First off, I really need to have that breakthrough for the Deadworld game. I've been chasing my tail on explaining how I want conflict resolution to work for over a month now. It works in my head but I just can't seem to find the right way to explain/phrase it that looks right to me on paper. I keep having false starts that lead to nowhere. If only there was a way to transcribe what is on the whorls of my brain I'd be done by now. This is something that I really can't even hand off to someone for polish because, well, it's in my head. Game design can be frustrating sometimes.
I think that part of the problem is that I need to be gaming. I need to step up trying to pull some gamers together.
In The Queue
Kicking it Oldschool: I'm going to be starting active work on a retro clone once I can get Deadworld out of my head. I've talked with Daniel Proctor and I have a bunch of ideas that are going to go into a revised edition of the GORE rules. Rather than trying to be a more generic system I'm going to live up to its name and refresh the system into a modern-era horror game that draws upon both Call of Cthulhu and the classic (Pacesetter) version of Chill as inspirations. GORE is a great little system and I think that marrying it more closely to a setting will really help the system go somewhere. This isn't going to be a dramatic edition revision by any means. While the system is going to stick to its old school roots the setting is going to be more modern by comparison. I'll go more into this one various places (here and on Twitter most likely) as I get more involved in what I want to do with the game.
Kingdom of the Blind: The title is a reference to the quote "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." by Desiderius Erasmus. As you can tell by reading this blog I am a gamer, a game designer, more than a bit of a geek, and a fan of comics. One of the things that I have been looking forward to for a bit is the upcoming First Wave mini-series from DC Comics that is going to reintroduce comic fans to the pulp characters of Doc Savage and The Avenger in a world without super-powers that is also going to blend in Will Eisner's Spirit and non-powered DCU characters like Bat-Man (yes, that is how they are going to be saying it in this world), Black Canary, Wildcat, The Blackhawks and others into a pulp influenced world where the greatest hero of the world is Doc Savage. This has inspired me to pull together a system that will also create characters of this caliber (but without super or supernatural powers) and unleash them upon the world of 1938.
Jane Austen's Tales of Terror: This is going to be a setting book for Crafty Games' FantasyCraft game that will be set in the British Regency period and influenced by the works of Austen, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy and the British Romantic poets. The "high concept" pitch to Crafty was "Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a Merchant/Ivory production." Also expect some various FantasyCraft musings on here as well.
