The First Step Down The (Game Designer's) Road

I assume that only GMs read my posts, but just in case … Spoilers for Changing Seasons! 

Inspiration to make a new game setting can come from anywhere, especially if you’re talking about mini-settings. Pint-sized PDFs that can inspire a whole campaign. 

This month, I created one pretty much by accident, but first a journalism history lesson. In newspapers, stories have an “inverted pyramid” format with important broad strokes up top and descending down to less important details last. Most people assume  this is so you can read the first paragraph it you are in a hurry. 

The truth, though, goes much deeper and is rooted in different bits of technology.

When the telegraph and early telephone were around, reception sucked and lines could go down unexpectedly. If you didn't send the important news first, you had half a story. 

Not only that, but in  the last decade of the 20th Century New a paper layout was literal. You laid out strips of news stories on a page that already had ads at the bottom. If a story can too long the designer could Trim it to fit, safe in the knowledge that The last paragraphs were a minimum loss.

The lesson being that technology and formats highly impact what writers  do. As you can see, I changed the header of the Changing Seasons adventure in just under a day.

We went from:

(Left header) Cypher Adventures, (Right header) Fantasy

to

(Left header) Emperox's Road,  (Right header) Changing Seasons.

In a lot of products, the left header is for the name of the game line or the current book if it's big enough to have several chapters. If you open your Cypher book, you’ll see that format. 

For keyword searches, Cypher Adventures maybe a great idea, but it’s not very exciting. I needed something that sounded cool, might inspire me for further adventures and be distinctive. I already had an adventure in mind that involved some sort of changeling and doppelganger, so that eventually inspired the title fo the adventure itself, Changing Season. 

That made me think, what could further enforce the theme. Cicadas were a random thought and suddenly, I had giant, body-snatching cicadas. After that, the adventure pretty much wrote itself. 

That still didn’t solve the “Left Header sucks” problem, though.

The weather in Florida is going from life-sucking humidity to pleasant-to-be-a-human cool right now, so I’ve been taking walks and doing some of my thinking. Walking by the road, I think about what it would have been like to walk down an ancient Roman road back in the Middle Ages and BAM! I now have the idea using a road network as a mini-setting. And a lot of others would have left it at that, as a slight nod to real history. 

Part of world building is asking, “What’s next? Why is this thing really important?”

In a world filled with supernatural danger and far from civilization, would a paved road really be that much of an asset? The road would have to be something special to make it worthy of being the centerpiece of the setting. 

Thus, the Emperox Road has each cobblestone inscribe with a glyph or a rune, warding the road not only from regular wear and tear, but also (allegedly) the supernatural. To a vampire, crossing the road would be like crossing running water. 

You notice that I threw in allegedly. If it’s one thing that gets RPGs and GMs in trouble, it’s absolutes. Once players think they have immutable law in the game world, they will try to use it to their advantage, which is great. But when such things go from clever thinking to routine crutch, the game experience can start to suffer, either from the silliness of the cliche to outright boredom for everyone at the table. (This bit is highly subjective. Perhaps the silly bit becomes the in-joke everyone loves.)

So there’s a short paragraph in the adventure that insuiates that while the Emperox’s Road can general protect you, or even a town from minor supernatural dangers, there’s no guarantees. Stronger entities can muscle their way in. Parts of the road are failing or that it’s all superstition anyway. 

Regardless, the glyphs do nothing for mundane bandits, murading armies or Bugbear chieftains.

The lonely Emperox Road also give a sense that most places are their own, bits of civilization just barely connected to other bits with long stretches of wilderness in-between. For GMs, this is a great set up for running adventures without sweating local politics. It’s also great for a game designer because it means that adventures can be pretty much stand alone, no need to set up a large scale map and also increases the odds of a GM’s impulse buy.

So at this point, you can sort guess that when a writer or game designer says that inspiration can come from pretty much anywhere it’s an understatement.

Changing Seasons hits DriveThru in December 2018.
Love what you’re reading? Not only can you get the Cypher goods early, but also discover exclusive

early 5e content, world building and related fiction on my Patreon! You can also check me out at DriveThruRPG.com

Initial Inspiration - Triton's Call

 Judas priest, this is going to be a mess because Triton's Call has come out of decades of different inspirations, gaming experiences and gut instinct about the gaming industry. It’s all over the map, conceptually so you’ve been forewarned. 

Any time you step away from fantasy, as a game designer, you take a huge risk. 

As point of proof, the award-winning Ken Hite and we have a little shared habit as I’ve interviewed him over the years. I start a question with something like, “What do you think of the latest changes sweeping the RPG industry?” and he stops me cold right there.

