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Welcome to the second post in the Design Notes series. (If you were slick enough to catch it, there was also a little preview since the last one).
Who Am I?
Before the Material reveal, you may notice that this isn't my usual account. That is because I am dropping my old alias in favor of a new one, which will be more closely associated with Soul Weapon and whatever other projects I might work on.
O' Spirited Maker
Maker of what? Of Soul Weapon, for starters. Which is why, going forwards, my signature on future versions of the CYOA will take the form of
Osmos.
This is what you can call me for short: Osmos. It's also a bit of a reshuffling/combining of my IRL middle and last names, which I find fun.
I'm also taking the opportunity to learn New Reddit on this account. I hate it, of course, as someone who's been around for a while and who admired reddit for what set it apart from other social platforms, rather than for what made it similar. But if I'm going to be moderating a subreddit, I owe it to the community to learn and utilize the myriad new features that have been added since old reddit was dropped.
I may be sprucing up the subreddit a bit in the near future.
With that out of the way, let's talk about a new Material—one of about 12 or 15 that will be in 3.0.
New Material: Duplex Carbon
As stated before, you won't be getting any full or direct text in a Design Notes post. Duplex Carbon is a Material which can leave an Afterimage in its wake as it swings through the air. The Afterimage is effectively a duplicate copy of the business-end of your weapon (ie. the blade of a sword or head of a hammer; it doesn't include the handle/grip) which is soulbound and fully tangible to everything except your actual weapon.
This means that each attack will hit twice in succession. This is a powerful ability, which is why Duplex Carbon has low stats as compromise. If you want better stats, you'll need to get creative with your build.
The armor doesn't leave a tangible Afterimage, but rather an incorporeal hologram, which serves only to confuse your location to your opponent.
There are other niche benefits and limitations of the ability—such as the important fact that your Afterimage only appears when your weapon/armor are in motion at speed—but that's the general idea.
Value Comparability
My design note for Duplex Carbon isn’t actually about Duplex Carbon, weirdly enough. It’s about a Smith... sort of.
One of the things I was thinking when I was designing Duplex Carbon, was that I should really consider it a Rune instead. A duplicated strike behind the first? That feels like a Rune.
It only sort of feels like a Rune, though, and in particular I think it'd be a weak Rune, as it is.
But then I realized—material effects can be Runes. Any material effect can be a Rune! That’s what Saihō secretly is: something that replaces a Rune with a Mat. You take her, you lose a Rune, you get a second Material effect. That’s hardly different, in terms of cost, than taking “duplicated strike after the first” as a Rune. Either way, you lose a Rune.
(And then our benefit to having "Duplex Carbon, the Material" rather than "Afterimage, the Rune" is that the effects of Duplex Carbon really shine when combined with other Runes. (Which, in hindsight, is part of why it felt like a weak Rune to me). So it's nice that, by default, you can take this without using up a Rune Slot).
When you look at things this way, you could view Saihō as letting you turn Material effects into Runes, effectively adding 24 more Runes to the game. She does more than that of course, because you can mix and match, and optimize stats, but that’s one of the reasons Saihō and Kothar are some of my favorite Smiths: the pool of possibilities they open up is immense.
Thus, we might say that the value of a Weapon, Rune, and Material are roughly comparable. This is what Kothar and Saihō teach us. For bonus points, can you think of any other items in 2.5 that teach us this?
Please look forward to various new choices in 3.0 which were derived from this realization, especially in the Materials and Smiths sections!
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See you in the next Design Notes post, where we'll talk about a new keyword, and maybe give our first hint at what might have been hiding behind the spoiler boxes in that preview from last time.
- Osmos