The game designers / writers / artists alliance
CC -by -sa -nc Fabi Fliervoet
Let me brief:
We, are all a bunch of creative people, but we all have our shortcomings; either if it is lack of time, little experience, artistic skill (or lack of), typesetting skills, writing, just pick yours. I as a Spaniard who lives in Spain may have a few more with my English and my ability to attend conventions or launch anything on kickstarter.
We are in the long tail of a small market, and we can hardly produce a game a year at great personal cost; and let me not get started about marketing.
A labour of love, yes, we do it because we love doing it, but
What if we cooperate in a more permanent structured way? I am already giving a thought to an offer on of our fellow forum-ers; and I think we all need to consider similar ideas:
What if artists/writers/editors could work for a share in the benefits?
What if the manuscript could be edited online by a team of collaborators?
I believe our games will end up being better, more professional and get easier funding.
The Infinity Road: a free setting
I have made up my mind to make The Infinity Road a free setting; free as in free speech and as in free beer. Reasons?
A price tag
Turns out that selling a game it’s much more than simply hanging a price tag from it. There are increased costs: both monetary and personal. On the monetary, I would have to hire an editor, which can mean a few hundred of dollars, then a cover, another hundred, at the very least, and the interior art. Then there is the advertising, taxes and a plethora of small things.
In other words, I would consider myself fortunate to produce They Infinity Road on less than €1000, very fortunate. That’s a bit less than my salary after the cuts, thank you, crisis.
But that’s not the main thing
The main thing is that I have a regular 7AM to 3PM job, and a vocation. There is the small chance that I might end up becoming an Anglican1 priest. I do not really count on it; not the best material for a priest. Finally I’m writing fiction, in Spanish, which happens to be my mother tounge.
I cannot do everything, but I will still like to game, and this is my best alternative. I will still revise my writing and do a basic spellcheck. But my images will come from open or public domain sources. The result will not be perfect, but at least playable and,
You can always improve it
The whole book will be open; not sure yet whether I will use an OGL, a Creative Commons or a GNU documentation license; but in short, anybody will be able to use all the material I create. I think that is better atuned to the role-playing ethos; yeah it’s OK if people make money, in fact the hobby would have died out without regular businesses, but I think that role-playing is hacking in fantasy, and the more open it is, the merrier.
-
That’s Episcopalian for those of you on the American shore. ↩
The Infinity Road: Update
OK, so the Infinity Road is progressing nicely. There are almost 50 pages of main matter written, without illustrations, just text, tables and some white space. It is now 17,000 words and its structure is complete. Right now, however, it’s a mess of Game-Master notes. There is a lot to do in the way of editing and fleshing out, but it is already usable. Anyway, let’s take a look at the structure of the book
Table of Contents
Introduction, where it introduces the world of The Infinity Road
Characters, discussing how to create new characters for the Infinity Road and how to introduce your old but loved player characters into the setting.
Settlers, regarding villages, hamlets and the people who live there
Wanderers, regarding those loners who devote their lives to relentlessly find a door out of the Infinity Road and back to Earth
Nomads, including marauders and slavers
The Wilderness, telling about how it’s so hard there and introducing “The Guardian” (nasty and mysterious)
The Intelligence, the supposed “being” or “beings” that keep the Road running
Seeds for adventures: there are four campaigns detailed here, which I will be telling you more
Designers Note: nothing written here yet
Nomenclature
Index
List of Tables
As you can see, even it is a small book, I have kept every feature of the big ones. All in all, the Nomenclature, Index and List of Tables only adds 5 pages (right now), which will be of help for those of you who prefer to print the pdf, and for the paper version.
OK, back to work
The Infinity Road: The waif entry
CC -by -nc -sa Johnmuk
“I just don’t know how it happened; Allan and me, we sneaked out from the… place the… wo’khouse and Allan said that he didn’t like London any mo’. And he didn’t wanted to go to no town either, so we went to the station. Had no money, none of us, so we paid with our wits and sneaking in an onion ca’, which was all the right, ’cause they tasted good. And then, near a forest, somewhere north of Luton, the train stopped fo’ somethin’ and Allan said “I like this place, Georgy” –that’s me– “we’ll live ‘ight ‘ere” and so we did. And we walked into the forest, and we made a fire, and we were merry and we slept under the trees, and then we wok’ up, and it was a fog, a terrible thick fog, and then we were on this road.”