He patiently sighs and says, “This is the part where I remind you that these ‘changes’ are only happen to a small portion of the RPG crowd. The vast majority of them are enjoying D&D and will continue to do so. But I will be happy to give you my opinion about those changes you’re talking about.”

Ken himself is one of those designers making changes as he tweaks and plays around with a system call Gumshoe, which tackles the situation of the players missing their perception check when the GM has an important clue hanging around. It’s a question that’s important to Ken since his RPG love is Call of Cthulhu, a game where investigation and research is a central theme. 

On a more personal note, one of the longest games I’ve run was Mage, which was the Matrix and Urban Fantasy/Horror seven years before the movie. And before that I ran GURPS Horror game. Three guesses who wrote terrorizing beauty.

I’ve even fiddled around making a game where graffiti was the source of magic (based on futhark runes) and read, but never got to play, Unknown Armies. 

Fast forward to 2016, I ran a End of the World RPG game. The set up is our current world that has you, as your own PC, going through an invasion scenario. The four books in the series take invaders, like the Gods or our own Machines, who push us back into the stone age.  The book I picked was Aliens, which included aliens … from Atlantis.

Funny thing, I’ve always wanted to run a comic book RPG about an Atlantis AND my first trunk novel was an Urban Horror novel about conspiracies, pretty outsiders and Atlantis bio-tech. (Maybe I should have lead with that.)  Needless to say, I enjoyed running that game and kept trying figuring out how to revisit it. 

I also like giving GMs options but if you already have my Cypher PDFs, Mortal Fantasy and Cruel Stars, you already know that. I also loved the tool kit approach that allows GMs to run the same concept in a dozen way. And especially after reading Hite’s Night’s Black Agents, it proved to me that such multi-genre book would work. (Thanks to Stephen, who motivated me to  expanded Triton’s Call to include fantasy)

Both goals are also a great way to expand the appeal of a book that already has the deck stacked against it for not being pure High Fantasy. 

So all of these separate obsessions have all rolled into a single  inspiration for a game. 

In these early days I see the toolbox taking the GM through the process of narrowing down their game to a sentence, something similar to our Cypher fans (or would that be Cyfans?) The different blanks in the sentence would define different aspects of the genre, action and the timeline. 

All things are subject to change but for example: 

The characters have discovered they have ____ Atlantean bloodline, but their kin are involved in a _____ conspiracy and have planned an _____ invasion that will happen _____. 

After working through the book, a finished sentence would look something like this.

“The characters have discovered they have mutant Atlantean bloodline, but their kin are involved in an International conspiracy and have planned a psychic invasion that will happen soon.”

This will be just one tool, though. I still have to iron out that Trident of Power yet.

Love what you’re reading? Not only can you get the Cypher goods early, but also discover exclusive early 5e content, world building and related fiction on my Patreon! You can also check me out at DriveThruRPG.com 

Initial Inspiration - The Reaches

By Christopher Robin Negelein

For many GMs, tabletop RPGs are a gourmet meal. For many players, RPGs are comfort food.  
Over the years, I see lots of GMs hunger for a bit of variety in what they do. They want to try new game systems or even new genres. 
The challenge, though, comes from their players being quite happy with the status quo. They may say they want something different, but what they really mean is “different, but the same.” 
I actually had a love/hate relationship with AD&D for a long time because it was always an uphill battle to fight the inertia at the game table to try something else. That changed a little when White Wolf hit the scene, but the new thing quickly became the next old habit. 
Esper Genesis tackles this issue by putting a familiar game engine into a different genre with new classes, races and star ship rules. And it’s paid off with me constantly hearing things like “now I can finally get my Traveller/Gamma Word campaign going,” or “Now my players will let me run a much wider gamut of things at the table.” Though it’s not a secret that D&D has had science fiction in its veins since the early days.
What’s less obvious is that it has quite a bit of the Wild West/Weird Western as well. The core set up (a group of traveling misfits who braved the lawless wilds and are forced to save town from a local terror as a matter of survival) is right out of Spaghetti Westerns and Joe R. Lansdale. 
So there have been a few attempts to make D&D Westerns, and they followed the same philosophy of new classes. But when it came to races, Dwarves where often prospectors and Orcs wore sombreros. That last bit is a tad tone deaf in 2018. Regardless none of them caught on despite letting wizards cast spells with their six shooters. (How cool is that!)
Then I read Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country and my head exploded.
The story is set in his First Law grimdark fantasy setting, which would feel familiar to any Game of Thrones (Song of Fire and Ice) fan. A secondary world where blood, sweat and ambition put subtle and low-key magic in the backseat. Red Country took us a place called the Far Lands that was almost a pure Western in a fantasy world -- and the result was an interesting weird spin on Fantasy.
On the surface it seemed to be an easy formula:

• Pistols = throwing knives and hand crossbows
• Shotguns = heavy crossbows

But there was much more going on as I dug in. 

