3. March 2010 by admin.

Writing is picking up pace on the truly new parts of GEARS. Work is right now being done on the Systems chapter, which includes ideas and ready-made components for games of any genre or style, and the current section/chapter is Esoterics. that means magic systems, rule elements for psionics, alchemical components, and all sorts of hocus pocus we all know from other games, and movies, and books, and… you get the picture.

This kind of writing is a fresh challenge. The raw rules that have so long been at the center are being turned into something practical. And not just a quick set of usable spells or the like, but a rich tapestry of magic systems, with guidelines for creating magic based in ancient lore, fairytale sorcery, technical training, or any other kind. It is far from exhaustive; I have material enough to fill books upon books with magical goodies. But it is extremely dense (one box describes the construction of over a thousand spells!), and allows a lot of variation, using only the basic components of GEARS already created.

There is still a lot to do, but now we have entered the System chapter, the last untamed land remaining. Things are still slated to go up before everything is written, but this makes it look like more will be available than expected when that happens!

Posted in Game worlds, Design kits, Style, Genre, Magic | 1 Comment »

1. February 2010 by admin.

It’s been a long time since there have been really tough decisions on GEARS. Tough work, sure, with all the rules that have to fit snuggly together and make sense! But tough decisions are a different beast altogether, and one essential decision has been showing its teeth these last few days.

It relates to the last post, really. I’ve been a bit psyched about the Intransigent Design setting, especially with some very positive commentary arriving from playtesters. It’s a complex world, with a lot of deep philosophical choices and concerns. It’s provocative and makes you think. But in the end, those are not necessarily good traits for a game world. For an intellectual debate, perhaps, but game worlds are not pensive documentaries.

The main setting for GEARS has always been Alice 2.0. This has not changed. The question is, is GEARS going to be the source of all the game is, or is Alice? Is this about a new kind of game rules, or about a new kind of game world? Which will be on top?

It might seem a bit redundant. After all, if both are made and both are published, who cares what the intented focus is? But the decision is rather serious, simply because it will influence both the publishing model and the later supplement line. As mentioned before, GURPS is a big inspiration for GEARS, but GURPS also had what some would perceive as a problem, namely that it had game worlds made left and right, with little cohession and followup. Its 4th edition put a multi-world setting at the center, but the philosophy still seems unchanged. Is that what’s ahead for GEARS? Or should the game simply stand up and proclaim that the rules are solely there to flesh out Alice 2.0?

Lord knows Alice allows anything to be used, and poses the kind of challenge to the system that GEARS was made to tackle: Diversity, flexibility, coherence, all the goodies. But Intransigent Design was not made in Alice’s image. If everything is about the core setting, that could be considered a problem, or at least a divergence from the bigger plan.

So… What do we want? A set of rules to rule it all, or a settingfor the rules to serve? Divergences are still possible, no matter what the choice, but the exceptions to the rules (no pun intended) cannot be what carries the system.

I am leaning towards making Alice the focus, and creating the best possible rule system to flesh her world(s) out. Intransigent Design is still in my heart, but I can actually see it as ‘the rebel’, the one setting that defies the mischievous mayhem of Alice and Babylon, by being deep, dark, and foreboding. The sinister cousin of the lovable rogue.

Yeah… I can imagine that!

Posted in Game worlds, Intransigent Design, Genre, Fourth Draft, Alice, Playtests | 1 Comment »

27. January 2010 by admin.

Rules are still being crunched, verbalized and streamlined for the upcoming Fourth Draft. On the downside, there is so much that it sometimes seems impossible to ever get done. On the upside, a lot has been done in a short time, and things are looking so good there are whispers Sixth Draft might be the last draft before a true First Edition rolls about! Nothing for certain, but things look better and sturdier than expected, so hopes are high…

What is looking pretty sure now is a line-up of what the first roll-out of GEARS settings will be, and they are looking juicy, very juicy…

Alice 2.0 remains the default ‘core setting’. Using it will be optional, but it binds all other settings together very nicely. As is already in Third Draft, Alice arrived to our world in 2007 in an explosion of the coast of Morocco, and promptly swam, ran and commandeered transportation to get her into the Saharan desert, where she founded Babylon. Now, Babylon is a mysterious city, full of secrets, madness and intrigue, the center of worldwide conspiracies and espionage, and very secretly home to super-scientific Resurrection Machines and portals to other worlds. Nobody knows who this Alice is, what she wants, or how she does what she does and knows what she knows, but the world is watching her, and the Iron Ring barricade the UN tries to keep from imploding at the edge of Babylon. And wouldn’t you know it: The player characters are smack in the middle of it all! Lunacy ensues!

