Drawbacks, Turncoats and Fate

In the next version of Anamnesis we'll be able to give our character a number of personal drawbacks that can be turned into strengths, switch allegiance mid-game, and generate player characters entirely at random.

Player character drawbacks will be entirely optional and only available if you chose to play advanced mode. You'll be offered 3 at random and be able to re-roll them all or individually as many times as you want just like the starting contexts. They will work in a similar manner, but modifying your character rather than the world as a whole, generally giving your character a strongly negative handicap along with a positive advantage. In between cycles, you'll be able to turn any drawback into a strength, removing the negative trait while keeping the positive one or getting a new positive effect if it previously had none. This will cost 1 Insight tu turn around the first drawback, 2 for the next one and so on.

At the time of writing there are only 14 of these personal contexts, so more variety will be needed before the release. For example, the mysterious benefactor social context was turned into a personal one (and made harsher), allowing you to spend Insight to remove the Local Tension increase each 100 weeks while still getting the Arkhe reward at the end of said period. Others will have your character being a pacifist, granting you Merits but barring you from using unprovoked violence, add a time limit for each cycle by giving you a fading body, or making you an imperfect renascent so that any death in combat finishes the current cycle. Some others get us significantly closer to that long term goal of having a monster game mode for non-human player characters.

Others yet proved to work better as regular socio-environmental contexts, so the game also has 4 more of those for now.

Other than that, following a suggestion in the Discord server, I also decided to allow players to switch between The Court and The Influence between cycles, which I admittedly haven't even thought about until now. This can be done in a few ways. When you have 3 consecutive victories, a random enemy renascent will approach you to try to convince you to switch and join them with arguments of varying validity. When you befriend and bond a captured enemy renascent, you'll also be able to use this to earn the other side's trust and switch at any time. Some of those new personal contexts also allow this.

Lastly, every character generation option can now also be chosen for you at random and left to fate if you feel like it, in case that needed any further clarification.