Games I'm Working On

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

Death and Rebirth

So, after two months and not nearly as many games as you'd think we've switched systems and worlds away from Numenera. Happened mostly because we didn't play for more than a month and during that time I started doing a ridiculous amount of overtime at work which killed my momentum and inspiration for the game. Honestly it was hard for my to build up inspiration for the setting as well. I felt like I was constantly struggling to make things weird enough for the Ninth World setting and yet keep it familiar enough for play to still happen. The other wall I ran into conceptually was the fact that it was an explicit rule set out in the core book and in a couple of the head designer's blogs was the fact that you weren't supposed to connect it to the modern world at all. I know it's my game and I can just change what I want to but having it said explicitly made me struggle with it. Silly I know but there you go. Anyway, on to the new game.

Now, as of about two weeks ago, I'm running a sandbox Warhammer Fantasy game. The catch is that we're using Runequest 6 for the game. So far we've had two games, one was character creation and the second was finishing up characters and starting the first adventure. I'm starting them off with the adventure in the core WFRP 2e book because of the group two of my players are pretty much completely unfamiliar with it and the other two are only passingly familiar with it. Both of them are fairly conversant in 40k though so I'm hoping it'll translate over to some degree.

Everyone's characters are complete as it stands, though one of my players went out of town for a couple games so I need to finalize things with him. The characters are currently:

Orzad, a dwarven machinist and engineer obsessed with clockwork and automata. He was "suggested" to join the army to help deal with the Chaos incursion that became known as the Storm of Chaos as a battle engineer. Is a good shot with his rifle and is near constantly fiddling with it and other bits of machinery. Technically a member of the dwarven gentry he's lost much of his influence since his departure. Still one of the richest and best equipped members of the party.

Hannah, a high born priestess of Shallya. Doesn't quite get the whole adventuring thing and is still carrying some baggage from her birth in terms of how she expects people to act and react to her. A passable combatant and the second best off member of the party what she really offers is the social graces and the miracles of Shallya she can call upon. Is currently on a pilgrimage to learn humility and got caught up helping refugees from the Storm.

Torendil, an elven commoner and apprentice magus. Is currently a student of Aqushy, or the Bright Wind of magic, the use of which is used to burn things mostly in a variety of fun and interesting ways. Has little to nothing in the way interpersonal skills and is about as arrogant as it's possible for an elf to get. In fact even other asur have taken offense to his attitude and it was his teacher who sent him on a mission to "prove his mastery of magic" in the human dominated Empire which he took up with great relish to show the humans a thing or two. Hopefully his magic is enough to keep him alive because his skill at arms is very poor.

The last character still needs to be fleshed out some, he doesn't even have a name currently. All I really know is that he's a former slave who killed his master and is now travelling to seek his honorable death as a dwarven slayer.

And now I have to head off to work, I'll pick this back up later (maybe tonight but probably tomorrow). At the point I'll go into how I've been having them make their characters and go a little into what subsystems we're using from Runequest and what I'm porting over from Warhammer.

A Slight Change

Small change of plans. Last night one of the players in my Shadowrun group came to game (or rather when I showed up for game, since we play a his place) had bought the Numenera core book. So now, instead of planning out a RuneQuest game I'm going to start setting up for a Numenera game based around the same concepts and ideas. First up is going to be my translating and Numenera-izing "Keep on the Borderlands".

Introduction..Thing, I Guess?

I guess this is where I write something about myself then? Nothing terribly interesting I'm afraid. I'm a gamer in my mid-20's with horrible organizational issues that's hoping that using a blog to write about his game planning will help keep him organized and on track. I'm going to try to write here at least once per week, hopefully more then that, to get my mind and plans in order.

Anyway, I'm going to be using this place to map out and discuss (mostly with myself probably) my RuneQuest 6 game. Currently it's in the very early planning stages so most of it's pretty vague but I'm going to be using a homebrew world I've been working on in one form or another for years called Myganos. The basic premise of the world is that there's a largish empire (Turin) that's doing a Roman Empire impression currently. It has been expanding constantly for the last several generations and looked to be set up to continue for the foreseeable future but then one of their border provinces rebelled. The ensuing civil war broke the momentum of expansion Turin had and inspired other uprisings. Which, while individually minor, caused enough problems that the wars haven't stopped since. There are numerous smaller kingdoms, city-states and countries surrounding Turin waiting to see how the wars end while rival empires sharpen carving knives to slice up whatever is left when the dust settles.

This'll only matter peripherally though because the game itself is going to take place in the far northern reaches of the empire and going to concern the goings on of various ne'er-do-wells, vagabonds and cutthroats that usually make up adventuring parties. It does however inform the kind of situation the PCs are from, whether they hail from the Empire, one of it's rival kingdoms or one of the many tribes that have thus far escaped assimilation. It also goes to explain why there are places of darkness like this that exist since the Empire did at one time assign "specialists" to deal with such things.

I think that's enough for now. Mostly because I can't seem to get my mind to concentrate properly on the task at hand (it took me almost 2 hours to write this post). I'll post again in a few days.