Oh, It burns!

Burning Starlight?

Author

John B
January 08, 2025

This week we're talking with Ryan, who writes Burning Starlight.

Ryan is a big booster of other authors and all around great guy.

Questions
(1) How'd you come up with this system?

I’ve been making my own games since middle school, which is just about a quarter century now. It started with card games, and by high school it was tabletop rpgs.

When I started writing for myself, I quickly discovered I was a “hard magic” sort of guy. That remains mostly true to this day. Over the years however I’ve exposed myself to a lot of different magic and progression systems, and my stance has softened somewhat.

This is especially due to xianxia and cultivation fiction. I read a lot of very middling translations of stuff coming out of China for a year or two, and much of it stuck with me. There’s something about the idea of dedicating oneself to the pursuit of a concept or an ideal and following that path all the way toward immortality.

So when it came time for me to create a system, I drew on that as my core. I knew I wanted to riff on the idea of cultivation, but I wanted to try and find a lane that hadn’t been thoroughly trodden before.
(2) Was it based off a game you played and loved or a book?

I’m obsessed with TRRPG design. It’s to the point now where I’ve collected some 6 bookshelves worth of TRRPG material—I read sourcebooks full of rules for fun.

I adore a unique system that’s laser focused on telling a specific story, but I personally fell in love with more generic systems like Fate, Cortex, Powered by the Apocalypse, even GURPS. I think it’s safe to say that while my system doesn’t resemble any of those games too closely, their design ethos is too much a part of me to ignore.
(3) Is the math a constant obstacle for you?

The answer is, as it ever is, spreadsheets. Even though I’ve obfuscated away most of the numbers that face the reader by using ranks, I’ve still got a lot to track on the back end. Thankfully with a good set of spreadsheets most of the math is just setting up formulas once and checking in every chapter to nudge some values.
(4) What are the main skills, and why did you choose those?

I don’t have a core set of skills, but I do have unique attributes so I’ll talk about those.

One of my favorite simple systems to whip out for one-off games was a Cortex (or Fate) based game with two columns: approach, and tool. A player decides how they want to do something, and what they want to use to do it.

That’s basically what my attribute system is approaches and “tools”. The approaches are Force, Grace, Insight, and Resolve. The sources are Body, Mind, and Spirit.

That leaves 12 possible combinations, and therefore 12 Attributes. Is it a lot? Yes. Does it interface well with the cultivation that underlies my system? Also yes.
(5) Did you make the system first or work through the plot first?

My goal with the system was to make a consistent set of rules for myself that accomplished three goals:

Be consistent enough that I don’t need to babysit it
Give me a way to tie progression directly to a character’s arc and personal development
Be flexible enough that all of my stories can use it with minimal adjustment.

(6) Is there anything you wish you had done differently?

I don’t know yet! My first real public fiction only started in mid-November. Time will tell how will it holds up, but it’s doing what I need it to so far.
(7) What's a "level up" in your system?

I’ve got my magical spreadsheet that calculates the ranks of all skills, abilities, and tracks (Class/Profession). Once a threshold has been crossed, you tier up! But that’s a pretty boring answer.

The actual “leveling” experience is really found in ranking up skills and abilities. The process of earning a rank is identical for everything that uses ranks, so we’ll just use Skills as an example.

Let’s say you’ve gotten yourself the Swordplay skill at Novice rank. You’re a Novice Swordsman–easy. Now, getting to Apprentice? That’s pretty straightforward: practice, practice, practice. But to move up to Adept, you need more. You need novel experiences, you need to apply the skill in interesting ways, you might even need some sort of profound breakthrough in understanding–that’s how you increase your mastery.

This is good as an advancement mechanism over pure repetition for at least two reasons:

It’s easier to know exactly when something deserves to rank up (because it’s probably related to something happening right then in the story!)
It’s tied tightly to meaningful character development. Skill spamming won’t get results; only pushing the limits.

What do you want to shout out?

What do you want to shout out?
fONDOUR is a creative powerhouse, and everyone should be reading their work and following their new works closely.


Burning Starlight

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/98248

Thanks for reading System Analysis. If you have a suggestion drop me a line [email protected] or check out my author website https://storyweaver.quest

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