Every story shares three common elements: a group of people travelling across some desolate place get lost (1), often in a mountain or a forest, find themselves engulfed by a fog (2) and then suddenly appear on the Infinity Road (3). They differ on every other aspect. However, some stories are more common than others: for some reason children between 7 and 15 make up for the 70% of the Exiled.
The infinity road
CC -by Ian Sane
In her own words
“Hi, this is me, Anne Elizabeth. I’m 13 and 12. It’s kinda hard to explain because we’re not growing ur or old any more. Mom and Dad say it’s OK. They even say it’s all the better for them -not to grow old any more- and say they are only worried for us, Peppy -she’s my sister-, Spotty and me. But I know they’re faking it. This is way weird, scary weird.
You see, one year ago it was my birthday. I was all excited up. It was a school vacation and dad and mom had taken a few days off too. It was to be four days, three nights on the forest, just ourselves and the trees. Our first adventure! Only that mom got lost, I reckon. Or something like that. And then the road became too black, too neat, too weird, no marks on it, no lines, just black, no rough edges, all perfectly black, too neat. ‘specially for a forest road, you see. And then a mist came and covered us and then we got lost, really, fully and completely lost. Lost like GPS didn’t work any longer and maps said we couldn’t be where we were. And then everybody got mad, but it didn’t help, at all. And it got sundown and you can’t see any stars at all. That kind of lost. And then we drove on and on, and then we met a lovely who had got lost too, hundred of years ago and they kept chickens, a mule that survived Little Big Horn and a baby… Triceratos!
Then we knew we all wanted to be back home.
The setting
Imagine that there is a road somewhere, out of space and time to which nobody has ever arrived except by chance. Once there they do not age any longer even a second, and cannot procreate.
Some creatures, apparently common plants and animals, are born in the Infinite Road; these live normally. The rest are lost in time and space. Of those who arrive, most end up settling somewhere along the road, some continue on and on, trying to reach the end of a road that seems to have no end; a few venture to the Great Wilderness beyond the road, where beasts from the past and present dare.
The Infinite Road itself is far from safe: marauders, slavers and warlords can prove to be more lethal than the odd chance of meeting a wandering saber-tooth.
(To be continued)
Newsies & Bootblacks: Grown Ups
Version 0.1 (Early Draft)
Abstract
I am incubating a new role-playing game, working on Newsies & Bootblacks. There is nothing set in stone now, except that my goals remain to create a role-playing game that is fun to play, neither rules-light nor crunchy and that could be used to role-play children and young-adult novels. However the heroes of young-adult novels are not always all young-adult themselves. The rules set in this article will allow N&B players to generate and play grown-ups.
Dice (A reminder)
Newsies & Bootblacks uses normal six-sided dice. They are made stronger or weaker than regular dice, just by the way you read them.
Fool Dice (fd) : When you roll fool dice ignore any result higher than 4. That means if you roll a 5 or 6 you read it as if it were a 4.
Weak Dice (wd) : When you roll weak dice ignore any result higher than 5. That means if you roll a 6, you read it as if it were a 5.
Normal Dice (nd) : These you read normally; a 1 is a 1, a 2 is a 2, a 6 is a 6, and so on. (Also known as OK dice.)
Swell Dice (sd) : When you roll any swell dice, ignore any result lower than 3. That means when you roll a 1 or a 2 you read the die as if it were a 3.
1 Player characters
The standard rules in Newsies & Bootblacks disallow adult player-characters. In fact, one of the first rules in the game state that once your character hits 17, he is out of the game. This module makes room for those who would like to play older characters in their game and prepares for further development of the N&B game rules. Even thought I have included a few explanatory notes, I am assuming you are familiar with the N&B rules, which you can find on this blog and elsewhere on the Internet (just google Newsies & Bootblacks)
2 Who are you?
Age
Age is not that important for grown-ups. Just choose any convenient age for adventuring.
Name and gender
Next, we need to know your character’s name. Choose any name you want and write it down. Choose your character’s gender too. In this game it doesn’t matter if your character is a boy or a girl, except when he or she goes to the restroom.
In short
• Choose any name you want for your character.
• Choose any gender you want for your character.
Birthday
Birthday is less important for grown-up player characters; but go ahead and choose one.