 As you can see

I really appreciated how he did the trick and there was some buzz at the time about how he was going to reinvent the fantasy genre, but since then he hasn’t revisited the Far Lands since.
The great thing about being a writer, though, is that if you can’t find something you want to read then you have a another reason to write.
So putting ten-gallon hats on elves and having wizards do some spell-slinging didn’t catch on. Maybe it’s time for another approach, give players something that's “same, but different.”  They can have their elves and rangers but discover a new fantasy landscape that intrigues them because it has some oddball features and challenges. Something the OSR crowd has been enjoying for years. 
Those features will be the likely result of tweaking the setting to allow GMs to bring their Wild West adventures into the game and keep their creative juices flowing. 
So that’s my goal. A setting that on the surface can be played with as a fantasy game with a truly strange new land for players to explore but also inspires GMs by letting play around with a genre and a campaign they ordinarily wouldn't be able to pull off. 
I’m aiming for the sun, let’s see how much I get burned.

Even the grid can not save myself from the horrors of my own artist skill!

P.S. Yeah, I've been working on this idea for a while now.
Love what you’re reading? Not only can you get the Cypher goods early, but also discover exclusive early 5e content, world building and related fiction on my Patreon! You can also check me out at DriveThruRPG.com

  

The hits keep coming ...

Listen to it on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Google Music, and Spotify

That's right, I've got so many things happening that I almost forgot one.

The great Story Tale Podcast has taken one of my science-fantasy short, High Tides, and made it a FREE mini-audiobook!

KCJ is a great guy who understands the level of dedication and cooperation it takes to make great entertainment -- and loves doing it.

Find out what the Earth is like in the far, far future under the Tarnished Sun for free with a great narrator!

I had no idea when I started my own Dying Earth genre stories years ago that I'd end up designing for the Cypher game system, which came of Monte Cook's own Numenera setting.

So it may not be all that strange that we'll visit the Tarnished Sun again in the future in another incarnation. Once we get Pateron up and going, we'll put that on the docket for consideration.

In the meantime, the Esper Genesis RPG, a sci-fi RPG that uses the latest edition of the most famous RPG fantasy rules is now available for your FLGS. Discover new sci-fi adventure with the rules you already know.

Blows dust off the blog …

Irony. That’s what it is, irony.

This tortoise of a blog used to be so slow because there wasn’t really too much to say. But now things are speeding along and I can see the boulder of work rolling down my way and picking up speed.

First things first, I just had a short story picked up for the Dark Fantasy anthology, In the Shadow of Mountain, by Elder Gods Publishing.
 

What’s Dark Fantasy?

Depending on where you hail from in your favorite reading. Dark Fantasy is either gothic high fantasy or Ravenloft tie-in fiction. Either way, it’s dark fun.

The free version of the game I worked on, Esper Genesis, was nominated for Best Free Game by the ENnies. Sadly, we did not win. All of our fellow nominees, though, were great games, so hard to feel bad about losing there.

In the Alley Alligator Entertainment department, we are working hard to sync up our art with monsters to get the Esper Geneisis Threats Database out. Better yet, we’ve just finished the PDF of the GM screen for our Backer Kit people.

This is on top of the 17 PDFs I put out for the Cypher RPG, along with another published short story in the last two years. Within this content were at least five different new settings, five new world building exercises.

So what does the future hold?

Probably more Esper Genesis, more Cypher, perhaps more fiction and maybe a Pateron. We’ll see.

Wow. Feeling the love and maybe punch drunk.

This is a bad ass cover.

And lot of you guys evidently agree.

I did manage to get a five-star review for the content, which is also super nice. Mortal Fantasy was officially my best seller right out of the gates. The market was hungry either for a more generic GotF book or more in-depth Fantasy supplement.

After feeling like a lot of effort goes into making very little progress, this is amazeballs. If I had started out with sort of support, I would have been super spoiled.

I found a few mistakes and learned some new layout tricks so I updated the file. Feel free to go get your update today!

Thanks again my fellow Cypher phans! I am now going to eat a lot of chocolate and watch some Marvel Netflix  and chill with myself.

Someone just told me what that means.