[LEGION] System mutterings

As a general rule, I'm not particularly fond of universal role playing game rule sets. I experimented with them quite a bit some years ago - Fuzion, TriStat/dX, and a handful of others - but as time has gone on, I've come to a fairly simple conclusion. While universal gaming systems can usually handle anything that you throw at them, most of them do so in a fairly mediocre fashion. In a couple of instances I'd even go so far as to say mediocre is being kind. Needing to constantly adjust house ruled fixes for these systems was as much a pain writing a game from scratch in some cases, especially in places where those universal systems hadn't even made an attempt to cover the subject (like, say, Fuzion and magic.)

I'll give d20/3.x/Pathfinder a pass on this subject, because I don't particularly believe those games to be universal in any sense. They're designed to do exactly what it says on the cover: play fantasy adventuring games. They may not be the -best- at what they do, but they handle that familiar territory easily enough. Trying to play a science fiction game or a super hero game with those rules is kind of like trying to cut through concrete with a butter knife.

Rules written to cover a certain type of game or genre seem to just work better for their intended purposes, in my mind. This lead me to the decision that creating a new system for LEGION would be in my best interest, but I'm not entirely sure it's necessary at this point.

About a year ago, I picked up a copy of Rogue Games' Thousand Suns, a science fiction RPG designed to provide a gaming experience much like that of the original Traveler and other classic SF games. Having fiddled with Traveler in the past, I can safely say that I much prefer the methodology used in Thousand Suns, particularly the character creation system. And while I'm not particularly enamoured with the default setting presented in the book, I think the TS rules may be exactly what I need to run LEGION.

Rules for cybernetics, alien species, psionics, starships and smaller vehicles - everything I really need is already covered in the basic TS book, and from what I have read on the Rogue Games site, the handful of expansions available for the game should neatly encompass any other options I may need. I will probably be shifting the baseline assumptions for character ability a bit towards the upper end - the character creation rules in TS do seem to heavily favor the average, which is definitely not what I had in mind, but that's a simple fix. I appreciate the simplicity of the 12 Degrees system used by TS, which features a roll-under mechanic using 2d12 for everything. Roll Under systems aren't particularly popular in the wider gaming market right now, but I never really have had a problem with them - which is a bit odd, because I'm not very fond of the classic percentile systems. Ah well. It may be a simple matter of presentation that makes all the difference.

Of course, I can't really expect to be able to publish anything for LEGION with another person's system, so what I'll be doing at this point is probably the same thing I've been doing with Aulkirk - working on setting details for now. It may come to pass that I will have enough material to write an actual source book for LEGION, and at that point I may contact the folks at Rogue Games about licensing and all that jazz. Not gonna be any time soon, of course.

Picking up the pieces.

Hi everyone. I'm trying to get back up to speed over here, still, but I wanted to make sure I got in at least one more update before the end of the month. There's been a little bit of development on a couple of fronts, mostly transcribed from my little flip top notebook, scribbles jotted in margins, and the like. The last three weeks have wiped me out, emotionally and mentally, but I think I've gotten my feet back under me. So, hopefully the next few weeks will bring a more regular update schedule.

Anyway! On to the meat and potatoes:

A) Aulkirk is undergoing something of a thematic mutation. While my goal of maintaining a player-created world is still central to what I want to do with the game, I'm creating something of a meta setting in the background that can fill in the blanks in areas where the players don't pay any attention. This had lead to some unexpected developments: the setting is now officially a science-fantasy one, though perhaps the term "supernatural planetary romance" might be closer to what I have in mind.
The salient details that lead to this idea are simple ones: some of the various species across the face of the world Aulkirk rests upon are not native to it, and some artifacts that may be found in various states of operation will attest to this. While trans-world journeys are not currently possible or even conceptually evident to 99% of those on this world, they have happened in the past many times, and will probably happen again in the future. Visitors from other worlds have, at various times, played immensely important roles on the local social and political terrains; the prototypical ancient empire that shaped some of the lands near Aulkirk itself is a result of one of these immigrations.
Now for the time being I have no plans to make these details obvious to players, though game masters may have full knowledge of this - which means many of the players will too, eventually. This doesn't bother me, and in fact, if some of the players choose to include these details in their own backgrounds and material contributed to the collaborative effort of making the setting more interesting, then that's all the better.

B) While I still fully intend to try and create a setting for use with the ANIMA rules, my plans have been supplanted by the desire to import the stupendously evocative setting for the indie game POLARIS. I've never been fully comfortable with the rules presented in the POLARIS pdf, but each and literally every time I take a peek at the text, the world that was designed for the game rises up and seizes me by the creative short hairs. Whether or not I get an opportunity to unleash this on any of the players in my local gaming group is really up in the air at the moment, but the impulse to follow through on this is way too strong to ignore.