3 Attributes
Attributes are the figures that define your character’s basic capabilities. It is important that you understand what each one of these is used for.
3.1 These are your attributes
Strength (STR): Measures how strong you are.
Health (HTH): A measure of your character’s resistance to sickness, fatigue, poisons, bullets and thrown cream cakes.
Agility (AGI): Tells you how graciously your character moves. A character with low Agility will never be a good athlete.
Education (EDU): Measures how much the character knows about the world.
Eyes & Ears (E&E): Measures how well your character can understand what’s going on around him. Please remember that it does include all five senses; not just sight and hearing.
Charisma (CHA): Measures how cute, swell, nice, handsome, cheerful, good-looking and cool your character is, all rolled into one attribute.
Note that all humans have a least one weak die assigned to each of these attributes, as will most animals. A few monsters, such as ghosts, will not use each and every one of these. Please, take time to consider before adding any new attributes to your game. Do so only if you sorely need it.
3.2 This is how you generate your attributes
We pay for new dice with attribute points (APs). You begin with as many attribute points one swell dice plus fifteen.
In short
• AP = 1 sd + 15
With those attribute points you can buy dice for your character’s attributes. Every weak die costs 1 AP, while a normal die costs two APs. You can also upgrade a weak die to a normal die for 1 AP. Adult characters can have allocated up to six dice in any single attribute. Every attribute must have at least one die allocated to it.
In case you are wondering, you can’t buy swell or fool dice. Your character’s skills upgrade your normal dice to swell dice or in some cases, downgrade your weak dice to fool dice. These will be explained in more detail in the following chapter.
Be wise when you split up these dice. If your character gets very strong but is so ugly that dogs run away from him, they won’t sell many papers. And, they can be as cute as a kitty with angel wings, but if they stay most days in bed sick, they won’t be of much help, either.
In short
• One weak die (wd) = 1 AP
• One normal die (nd) = 2 AP
• Upgrade one wd to one nd = 1 AP
• Maximum number of dice in any single attribute = 4, 6 for grown-ups
• Minimum number of dice in any single attribute = 1
• You can’t buy swell or fool dice.
4 Pace
Pace is a measure of your character’s speed, expressed as how many yards your character can walk per turn. Adult characters roll 1 swell dice and add 1 to determine their pace.
In short
• Pace = 1 sd + 1
5 Skills
5.1 These are your skills
Skills are stats just like attributes, only less broad. Agility (attribute), tells us how well you move in general, while Riding (skill), for example, tells us how good you are at handling a bike.
This game has 21 skills open to player characters:
Fisticuffs (STR), Throwing (STR), Athletics (AGI), Climbing (AGI), Dodging (AGI), Locks (AGI), Pickpockets (AGI), Riding (AGI), Stealth (AGI), Swimming (AGI), Vehicles (AGI), Academics (EDU), Crafts (EDU), Healing (EDU), Mechanics (EDU), Streetwise (EDU), Observation (E&E), Shooting (E&E), Languages (CHA), Performance (CHA) and Sweet Talk (CHA)
You will figure out that Athletics is good for climbing, jumping and playing football; Fisticuffs comes in handy for brawling and Healing helps to fix people after that brawling. Other skills might be a little harder to figure out. If you need help, they are better explained in Chapter 3, Section 3.8.
Every skill is linked to an attribute that is shown in brackets. For example, Academics (EDU) is a skill linked to the Education attribute. That means if you are good at Academics (an Education skill), you roll using your Education dice, but upgraded.
Notice that no skill is linked to the Health attribute.
5.2 How you generate your skills
First, find out how many skills your character is good at. These are as many as one swell dice plus seven
Then, find out how many skills your character is bad at. These are as many as one weak die plus one.
Those skills you have not chosen to be either good at or bad at, you are OK at. We deal with the exact meaning of these in the rule-book. Right now, all you need to know is that being bad at a skill decreases your chances at completing any tasks associated with that skill because it downgrades your dice. Being good at a skill upgrades your dice.
In short
• A player character is good at as many skills as 1 sd + 7
• A player character is bad at as many skills as 1 wd + 1
• The player chooses freely the skills he is good at or bad at. He records these on the character sheet.
• Any skill not chosen as either good at or bad at is an OK at skill.
Can you read?
