Axioms Of Alchemy And Artificing

Dynamic and flexible crafting for characters and buildings

Introduction

Axioms is a game with a large focus on detail and simulation and also replicating the experience of a playing like a fantasy novel character. Crafters, smiths, herbalists, alchemist, wizards, enchanters, and artificers are all iconic character archetypes from fantasy novels and also games with fantasy themes. But it is my opinion that in most cases games fail to reconcile the experience of playing such a character with the experience depicted in written fantasy. While Axioms doesn’t go quite as far as those games that hone in on a specific profession of fantasy artisanship it does offer a breadth and level of uniqueness that still stands out.

Production Professions in Axioms all operate on a unified and flexible system that those who study and analyze games might refer to as a noun and verb system, and maybe it has some adjectives and adverbs as well. The concept and design and themes of the economic and productive systems in Axioms draw on a broad selection on games and genres including previous projects I developed but which are unfinished for various non-gamedesign related reasons.

I wrote designs for and in some cases did code for games in the rpg, mmorpg, city builder, and crafting genres. I spent a lot of time adapting an open source RTS game to make a Majesty+++ game with deeper guilds and Emperor:RotK style citybuilding and economic mechanics. I got pretty far on that but ended up deciding that as a FOSS(free and open source software) game it wasn’t viable since it couldn’t pay the bills.

I also spent a year or so, and this is the beginning of learning C++, before that on a purely cooperative, players vs world, crafting and magic focused, mmo rpg. That game drew on Morrowind, SWG, ATITD, UO, and a few other rpgs and mmos as far as crafting. I even got to talk to prominent MMORPG devs like Raph Koster on forums and his blog. The crafting in Axioms draws on those genres and games and the problems in the popular crafting models therein.

Overview

Axioms uses a unique version of what you might call noun and verb simulation in crafting. Essentially each resource in the game has a number of tags, part of the extensive use of tags in the game over all, related to storage and processing and interaction.

So for example some of the processing verbs would be:

• Cut

• Slice

• Smelt

• Grind

• Soak

• Steep

• Powder

• Heat

• Chunk

• Facet

• Etch

• Cure

Some of the storage verbs would be:

• Chill

• Dry

• Shade

• Submerse

• Heat

They’ll also have, as previously discussed, “output nouns”:

• Weight

• Hardness

• Heat

• Cold

• Glow

• Strength

• Sharpness

Output nouns are an expansive category but I don’t wanna clog up the page. Elemental or magical aspects, energy, temperature, physical traits, potion attributes and so forth.

I’ll cover Storage and Transport here as well since it doesn’t merit a full subsection. Various ingredients including food as well as materials and ingredients, need to be stored under different circumstances. Throwing stuff in a bin or a tub works but the stuff degrades faster. Some things aren’t even really usable, except fresh, without special storage conditions.

What this means is that populations with access to different terrain and climate, different magic, different capacity to build different specialized storage, and so on will have different capacities to gather, store, and utilize different things. There’s also some level of greenhouse tech and ability to grow different things in different places. That’s crucial imo to make trade work well and be important. Indeed depending on the world generation many valuable products will only be able to be produced in certain places and may not survive transits to distant locations. This helps make polities feel distinct.

Alchemy And Herbalism

Alchemy and Herbalism are fully fleshed out game systems that are connected to magic. While there are no fancy visual-spatial aspects to the system like some of the recent popular alchemy focused games, though there may be in the future, there is a detailed system of testing and cataloguing ingredients and processes and associated items.

Herbalism is basically a basic version of alchemy without magic involved. Poultices, unguent, acids, poisons, rinses, and drinks are all available with various effects. The results are less intense than alchemy but the production is simpler and uses cheaper ingredients generally. Herbalism actions can be performed by trained artisans or by buildings with specialized tools for regular workers. This does not reach a level that can be called industrialization.

Alchemy involves the use of a magic source and basically unlocks bonus effects/combinations/results. The magical source can be from a Character, in some special cases a Population with magical racial traits, or from an Item/Building. Generally you’ll start with Characters with individual magical abilities. The magic can be applied at any stage of the processing including simply “imbuing” a “potion base” or a finished potion. Fancier magic and refining specific ingredients earlier in the process is also possible.

