LoreForge SWADE Dedicated Master Roadmap: Fast, Furious, and Boundless

System: Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (SWADE) — Core Rules, Companions, and Settings
Philosophy: Pure Tabletop Velocity. Your rules; our unbreakable table! — Leland

⚡ The Vision: Fast, Furious, and Truly Unbound

LoreForge is engineered for live gaming tables that prioritize velocity, narrative freedom, and tactile excitement over sluggish, sterile computer simulators. In Savage Worlds, every combat roll should crack with tension, every Bennie should feel clutch, and every Ace should spark table-wide cheers.

Following the live production rollout of In-Game Tabletop Loot Drops and Community Sharing to Discord (which delivered cloud-persisted GM Armory Vaults, closed-loop tabletop loot grants, and verified .lore community sharing to Discord #💎-lore-shards), this roadmap establishes the next evolutionary leap of our SWADE engine across Four Major Feature Drops (Drops 5 through 8).

🧭 Milestone Architecture: Shipped Foundations to Future Horizons

🎲 Feature Drop 5: Declarative Setting Rules, Switches & Dynamic Table Overrides

Switch seamlessly between gritty horror, high-flying pulp, and tactical sci-fi without breaking table flow.

Savage Worlds shines because of its modular Setting Rules. However, most virtual tabletops ignore them entirely. LoreForge introduces a declarative Setting Rules Engine with a strict 3-Tier Scope that delivers automation where it matters.

1. Tier 1: Hard Combat & Math Hooks

• Wound Cap Automation: Wild Cards never suffer more than 4 Wounds from a single strike. Crucially, the engine caps incoming damage before prompting for a Vigor Soak roll—ensuring heroes never burn precious Bennies soaking wounds beyond the cap.
• Conviction Exploding Meta-Die: Wild Cards track Conviction tokens. Activating Conviction flings an exploding +1d6! die onto every Trait and Damage roll. At the start of the next turn, an automated action prompt asks: “Sustain Conviction for 1 Benny, or let it expire?”
• Hard Choices Benny Routing: When enabled, the GM and NPC Wild Cards start with 0 Bennies. Every time a Player Character spends a Bennie, it routes dynamically through Supabase Realtime straight into the GM’s Benny Pool.
• No Power Points Engine: For grim low-magic or pulp settings, the Power Point counter vanishes. Activating a power applies an automatic penalty to the Arcane Skill roll equal to $-\lceil \text{Total PP} / 2 \rceil$, with an active maintained power counter imposing $-1$ per sustained power.
• Unarmored Hero & Iron Fists: Automatically injects $+2$ to Soak rolls when wearing no armor, and mutates baseline Unarmed Strikes to Str+d4 lethal Natural Weapons.
• Dumb Luck: Keeps the [Spend Bennie to Re-Roll] button active on Critical Failures with an amber advisory indicator.

2. Tier 2: Builder Soft-Cap Modifiers

• Born a Hero: Bypasses Rank prerequisites on Edges during initial Novice character creation, automatically re-enforcing standard Rank progression as soon as the hero earns their first Advance.
• More Skill Points: Dynamically shifts starting skill points from 12 to 15 (or custom GM targets) without altering engine schemas.
• Multiple Arcane Backgrounds: Suppresses duplicate arcane warnings and enables multi-pool tabbed tracking (e.g., Magic + Miracles).
• Sanity Derived Stat: Renders a dedicated Sanity badge ($2 + \text{Smarts} / 2$) alongside Pace, Parry, and Toughness for cosmic horror campaigns.

3. Tier 3: Custom Advisory Badges

Preserving your table rules without brittle automation. LoreForge fires high-visibility tabletop toasts at the precise moment of resolution:

• Gritty Damage: Any unscheduled Wound triggers an instant prompt: “Gritty Damage Active: Roll 2d6 for Injury Location and apply temporary condition.”
• Creative Combat & Dynamic Backlash: Raises on Tests or Critical Failures on Arcane rolls display context-sensitive reminder chips in the live combat feed.
• Heroes Never Die: Suppresses lethal death prompts, updating status to Defeated / Captured.

4. Two-Tier Inheritance & Player HUD Pill Bar

• Campaign Defaults vs. Scene Overrides: Campaign rules configure inside the GM’s master record and clone into active combat sessions. GMs can temporarily flip on Gritty Damage or No Power Points for a single hazardous arena or boss battle without corrupting their global campaign defaults.
• Player HUD Active Rules Bar: Compact, high-contrast badges along the top of the shared player view display active rules (e.g., [🛡️ Wound Cap], [⚡ Conviction], [🔥 Hard Choices]). Hovering or tapping reveals the exact 1-sentence mechanic, keeping the table transparent and aligned.

🧬 Feature Drop 6: Extended Character Forge — Ancestries, Frameworks & Class Chains

Build any hero across Core, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, or both with zero-prep friction.

Expanding beyond the equipment foundations of lore sharing, Feature Drop 6 opens the Character Forge to deep character creation mechanics, supporting official Companions and community homebrew.

1. The Custom Ancestry Builder & Soft-Cap Telemetry

• Non-Blocking Point Budget Bar: Craft custom races and ancestries directly in the Forge:
  • Core Rules & Fantasy Companion: 2 Net Points baseline target.
  • Extended / High-Fantasy: 4 Net Points baseline target.
  • Custom / Homebrew: Open without fixed limits.
• Soft-Cap Advisory: Displays real-time green/amber budget pills. Points over or under standard recommendations trigger helpful guidance but never block saving, honoring GM house rules and asymmetric worlds.
• Human Variant Quick-Toggle: 1-click injection of a Free Novice Edge and immediate budget validation.