If your character is bad at Academics he can’t read. If your character is good at Academics he can read perfectly.
If your character is OK at Academics, he can read, but might misunderstand a few things. The game master may ask you to check your Academics skill any time you try to read something more difficult than a children’s book.
6 Chits
6.1 What are chits?
Chits are points a player can use to buy favors from the game master, such as rolling dice again or making dice stronger. Chits can also be used to avoid death or change the flow of the story, at an increased cost. Don’t be too happy spending them, because chits are hard to refill. If you run out of chits your character could become a crybaby who would rather whine than try hard at anything.
More about chits later in the rule-book but for now know that the more you have the better.
6.2 How many chits you begin with
Adult characters begins the game with only 1 weak dice + 1 chits
During the game, you will be able to earn more chits and share them with other players. The maximum number of chits you can have at any time is twice your starting chits.
In short
• Use chits to buy favors from the game master.
• Every adult player character begins with 1 wd +1 chits.
• Adult player characters can have up to as many chits as twice their starting chits.
• Only player characters can have chits.
7 Equipment
The characters of this game are poor orphans and they have to earn the money for their own bread and butter. Even so, they begin the game with a few items and some money.
7.1 Dress up or fade away
First, let’s see how well-clothed you are. Roll two normal dice and check the number you get in the following table.
7.1.1 Clothes Table
Dice (nd) Clothes Grade
2 to 3 A
4 to 5 B
6 to 9 C
10 to 11 D
12 E
What do these letters A to E mean? A = best quality, while E = worst. More details are avaliable on the rule-book
7.2 Wealth
Your character will want to buy things, and the best way to know if he can afford something is to determine how much money he has. Roll three dice; these are the dollars your character may make use of without compromising your upkeed.
In short
• Starting wealth = 3 nd.
Safe Havens
CC -by -nc -sa Mark Tn
Version 1.0
CC -by Miguel de Luis, minimrpg.com
What
So, let’s say that you are in the middle of a campaign and then your player-characters have been through 23 fights, 4 chases, short-changed a dozen inn-keepers and they have just learned who’s the big bad guy and his evil plots. Or, for whatever the reason, they have bitten more than they could chew: two party members gravely injured, their best weapon locked and an evil horde have the heroes locked on their sights. That is when a safe haven could come handy. But what’s a safe haven anyway and how could we make it work on a role-playing game?
Time for a little definition (and a rule):
- Safe Haven
- A location where player-characters will not be attacked.
Which is pretty straight-forward. So no axe will come to their throats, no street kid will try to snatch a copper penny from them, nor an unfriendly ghost would come to scare their souls out of their bodies.
Why?
First of all, Safe Havens are a narrative tool in the Game-Master’s arsenal. There are times when you want to slow down the place of your story, allow the entry of a new character, show the world they are supposed to save, develop a love story or challenge the players to use their brains in an investigation.
Secondly, your heroes may, at times, need somewhere to hide and heal their wounds. It might be not the most heroic of the actions, but it’s more sastifying to run from a thousand orcs and cross the gates of the Kissmydwarvenbutt Stronghold under a hail of arrows and javelins than being rescued or heroically dying in battle. Consider The Lord of the Rings, had not the hobbits found any friendly spot along the road to Mordor, they wouldn’t have made it much farther than, the Shire, actually.
Thirdly, a Safe Haven can be a very memorable location in your game. A place for friendship and love, to share stories of old quests and find new ones, where true role-players (c) will feel vindicated while minmaxers and treasure grabbers take a secondary role, if only for once.
Fourthly, paranoid players will find a place where they have not to check for hidden traps in every box they open, try for poison every cup they drink or shoot at every unfortunate caped fellow they encounter.
A few rules
- Rule 1 No evil
- In a safe haven player characters will not be attacked.
Which seems pretty striaght-forward, but needs some polishing and justification. On the polishing side, the Game-Master should make clear that “player-characters will not be attacked” allow non-player character to defend themselves and that authorities, if any, will still prosecute crimes that player characters will purposely commit. It does mean that the “bad guys”, new or old, will not touch them. Any injury, damage, sickness or curse carried from the outside world will still affect them inside the sanctuary and will heal normally: so yes, that terrible plague you caught when you danced with that zombie girl can still kill you.
Sorry.
