Familiars and Mystics

I'm going to pivot back away from the coding side of things for the moment, and back to game development concepts, and narrative elements.

In a "normal" fantasy roleplaying game, the magic-user is the centre of attention and their familiar is some kind of pet who shares a mystical bond with them. Perhaps the familiar helps channel magical energy a little better, perhaps it provides a benefit to casting die rolls, perhaps (as in Mage: the Ascension) the familiar eats aways the penalty effects that come with existing as a quasi-force of nature in a world of mundane masses.

In a game called "Familiar", the concept is naturally going to be flipped. The familiar is the main character, they have agendas of their own, and the magic-user/mystic is their conduit to the world and a source of both stability and narrative potential within the world. The familiar is effectively immortal, but their vessel may change every couple of years (if they're lucky, a mystic may last decades or een centuries... if they're unlucky, maybe only weeks or even days).   

I'm seeing it a bit like the Trill in Star Trek.

Old posts went over this idea, and my intentions really haven't really changed a lot since then.

(Looking through old posts it seem that much of my development process for Familiar was never published here on the blog, only a few posts like this one and this one seem to have been uploaded.) 

The familiars of the game are constants, but they are only ever one half of the equation. 

To define them, I'm looking back at the general character development for werewolves/garou in Werewolf:the Apocalypse. Each character has three findamental concepts that guide their development process... tribe (which gives a cultural identity within the werewolf race), breed (which determines the origins of the character; whether they were born of humans, wolves, or descended from other werewolves), and auspice (which is the phase of the moon they were born under, and generally works like a caste or occupation witin the community). These three factors can be mixed and matched in a variety of ways to get all sorts of different character concepts, and while character creation is generally an open "point-buy" system, it helps to focus a player's ideaas. 

For familiars, I'm looking at the categories of Origin (the circumstances that originally spawned the familiar), Element (the resonaance of energies flowing through the familiar), and Beast (the type of animal that the familiar looks like to regular mundane mortals). Each of these contributes some base elements to the character, which can be built upon once the core idea is established. 

I kind of did the same thing with the scarecrows in "Bustle in your Hedgerow" last year. 

The thing with Familiars is that they can't really interact with the mundane world, without a mortal vessel to channel ttheir will through, so they don't really have attributes or abilities. They have magical powers and the ability to augment the magical potential within aware mortals, but it is the combination of yin and yang that makes a magical whole. The mortal brings about the desire for change, the familiar brings about the power to enact that change. Like a vector needing direction and magnitude, if you only have one or the other, nothing happens.