WELCOME! TO CASUAL TABLETOP

Valkyrie Sky 3.5 starting Saturday June 25th!

Valkyrie Sky updating will be finishing next week! The first game will be on Saturday, June 25th at 3PM Pacific or 6PM Eastern. And as always, the game name and password is Game Time with Romeo! and gtwr.

Character generation and rules clarification will probably consume the first hour, so don't worry about showing up exactly on time. The expected duration is a two hour segment, an intermission, and then another two hour segment, totaling about six if you stay for the whole thing. Depending on room available, the game may be opened to the public. It'd be great to have a mix of vets and novices! Let me know if you want to reserve a seat, as well as what time you're expecting to arrive.

The active galaxy is Valkyrie Standoff - a galaxy where valkyries and humans coexist but not without heavy tensions between them. Humanity is in a golden age of indutry, consuming a planet's resources and filling the air with polution, then using their terraforming and atmospheric processing technology to make it habitable again. By contrast, valkyries are some of the most highly efficient creatures to ever exist, and go to great lengths to live low impact lives and preserve the ecosystem. It's a productive and sometimes violent life in the galaxy. All's normal until a mysterious new type of matter emerges - Dark Glass - and a gold rush to obtain the powerful new substance occurs. However, the pursuit of dark glass further exposes the cultural differences between valkyries and humans, and tensions rise further. Will this lead to a flashpoint resulting in another interstellar war? Or will the tension be dispelled and will humans and valkyries find a way to live in harmony?

Or will an omnipotent caffeinated entity consume all?

Explore new planets and systems while discovering new species. Collect and experiement on them as a scientist, or fight them and collect trophies as a beast hunter. Receive missions and run errands for important figures and gain rewards and social influence with them. Fly through superspace and hunt down pirates, or rob haulers blind!

Valkyrie Sky's improvements has been focusing on making things more complex while making them less complicated. Depth has been increased, but it's easier to get a grip of things.

Combat
The stamina system is basically a bar on top of your health bar that prevents your party from taking damage until it's depleted. It represents your tactical advantage and mobility. As you receive attacks, it dwindles down, and your enemy closes in on you. Once its gone, your actual health is vulnerable.

Everyone takes their turns at the same time! Turns have been sped up considerably. Math has been simplified and it's all just a lot easier! There is no actual character movement in combat - all of that is abstracted through the various ways you can interact with stamina.

Stats, Masteries, and Knowledges
The stats of your suit and vehicle are fully independent of your character and this helps prevent runaway stats and metas. This also helps make it so that intillectual types can still have an extremely strong presence as a combatant. Suits are basically exoskeletons or small mechs and are as interchangable as a breastplate (though significantly more capable). All players also get a vehicle - car, motorcycle, ship, whatever! They all come with their minor perk depending on what they are, and they can all mount weapons and use deployables!

Masteries represent your personal characteristics, both intellectual and phsyical. They are very general attributes that are used for majority of non-combat interactions. Masteries are enhanced with experience, a product of everything memorable that you do.

A player's Knowledges are very specific skills that a character has and can range from geographical to martial, social to scientific, or more. Knowledges are learned from people or events. They are a product of your chatacter's education.

The skill check system emphasizes fairness and simplicity, but still has quite a bit of depth and a controlled luck factor. The process uses your general masteries and multiplies it with your specific knowledges to create a very believable and accurate skill check system.

Materials and Cards
Valkyrie Sky has does not have a standard currency. All trades and what not are done through bartering and at the center of that are materials. Materals are a standardized generic set of things that are the building blocks for everything in the galaxy. Every item is a product of basic materials refined into advanced ones then manufactured into the item.

And then there's cards! Mysterious little chips that can have a small or dramatic affect when placed in your equipment. But do so carefully, as while cards may be plentiful, it's quite difficult to remove them from your equipment. And equipment is definitely not plentiful! Cards boost attributes, grant abilities, and unlock things for the player!

Events
The passage of time is not free. The party is constantly subejct to events, cards that have written on them a mundane or exciting event. These events include things such as a vehicle malfuntion, a pirate attack, finding hidden resources, or an interaction with a curious beast. Events dramatically shape storytelling and influence how the overal campaign will procede.

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I can't wait to see you all in game!

-Romeo