Justification
So what protects the player-characters from harm? Ultimately it is the responsibility of the designer, Game Master and players, but let me show a quick brainstorm of ideas:
- Law, custom, superstition and religion
- It could simply happen that on the Temple of Healing nobody will dare to challenge the prohibition to attack those who obtain sanctuary there. This justification seems more appropriate in campaigns that feature a noble oponent who will still abide by some rules, where the bad guys fear an even stronger neutral power or where gods are assertive enough to vaporize sinners on a whim. (You killed that kid in MY sanctuary, get ready to taste MY hell!, that kind of god).
- Powerful defenses
- Triple curtain walls, huge towers, powerfull spells and a garrison trained in Sparta could do the trick.
- Remote and/or hidden location
- Think on that house in a crowded city that almost nobody knows, a hidden cellar, a village perpetually surrounded by a wall of clouds or even an uncharted island.
- Technology
- A group of benevolent aliens might have set up a research base somewhere off the coast of Virginia. They are bound never to interfere on earthling’s business but they could, at times, rescue a bunch of twelve years old heroes. Or it might be that in your post-apocalyptic world a group of scientists and graduate students were able to stablish a technological stronghold. A few rowding marauders? Let loose the robot-hounds of war.
- Social contract
- Or the Game Master and players agree that “Hotel Concordia” is a Safe Haven. The Gestapo will never be able to track the player-characters there and if they do, at the last time, a Reichsmarshall will order them to attend to more pressing matters.
Of course, these ideas could be co-exist and be combined for the ultimate Safe Haven: a Temple might be remote, defended by an army of crack paladins, protected by heavy walls and the fury of the angels, if need be. Just choose those which will be more approppriate to your game and style of play.
- Rule 2
- No revolving doors
It must be hard to get into or go out a Safe Haven; or both. I mean that the players should not be allowed to get out of trouble at whim. Getting into or out of a Safe Haven might become a little adventure on its own; or it could simply be that it involves a long journey, knowing a secret spot in a dark neigbourhood in your city, knowing a spell that can only be cast once per week or paying a large toll at the gate.
Above all, discourage players from entering a Safe Haven at the first sight of trouble. Or, if your rules allow them (a tele-transport spell, for example) make them hard to return.
- Rule 3
- You aren’t boss here.
Player characters must not be allowed to control a Safe Haven. A non-player character will always be in charge. If the player characters attempt to be in control, for whatever means, by all means let them, but warn them that they could jeopardize the Safe Haven status of the location.
“You want to be kings? Fine, just remember that the palace is not a Safe Haven any longer.”
- Rule 4
- An exceptional place
Safe Havens should be rare in your campaign; truly special places. Yes, every church was supposed to be a sanctuary in medieval Europe, but even the popes had to flee from time to time. The drama and the game demand that these places to be exceptional. From a narrative view point a Safe Haven on every corner makes them dull and hard to justify; from a gamist point of view a thousand Safe Havens allow players to hide from any trouble at any time.
- Rule 5
- Best before clymax
Safe Havens can retain that status only provisionally. For example, the Game Master could say that on Hotel Concordia player-characters will only be safe for a week or the Virginian aliens may work under a time-table and then they will return home, somewhere around Barnard’s Star.
But even permanent havens could not last for ever. The neutral embassy which protected your freedom-fighters might perish in flames after a particularly messy air raid; the army of evil (inc) might have finally amassed enough strength to conquer Kissmydwarvenbutt Stronghold or a traitor may share with the authorities the location of your secret hideout.
The Game Master may want to do this if the players have been abusing the Safe Haven, but it would be more interesting to do this to signal that the storm is approaching and the armies are gathering for the big battle. In other words, to mark the clymax and ending of a campaign.
In any case the players must have the opportunity to escape –or fight if they so choose– before any evil can happen to them, which lead us to the following rule:
- Rule 6
- Tell your players
Players must know the rules governing the particular Safe Haven(s) of your campaign. So tell them, don’t forget to share if the Safe Haven is permament or not and warn them of any impeding catastrophe, allowing them to flee unharmed, if they choose to do so. (Once they are back in the normal world and the Safe Haven loses its Safe Haven status, they are fair game, though).