C)On the LEGION topic: I did have an interesting conversation with a friend who's about to start a science fiction time travel game of his own. The starting era of his setting sounds remarkably like the early days of the Terran confederacy, before the days of the Legion itself. Depending on how his game turns out, he and I may start talking about rolling the material he's preparing into the history of LEGION, which opens the door to the concept of adding time-travel to the realm of possibilities in the game. That very much increases the creep factor that I can lend to the horror stories told about the Terran Legions, and it allows for a much broader scope of actions that could lead to a Terran Resurgence in the contemporary era the game is set in.
I like where the concept is headed. I just hope it doesn't overshadow the core themes of the game.

D) Development on STAR SONG and others are effectively on hold for now, until I can clear out some more room in the ol' brain pan for them.

I still have a lot of work ahead of me. I don't know that my 2012 release goal is even remotely possible at this point, but that's okay. I've been devoting an increasing amount of free time to my artistic pursuits, and plans for later in the year may necessitate a second job, if only for a short time. That puts gaming development time at a premium, and Aulkirk will probably be the one setting I work on to the exclusion of others.

Time will tell, I suppose. That's it for now. More soon, hopefully!

Quiet update.

Things are going a bit better over here. The medical emergency that I mentioned a while back has largely been resolved, and while the real effects will last for the rest of the lives of those involved, the immediate danger is gone.
I'm slowly easing myself back into the saddle over here, both with my gaming material and with my illustration practice (which I won't show here). I noticed a little test on I Write Like, which takes a sample of your writing style and compares it to various authors to show you who it thinks your style is most similar to. Curious, I went ahead and submitted a post (the Aulkirk piece I did a while back), and here's what I got:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

I don't know whether to be pleased, or horrified.
Perhaps a little of each is appropriate.

Apologies in advance...

Posts are going to be a bit sparse for a while, as if that was somehow new for this blog. I'm still puttering away with my projects, though I'll admit that Anima has been gobbling up more of my time than I should allow. I'm going to aim for at least one post a week for now; they'll probably be a little less focused that previously, as I'm not going to have much time to properly format some of this stuff for a while.

Thanks to those of you who've started watching this blog, and for the kind words.

C is for Cooperative World Design.

One of my initial premises for Aulkirk was the need to make the game world attractive to players. In order to do so, my plan is to set up the game in such a way that active discussion with the players is necessary to create the campaign setting in which the game will be set.

This isn't an easy concept, of course; its been my experience that when you give a blank slate to a group of players, you'll end up with at least three highly contradictory results, and at least one of them will inevitably try to burn said slate to ashes. A little framework was necessary, hence some of the material that I have posted earlier about Aulkirk itself. The town therefor exists as a kind of literary anchor; as I go about my design work I will try to provide more hooks and interesting bits of detail about the town, to help encourage inventiveness and creativity on the players part, while at the same time ensuring that a base line assumption has been provided for some of the important questions. (Where are we? Who lives here? What's that funny smell? etc.)

Of course, the downside is that without some careful thought, Aulkirk itself could turn into a fairly mundane picture of a town that the players simply wont give a damn about, and the characters will either end up taking the first coach out of town, or try to burn the place to the ground for a change of pace. Lord knows I've had both experiences in RPGs over the years, as a player and otherwise.

Writing interesting NPCs seems to be the easiest way to go about this, but as anyone involved in creative writing will tell you, that's a lot easier said than done. I -think- that Cullae and Emerlain are interesting figures, or rather, I hope so. A little more detail would reveal things like Cullae is a junior member of a group called the Crusaders, an order of knowledge obsessed warrior scholars, or the fact that Emerlain is, in fact, actually a retired conman that has only just come into his position as a result of some youthful indiscretion coming back to bite him on the arse. I've yet to post much in the way of information about Vera, the town's well intentioned but cranky medicine woman, but the hope is that the trio of powerful personalities and the options they present to the players, in a social sense, would be the basis for an attachment to town.

If that turns out to not be the case, I may have to start over from scratch.

So much for that.

As the silence here has indicated, I haven't been able to set aside much time for posting here recently. I'm going to call off the blogging challenge, and just get back to posting again when I have some time.

B Is for Belated

Thanks to an incredibly busy weekend, I'm running a little behind on the A to Z blogging challenge. I reorganizing almost half of my home on Saturday, and in doing so ended up sorting through my gaming collection. A few pieces (mostly card games and unused miniatures) are going out to either thrift stores or friends who'll get more use out of them than I will. I'm a little sad to see some of them go, but at the same time, I haven't touched those particular games in years, and undoubtedly that's a permanent situation.

Anyway!

I'll try to get the next few letter posts done today, as I've got some time between tasks.