Herbal or Alchemical ingredients have a set of available “processing verbs” including some but not all of the examples above plus a few other options. Powdering minerals/crystals, chopping/slicing or soaking/steeping various plants, and so forth. Creature and Monster parts are also potential ingredients. You can also dissolve powders into liquids, extract dew/fluid/etc from ingredients, dry or heat or chill things and so on.

Generally different processing choices can modify different aspects of the “output nouns”. One action may increase potency of the same starting amount of an ingredient, another may change the amount required to achieve an effect, and another may unlock a different effect. Adding more of something that has a reduced volume requirement will not improve potency generally.

Alchemical products have a wider array of outputs and can also generally have more intense outputs. Alchemical processing can help to lower processing requirements, both in Alchemy and Herbalism and in other professions. Like lowering the heating or cooling requirements for some substance whether that is smelting metal or boiling a fluid or w/e. Alchemy also produces more magical effects. Herbalism can speed natural healing or cure poisons but Alchemy can cause instant healing as an example, like a “health potion”. Alchemy can interact with a broader array of ingredients and utilize more processing methods as well.

Smithing

Smithing is an umbrella term for a wide array of activities. Blacksmithing, whitesmithing, armorsmithing, weaponsmithing, and others. They generally all function the same, though. Historically whitesmithing and blacksmithing were distinguished by tin vs iron respectively, and for reasons relating to the material they often created a different set of products. Blacksmiths and whitesmiths were generally producing civilian goods although in places with low specialization blacksmiths might also make military products.

Smithing materials generally come with nouns like hardness, strength, malleability, or sharpness. They usually use verbs like smelt, etch, pound/shape, extrude, and so forth. They’ll also have special nouns and verbs for enchanting, which I’ll discuss in different section, and which are shared by most other resources/materials/ingredients to some degree.

Much like Alchemy basic Smithing can be done by populations with the appropriate buildings and items to represent workshops and tools. Many populations will have better or worse capability in different crafting. This is actually pretty historical. Different tribes to the North and West of Roman lands had extremely high quality metalworking skills although quantity was a problem for stuff like armor.

Crafts like Woodworking function pretty identically to metalworking but just with different materials and skills and knowledge. Wood of course has some unique properties. Different real and randomized trees will have wood with different properties. Weight, strength, hard vs soft, burn potential, etc. Woods also have properties related to weather and, like metals and minerals and crystals, magical potential.

Textiles

Textiles were a crucial resource historical and the drivers of major nations and historical events. The north south industrial divide, competition between the English and the Dutch, the Silk Road of course was name for a textile even though plenty of other goods traveled along it.

Access to waterpower will be a crucial aspect of textile production and a driver of geopolitics. Especially since automation will not be possible at industrial scale.

There are a huge variety of textiles and methods of creating finished goods from them. Felting, weaving, darning, spinning, braiding, and so on. Textiles will have output nouns like insulation, strength, flexibility, resilience, softness, weatherproofing, and of course the aforementioned magial potential.

Textiles will be one of the major groups of luxury goods. And they’ll be tied into many things like boat construction, herbalism and alchemy, for storage and dyeing and other processing, and so on.

They’ll also be options for providing Amenities to housing. Curtains for instance provide Decoration.

Enchanting

Like Alchemy I imagine many players, especially those who plan to focus on adventuring over politics, really want to know about Enchanting and the mechanisms and possibilities. Almost any material or finished good has some potential interaction with Enchanting. Enchanting is not only useful for combat but for crafting and travel and economics, and of course super fancy Enchantments can engage with Amenities, terraforming, transport and so on.

Nearly every material in the game has some level of magical potential. This is probably divided into four categories. First capacity, second intensity, third duration, and fourth conduction. Intensity is how powerful an Enchantment you can have. Capacity is how much Enchantment you can have. Duration is obviously how long the Enchantment takes to degrade. Finally conduction is how much power it takes to activate and sustain the enchantment. Often these will all sync up but they can diverge heavily in some materials.

