Hollow Knight RPG

Hello Veeky Forums! I mentioned this in a thread a week or two ago, but I started working on some ideas for a Hollow Knight RPG system, and I wanted to get your help on it and also discuss ideas. In the end the goal is a 2d-styled bug-based exploratory adventure throughout the underground (and maybe overworld!).

So far the main mechanic that I've been working on and championing is the idea of a semi-randomly generated map, in order to keep the exploratory and platforming kind of feeling that the game itself has. How this works is roughly like this (though it's still very much a work in progress)
>The players do not have a whole map. Instead they either have nothing, or a rough map with icons and some notes, but nothing concrete.
>The GM designs specific "rooms" ahead of time. These arae places that the GM wants to use for particular encounters, plot stuff, and other particular landmarks. These would be where some of the icons would be.
>The rest of the map is then separated into Zones by the GM, with different biomes and aesthetics.
>As the players explore the areas not premade by the GM, the GM rolls on a series of tables for that biome, which generate the 2d layout of the area they are in, and if desired populate the area with enemies.
>The players get to draw in the map as they adventure, and as they advance can get things that make mapmaking easier or mark more of it ahead of time.

At this point the biggest issue I'm having is the logistics behind the bugs themselves. With the sheer variety of them I'm not sure how to handle their various types mechanically. Perhaps a point-buy system where you purchase specific attributes for things like wings or size?

As for the Zones in particular, my idea was to present a selection of them for easy use, and then add a cohesive guideline to creating them, as well as some blank tables to follow it.

The ones I was thinking we would have as examples would follow the game loosely:
>Underground
>Underground (Deep)
>Mountains/Mines
>Garden
>Garden (Overgrown)
>Fungus
>City
>City (Ruins)
>Wilderness
>Desert

And then perhaps a series of modifiers that would change up the tables by adding or taking away options. Stuff like
>Watery (So that you would get the City of Tears instead of just the City)
>Infested (Turning the deep underground into Deepnest)
>Settled (Changing the Fungus into the Mantis Village)
And perhaps even Abyssal? Depends on exactly how much we want to invoke the actual game's setting.

For the core mechanics I am thinking something relatively light, as to acommodate the massive variety of insects, creatures, weapon types, and methods of combat available. However the one core method that I think I have a handle on is Soul.

Soul works in that every character has a pool of it, and can use charges of it to either heal or perform spells/augmented maneuvers, and I think should stay a constant no matter class or attributes or however the actual crunch for character building works. Instead, Soul is something that raises in capacity as part of your advancement, acting as a combination mana pool and healing surge pool that is refilled by either direct, in your face combat, or rest. Each Soul would heal one full "point" of damage taken, with players having a health pool of around six or so to start off with, depending on build. Since Soul is both your heals and your spells, it means that depending on your focus you could either be a relatively fragile spellcaster or a big beefy tank with the same build, entirely dependent on how you played it.

Of course, attributes or skills would offset this.

For combat considering I wanted to keep HP low, I was thinking that the majority of combat could work similar to how Qin: the Warring States handles defense. You have your passive defense, which functions as AC, and then if something breaches your passive defense you can sacrifice either an action this turn or skip your next turn's action to make an active defense roll to dodge. That way you can have sick dodge moves.

As for actions per turn, I think they should be relatively high. The average I think would be two at first "level", with big strong dudes getting one and speedy dudes getting maybe three. The average damage however definitely starts at one though.

Upgrading your Nail is part of that then. Finding means and materials to increase your damage output is a huge bonus, as the number of actions you have advances very slowly.

I'll bump this once more before I go to sleep. If there's no interest in it, I guess I'll go back to work on making it more of a proper game and post it in a few weeks or something.

Why doesn't the DM design the whole dungeon in one go? That wouldn't affect the PC's need to explore would it?

needs more modifiers
perhaps some that aren't in the original game

I say change Infested to Dark, and have Infested be something like the amber that appears in the crossroads midway through the game. In general, having modifiers appear after some even to shake up a known area is a fun idea to keep up the challenge in the connecting area.
The Abyssal modifier could be generalized to Haunted. With the exact nature of the Haunt depending on the story.
Some modifiers I can come up with
>Chaotic
Lots of enemies fighting each other, for if there's two factions at war with each other.
>Warped
Structures and pathways turned at a weird angle or twisted around because of an earthquake or deity, so you have to be creative when gettng around
>On Fire
Like Watery, except with fire

What sort of content could you base off the white palace?

Dreamworlds are pretty setting-specific.
You could have a bright area that is only accesable through a specific NPC or something.

I think those three would work great, and Haunted would work well as a generic term for "filled with spooky shit.". I especially like Warped!

As for the White Palace, I was thinking that that whole area could use it's own zone type, the "Lost" zone, and be represetative of places that no longer exist/exist outside of this dimension. As much as it is a setting-specific dreamworld tied to an NPC as says, it could still have its own zone type representing the mostly-empty Palace filled with traps. Kind of like the bug equivalent of a ghost town.

It wouldn't, but I originally thought of the random generation for two reasons. The first was to make it a bit easier on the GM in terms of mapmaking, since exploration is such a huge deal in Hollow Knight and having to plan out every single connecting area would be kind of a pain. However, I also decided on the random generation because it would allow both the players and the GM to not necessarily know what's coming next, and create an easily explorable massive map in the process. Additionally, because it's a simple set of rolls, the GM can easily tack on extra chambers and tunnels and rooms during downtime or combat surreptitiously, adding them to their copy of the map.
I figured it'd be an interesting way to go about it, and might also work well for other Metroidvania-style games.