Broken Pattern is a post-apocalyptic world set after technological marvels became humanity’s fall. Society did not explode; it imploded, tearing itself apart when we could no longer govern ourselves. The cities are still there, and our technological remnants are fought over greatly, especially by those who gain their power from applying what can be salvaged. In the desolate and destroyed New World, technology like battered exosuits and fickle AI is not a forgotten artifact, but the key to True Power! Broken Pattern is gritty and harsh, but at the same time shows what kind of hope can be built from knowing your past…

Hybrid Elite, set in a far future, has powerful aliens holding Earth in a military/diplomatic deathgrip as humanity accepts their new overlords, getting in return powers beyond belief. Galactic superhumans maintain the seemingly benevolent alien rule, while rebellious powers try to find their way in to deal a much needed blow against the new ruling class. Combining dark, ultra-powerful superheroic adventure with breathtaking transhumanistic ideas, Hybrid Elite is a setting of tremendous powers, to those willing to fight for their species’ survival in the name of another race entirely.

Stone Sky Kingdoms is GEARS’ contribution to the fantasy genre. But it is not fantasy as you may know it; it’s both darker and grander, as powerful sorcerers try to make the stars fall to the ground and build mighty cities around them, draining the power of these fallen pieces of the ’stone sky’. A power so great that few dare go too close, and the lands around the fallen stars warps with magic only tapped by the most insane. Stone Sky Kingdoms explores fantasy as a large and bewildering tapestry of magics, faith, arcane torment, chaos, and immense beauty and heroic values that may be the last defense against those who want the sky to truly fall!

Ectopia, “the outer place”, is a cyberpunk world of the near future. But something is wrong. There is something lurking in the artificial realms our technologies have created. ‘Ghosts’ seen only through bionic eyes and in data archives, entities wanting to reach out to us, for reason we cannot, perhaps dare not, understand. And as material greed and carnage claw at society, in a world that has not come to terms with the power it has attained over such a brief age of progress, something new is being born in its blind angles…

These five will all get a treatment in GEARS Fourth Draft, and presumably in the final First Edition. The following two, however, are slated as the first settings to get separate treatment as supplement:

Intransigent Design, where our world is rocked to its very core in a not so distant future. As humanity looks on, God returns, bringing with Him the armies of Heaven, a civilization of unimaginable power, loyal to a Plan so far beyond the understanding of humanity that we have, inadvertedly, strayed from it. The loyal and devout will submit, the rebellious will fall. But God has adversaries, both human and other, and as the realms of Heaven and Hell and the intricacies of the human soul becomes the stage of the greatest battle faced by either of those fighting, the world is changed forever.

Reich X is picked as perhaps the truest of Evils, a world in which Hitler claimed victory and subdued the world… by magic, alien saucer technology, mythical creatures and advanced inventions. Inside Neuropa, brains in jars plan the war of a Third Reich armed with sorcerers and cyborgs, ravaging unconquered lands with vampires and werewolves, and hunting Qabbalist rebels with saucers before the spirits of the slain Hebrew people can give the Underground a foothold in the glorious Nazi empire.

Posted in Intransigent Design, First Edition, Hybrid Elite, Broken Pattern, Ectopia, Stone Sky Kingdoms, Sixth Draft, Game worlds, Reich X, Magic, Superpowers, Fourth Draft, Races, Aliens, Alice | 1 Comment »

19. January 2010 by admin.

Let’s talk business for a second, shall we…

Roleplaying games are a shaky one; the market is vulnerable and not that strong, and there are plenty of options out there for anyone to go grab. The old proverb is that “to make a small fortune publishing RPGs, you have to start with a big fortune”, meaning that most of it is money out the window. Who would publish in a climate like this?

