I decided to throw my hat in this year with the first ever National Game Design Month, or NaGaDeMon. While this is pretty outside of the purview of Legend4ry 4e D&D, and since I've all but abandoned my other blog, I've decided to discuss some basic ideas about it here and also, with other Legend4ry-related posts, post updates about the design process.
While fantasy is normally my wheelhouse or cup of tea, I've decided to branch out. Earlier this year I was toying around with a sci-fi system and have decided to revisit it. Initially I was going to tweak it into a generic fantasy RPG, but I've decided to go a different route with it entirely after a few days of deliberation and reviewing what mechanics I had worked out. I am going to create a pulpy science-fantasy RPG.
It's no secret that I am a pulp fiend. I love Conan, I love John Carter, I love Lovecraft. If it is pulp, I probably dig it! As an extension, I also love noir, but don't quite have the brains to write it or design it mechanically.
Growing up I was reared on a healthy mixture of sci-fi and fantasy, as I'm sure most of us in the gaming community were. When I was younger, sci-fi was my thing, but as I grew up, I also grew tired of it. Let's be honest, in our shared hobby there are a lot of tropes and even 12 year old me couldn't deal with the cliches anymore. So I moved to fantasy, which has some of the same tropes but different ones as well. I bounced back and forth between these genres for years, whenever I'd tire of one I'd switch to the other.
But something always interested me, those rare moments when these two genres were mixed successfully. I'm talking John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Deathstalker series by Simon R. Green, the Dune series by Frank Herbert, and of course Star Wars!
Swords and sorcery, guns and laser pistols, magic by way of science and more. This is science-fantasy at its best. It draws from the cliches and tropes of both of its parent genres and does its own thing. Archaic weaponry and pistols work side by side without ever truly overpowering each other.
My original sci-fi system was meant to encourage all types of sci-fi play from Aliens to Firefly to Star Trek. It's an interesting d10 based system and I think it works well. It's fairly crunch-light and pretty open to player suggestion, but I always felt it was missing something. I might spruce it up a little and post it here eventually. I was going to tweak it as a straight up generic fantasy game either using d6s or d10s, I hadn't quite decided. But then it hit me... Why not both?
So far the mechanics are pretty simple, still using inspiration from my earlier sci-fi RPG attempts, but with some extensive changes. For example, the game will use only d6s and d8s. There are not set pre-determined classes, but skills you can choose to create your own "class." Think Skyrim's "class" system here. Each player begins play with 3 skill choices and upon leveling up can choose to either train further into a skill, pick a new skill to be trained in, or increase their life by 1. Speak of life points, I really like abstraction, so I am going to take it a bit further. Instead of having rigid hit points, each character begins being able to take only 3 hits before death, but this can be augmented upon leveling as stated before.
Again, these are very rough concepts, but I hope to have them hammered away and also include a small adventure before the end of November.
Wish me and my other NaGaDeMon "contestants" luck throughout this busy month that is November!
Until next time,
OH! And I am participating in the Winter is Coming II Blog Carnival throughout the beginning portion of this month! I should have my first post for it up by mid next week.
I am looking forward to seeing how this goes. I was really close to doing a "sword and planet" game for this years NaGa DeMon. Good luck!
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