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| A mere soupçon of the inspirational material I'm drawing upon... |
Several days this week have been devoted to making serious progress on my long-gestating "
fantasy heartbreaker" roleplaying system.
In collating the "best bits" of first edition
Crypts & Things with my own houserules (
most of which have appeared in some form on HeroPress over the years), I'm most definitely
not creating some Frankengame to foist on the general public.
This game, built around my 1980's movies-inspired game setting,
Tekralh (
which takes Hawk The Slayer as its starting point and builds out from there) is purely for home use, my attempt to craft a system that works for me.
It won't be a complete game, just enough material that I calculate could serve as the basis for my dream of an open-ended, long-running campaign for the Tuesday Knights.
Pete's wife, Jeni, was quizzing me the other night about my hobbies, as, seeing my gamesroom for the first time, she wanted to know which of my many interests I considered the main focus of my geekery.
This is something I've been thinking about for a while, so I had an answer at hand: gaming, particularly roleplaying games.
All my other interests, in fact pretty much everything I do, in some way or another, feeds back into the wonderful world of roleplaying games.
Every film, TV show, book, comic, etc I consume informs my gaming: from suggesting plots or characters to translate to constructing thought experiments around how to emulate events in someone else's story idea in a new rules mechanic for my own gaming world.
And it's not just fiction and obvious documentaries, such as those seen on The History Channel or National Geographic, but everyday events.
Something like an international football match will get me thinking about how to bring sports into whatever roleplaying world is percolating in my brain at the time, while a trip to the doctor will conjure ideas for rules mechanics for handling disease, illness, recovery etc
In my mind's eye, I see the world through a prism of polyhedral dice and random encounter tables.
Therefore, I have to kind of smoosh all this together into a game of my own (
which isn't really my own, it owes an awful lot to Newt Newport for giving us Crypts & Things in the first place, which, in turn, used key elements from Blain Neufeld’s swords-and sorcery houserules at Akratic Wizardry) just to keep my head from exploding.
At school, one of the few areas I shone in - besides writing - was "statistics" (
because, ironically, of my love for roleplayng games!). My brain has become far more addled than it was in those halcyon days, but I'm still pretty sure I've got the maths and probability about right in the mechanics I'm creating.
And it's an excuse, as if I really needed one,
to utilise my arsenal of funky dice.
This isn't the first time I tried to kludge together my own system, but this attempt benefits from the knowledge gleaned from previous stabs as well as the fact that, given the Tuesday Knights are still in the early days of Simon's 5e
Dungeons & Dragons campaign, there's no sense of self-imposed urgency or looming deadline.
I'm taking my time, drawing up lists, not trying to bash everything out in one sitting, from start to finish. I'm writing up chapters when I'm ready, but not printing them, so I can go back and amend them when new information and ideas are forthcoming.
It is a work in progress.
It's not going to be clever and innovative, or even anything particularly new, but it's going to be mine.
There's a palpable sense of joy when things come together.
It's going to let me run the kinds of games I've always imagined.
And I'm very pleased with it so far...
