Rush...I don't know how to incorporate it, but maybe farther on down the line, Rush can have boosting abilities..like to increase speed, strength, or defense to make it through certain challenges in the story. He was in a lot of wars... so maybe he'll be doing a lot of that sort of thing...

Turning into an animal? Weird. Um... I don't know if that might work. But it's interesting!

Maybe they have to go through and either make or read a certain 'eumonetic blueprint' of the creature to be able to change into it.

The Protean race as a whole might have the ability, but using it might have roots in various inter-locking levels of tradition, precedence, and appeals that have never really punched through the required beauracracy. As a result, Proteans might have just completely forgotten about the ability,the required eumonetic blueprints moldering away in a high-security government depot. That's not to say a few have 'vanished' among the years.

Brooke would discover these and thus expand her repitoire of morphable animals. They might, also, be inherited and she manages to gradually decipher blueprints as the story progresses. Kydran could create a blueprint of the creature, and so on.

I like the idea of having hidden books of Protean Lore around... y'know, that you have to find in your adventures. Some of them you might find after big battles, or maybe some of them you can find on your own but aren't actually necessary for the story. Kind of like collecting game cards. Sort of adds a bit of interest to the game. It also helps to boost exploration.

Who knows? You may not find any Protean Lore but you find more stuff for trying. That's always something that helps me enjoy a game - even though I haven't found what I was looking for, I found *something*. I like that.

Also, The Lore thing is almost exactly like the blueprints... only, you don't have to go after them if you don't want to. Finding Lore also helps to boost the 'understanding' or level of of understanding in order to produce a change greater than what Kydran can do.

And speaking of on-going chats, you may want to read the transcript from our last meeting. (Thanks to Stix and Vimes for being there!) But allow me to hit the high points, as they pertain to this task:

• Syne's coordination abilities could cover everything from efficiently organizing attacks to automatically carrying out procedures that involve several characters' abilities and several steps. Syne might even be able to be "taught" such procedures by the player so that he can execute them automatically later.

• It follows that solutions our puzzles should require multiple characters and their abilities.

• Character abilities should have uses (not necessarily direct ones) both inside and outside of combat.

The rest of the chat was focused more on purely gameplay aspects, though we can't really separate the specific puzzles and battles from a discussion of character abilities, since one is an application of the other. However, I really want us to focus on what tools we're going to give our player. And we've beaten Brooke's morph to death. In fact, maybe we should take a break from eumonetics altogether. In our enthusiasm over the unique eumonetics system, Syne, Enna, Cade, Ko, and Rush have barely been discussed. This is the majority of our PCs!

So I'd like to hear more ideas in that area. Remember to think about how these abilities can be used both in and out of combat; try to give some examples. Also, how might some of these abilities work together? If you're at a loss for ideas, I suggest going to the plot outlines. What abilities would make sense for a particular character to have within the context of the story? Or conversely, if you have an awesome new ability idea, what implications does it have for the character's story? (As usual, I'll give contributors a first go at it before I offer my own ideas.)

I like the ideas! But, all of these seem pretty battle-oriented. Remember that battles are not the main focus in Fate of Io. Most abilities should not be directly battle-oriented (damage/healing), but have some other effect that could be used in a variety of situations. Each character should probably have only one or two direct-damage abilities.

For example, Dell could carry party members as well as enemies. This could be very useful for getting over small gaps or other obstacles. However, Dell should only be able to carry people a short height or distance before getting tired. That way, there will still be places that Dell can fly to alone, but can't bring anyone with him.

Regarding the eumonetic techniques, Dell could use wind to push objects around. Hmm... we should define better what each element includes. For example, the air element includes not just "air" stuff but also anything related to movement. So, levitation or telekinesis would be air techniques. Also, lightning is air-fire. I'm not sure if poison should be air-water or earth-water... hmm.

Well, gasses can be poisonous.

But I guess poison should really be water... with poison gas being air-water and perhaps some other kind of poison being earth-water.