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...
Read MoreSafe Havens
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...
Read MoreExtry! Extry! Newsies & Bootblacks Primer is out. Read all ’bout it
You know that many retailers offer a free introductory booklet of some new game. That is called a primer and that is exactly what I am offering you today. Newsies & Bootblacks: First Game is 15000 words, 62 pages long, and features basic and simplified rules, and introduction to the setting, a character sheet and a sample adventure, complete with pre-generated characters: Forsaken. In Forsaken, the players play the children of well-to-do family who, after school, find themselves forgotten by friends, family and every other living soul. The characters will have to brave the streets of New...
Read MoreNewsies & Bootblacks final draft is finished
This is how you spend your weekend if you are publishing a role-playing game on your own: correcting typos —and yet knowing it won’t be 100% perfect. And then you wake on Monday at 5:00 AM so you can tell the world you still have work to do. But it is great to have the game finished and complete; or at least the first edition of it. I still need to fix a few issues and add a couple of features, which I hope to have solved soon. Yeah, I say soon, I have learned the hard way that on your first attempt to publish anything you should not promise any deadlines. Basically because you...
Read MoreCharacter Sheet Prototype
Here it is, the 0.1 Newsies & Bootblacks Character Sheet prototype. It is very, very plain, focusing on content, leaving the niceties to further development. As it is, however, it’s perfectly usable, covering all the stats you need to play a game. There is one issue with this character sheet: rules changes. Just a minor edit on the rules to be precise. You see, when I wrote the rules I envisioned three “skill boxes” on the character sheet: “Good at”, “Bad at” and “OK that”. Yet, when I actually came to design the sheet, I noticed...
Read More