Enchanting can be performed by some rare magically powerful populations but only basic kinds. Like Alchemy it is primarily an activity for Characters with skills built up over years. There are a variety of magical skills targeted to Enchanting directly, slightly more than for Alchemy, and then there are magical skills that apply to any crafting action and revolve around the types of Enchanting one can do. Elemental manipulation skills for instance.

Enchanting covers all the normal stuff you see in RPGs and MMOs, like elemental damage, light, resistance to magic, regeneration, and so on. However in Axioms it covers a wide variety of civilian/economic uses. Making materials lighter or sturdier, resistance to various wear and tear from the elements, stasis fields of various kinds for storage, portals, motive force, temperature control for various purposes, and so on. Nearly every magical effect in the game at all can be reproduced by enchantments. Feel free to search the blog for posts with “Esoteric Arcana” in the title.

Recipes

This section will contain various examples for moving from some base material/resource to a finished good or item.

Suppose we want to make a healing potion. We’d find some herbs with life, healing, body, energy, or some other aspect. We’d process the ingredients if we knew how to improve their impact. You can make single ingredient potions but you get a better result with some variety. You can also control the result more easily. Do you want something that lasts longer? That goes hard right away? Perhaps with a secondary effect? Something cheaper for mass use? Etc. You’ll have some set of known actions like boil water to steep borgleroot, squash up chupberries to get the juice, and mash frogcaps into the pot. And that combination of ingredients and processing will get you a long lasting low health per second regeneration potion.

Metalwork is a bit different than Alchemy or Herbalism. Running with just one core material is a valid strategy to relatively high qualities. You’ll engage in more processing to get to your goal in lieu of adding lots of ingredients. Axioms does allow alloys and also the use of things like carbon, though. You’ll need to be able to heat the metal to the necessary temperature, using a variety of methods for different metals. You’ll need a mould that can handle that temperature. You’ll need various shaping tools.

For Enchantments and Potions you’ll have Recipes that Characters can learn. Once you’ve personally made a particular product you’ll keep that knowledge. You can spread it to other Characters but be careful about trusting someone who might sell the information themselves.

Society

In any case once a single crafter learns to do something they’ll need to teach it to others for the knowledge to spread. For populations making various goods they’ll slowly evolve in skill over time. Different work traditions and conditions will impact things like knowledge spread and production power. You’ll have family skills, apprenticeships that are more public, state schools, guilds, and so forth. Even as a player trying to influence economic structures you’ll be limited by cultrual stuff like Ideology. “Family-oriented” Populations, and Characters as well, will be much more resistant to giving up production styles like family callings.

I noted above that you can trade information on crafting between Characters. You can engage with that process in a ton of ways as a society. You can make people swear oaths to secrecy, establish laws and societies to police rulebreakers, and so on. I’m sure many of you have read stories where guilds or royal/noble academies restrict knowledge of especially valuable skills. You can do that. And the AI will sometimes do it as well, if their polity and populations are ideologically disposed to that behavior.

Because this is a premodern world the distribution of information is not simple and easy. You’d have to transmit it verbally and that would require high mental capacities unless you engaged in prolonged training, or you’d need to create a book or pamphlet or guide. Or clay tablets or w/e your polity used for writing. This actually applies to all sorts of complex information. Of course there’s some abstraction here but still, it is quite extensive as part of the simulation.

Conclusion

Knowledge is a concrete thing in Axioms. It might be stored in a Character’s mind but it can also be passed around through various communication methods. This enables all sorts of awesome political and economic and social integration between crafting and other game systems.

Axioms has a very detailed and dynamic crafting system which has all sorts of end results and also allows for strong variation between the economics and production of different societies. The crafting mechanics in Axioms are inspired not only by city builder/tycoon games but by rpgs/mmos and finally, as in all the ideas of the game, by fantasy, and alt-history/history stories.

Player Characters, and many NPCs, can engage with the game in a totally separate way from landholding or political Characters. Axioms offers a variety of mix and match gameplay options with, hopefully, the depth to back them up. The game is focused on playing some sort of leadership character but there is flexibility there.

Finally I simply want to do insanely cool and unique magical/fantasy stuff. I will definitely be playing a high magic world with a magic obsessed character when I play the game myself.