The Sanic Hack - Checkpoint 2
Howdy, Farmhands!
It's been some time since I last had a serious sit down and think about the Sanic Hack project. Most of 2025 was spent play testing my houserules at a pair of tables, with a few posts here or there about things I was considering adding to them. The blog versions of those considerations usually were posted months after I'd initially had them, and the last six months or so actually involved very little Sanic Hack progress from little ol' me. What's coming next is a bit of a streamlining and stronger focus going forward, but before we get there, we need to recap what's been written thus far.
The First Sanic Hack Recap can be found here, if you're not up to speed.
Furkind: A Player Option for the Sanic Hack
What the fuck do you mean I published this in May of 2024 holy shit i procrastinated for so long
For the first pass at a "playable race", iiiiiiiit's fine? The only thing I really like is the table of quick motivations, with each entry doubling as a hook for your character and a lore drop without having to outright say it. There's still plenty of room for concise editing. I'll get this down to a single page if it kills me. What has failed to keep my interest, even when I wrote this post a year and a half back, is the Blessings. We'll see these again in a moment, but they'll disappear from mention pretty quick.
The Sanic Hack Part 6: Weapons and Mastery
I was super into this when I wrote it- but while this entire project has been Gadda complicating an Odd-like, adding damage types is a bridge too far. This is getting dropped, though I'm tucking the weapon mastery mechanic into my back pocket. Maybe it'll show up again at some point, who knows?
Rubberwho: A Player Option for the Sanic Hack
Not much more to say here that wasn't already said in the Furkind post. Blessings aren't doing it for me anymore, and there's room for more elegance in my writing to imply setting details. One thing I knew was a stretch when I wrote it was the inferrence of societal grief related to stereotyping. I'd had the thought and decided to just hit the gas as a challenge to myself. Could I successfully imply fantasy racism in my setting without saying it outright? No, it turns out! I could not land this plane that no one asked me to fly. I do not think I will be revisiting it, either.
Weird to think that in a year's time, there'd be an official Sonic x Pacman crossover in a console video game.
Ol' Gadda's Pirate Game
I like this post! It's Cairn with some slight modifications! I made it hoping search engines would direct a poor soul to it in the future, solving their specific table's needs! Other than that, it's just a brief recap of what I've been playing with in my home game while trying out various other Sanic Hack tech.
The Sanic Hack Part 7: Auras and Aura Shards
This is a post I put almost on the level of my personal favorite post thus far: Soda Potions. Do I think it's perfect? Absolutely not. Is it still pretty good? Hell yeah. The difficulty in putting obviously video-game coded stuff into a ttrpg is getting everyone playing on the same page vis a vis the abilities and limitations of those elements. The Passive, Active, Dispel categories work really well to help triangulate what nonense one should be able to get up to; though like the player options- there's a more concise cut somewhere in there.
Ol' Gadda's Y2K-ish City Game
This one's just ok. /j It's an updated version of the Pirate Game post with some more obviously Sanicy bits included. Not much else to say other than that.
The Inventory Trio
Kludgebuckets - Customizable Vehicles for the Sanic Hack,
Costume and Accessories - Inventory Management Musings for The Sanic Hack,
Themes - Quicker Game Prep for The Sanic Hack
When brainstorming these posts on bsky, they were one continuous thought, so it makes sense to combine them here.
The key problem this intends to solve is basic inventory, how to have collectibles in an odd-like with 10 item slots, and some way to customize vehicles without going outside of that inventory ssytem. I think what's come into focus here is good, I just need to come up with a handful of example sheets to bring the vision together. Of course, this could probably just be recency bias, as I did relatively recently write the things.
What comes next?
As I mentioned in the introduction, this Checkpoint comes right before a re-focus for this project. I have a better idea of the direction I want to take it beyond "Cairn with Sonic in it", and the next couple posts in this series should better explain what that direction is. A couple of my darlings won't be making the journey with us, but ce la vie. Maybe one day I'll have a project to slot them into where they were always meant to be. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to take the Weapons and Mastery post out back to put it out of it's misery.
Until Next Time,
Farmer Gadda