Cataluvia was normally a relatively quiet city amid the provinces of the Gauthier Empire. The many businesses made their trade on the wide and slow-moving River Tytheus between two of the larger cities up and down the river from them, one up in the mountains, one at the sea. By most accounts, it was a sleepy city, whose primary industry involved refining metals and ore from the neighboring villages and the mountain mines, into tools, armor, and weapons for the port city downriver from them. Cataluvia, indeed, was a city of the crafts, presided over by the Lord Bishop of Cataluvia, who was seated at the fortified monastery which housed his order of monks, who were themselves craftsmen, glorifying the god of laws with their masterful work.
Days passed mostly in silence at the monastery, with hymns sung upon each of the six hours of the day, which were measured by the swings of the great waterwheel-powered hammer system at the heart of the monastic manufactory. As ever, work moved steadily along to the clanging heartbeat of anvil and bell, until a cry of anguish rang out from the hagioscope of the chapel. An Anchorite, Forge-Saint of the Cataluvian monks, had ceased his hammering, for he was assaulted by horrible visions. The Lord Bishop himself was called to his cell to hear and interpret their portents. And the portents, he determined, were ominous indeed.
The Anchorite had seen an industrial city somewhere in the Sacred Imperium across the sea, turn to chaos in the days following a great contest of succession in the City of a Thousand Guilds. For whatever reason, the continuum of time and space was ruptured, causing the city to be rendered as molten glass by an enchanted meteor, and in turn stitched into new reality by the intercession of Astral Sorcerors. Was this a result of the dissolution of some cosmic law? A sign of the end times?
The Bishop was able to recognize these worldly events for what they were- Anomalous omens from a year past. And two months from the anniversary of this event, the Lord Bishop realized that something needed to be done to prevent another outbreak of Cosmic Indeterminability... Lest another city be destroyed, and its subjects be driven insane in the ensuing Dimensional Merge.
For this reason, it was decided, that a sacred festival of crafts would be held the following week, to determine the best Blacksmith among all who assembled in Cataluvia. Whoever proved themselves would be awarded one of the Monastery's most Holy Relics, the Reliquary of Forge-Saint Dataniogne, with which they may repair the very welds of Time, and prevent the universe from catastrophic divergence.
THAT'S RIGHT BITCH
YOU THOUGHT IT WAS GONNA BE ME WRITING A SHORT STORY IN HERE
BUT IT WAS ACTUALLY ANOTHER ROUND OF
YEAAAAAAAAAH!
Now, if you're new here (and that's an unusual amount of you all lately) or just too productive to have noticed before, you may be wondering, "What is Blacksmith?"
Well, I'll tell you! Blacksmith is one of those fill-in-the-blank-type card games like Snake Oil or Superfight, where you use your randomly assigned resources to create the kind of highly specialized and weirdly-enchanted weapons or items that would be at home in a roguelike or pulp fantasy. With your ingenuity, you will battle other players to win the most customers. Or the greatest keks, whichever one is most valuable to you!
Here's how you play:
Each player draws 2 of each card type, and then an additional one (the "bonus card") the type of their choice: Materials, Items, Prefix Descriptors, and Suffix Descriptors.
For an example of how these would be put together, |Blessed|Brass|Rope Dart|Of the East|
Players are allowed to mulligan at any time between rounds, at the cost of forfeiting their bonus card on the next draw.
Players will take turns in order of who joined first to be the "Customer". They will read out a "Quest" card which describes the potential customer and their needs.
For example,
"Plague doctor needs new surgical equipment after their last dysentery patient exploded."
And then the other players would submit and describe their inventions- Have fun with your interpretation, just try not to veer too far away from what the actual card (the prompt, if you will) is saying! To avoid this becoming a game of people inventing the most all-encompassing magical multitools or just extremely overpowered weapons, the Customer is advised to pick the one best suited to their specific situation. As well as what they think would be funny.
The rest pretty much proceeds as this sort of concept-pitch game always does. After the winner is declared, all players who spent cards this turn will discard their cards to the bottom of all relevant piles and then draw from the decks until their hands contain the original amount of cards. (Though if the "additional" one was spent, the player is allowed to pick a third of a different type.) The winner is awarded the judge's card, and the first one to get up to a number picked before the game starts wins. At least, that's how it would work if this were a real card game. But since we're playing this over the internet, we have to get a little bit meta and honor-system-ey.
Because I dream of someday playing this game myself, the way to play it on an internet forum has been revamped. This is so anybody in the future, if they want, can start a game of Blacksmith by themselves at any moment, without one player always being sort of on the side of the game simulating the deck of cards as it would be played in real life.
Here is the Random Card picker I use! It comes with a random item generator of its own, both for utility in running the game, and because it's funny.
https://perchance.org/vhuap91ydn
Now, the game will proceed with whoever started this game dealing everybody a hand from the "YOUR HAND IS:" line. All cards are dealt in the order of *[Prefix]* *[Material]* *[Item]* *[Suffix]*, or in the case of "YOUR HAND IS" *|Prefix|* *|Prefix|* *[Material]* *[Material]* and so on. Since some cards have a lot of words, all of them have been marked with asterisks to show where one ends and another begins. Remember, a full hand consists of two of each kind of card, and one bonus card! If there are repeat cards, you are instead to replace the copy with an item of the same kind from the "YOUR RANDOM ITEM IS:" line. Because of the nature of how I plan for this game to be run, it will be impossible for everyone to catch all duplicate cards made by this infernal machine, but everybody try your best and it'll be fine. The Dealer (and every customer after him) will also PM the "YOUR CUSTOMER IS:" scenario to the next customer for them to write up the appropriate spiel in the game thread and get the blacksmiths thinking.
Importantly, the original "dealer" will abstain from the first round, for maximum fairness. All future rounds will be "dealt" by the previous customer, with the players of that round PM'ing them which cards they need to restore their hands, (If it's only one, give them the card of that type from the RANDOM ITEM. If it's two, give them both cards from the YOUR HAND IS. If it's three, give them all cards of that kind from both. If any of the cards you need to give the other person are repeats from previous points in the game, refresh the generator!) and the dealer being PM'ed their hand by the first customer. Does that make sense? I hope it does. Post your questions if it does not make sense! I will draw diagrams if I have to.
As far as card syntax rules, I'll say that a creation doesn't need to be just one of each card in that specific order. At bare minimum, it can be two cards. At maximum, I'd say 5. As long as it makes grammatical sense for what you're proposing, you can even use materials as items and vise versa, since they're both nouns. You could, say, use "Cake Sword" to mean your sword is made of cake, or "Sword Cake" for a cake made of swords. I don't want to be too restrictive, if your creation makes some kind of grammatical sense, it should be legal. If anything's dancing on the edge, remember that one of the oldest unwritten rules of Cystia is that anything funny is legal at least once.
We'll need 4 (including me) to 6 people to play this game, and the first person to 3 points wins... 15 Golden Frijoles! But of course this kind of game is rarely ever about the score, is it?
