Sagas of Unending Loss

Sagas of Unending Loss, or SoUL, is a passion project of mine. It aims to be a relatively light weight, easy to use system in order to drive combat focused play without being a slog all of the time. Currently, the bare bones material sits at 20 pages in A5 format (for phones and other mobile reading), so roughly 10 pages in A4/Letter format.

Character progression is freeform and follows the classic method of buying a score increase every level. Inside are a handful of starting "class packages" which provides enough to quickly make a character.

Armor is piecemeal, allowing you to cobble together various pieces to raise your resistances to the different damage types.

Weapons are customizable with "Tags" and an outline for higher quality weapons will be included in a finalized product. Higher quality weapons allow more Tags as well as base damage and/or scaling.

Combat uses an archaic Action Point system because it fits so well. It also has various actions you can perform, and what these action implicate. Either you regain enough AP per turn to do more than just attack, or suffer because your choice of heavy equipment for high defense and lack of considering stamina regeneration.

Most enemies don't make rolls. Players take action and succeed, or fail and suffer. This is but one way the game stays moving. Boss type enemies have "Moves" which they utilize on the GMs turn. This more often than not augments the way they react to the PCs or provides them with bonuses.

The one liberty I took with the design is an inspiration from Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and Remnant 2 (I know, it's not super souls-like). Slottable Archetypes. No, they aren't classes, they're more  like Great Runes or Humanity. You gain a substantial bonus once activated, but it only applies in certain circumstances. Some are playstyle focused, other are utility focused. I aim to develop this more in the final release to allow upgrades that provide further bonuses, without being too unbalanced.

Saving the best for last: this system will be CC BY 4.0. You will be able to create any content you want and the only limitation is attribution and no further legal restrictions to the system. Just drop in "Inspired by the works of XP,"  "Inspired by the works of DeadMagician" or simply "Made With SoUL" somewhere and that's it. Add to the rules, alter them, make new weapons, armors, magics, complete source materials, sell it all or share it freely. 

It's your game too.

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The Guide and Quickstart are also free, however, they are not released under the CC BY 4.0 license. They are meant to be used as a means to demonstrate what you can do. I am posting it now, but it is in need of some beta reading. I'm sure it's got errors dappled all around, but I believe it currently holds the most updated information. 

While this material is not CC BY 4.0, the setting material of Dekatria (once completed) will be released under a CC license which allows free use creation for the materials under similar limitations such as not claiming it as your own or as official products.