Your cast and everything they carry

Playable characters, NPCs and enemies are one kind of definition: a template the game makes creatures from. An NPC or an enemy can be a variant of another, keeping everything it doesn't change, and a variant can have variants of its own.

• Values a variant removes on purpose instead of inheriting, such as a ghost villager who carries nothing
• Unique for a named character the world holds one of, off for a template the game makes many of
• Variants that take their parent's equipped gear and carry an inventory of their own, or none
• Tags from your taxonomies, such as a faction, that formulas and conditions can test

Keywords are the text a character brings to dialogue, quest text and narration, such as a name, pronouns or a title, and an image scheme is its set of picture slots, such as a portrait for each mood in a visual novel. A keyword's value is fixed, offered to the player as a default, or typed in by the player, and it can draw from pools, so each creature made from a template draws a name when the game creates it.

• Pools open by prerequisite, so an alien draws from alien names and never from human ones
• Cases for text that depends on the creature, such as a pronoun that follows the player's choice at character creation
• A conversation portrait for each character, shown unless a scene or a line picks another
• Keyword renames that reach every conversation using the keyword

An equipment layout is the set of slots a character wears and wields things in, and an inventory layout is the shape of what it carries. Inventories are lists of slots or grids of cells, one choice for the whole project, and new projects start with lists.

• Slots that take items by tag, with a count for slots that are alike, such as two ring slots
• Slots tied to a body part, or to none, such as a belt pouch or a familiar
• Containers with an inventory of their own, a list or a grid like every other
• A change of mode that converts every capacity, container and starting item in one step, which one undo takes back

Every item is the same kind of definition, and its roles decide which sections its editor shows: Equipment, Consumable, Quest, Weapon, Ammo, Container and Device, in any combination. An item with no role is a prop or a token for the plot, and a variant inherits from its parent item, adding only what differs.

• A usage requirement read from the would-be user, with a count of how many of your characters meet it
• Roles that combine, such as a throwing knife that is a weapon and its own ammo
• Weight as a number or a formula, such as a flask that weighs more as it fills
• Durability, stack size and charges kept per copy, so each sword wears down on its own

A weapon has one damage formula, dice and all, and the editor shows the lowest and highest it can roll. Ammo fits a weapon by tags, with no list of items to keep up, so a new kind of round fits every weapon whose ammo tags it carries.

• Clips that hold one type of ammo at a time, refilled by reloads that top up or swap
• Bows and thrown weapons that draw straight from the pack, with no clip to fill
• Magazines that are ammo themselves, and come back holding what was left
• Reloads that mark what went in, so a shot can tell armor-piercing rounds from standard ones

An item's passive effects work while it is worn, while it is anywhere in a character's inventory, or around the item itself, wherever it is. A hosted reaction makes the item the actor, so a timed charge goes off where it lies, not on whoever set it.

• Every copy counted, so ten chunks of uranium in the pack give ten times the radiation
• A container that reads what it holds, such as a sack that tears when it's overloaded
• Items a spell reaches where they lie, such as a powder keg that explodes when fire hits it