The Sorcerer's Apocalypse

Got inspired for something new this weekend, was hoping it would be one of those things that I could blast through in the span of a good weekend but I was also fighting off a cold so that slowed me down.  So now I have a rough outline of a new RPG setting, and maybe enough of the details figured out, but definitely still a lot of actual writing to do.

The Sorcerer's Apocalypse is set in present-day Earth, except that magic suddenly appeared one day and now we are in the middle of the whole world falling apart as everyone struggles to deal with this.  There's random wild magic happening everywhere, and also some people have developed the ability to use magic but haven't yet figured out how to control it very well.  The PCs are all new magic users and are working to help their communities survive through the current chaos while trying to control their new powers and keeping themselves safe from the various anti-magic factions around them.

Probably no surprise to anyone, I'm doing this in Fate (although the full system this time, rather than Accelerated Edition).  Current plan for working magic into the rules is to add it as its own skill, which everyone has at 0 at the start of the game, and also that everyone has to take an Aspect that describes what kind of magic they can do (and gives an idea of what kinds of unwanted effects they'll get on a compel).  Still need to reread the relevant Fate materials to see what other ideas this might give me.

So that's that in a nutshell.  I'm aiming for the finished product to be 5-10 pages.  Might be done in a month, realistically?  Of course I'll post again here when it's up on DriveThru. 

TTSR - first playtest

Had my first open playtest today for Tonight the Stars Revolt!  It went about as well as could be expected, by which I mean the players liked the theme and the overall structure of it, and gave me lots and lots and lots of feedback on things to improve for next time.  My biggest concern was the combat system, which is currently pretty flat and really was just a placeholder for initial testing anyway.  Players agreed that it wasn't great, gave me some suggestions for other games to look at for ideas, and that was as far as that went so it's pretty much all "TBD" at the moment.  My initial idea is to add randomization on top of the combat stats for the different ships, but I'll check out the other suggested games before I really get to work on anything.

Ooh, maybe cards for special maneuvers in combat.  And the aliens would get something similar, with more cards added or removed from that deck based on what players do.  Actually, maybe that idea should add onto (or completely replace?) the current AI system as a whole.  This will need further consideration...

Yeah, the enemy AI system, that was my other main focus.  In principle it worked well - they liked the setup with the three different decks of cards and with the players' actions determining which deck the aliens would draw from, and they used that as part of the strategizing on their turns, which was exactly one of my design goals for the game.  But it actually worked too well in that regard, and the aliens wound up being very passive in this playthrough, which is the opposite of how it should go (and very different from what I got in my last solo test, but then I was also playing it pretty differently from how the other people were today - which of course is part of why testing with a group is so important).  So whatever I do to revise the AI system, it will need to be a lot more aggressive overall.

Those are the main things I'll be focusing on for the next round(s) of revisions.  Other things that came up today were giving players more control over what tech upgrades they get (maybe even have whole tech trees?) and having more ways for them to interact meaningfully with each other.  I definitely do want to address both of those, but for right now they feel like lower priority compared to combat and enemy AI, so they're going to have to wait for a bit.

Hang on to tomorrow, because tonight...

 It's been a few more rounds of tinkering, solo testing, and tinkering some more, but I think I got Tonight the Stars Revolt! up to where I want it - ready to start testing with other people.  Solo testing with the current iteration felt suitably tense, with a lot of back-and-forth swings between the humans or the aliens having the upper hand, and that was very much how I want it to feel.  There's still a lot to figure out, most notably whether combat is going to be based on static numbers or if there will be any randomization, but that's what further testing is for.  At least now I got it up to where I can start doing that, maybe as soon as next weekend.

I'm back, and with even more lasers...

That hiatus over the last few months was good for me, but I am definitely back now.  Today I did my first barely-even-alpha solo test for a new board game, Tonight the Stars Revolt!  The premise of the game is that a number of human-occupied space stations around a trinary star system were being forced to gather energy from the stars for the benefit of their alien overlords, but now they are fighting back.  It's a co-op game with all of the players working together against the aliens, trying to destroy their mothership before the aliens have collected too much solar energy.  The goal is to have lots of high-speed space combat, multiple problems on the board that need to be addressed at any given time (kind of like X-Com, now that I think of it), and an interesting AI system for the aliens.  There's still a lot for me to figure out, but I think I'm at least on the right track here.  And I like what I have so far for the AI, that it uses three different decks, which are weighted toward different types of actions, and the decision of which deck to use depends on the player action to which it is responding.  Ideally I'd like to get it to a point where players can strategize around which deck they want the aliens to use (or avoid), and have that be a meaningful decision.

There's still a lot of work to do before this one is even ready for testing with other people, but it does already feel like there is a real game here (much more so than what I got with Scales).  And more importantly, it's gotten me excited to get working on games again. 

minor update (but yes I'm still here)

I know things have slowed down lately with the game design stuff while I work on some other projects.  But I did knock out one big task today, which was finally giving the Werewolves of London rulebook a proper update instead of just having all the changes scattered among my playtest notes.  And that means that I'm now ready to submit it to this year's Hippodice competition!  And then to some publishers after that's over.  So let's see what happens with that in the near future...

Scales - stepping back

After a few more weeks of beating my head against the Scales rules, trying to find a way to make this game work, I've decided it's time to set it aside.  I might come back to it eventually - at the very least, I would hate to let all those band name puns go to waste.  But I definitely need a break from it for now.

Which means I do get to put my real focus on another project that's been hovering on the periphery for a while.  I'll explain that one in the future post, hopefully with some more things figured out that I can include there.  For now I'll just say that this one is probably going to be around the same weight as Explorers of Legend, give or take a bit.  I'm a little disappointed that this means I pretty much definitely won't have an almost-ready game to bring to PAX Unplugged this year, but that's alright.  It's going to be that much more exciting if/when I do have it more or less complete.

Roll the World is now live on DriveThruRPG

All done and ready for public consumption: 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527945/roll-the-world