Games I'm Working On

An overview of all the games I'm currently working on.

~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~

The first, and probably the biggest, project I'm working on currently is Myganos. It's my main homebrew world that I've been working on in fits and starts and in various forms since high school. A lot has changed in it since then though at this point I think it's basically settled into it's final form. It still needs a lot of detail work though the big strokes for the main play area have been figured out for the most part. Currently the plan is to just make the setting and mostly worry about rules after I get the setting parts figured out. Since this isn't always possible for various reasons (mostly stuff like magic that are very rule dependent) I have settled on running it with GURPS so I can help describe bits of the world better. The plan is to run it using base GURPS that I've heavily borrowed from the Dungeon Fantasy RPG to help simplify. If nothing else the Exploits book is a good resource for the normal kind of things that a D&D style group of adventurers get up to rather then combing through the core set and various Pyramid magazines.

The biggest thing here is going to be buckling down and detailing the play area including a map and the various factions that exist within it. Writing up a brief world overview document is going to difficult as well since I know I tend to ramble and if I want people to actually read this thing I'm going to need to pare it down to essential information. I can always give out more stuff if they get interested in it.

Myaganos also exists as a D&D setting though not everything comes across as well if I run it that way. I think it works best as a setting for Adventurer, Conqueror, King System because the differences between the playable races are a bit more pronounced than in a normal D&D setting and the different racial classes help to emphasize that within the core rules.

~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~

Next I'm working on a Shadowrun game set in Denver rather than the default of Seattle. Honestly I'm not sure why I'm making life more difficult for myself by choosing a city other then one of the ones they've spent a lot of ink and paper detailing but I really like how central Denver is to the rest of North America and the interactions between the various signatories of the Treaty of Denver, the Great Dragon Ghostdancer, the Free Spirits that have set up shop there due to his influence, and the various mega-corps make me happy. This'll be set in the same continuity of the last game I ran with the events of that game pushed back a year or so and the new game set almost a year after that and the trouble it stirred up. I still have two of the same people playing so I'll let them play the same PCs if they want to, it'll save me from having to come up with new plotlines for them. :-p

Most of the work here is going to be getting a decent map of the city together that is both detailed enough for both me and the players to use but vague enough so that neither I nor they end up dealing with information overload. I think there's an old City of Denver boxed set for 2nd edition Shadowrun which I should look into despite the fact that I'm going to be running 5th ed and that box is set before the arrival of Ghostdancer. It should at least provide me with some good info that I can use as a base, maybe even a map I can scan and alter to update it. After that I'll need to do at least basic write ups for various gangs and other groups that are in the city and quick overviews of what the various movers and shakers are up to.

~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~

The third game I'm working on is probably going to be a Traveller game set in some version of the default setting. Honestly this is the one that I've done the least amount of thinking on since it's the one that I expect to be voted for the least. I'm going to bill it as playing the game that Firefly was based on and while that would've gotten a lot of support from one of my former players he moved to Philly so that's not really a factor any more. I do know that I want to use the Mongoose version of the game and that the plan is to have the expanded options books (High Guard, Merchant Prince, and the like) other then that I'm not sure. I know I'm planning on doing the "default play style" where the PCs are folks living on the edges of society working to keep their boat afloat beyond that I'm really not sure. I know there's a few different versions of the setting that I need to read up on and that for the most part the default setting is the Spinward Marches but other then that I need to do more reading.

~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~

The last thing I'm working on as a personal project that'll show up here periodically is converting the original setting of Warhammer Fantasy into the RuneQuest 6/Mythras system. It's something I tried to do on the fly years ago and it frankly didn't work. I got some of it to work okay and as long as I wasn't trying to force two different magic systems to work together everything went alright but the game fell apart since I didn't actually have the requisite system knowledge for either system to make it work right.

