, and so on to make it a fairly smooth system. It’d been three years since I’d put it together and that always helps when you’re working on game design. Time heals all wounds, makes wine finer, and RPG rules smoother. The system itself got some revision as I toiled through editing it – things popped up that I likely should have seen and by the time I’d submitted it and gotten a prelim PDF back it was in top shape.

All in all it took me about 80 hours to write, 50 hours to edit, 0 hours worth of research, and 120 hours of revision. I spent a further 10ish hours looking over the preliminary PDF for any issues and revising.

There are no real outtakes from this article as everything got published that I wanted to get published.

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