The Article of Clarifying Fire
January 10th, 2011
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Dark Designs. Today, I wanted to take some time to talk to you about our recent release, A Necromancer’s Grimoire: The Book of Purifying Flames (boy is that a mouthful!), on sale now for the low price of $2.49, which is less than a happy meal these days (by quite a bit, I’m told). Due to our new publishing schedule, there is a very good chance that I won’t be able to devote even a single article to each and every book we publish from this point on, and so I thought that it would be nice to take a moment to talk about this first book in what will (hopefully) be a long series of necromancers’ grimoires (Grimoirai? Grimoiaeux?)
I have no doubts that the more cynical amongst you are, even now, thinking to yourselves that my real reason for talking about the book is to drum up sales. This is partially true (in that I received a certain amount of encouragement to write this article from a member of the design team, and that I have little doubt that he is motivated primarily by driving sales), but honestly I’m not really that worried about it. To be honest, I am fully confident that The Book of Purifying Flames is more than worth the listed price, and don’t feel much of a need to push it, sales-wise, as I’m pretty confident it can stand on its own merits. That said, it’s come to my attention that in order for people to buy things, they have to actually know about them first. Along the same lines, in order for people to read a book, they need to know that the book exists. And, as someone who worked hard on The Book of Purifying Flames, I’d love for as many people to read it as possible. I think that it’s fun and exciting, and would love to hear back from readers about it. I imagine that a mother who sends her child off to elementary school for the first time feels largely the same way, though no doubt on a larger scale.
Besides, one of the downsides about writing smaller projects (The Book of Purifying Flames came in at 23 pages) is that I have a lot less space within the product itself to talk about the design choices we made and why we made them. Most likely, if you read Dark Designs, you didn’t respond to that statement with “yeah, so?” but, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume you did. Generally speaking, I feel that it’s very important, as a designer (even more so as a third-party designer, like we are, and not a very well-known one, at that) to explain your choices and why you do things the way that you do.
There are a few reasons for this, but ultimately I think it boils down to trust. As a gamer, a reader, or some other kind of consumer (it never occurred to me how cool that phrase could be, if it wasn’t laden down with marketing and sales connotations. Mental note: make some kind of “consumer” prestige class or monster…or monster prestige class!), you are basically putting a certain amount of faith in the premise that I, as a designer, have some idea what I’m doing. As a relatively brief Google search can probably demonstrate, anyone with an internet connection can say that they’re a game designer, and they can put out all kinds of monsters, classes, rules, magic items, whole new systems, whatever. There’s not really any kind of prerequisite. Even by reading Dark Designs, you’re going out on a limb and giving me the benefit of the doubt that I know what I’m talking about, and this article is free. The Book of Purifying Flames costs money. That’s a much bigger leap of faith.
Most of the time, I think that the work we do here can largely stand on its own, and doesn’t need any explanation. After all, how much is there to say, really, about making a handful of extra cavalier orders? The answer is actually surprisingly a lot, and even as I pose the question rhetorically I can hear dozens of answers and articles ideas pouring into the back of my head from…somewhere. The front of my head, I guess. The point is that, generally speaking, it’s easy enough for the at-home audience (that’s you, by the way, unless you’re part of our live studio audience) to follow along with what I did there. There’s nothing weird or extraordinary in that article, and that’s fine, because it wasn’t supposed to be revolutionary: it was just supposed to provide a handful of new options for people who liked cavaliers (arguably, it was really just an excuse for me to play with some new toys from the Advanced Player’s Guide, but let’s not split hairs).
The issue largely arises when we, as designers, make mistakes that players can’t immediately grok (“Grok” is a concept from the book Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, and means, loosely, “to understand.” For those of you who assume that I picked up this phrase from Mark Rosewater, who also uses it frequently, I’m proud—and more than a little smug—to say that no, actually, I came to use grok all on my own, long before I ever read Mark’s column, or knew who he was). If our reasoning isn’t immediately apparent to you, as players/DMs/readers/consumers, then you are led to the very reasonable conclusion that we don’t know what we’re doing. Personally, I feel this way about a wide variety of third party publishers that I read (and, sometimes, this opinion is only strengthened when I read about their reasoning, but that’s neither here nor there). By taking the time to explain our thought process to you, however, we can not only entertain and educate you to be better designers (and smarter consumers), but can also give you an insight into what we were thinking when we made these decisions you don’t immediately grasp, thus (hopefully) giving you a reason to continue trusting us. To be perfectly honest, I can think of little that would be better for the gaming industry as a whole than if more designers spent time writing about how and why they designed the way they did, rather than simply designing things.
And now that I’ve used about 2/3 of the article to talk about that largely unrelated issue, let’s talk about The Book of Purifying Flames for a minute, shall we? For this book, we approached the idea of holy, purifying fires from (what I, at least, consider to be) a very unusual angle. For those of you who haven’t really been exposed to the concept of purifying fires before, the general idea is that the fire is magical, and only burns those who aren’t pure of heart (or similar). Further, the fires can magically burn away illness, wounds, curses, or other things of this sort. They pop up often enough in folklore, and not infrequently in fantasy settings, but rarely in D&D or Pathfinder.
Obviously, this presented a wide field of options for things that we could do with the holy fire in question. Even with just the cliffnotes version above, I’ve already mentioned diseases, curses, and direct hit point healing. But there are lots of fun conditions that it could cure. And further, as long as we were working with holy fire, maybe it could inflict a lot of bad things on evil creatures, too. Basically, we had one new energy type to work with, and about 50-odd “rider” effects which we wanted that energy type to do in addition to the damage. We could have made the energy type just have all of those extra effects (and briefly considered doing just that), turning it into a giant condition-hammer which also did some damage. But besides overwhelming any damage that the energy might have done, and restricting it to much higher levels, this would make our purifying flames a headache, as you would have to consult a giant laundry list of effects every time you used it.
So, instead, we decided to have the purifying fire use the special “purifying” keyword and damage type, and then created a large number of feats which you could use whenever you dealt purifying damage (purifying damage, by the way, is always paired with fire damage—in this book, at least—for both flavor reasons and balance reasons) to add one or more of those “rider” effects, modeled after the critical feats in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook (but with a little more flexibility about how many you can use at a given time). The mechanic turned out slightly parasitic, but much less so than I had originally feared, and, besides, you don’t get to wield the true might of holy fire by dabbling, do you?
In short, if you like playing good characters (spellcasters or otherwise: we have a prestige class in the book that’s designed almost exclusively for paladins and fighters), enjoy playing with fire, or are intrigued by the idea of a fireball that harms your enemies but heals your allies (and isn’t inherently unbalanced), you should consider picking up A Necromancer’s Grimoire: The Book of Purifying Flames. If not, well, just wait until our next book comes out in a couple weeks.
In the meantime, don’t hesitate to explain your reasoning: you may very well be amazed by the result.