2. Frameworks vs. Archetypes (High-Tech, Cyberware & Supers Support)

• Archetypes (Zero-Sum Novice Presets): Town Sheriffs, Elven Rangers, and Street Samurai that neatly allocate the standard 5 attribute points, 12 skill points, and balanced Hindrances.
• Frameworks (Additive Operational Chassis): First-class support for high-octane settings! Super-amped Frameworks (Power Armor, Cybernetic augmentation, Supernatural powers) and Super Powers Companion archetypes layer stat overrides, bonus starting gear, and unique advancement paths directly onto character sheets while gracefully overriding starting creation budgets.

3. Universal Edges & Class Progression Chains

• “Class Edges are Edges”: Multi-tier Class Edges, Core Background Edges, and Weird Edges share an identical, elegant Rank and Prerequisite lifecycle.
• Class Chain Navigation: Visual progression trees allow players to advance from Base Class $\to$ Improved Class $\to$ Master Class (e.g., Barbarian $\to$ Improved Barbarian).
• Rank Guardrails: Soft-warning alerts warn players if an Advance requirement is missing without hard-locking character evolution.

4. The Hindrance Economy & Lossless Ingestion

• Severity Selector: Seamlessly handles Minor (1 pt), Major (2 pt), or Choice Hindrances (e.g., Pacifist, Phobia).
• Advisory 4-Point Budget Cap: Real-time tracking of the canonical 1 Major + 2 Minor limit.
• Lossless External Import: Full mechanical ingestion of custom Savaged.us exports, mapping generic modifier pools cleanly into character sheets.

🛡️ Feature Drop 7: Advanced Arsenal, Tactical Powered Armor & Multi-Crew Vehicles

Deploy walking tanks, starship dogfights, and powered exoskeletons without bogging down the table.

High-tech and military campaigns require high-tier hardware. Feature Drop 7 delivers advanced combat engineering without heavy bookkeeping at the table.

1. Tactical Powered Armor & Exosuits

• Worn Equipment Architecture: Power armor is treated as advanced wearable gear rather than an independent combatant, preserving inventory drag-and-drop and instant equipping.
• Strength Overrides: Replaces natural character Strength with augmented thresholds (d12+2, d12+4) for melee damage and encumbrance limits.
• Heavy Armor Descriptor: Immune to attacks lacking the Heavy Weapon tag.
• Integrated Hardpoints & Embedded Weapons: Equipping a suit dynamically injects mounted weapons (e.g., Wrist Micro-Rocket Pods, Shoulder Blasters) straight into the character’s active weapon matrix.
• Specialized Damage Resistances: Structured damage reduction metadata (e.g., +4 Armor vs. Energy/Lasers).

2. Pure SWADE Multi-Crew Vehicles

• The Ground Truth: A vehicle in SWADE is not a physics simulation—it is an environmental container for actors that passes modifiers and weapon stations to assigned crew.
• Individual Action Card Integrity: Vehicles do not get independent cards. The Driver, Gunners, and Passengers keep their own initiative cards on the Action Deck.
• Crew Roster Binding Layer:
  • Driver / Pilot Slot: Maneuver rolls (Driving, Piloting, Boating) automatically receive the vehicle’s Handling modifier minus current Vehicle Wounds.
  • Gunner Slots: Vehicle-mounted weapons (turrets, pintle mounts, fixed cannons) bind directly to the Gunner’s active weapon tray. The tracker checks for the Steady Hands Edge, automatically displaying the $-2$ Unstable Platform prompt if the vehicle moved.
  • Passenger Slots: Passengers gain passive Tactical Cover badges (Cover: Total for enclosed tanks/sedans; Cover: Light/Medium for open buggies).
• Critical Damage & Wounds: Tracks 1 to 3 vehicle Wounds, Heavy Armor defenses, and Out of Control triggers.

📦 Feature Drop 8: The Lore Bundle Standard & Universal Community Sharing

Package full themed loadouts, custom arsenals, and campaign rulebooks into single-click drops.

Our recent loot drops expansion delivered single-item .lore v1.0.0 sharing for weapons, armor, shields, and gear. Feature Drop 8 scales this into complete Lore Bundles.

1. Atomic Multi-Item .lore Bundles

• The Bundle Manifest: GMs can bundle complete themed drops (e.g., a Juggernaut Shocktrooper Loadout containing Powered Armor, a Heavy Plasma Cannon, Micro-Fusion Cells, and the Heavy Armor Training Edge) into a single portable .lore file.
• Setting Preset Bundling: Include an optional setting_rules configuration block inside the bundle. When another GM imports the .lore file, it instantly configures both their Armory Vault items and their campaign rule toggles with a single click.

2. Discord #💎-lore-shards Community Ecosystem

• Multi-Category Tagging: Outgoing webhooks attach the .lore bundle, tag the thread with 🃏 SWADE and category markers (🛡️ Armor, ⚔️ Weapon, 🚗 Vehicle, ✨ Power), and embed structured visual previews.
• Verified Attribution: Community creations highlight verified Discord handles (Forged by @Handle), maintaining creator recognition and protections.

🏛️ Technical Governance & The Zero-Debt Architecture

Every feature drop across this roadmap strictly adheres to LoreForge’s core engineering tenets:

• Your Rules: We provide a supportive environment that lets your table decide how you play.
• Our Table: A framework of ideas and options that keeps the action flowing no matter how you want to use it.

🚀 The Road Ahead: Pure Tabletop Velocity

From high-octane vehicle pursuits to custom alien ancestries and fine-tuned setting rules, LoreForge is building the most agile, faithful, and visually stunning Savage Worlds platform in the hobby.

Fast. Furious. Fun. Unstoppable.