I still like the idea of running in the Warhammer Fantasy Old World and I still think using RQ6/Mythras to do it is the best option but...well I think I need to actually spend more time converting stuff from the first setting into the other system to make it work. We'll see how this ends up going since to do it I'd like to get the updated Mythras version of the core rules since I've got the older RQ6 version and while they're supposed to be compatible I'd like to work out of the core book that I know my players can buy a copy of if they decide they want to. (Especially since I think they included errata into the newest printings.)

~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~          ~~~~~*~~~~~

So there's that. Hopefully I can limit myself to doing these things and keep on point for it rather then harrying off to tilt at other gaming windmills. That's the plan anyway.

A State of the Blog Thing

A lot's changed since the last time I wrote in here.

For one thing that game I was talking about never happened. Stuff kept coming up for everyone involved so it just kept getting postponed until finally I just accepted that we weren't going to play.

So I began retooling it as a free-for-all hexcrawl kind of thing. I was going to pull from the West Marches games and other internet famous hexcrawl and mega dungeon games. The plan was to get it to a playable state and then run it using the new Dungeon Fantasy RPG recently released by Steve Jackson games at my FLGS. It's powered by GURPS and I think it would've been a nice change from the D&D and Pathfinder games that were getting run there. Unfortunately the company that owns the building they operated out of decided to jack their rent up which, when combined with a slow holiday season last year, means that they had to close their doors at the beginning of this past September. RIP The Enchanted Badger, the best damn gaming store that this town's seen in the years that I've been part of the gaming community.

Now I'm back to writing it up to play with a smaller and more consistent pool of players, hopefully with some guest players periodically. I'm back to planning it out in GURPS as well since I'm currently playing in a D&D 5e game run by one of the other members of my group. It's her first time DMing a game (or maybe her second?) and the first time most of us have actually played 5e so things can be...rough sometimes but it's fun. I kinda wish there was a bit more RP at times but to be fair we're all pretty rusty and this is a fairly straight forward dungeon crawl so whatever.

I'm going to try and properly resurrect this blog as well. Right now the plan is to do play reports for the game I'm playing in that'll post every other Monday, since we play every other Saturday. On Wednesdays or Thursdays I'm going to do some game design stuff, mostly geared towards the fantasy game I'm planning on running, though it might be for other games too since I've got system ADD pretty bad and I'm hoping that this'll be a good way to help curb it so I can stay focused.

So that's the plan, hopefully I can maintain output consistently enough that I'll feel comfortable enough to push myself to expand the audience for this thing. Maybe even submit it to the GURPSday Thursday thing that Douglas H Cole does on Gaming Ballistic.

Choosing a Game System and You, or More Accurately, My One Sided Conversation with Myself to Try and Figure Out What to Run

Like I mentioned last time I will hopefully be running a game gain sometime in the near future, and that while I'd like run GURPS running something we all know the basics of pretty well might be a better idea. This leaves either World of Darkness or some variation on D&D as games either everyone already basically knows or I know well enough that I can teach them without breaking a sweat. I settled on some variation of D&D, mostly because I could then perhaps get my players to do a switch over to GURPS at a later date with the same characters but rebuilt for the different system.

The next step was the figure out which variant of D&D to use. The game has spawned countless revisions, hacks, clones, and imitators and I own more then a few, not to mention all the ones available online for free or right next to it. After talking to a couple of the potential players (one of them a gaming gear head like me) I decided against going for d20/3rd/Pathfinder for this. There's just too much material out there for it and despite being able to run the game from heart after it being the go-to system for almost a decade of my gaming I decided that something a little more self contained was the order of the day. I also decided I wanted to run something I owned a dead tree edition of since generally I dislike electronics at the gaming table if it can be avoided so something I can only get as a pdf where the legality of printing the dang thing out is iffy tends to get sidelined in my mind. So now I get to pick between the newest edition of D&D (which I'm pretty sure is officially 5th edition but honestly I'm not sure since the ocean adjacent magi had talked about getting rid of edition numbering for...reasons) and the estimable Adventurer, Conqueror, King System (here after known as ACKS) from Autarch.