The answer to that is easy: Diehard roleplayers, and crazy hopefuls with an idea. Why? Because of a love of the game (or just the idea. It happens). But the big question is how? In the olden days, it was about getting a bunch of prints made, taking them to a game event like GenCon, and hoping someone would buy them. Then came Print on Demand and PDF publishing, and the business changed. Well, it changed a little; books were suddenly easier to produce and sell, and online sales were easier to get to a larger market. Free samples were affordable, and some people sold their wares. But things changed even more…

The business plan that I have been poking at for some time, without really understanding its practical implications, is ransom publishing. Essentially, it involves making people pay for something before it’s even created, like a massive pre-order, and then making it freely available once it is done. To a business man, that might sound like lunacy, or a wet dream, but people are doing it. I found out exactly how much the idea of ransom has spread when I came into contact with Kickstarter.com, a site that facilitates the creation of art and other things with the ransom process. Simply put, they collect prepayments and only bill them when a project has enough of them to be fully funded. Then, the creator can create it and make it free or hand out erly copies to those who supported it.

I like this as a business model for GEARS, but it is filled with uncertainties. The big one, of course, is whether people will fund a game book before it is made, or if they want to see it before buying it. But the potentials of this model are staggering! For one, it would provide opportunities I like, such as allowing anyone to print and sell copies for free. If the game shows its true worth successfully, that means a lot of people will be making money on it with little investment, and odds are they will be first in line to facilitate the creation of more books, giving them something to sell. Others can support with lesser sums to move things along, since 500 people supporting with $10 is $5000, which is enough to get a fiar-sized game supplement written. Having the line free after that makes it highly available, and people can print it however they see fit.

But the greatest win from a ransom model is freedom. In that, I mean freedom to focus on the writing and playing part of the game! A ransom model would take away a lot of business responsibilities from myself and those helping GEARS get created, allowing more to be written for it. No print hassles, no rights issues, no worries what book to write first, because the funding will show the interests that exist. It would allow us to be exactly what we want to be: Game creators, not business people. If we wanted to do business, we’d be making silly ringtones, after all

Ransom is not a guaranteed model for GEARS to launch on, but it is on the table, and it has a lot of attractive qualities. More research will have to be done, but if it can be pulled off, the need for extensive business research will fade in the future. It will be what it was always meant to be, anmely about the game!

Posted in PDF, Business, Game worlds | 1 Comment »

6. January 2010 by admin.

Writing on Fourth Draft is furious. Much of it is the long promissed ‘design kits’, most of that being streamlining of things transfered from old TAYDS material and notes made from playtests since that was written, methods for creating adventures and running games, for designing worlds and handling players, and of course the question of what kind of Narrator you want to be.

I don’t mind that. I like updating my old work to match new experiences and concepts within RPGs developed since. But I find it difficult to adjust to one aspect of this writing: No rules! The guides are just that, guides. They contain no character trait explanations, no simulation of game world realities, no streamlined dice use, and it just feels… weird.

Now, I grew up with roleplaying games being mostly a book of rules on everything from battlemaps to race bonuses. I love creating adventures and worlds, and I love teaching others how to do so. What actually pains me is that I am currently putting a lot of effort into teaching others how to create, and it is like talking about surfing or painting; it makes you want to actually do it! I have not had the amount of creative urges I have right now in a long time, ideas just swelling up inside me, wanting to be transformed into creative works. It does not matter if those ideas are on how to cleverly represent some twisted aspect of a literary reality, or if it is the invention of a new civilization for a game world, I just feel a lust to create.

For now, I take constant notes while writing the guides. I jot down ideas, questions, stray thoughts and anything else that comes to mind and wants to get out. The guides are doing their job, making me think and create, but they also need to be written themselves. I can only imagine the things ready to burst from my skull when all the guides are done… and that’s just the basic versions for Fourth Draft; there is plenty more in the pipeline for Fifth Draft!

