Enchanted Realms Rulebook
Forward
A quick note to acknowledge that this is the second tome of the rules. This is where all the details, all the exceptions and all the intricacies are explained. This tome will enhance and perhaps override the general concepts that were given in the Game Starter tome. That said, buckle up and bring your thinking caps. The rules are not really difficult, but there are a lot of possibilities to consider.
What will be addressed in this tome is a comprehensive list and explanation of the skills system. There are many since skills represent the primary aspect of the game. Also in thiss book the details that were glossed over or generalized in the first tome will be explained in greater details. This include combat mechanics, equipment and the whole skills system.
A World Not of Science
At first appearance, Enchanted Realms might appear as just another system. Perhaps that is all that it is. However, the game designers built the mechanics from a unique concept -- of course, after many years of trials. The idea came from questioning and wondering what a world where magic and deities existed would be like. What were the physics? What was the science of such a world?
The world “chimerics” was coined, which meant the workings, the physics of a fantasy world. Soon we realized that scientific explanations simply did not work well for the world envisioned. A closer concept was the idea of shintoism, which is an ancient religion that saw spiritual powers existing in the natural world. Shinto revolves around supernatural entities called the kami, who inhabited all things, including forces of nature and prominent landscape locations. As game designers we took this further, having the kami serves the gods -- and therefore, controlled the natural forces. There were weather spirits, agricultural kami, frost beings creating art in the winters, and so on. All of this existed in a hierarchy, each type reporting up the chain, until finally reaching the deity who reigned over the province.
This kept things in a sense of order that seemed like weather patterns and seasons; however, because the greater kami spirits were beings of intellect and volition, one could create events that seemed like a curse, a blessing or even angry vengeance. It explained the orderly patterns of the natural world, but also the miraculous exceptions -- especially when a priest was involved, using the power of divinity to control or influence the kami to act out of the norm. A magical prayer to alter the weather is merely sway the actions of the great spirits who control the clouds and mists.
This idea destroyed Boyle’s gas laws of chemistry, opening up more questions. Why does gravity exist? Is the world round? What are the stars? And then diseases and poisons got brought up. Germs and cellular biology simply didn’t feel to fit in this scene. It was chosen to use the ancient miasmatic model instead.
The point of all this narrative is to explain that the chimerics of the world began to drive the rules, game mechanics and overall system. It would seem most game development works by developing rules and fitting a setting around those. So, we believe that Enchanted Realms is different, perhaps even a bit quirky, in its design. Of course, as things get written down and play-tested, a sense of fairness and game balance start to be exposed. There were some original concepts that were watered down or beefed up to ensure that they worked.
All of this aside, due to the details of how things work in this fantasy world, several explanations of the chimerics will be given before going into the mechanics.