When I'd originally thought about this I was leaning heavily to ACKS since I really like the system and it's low level lethality, and the fact that most of the classes (especially the racial ones) map up nicely to the kinds of things that exist in my homebrew world Myganos. However after going over both I think I'm leaning more towards using 5e. Sure the racial classes don't exist and I might have a minor rebellion on my hands when I say there are race/class restrictions but honestly stuff I was afraid of (mostly starting power level and equipment) doesn't seem to be as big a deal as I'd feared. Especially with the wealth of homebrew material out there, not to mention the Unearthed Arcana articles, it seems like I'll be able to tweak the game to suit my desires. It might not be the "core"
game I was thinking of when I headed down this path, or even when I started writing this blog post) but the fact that the books are being sold in out FLGS and I think at least one of the potential players already owns at least the PHB, 5e might be the way to go.

So there we go, assuming this game gets off the ground I'll be running 5th edition Dungeon & Dragons in my homebrew setting of Myganos. Next up is gathering resources to tweak the system as needed, and trying to keep my desire to tinker to a minimum. Also writing a bit of fluff for the races and classes to give the players ideas about how they fit in and function in the world.

Goblin-Kin of Myganos

In Myganos goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs are all basically the same thing. The biggest difference between them is how they go about their day to day lives and where they tend to lair. For the most part what they get called is as much a regional thing as anything else. Technically these are specific classifications for distinct branches of the breed but the only people that really care about that are scholars that don't deal with them and the adventurers that get hired to hunt them down. Additionally ogres and bugbears are related to goblins but they're both special cases.

Goblins are creepy little spastic sadists. They have a thing for harming living creatures and tend to nest in deep dark forests, abandoned halfling burrows, mines, and caves. They don't form hordes/raiding parties very well, usually instead of it being a planned thing a group of goblins will start getting "friends" together and heading to a nearby village to hurt people and burn things and it'll build until it's a proper raiding party. Individually they have an innate sort of cunning, cobbling together tools, weapons, and armor out of scrap and scavenged goods; and being able to recognize valuable objects for decorations and sometimes trade if a shaman or chieftain that can organize them better has risen up from the rabble.

Orcs are basically bigger goblins that live above ground, generally in the mountains though migrations (both natural and forced) have scattered them pretty much everywhere on the face of Myganos that there aren't enough civilized beings to root them out.

Hobgoblins are the end result of an ancient sorcerer-king deciding that goblins would make pretty decent soldiers if only they'd work harder and got organized better. So now there are goblins that have soldiering burned into their very being. They stand up straighter then orcs or goblins, organize more readily, and are better craftsmen then any of their cousins. Neither of the previous sorts of goblin-kin are good at making anything, effective maybe but not really good as a general rule; hobgoblins however have actual smiths, carpenters, and masons to make their goods and evaluate captured goods so their equipment tends to be of a higher quality and their homes are more than repurposed caves, captured dwellings, cobbled together hovels. While orcs and goblins will raid a village, take everything that they can carry and then burn and despoil the rest; hobgoblins will raid carefully so as not to destroy a good source of future goods or to actually take over a village and give them a permanent settlement and a large number of slaves to use and sell.

Ogres are an odd mutation of sorts that happens with goblin-kin sometimes. Periodically a whelp is born that's bigger than the rest of it's siblings and hungrier. It looks odd compared to it's kin and is box-of-rocks dumb to boot. Usually ostracized and tortured while grow that stops once the rest of it's tribe realizes that it hasn't stopped growing and comes to the conclusion of what it is. Ogres stand 8-10 feet tall, have distended jaws fill with rows of teeth that never stop coming in and are constantly hungry. They are usually found singly in tribes of other kinds of goblin-kin and how they live varies according to what kind of clan they were born into. With orcs and goblins they get treated about the same as any other member of the tribe, just with some added respect for their size and strength. In a hobgoblin tribe they get trained to be living weapons and equipped with the best armor they can afford to make in it's size, usually maille, and serve as the point of a vanguard or the chieftain's bodyguard.

[I'll be posting racial templates for each of these in the coming days along with actual stat blocks for examples.]