Faqs

Philosoraptor is a company based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada whose main current project is a tabletop role-playing game that may be called Fantasy Infinity or Aperion. It is currently a one-person, part-time operation.

Aperion is a love-letter to the Final Fantasy series of console RPGs. It’s a fast-playing tabletop role-playing game designed to invoke the feel of my favourite JRPGs, especially Final Fantasy IV and X.

It’s not a computer or console game! The default experience is playing it around a table with your friends, using pencil and paper, dice, and in this particular case, a gameboard-like piece called the Battle Board. No computer or other electronic device is needed, though they do come in very handy at times. In particular, online play through platforms like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds is increasingly popular, especially since the pandemic started.

(Dungeons & Dragons is by far the most famous example of this sort of game.)

It’s not exactly a boardgame as you probably think of them, either. It’s more like improvisational theatre, but with rules for things like combat. One person is the Gamemaster (GM), a sort of narrator and referee, and the others (“players”) each take on the role of one of the main characters in a story they create together. By default the players are not competing against one another, but instead work together to overcome challenges presented to them by the GM.

There’s only one game involved, I’m just undecided on what to call it.

That’s probably all the answer you really need, but if you’re curious about things like the provenance of those names or what I see as the downsides of each, feel free to read on…

The naming of cats RPGs is a difficult matter. In fact it’s proving to be a harder problem than a lot of game-design conundrums I was originally far more worried about.

Originally the working title was Final Fantasy Infinity, but obviously I can’t call it that if it becomes commercially available and/or popular. Square-Enix would sue my ass off, and I like having an ass, thank you very much.

So I shortened it to Fantasy Infinity, but playtesters kept getting it wrong or complaining that it was confusing and/or too much of a mouthful, or just finding it oddly difficult to say. One guy who’s otherwise a huge fan of the system spent about two years consistently calling it Infinite Fantasy, for example. And other people I haven’t played it with also have the damndest time remembering that name. All of this tells me Fantasy Infinity is a really bad name.

So for a while it was going to be Aperion. This is a word I invented accidentally, by mangling a Greek work which can mean “the infinite” among other things. (Technically it should be “Apeiron”, but that’s much less intuitive for English speakers. For the philosopher Anaximander, the apeiron was the one substance from which everything else originated.) This is also the name of the world in which, by default, the game takes place. But that has some issues too. I’d like the name to contain some sort of Final Fantasy reference, and I’d like to keep the setting and the ruleset a bit more separate than that. Calling both by the same name implies a much more inextricable link between the two than is intended.

I suppose Aperion is the current working title if anything is, but that’s all it is and the game is currently without a fully “official” name.

(I’m tempted to say “the 5th Edition of what?” but that would be disingenuous.)

It’s not derived from any other existing RPG. In particular, it is not a variant of any edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

The central game mechanic is a d6-based dice pool (the game doesn’t even use a d20). It’s most similar to some editions of Shadowrun in that respect, though as I explain in more detail in Crystal Memories (Part 3), that’s not where I got the mechanic from; it’s the result of years of trying to boil down Final Fantasy IV‘s central combat mechanic to something that works at the tabletop, and I only later noticed the Shadowrun similarities.

One of its more striking features is its atypical combat system. There’s no combat rounds; instead a given action takes a variable number of very short units called “ticks”. Some characters will actually take actions more often than others. This is one reason the Battle Board is used; along the outside of it is an “initiative track” similar to the scoring tracks found in many European-style boardgames, which is used for keeping track of when everyone gets their turns. It plays out quite similarly to Final Fantasy X in that respect.

There are lots of other game-mechanical things not found in any version of D&D, some of which I’m quite proud of, in many cases inspired by elements of one or another Final Fantasy game or other popular JRPG.

In terms of rules “weight”, I would not call it rules-light (it’s not a storygame or anything like that), but it’s much lighter than many other RPGs on the market. I’d put its complexity somewhere between Savage Worlds and 5th Edition D&D, probably in the same neighborhood as Fate or a core-only World of Darkness game, and well below that of, say, Pathfinder (either edition) or Rifts.

Progress has been slow but steady. Money ran out and I’ve become busy with other things, leading to a dramatic slowdown in 2016 which is still somewhat ongoing. Also, I think sometimes my own perfectionism is one of my most significant obstacles!

The game is still being worked on and I’m in the process of dusting off this Web site, among other steps in the general direction of getting it out there.

1. Get a few more parts of the game ready.
2. Resume commissioning art
3. Hook up with someone who understands marketing because I’m hopeless at it
4. Launch a Kickstarter
5. Use those funds to commission more art, take a little time off work to get the last few things whipped into shape, and fund an initial print run
6. With some luck, become, not rich and famous exactly, but at least self-supporting off designing and publishing Aperion and other games.

A timeframe on this is not something I am prepared to make promises on until such time as it’s clear I can keep them.

Crystal Memories is a series of personal reminisces about my experiences with the Final Fantasy series. It’s loosely related to Aperion in that I sometimes discuss where aspects of Aperion originated, but that’s not its main topic.

These include some of the entries on this blog that I’m proudest of. Parts 1 and 2 are probably my two favourite posts. (Part 3 is a little rambly and not what I’d ideally like it to be structurally, but it’s not bad by any means.)

I do hope to continue it but there’s no rush, plus at this point I’d almost have to re-play FFVII (the original) to get the next entry sorted.