StuffCraft

Well, its beginning; Blue Dragon is finally winding down, and hopefully I'll have it on the score sheet in a week or so (the joys of the working nerd).  Really we're down to all the little backtracking and sidequesting that is very much RPG tradition.  They've finally seen fit to give me the airship equivalent, and with that means that the Harvest can reach into all the nooks and crannies and convert the forces of badness in shinies.  Bring on the shinies.

I've had a good bit of fun.  Blue Dragon is very much a 16-bit RPG transported into modern gaming, and it was quite refreshing.  We don't need grim darkness is grim all the time.  But then something started nagging me.  It felt like there was something cut out, or maybe omitted before they even started to code this little monster.

Then it finally hit me.  I've probably mentioned it at the campaign's start, but there's no crafting system.  This game has been throwing stuff at me left and right, but everything has been either a one-shot or gear.  There's a token 'transformation' mechanic, but it's very sparse, with the only reusable instance being too little, too late to be practical (an NPC that takes a low-tier curative and makes it into a mid-tier one; the highest-tier ones are already available and plentiful.)

But I've got that itch again.  I don't just want to have an excuse to twink a -2 Butter Knife of Bland Dullness into +5 Alchemic Carbide Sword of Flashy Choppy Death (+7 Anything That Annoys Me's Bane.)  That's plenty fun, though.  I want to take a system and play with it.  Figure out thing like how somebody actually made an analogue to real chemistry and metallurgy and stuff.

Oh, and we need to find a way to include bismuth crystals.  That's some cool looking stuff!  I don't want to rip somebody else's pics off, so I try to describe it.  Basically they look like a helical staircase made of rainbows.  Natural ones are quite pretty and gemmy to look at, while artifically created ones (supposedly easy to do) look even cooler, since you have some element of control over how it forms.  You'd think that a real life mineral like that would get an awesome upgrade into a Material of Coolness for a fantasy game; but no, I've only encountered bismuth once (Romancing SaGa), as a generic mineral for tempering stuff, without a single pic or description.  It's somewhat tragic.

That's it, the next campaign is a damn Atelier game.  Set course for the crafting system, Moe Factor Three.