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Showing posts from December, 2009

I Love Tables

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Lately I've been way into tables. I'm not sure why. I used to love Rolemaster , almost specifically for its weapons tables. I dunno -- I really appreciate games where you can just look at the dice and know everything you need at a glance, but tables still have some weird allure for me. I wrote (and have used) a random adventure generator for Legends of Anglerre , Leftovers ' random Horror generation tables are one of my favorite things in the game, S.O.S. relies heavily on a table for all task and conflict resolution, and so on. Anyway, in keeping with that, here's the main table -- the effect table, or whatever I'll end up calling it -- from my in-progress Simian Circle contest entry. I'm not claiming it's totally original (it unintentionally shares some points of commonality with ZeFRS , BASH , and FASERIP , apparently -- not that there's anything wrong with that), and there's certainly more to the mechanics than just this , but I am totally in

Tasks: Hits and Flops

Welcome to the end of 2009! Hope everyone's looking forward to 2010. I'm pretty jazzed about it, because I'm going to put out at least two games next year. I let myself down in 2009 by not making meaningful progress on Twists of Fate , and I don't plan to repeat that in the new year. 2010 will see the release of Leftovers and... something else -- if not Twists of Fate , then one of the other projects I've been working on, like the S.O.S. (Sorta Old-School) RPG . That one's been going on behind the scenes for months now. However, I'm really digging this other game I'm doing for Simian Circle's d10 contest , so maybe that will take precedence. I dunno. S.O.S. is about three-quarters done, barring playtesting, so it's hard to say. I also have a few board and card games in development, which is a little surprising in light of the fact that I hardly ever play board or card games. The point is, stuff is happening, and that's cool. In the meant

Leftovers: The Basics

In the post-apocalyptic world of Leftovers, there are two primary forms of life: humans and Horrors . And it's not always easy to tell them apart. Not many humans are left -- no one knows how many, and there's no good way to find out. The Elder Horrors, the monstrously huge things that slithered across the world, devoured most of Mankind, but a portion escaped their notice, usually because they weren't worth noticing. These are the player characters. Despite how few humans are left, the scarcity of resources, harsh living conditions, and ever-present Horrors haven't done wonders for their sense of unity. There are gangs and factions, authorities and criminals, killers and thieves. Some fight to keep the insanity at bay, and some go insane right along with it. The Horrors are creatures undreamed of by Man except during the deepest throes of madness. Or something. There seems to be a near-infinite variety of the things, but all of them are terrifying creatures of deat

What Is Leftovers?

So what is this game, anyway? The core of the setting came from the contest's requirement to mash together at least two disparate genres selected from a discrete list. I wanted to do a post-apoc game anyway (for some reason), so I went with that, and then the "Mythos" genre -- if it can be called that -- appealed to me. I figured some version of Cthulhu awakening was as good a cause as any for a civilization-destroying apocalypse, and not something I recall having seen before. But the third genre is what really makes Leftovers sing, if you ask me: Punk. As in cyberpunk, steampunk, etc. Specifically, the contest defined this as a mix of body modification and grey morality. What better way, thought I, to incorporate the punk aesthetic into a post-Mythos-ocalyptic world than by having survivors replace parts of themselves with parts of the otherwordly, Lovecraftian horrors that still roam the Earth? That element really crystallized the game for me. Here's how I summ

Leftovers!

The title of this post has two meanings: I have another blog, Spirit of the Blank , that's all about tweaking Evil Hat's Spirit of the Century to fit various genres and needs. I love SotC , and I've had a lot of fun and success mutating it every which way. However, I have plenty of game ideas that have nothing to do with FATE or SotC that just don't fit into Spirit of the Blank's FATE-oriented mandate, but nowhere to present them to the largely ambivalent public. This, then, is a place for all of those "leftover" ideas. One of those game ideas is a little thing called Leftovers , which I wrote for the most recent Game Fu contest on RPG.net. Leftovers combines a post-apocalyptic setting with Lovecraftian horrors and the "-punk" aesthetic. It's gotten a good initial reaction from two-thirds of the Game Fu judging panel (the third has yet to weigh in) and friends, so I've decided to fully develop it for sale as a PDF and POD product, plus