The Packmind Ancestry

[open timber]

Hello! I've done a rough draft of an ancestry I'm calling the Packmind. It's inspired by the Tines from A Fire Upon the Deep (I recently started re-reading it 😄 ).

If you don't know what that is, imagine a pack of wolf-like creatures (like 4-8) that can communicate so effectively with hypersonic vibrations that they literally become a single person with their own emotions and personality.

Anyway, here's the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18su1g36s39j6TDyfKZ2uiK_PEgrmO5OdNJRsfUTgD7s/edit?usp=sharing

Any and all feedback and questions are appreciated!

[trail carbon]

Read the title and I instantly knew where it had to come from. Very cool!

[willow raven]

This is very unique, makes me think outside the box for what a character can be

[winter salmon]

Oh that's interesting

[final thunder]

Looks like a good first draft, I would love (but also maybe dread) to see a Packmind Summoner, the image of a player flooding the battle map with The Horde™ and just taking up a few dozen squares would be great (until they had to be managed).

[open timber]

Kind of tangentially related to your last point, I was wondering last night/this morning if I should reduce the number of pack members to maybe the 3-6 range just to cut down on how many individual tokens you need to keep track of.

I'm also considering if having a "swarm form" option could be a helpful addition for back-line characters. Basically, you group your pack into a size 2 area (but your creature size is still functionally 1M for most things.)

[final thunder]

I think the issue is that having any more than 4ish becomes cumbersome but also if you are wanting to play this sort of character than I think 4+ is a good baseline to hit the fantasy. I think a swarm form is cool but the fact that the constituents are each 1M is is the biggest issue, since you can't get any smaller than 1 square it means you have spread the tokens out regardless of how many you have (2 pack members are still a size 2 creature for most applications).

With that in mind it got me thinking about doing this concept as a slimefolk/plasmoid type of creature, With a more amorphous body plan you could get away with a system where each pack member is a 1T creature and then they combine into a 1S creature and adding more makes them 1M and then at maximum they become 1L (either make the requirements linear or exponential depending on how many constituents you want). IMO that sort of "swarm form" would hit the fantasy of spreading out the your guys without having to deal with the headache of marching tokens around the battle map in single file to get through doors or worry about instantly dying because the monsters had a single AOE, but that works significantly worse if you are going for the idea that your pack are all animals since generally they don't come in stackable form factors.

[open timber]

That plasmoid idea sounds really cool!

[open timber]

And also, yeah I completely spaced on the fact that size 2 creatures are also 2 spaces high, which would be a strange dissonance. The thing I was thinking of would functionally the same as just keeping them in a lil group.

[fading saffron]

Very interesting! Seems pretty similar to my goblin squad ancestry, controlling a group instead of an individual. Quite a few differences in design though. Have you gotten a chance to try it out yet?

[open timber]

I haven't had a chance to try it yet! I just got bit by a bug to try my hand at specifically the Tines and hammered out a quick prototype, but I did recall hearing about your band of goblins ancestry a while back. Actually, I was going to buy the Blacksmith's Guild issue 2 because I saw it was published in there and was wondering how it turned out (but I had some payment issue I haven't gotten to fixing yet.)

One of my intents is that even though you're controlling a squad, you still feel like its a single character (which is why i have them distributing most conditions and I don't really touch the action economy)