Neon Knights - ready for playtest

Here we are, end of the weekend and I have just uploaded the playtest draft for Neon Knights.  With as long as it took me to write about 25 pages of content, I have a whole new respect for authors who are putting out 2-300 page RPGs.  But I'm happy with what I have here.

Next steps - run test games, fix it up as needed, commission some art, spend way too much time learning Scribus, make this thing look like the kind of book a person would be willing to pay money for, and then post it to DriveThru.  Any bets on whether this will take more or less than one year from today?

Neon Knights - almost there...

 Had a really productive weekend as far as this draft goes.  Biggest single thing is that, after my previous second guessing about stats, I went ahead and changed it.  Instead of the default approaches from FAE, Neon Knights has these approaches:

• Courage - use this when you act in the face of danger, knowingly putting yourself at risk to achieve your goal
• Diligence - use this when you act with patience and steady focus rather than rapid action
• Wisdom - use this when you act according to your knowledge and understanding of the world
• Empathy - use this when you act according to your understanding and care for other people
• Prudence - use this when you act to minimize harm to yourself or others, even if it means giving up an opportunity
• Prowess - use this when you act by way of raw physical ability

 Not sure yet how that will actually work out in play, but I like the themed stats in general, and I feel like this fits better with a game about knights than if I had kept the original Flashy, Clever, and so on.  Honestly I was hoping I could just lift this from the list of virtues in Pendragon but those didn't feel like a good fit either, so I had to work out my own list and here it is.  I do still need to go back to Pendragon though and see what else it does to differentiate characters who are all essentially the same "class."

Besides that, I finished writing up the current rules for vehicles, including providing stats for a few generic examples, and I also wrote up some sample artifacts (I talked before about cartridges, which are the main loot in this game to fill the role of "magic items" in other games, but they're not the only cool treasure that exists).  At this point the draft is really close to where I want it in order to start playtesting.  I have a couple more rough spots that I want to clean up beforehand, and I need to stat out a couple of sample enemies in the unlikely event that someone else tries to run this game on their own while it's still in alpha, and then I think that's it.  With a little luck (and effort) it might be ready to go by the end of next weekend.

...and the other holiday weekend

 New Year's weekend was busier than I expected.  Nevertheless, I was able to finish what I wanted to do for the setting chapter and the equipment section for Neon Knights - I don't know if they're done necessarily, but it's at least enough for a playtest draft.  Now I just need to get the other chapters up to that same level and I can actually start running this game.

In the meantime, I'm back to questioning whether I want to stick with the standard approaches from Fate Accelerated, or a custom list based on knightly virtues (very likely to be stolen from inspired by Pendragon).  This had been my original idea for the game but then it went off in a direction that wound up feeling like I was trying too hard to be clever and losing game clarity as a result.  So for the moment I'm using the FAE terms, but maybe I'll change it up after all, if I can put together a list of 6-9 virtues that all sound like they would serve the same function as game stats.