Convocation Prime
A downloadable game
Following a robust body of “monster trainer” cartoons, games, and franchises (including the highest-grossing entertainment media franchise of all time), Convocation Prime is about relatively normal people (usually children) capturing and training magical creatures, often using them to fight the magical creatures of other trainers to solve problems.
Derived from C.W. Griffen’s Anima Prime, this tabletop role-playing game puts summoned mons (here called “eidola”) front-and-center, and aims to make creation of both eidola and their trainers fast. The mechanics are significantly less complicated than other monster-training games you might find on the internet, but still just a bit more crunchy than “rules-light”.
The game includes three different settings, each offering a different approach towards putting the human trainers in harms way (or not), with different ages of target audience in mind. While not specifically targeted at kids, older children may be able to handle the game’s more fiddly bits.
Character sheets are assembled from modular components, using “4-up printing” features available on most PDF software. (Or, if you are daring, with a supplied python script.)
An alternative set of "layered" sheets are build as single pages, with sections that can be hidden and shown, rather than using 4-up printing. These sheets require a PDF viewer capable of hiding and showing layers, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit Reader.
This title is a “DivNull Seed”, meaning it isn’t, and will never be, entirely finished, and is intended for you to tinker with. For more information, see its product page at DivNull Productions.
Convocation Prime is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Download
Install instructions
These files are:
- convocation-prime-1.1.pdf: the main game
- convocation-prime-sheets.pdf: you will need this for parts of the main game to make any sense. Each page of this document is a module, four of which get assembled into a full sheet. The first page describes how to use 4-up printing to do this.
- play-aid-conflict.pdf: a “cheat sheet” for use in conflicts, with larger pool trackers and summaries of the rules. (This sheet was constructed from modules in convocation-prime-sheets.pdf.)
- convocation-prime-character-creation-survey.pdf: a page you can hand out to starting players to guide them through creating their character and their eidola.
- convocation-prime-print-cut.pdf: an optional document that assembles the pages of convocation-prime-sheets.pdf into a format that can be printed out, then cut into modules for hand assembly as a sheet. Use this only as a last resort.
- conv-sheet.py: an experimental python 3 script which knows how to assemble the modules of convocation-prime-sheets.pdf into sheets, if you can't use 4-up printing, or want more complicated options. The second page of convocation-prime-sheets.pdf describes how to get it running, and its -h option details what it can do.
Development log
- Convocation Prime 1.1May 07, 2023
- Added layered sheets for Convocation Prime (letter & A4)Mar 26, 2022
Comments
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Thank you for this wonderful game. Ive been on an Anima: Prime kick for like 2 years now, and your Prime Spiral write-up has been incredible for working on my own WIP hack of the game. I'm planning to start running this game in the next month or so, with a few modifications from Prime Spiral.
I think in particular that a change to Tier 4 rules and the Primal Spiral suggestion of switching to more granular d10 rolls and Enlightenment, could allow for some nice rules for a Mega Evolution style mechanic, with a new type of evolution Procedure that unlocks access for a tier 3 mon to become tier 4 and Transcendent for a single fight, at the cost of having to spend influence to activate it. This also opens up a cool new setting option middle ground between Breech and Lost Chains, for Mundane trainers that are able to become Enlightened through a similar procedure.
I'm also toying around with on a new mechanic for Breeding/Baby Eidolons, slightly inspired by the Pattern system in Breech, where players can obtain new Eidolons that start at Tier 0 and only at Enlightened instead of Illuminated like other Eidolons, but allows for more flexibility in shaping it into specific facets through having an additional evolution chance.
I'm gonna be playing over tabletop simulator (Which I think is the best way to play this digitally, given how much it involves moving dice between pools, which other VTTs dont really support) and would be happy to post a link to the table for anyone else, once I finish scripting all the character sheets.
Thank you again for all the work that went into this!
so i dont play in person only though virtual tabletop and discord
any suggestions for that kinda play
while the 4-up printing sounds cool
seems difficult too use
I don’t have much experience with virtual play. Because dice act as tokens, you’d probably need some kind of support for moving the tokens/dice around between players.
As for the 4-up printing, what’s caused trouble when you tried it?
i dont really print anything nor do i know how to use python
i love this game concept but im kinda just stuck not sure what to do
If you don’t print character sheets for other games, what do you normally do to track characters?
virtual tabletop
pdf intractable sheets
or make a google doc
:)
To what PDF software do you have access? Under what OS?
What do you actually want to have in this case?
Well this is beautiful. Itwill take a lot longer than I thought to unpack all of it. Woooow.
Hi! I've been using your Prime Spiral & unofficial Anima Prime 1.5 document for the last few years. It's lovely work. I'm cracking open this now. If I have any suggestions, I'll comment here
Right now, my play group & I are involved in an Exalted Prime game, so your documents are, of course, invaluable.
I deleted some the comments below. Sorry. Was intended as a private conversation.
I don't think itch.io has PMs. :/ Sorry about that. Regardless, the thing was beautiful. Could I share it with my group? Thank you for your time.
Sure.