- Rule 7
- Vehicles
You may want a ship or even a mobile home as a Safe Haven. Fine, as long as the players are not in the wheel. The ship will only visit the ports-of-call that its captain desires and the gypsy caravan will only stop at the fairs. Player-characters may negotiate, bribe and plead; that’s fine, but if, for any reason, they replace a non-player character in leadership (see Rule 3) the vehicle will lose its Safe Haven status at once.
Newsies and Bootblacks, stripped
Hi chaps. I don’t know if there is somebody still attached to this blog but…
Anyway, you may remember a little game called Newsies and Bootblacks (#rpg #steampunk #newsboys #edwardian #fantasy) that I published online about a year ago. Today, I am working towards a new version to be published on Lulu, as a print on demand. Thing is Lulu makes you pay dearly for even the smallish color illustration inside your book. So, I’ve went through the N&B manuscript on LyX and manually deleted all but two illustrations (who happened to be nice and b/w). The resulting document is much smaller than the previous version; little more than 130 pages, that have been made ready to be printed on both sides.
I plan to add some new (and old) b/w illustrations to this new edition (almost no new text, mind you), when I finally release it on Lulu. But just in case you don’t care about images or would simply prefer a small document to browse, I decided to let you download the whole thing.
As usual, feel free to share it
Does the world need another role-playing game?
Let’s suppose there was no game out there but D&D; and I mean the original edition back in the seventies. It is safe to say that you could play zillions of adventures just with that. Even, given time and some ingenuity any self-respecting game-master or other hyphenated fellow could have expanded the original rules to cover sci-fi, dark fantasy, the roaring twenties, pulp or a good old-fashioned wargame. In fact, that is exactly what many did in the good old days.
But then, you know, there are many of us who were never satisfied with classes, levels and experience games or who preferred a good story and a solid game world to dungeon exploring. And we created games, and created games, zillions of them: rules, variants, house-rules and whatever else. Anyway, the thing we have zillions of games, all bases seemed covered, and players seem perfectly happy about it.
So, that’s my question.
Does the world need another role-playing game?
No.
Obviously not. I suppose somebody could come with some better rules; better setting, better everything: a new, improved D&D, for example. But players do not actually need something like that; they are happy with the hobby. And, in any case, setting to design a better game does not say a lot. I mean, you aren’t running for designing the worst game around, are you? And what’s a better game? Some like a setting detailed to the last fly of the last pig; others love to have but a structure on which to build their own worlds; yet another prefer to have a well defined core but be allowed to fill-in the blanks, so to speak.
These preferences created new games and settings; and it’s hard to think about something that has not been implemented yet and that would appeal to more than three gamers, that is.
I mean, you could come up with a game about, I don’t know, Çatal Hüyük, but who would game it besides me and a bunch of Archeology enthusiasts?
A bunch of enthusiasts
But then, D&D was born by a bunch of enthusiasts. It was not meant to spark an international hobby; but just to cheer up the life of a group of friends. And I bet they would have loved their game just the same.
I believe it is important to know why you are designing a game; and then keep that in mind when you design it and actually offer it up for all to see. Is it for profit? Then you should write the game the public wants to buy; period. Is it for a minority who share your vision? Then forget about marketing it and do the game you dream to play.
Commit, or not
Another thing is to understand how important your game desing is, to you. If you do not plan to make a living out of it; then do not act as if it were more important than your children.
Gaming my novel
Hi chaps. You probably do not know it but I’m writing a fantasy young adult novel by the name of “La Montaña de Dios” (God’s Mountain). And yes, I’m using my mother tongue which happens to be Spanish.
So why should you care?
Because of this weird idea I’m having and that you might imitate if you are also into writing. I’ll be gaming the last few chapters of my novel. Anybody able to understand Spanish (or who would hire a translator) is welcome.
The idea is that the writer (in this particular case yours truly) will send an email to brief the player with an introduction to the world, the characters, and the events. Just as you would do in a role-playing game. Following this initial email, the writer will send a” chunk” of the novel with a few options at the end of the chunk. The player can choose any of these, much like you would do in a game book but it’s also welcome to add his own suggestions or take the initiative, just as you would do in a standard role-playing game.
I hope that it will help me to write a better, unique and much more fun ending to my fantasy novel; and it’s an idea that I want to share with the world.
Te espero, amigo
In the event that you understand Spanish, you are welcome to delve deeper in my main blog Sabia Vida