A posting on RPGnet asks us to describe our homebrew systems. I ended up describing mine thusly. Maths-easy 2d6 comedy with either a manga/anime/mecha or zombie holocaust backdrop Qualitative success using 0-3d10 to create a crunchy yet narrative system which can be considered both rules-lite and “a gun game” with a backdrop of psychic powers…
Category: Game Design
Progress and updates on the game design process.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Literally.
It’s always been a frustration to me that I can’t draw. Jared and I have debated this a few times during my forays to Paris. Nightfall had the advantage of having DavA, Chippy and Stuart. Lucky bastards. I need artists for WotW, I need an artist to help me with the imagery for Viride and…
Status: Refugee – A beginning
They repurposed I-90 into a massive people-processing line, putting you through checkpoint after checkpoint. This one for DNA scan, the next one for ID verification, the next for health assessment–the list seems endless. You stand under the afternoon sun, sweating (is the sun getting hotter already?), shuffling with the line and lugging your allocated 50…
WotW: Earth – System Proposal
Here’s a simple system that would get a WotW: Earth game up and running. Before I go into the details, here’s what was going through my head as I designed this. WotW: Earth is set in turn-of-the-century England Player characters are likely to have a base set of skills which can probably default to stats…
WotW: Earth – The Martian Outpost
In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. “I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened…
System junkie
I looked up the definition of the word junkie. It says “Drug addict, esp. heroin”, and the term gets used to describe addicts to anything – adrenaline, sports, whatever. I think junkies (of the heroin type) are looking for the perfect high, which is what I mean when I describe myself as a system junkie….
It’s about starting conversations with new people
I started a little storm in a teacup with my last post. Even got someone else linking to me. And some of the comments on that posting (e.g. “Enh, I went and read the Late Gaming post, and it’s so stupid, I couldn’t even work up the energy for a reply.”) just prove the point….
If Jesus had tits, would you believe in God?
On mer writes about rpgs we find an opine about how it’s such a shame that the pulp-rpg “Spirit of the Century” included archetypes such as: Gadget Guy, Gentleman Criminal, Jungle Lord, Man of Mystery and not Gadget Girl, Lady Criminal, Jungle Queen, Woman of Mystery Yes. It’s a bloody shame. So why don’t we…
WotW: Earth – Air Superiority
“They’ve gone away across London,” he said. “I guess they’ve got a bigger camp there. Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky is alive with their lights. It’s like a great city, and in the glare you can just see them moving. By daylight you can’t. But nearer–I haven’t seen them–” (he…
WotW: Earth – London
“And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I realised…
My Superhero Game.
I’m not happy with the current crop of superhero games. My favourite is Advanced Marvel Superheroes from TSR which is nearly 20 years old. It’s certainly the most flexible and from the most basic amounts of text, oyu can extrapolate so much. I’ve tried most of the games out there and I’m really not happy…
Cherry Hinton
I have a friend who looks just like Cherry Hinton. No, not the town. The character Jared Earle used to play in SLA Industries who was nicely illustrated by Dave Allsop. The really weird thing is that she even calls herself “Cherry”. SLA Industries was the game and Nightfall were the people that inspired me…
One sentence settings…
This is kinda reminiscent of the “Six Word Stories” posting from a while back and also acts as a reminder for you to go read Story-Games. Just do it. It’s the right thing to do. Anyway, the concept is a formula: A (feeling) (genre/place/time) where (struggle/theme). Much like many Story-Games discussions, the fun is in…
WotW: Earth – Bows against the Lightning
“Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the first shell burst six yards above…
WotW: Earth – Progress
I don’t know if anyone is even reading this 🙂 Certainly doesn’t look like it in the comments. I’ve got two more WotW articles on the back-burner. About the actual technology, machines of war, recovery of civilisation and what we were left with afterwards. I’ve not written a jot on system yet. Will likely re-use…
WotW: Earth – The Red Men
The tragic story of a face-eating fungus on Youtube and another about mind-controlling fungi has pushed me to write a little about the Red Men. “The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of Salvation Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the bridge a number of loafers were watching a curious…
WotW: Earth – Here is the News
“At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts of that grotesque time–a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication–the Daily Mail. I bought a copy…
Writing elsewhere…
A few days ago, a d20 supplement author had a little kvetch about getting bad ratings on RPGnow. One of his reviews was very constructive, the second was written by someone new to Earth Languages. He was a little down and claims it almost made him quit writing. As you can see by the thread,…
1st Transatlantic Setting Design Challenge
This post on Story Games I find quite exciting. A month to design a game, using a previously published system? And the additional commitment of having to also be a judge. As a commenter on that page put it: “It’s the exact same situation as Game Chef or 24 hour RPG — feel free to…
Differing Methods of Character Generation
Over the last few years I’ve come to appreciate different methods of character generation. I’m not especially keen on point allocation systems due to concerns that they are unrealistic because a) not everyone is equal and b) they’re prone to abuse by min-maxing. (I find the latter to be more evident in games where you…