Maybe that’s also why there have been fewer posts on this blog; I want to get the guides done, and writing here is time I could spend on that

Posted in Design kits, Game worlds, Fifth Draft, TAYDS, Races, Narrator, Fourth Draft, Playtests | No Comments »

1. January 2010 by admin.

Christmas and New Years behind us, it looks like the time to get back in the saddle. Not that things have been all that quiet; writing on Fourth Draft has been quite active, much of it being structure and phrasing. The wording of rules from Third Draft are becoming more streamlined, making them easier to read and understand, and also setting them up for a better layout. And on layout matters, a lot of decisions are being made on graphics and text setup. Fourth Draft is going to push GEARS into a more respectable look, hopefully the beginning of making it look visually professional. Content is still the One True Focus, but we are far enough along that looks are beginning to count, if nothing else then because that includes how content is arranged, visually.

But that’s all still abstract ideas and nitpicking, respectively. What has taken center stage for the last week has been the Background trait. Of all the material in existence for GEARS, Background has become one of the more controversial topics, starting out as one of the foremost innovations of the rules and then abruptly slipping into the background (no pun intended), overshadowed by such things as Specifics and Learning Abilities in terms of innovation.

What Background originally did was guide character creation along what is known as ‘life paths’ in most RPG theory. In other words, characters were created by describing the paths they had taken in life, and defining Abilities and such from that. If your character had been a mercenary mechanics, that would produce some Abilities etc., and if a character had been orphaned at age 12, that would define certain character traits. Characters were not so much items picked as lives lived.

The rules now support a ‘pick your skills’ character creation more, but the old Background material is being revised and updated. The point now is to make game worlds the vessel for life paths, allowing some choices to be only available along certain paths. This might be learning mystical martial arts, possible only with enough Background from hard travels; without a heroic journey behind it, your character cannot be taught the Ancient Arts by secluded monks. Whether due to lack of insight, not having proven oneself worthy, or in other ways failing to have done something with his or her life, a character might be barred from certain options. Even advanced military training can require the character to have a certain amount of Background in the right fields!

And issues of Background are starting to show beautiful levels of sybergy with things like races, giving a character of one race opportunities other races lack. If you are not a dwarf, there are paths in life blocked to you. Those paths may hold otherwise forbidden knowledge, or they may simply be advantageous or plain interesting in other ways. Careers, challenges, experiences, associations, connections, they can all be made to tap into Background, with astoudingly easy game mechanics. This is what Background was made for, but the way it fits into the overall flexible GEARS game system is turning out pretty impressive.

Posted in Game worlds, Layout, Background, Human Template, Races, Third Draft, Fourth Draft, Genre, Character creation | 1 Comment »

27. December 2009 by admin.

With Christmas behind us, a bit of care is put into the work even during the holidays. After a short fight with technical issues on the site (sorry if it was down for a few hours over the holiday), I for one am turning my eyes back to the writing of the game.

Excepting some work still to be done to fine tune the layout of the color version of Third Draft, focus is on Fourth Draft now. New layout tools are being set up (Third Draft (color) pushed the old tools to their limits, it seems), but the big deal right now is in the presentation of Fourth Draft, and not the graphical one! Even with the new and improved wording of the rules being put together for Fourth, there is a distinct lack of feel in the text, making it look almost academic. The problem is that GEARS can be used in any way seen fit. So what is its basic mood?

The answer is not decisive yet, but the Alice 2.0 setting included might endup playing a wider role than originally expected. GEARS is about doing anything, yes, but it is built by people having fun with it, and much of that in a rather free-spirite way, from guns blazing to entertainment by overacting. Cliches, schticks and wacky cleverness has dominated playtests a bit more than has been let on, and the reason for not putting much focus on it has been to preserve GEARS’ universal attitude; portraying a style tends to color the system that style, and that is not the intention. But now, that policy is being reconsidered.

There is no way of telling how that line of discussion is going to turn out. GEARS remains a universal system, and that will be emphasized. But the wacky fun of current Alice 2.0 storylines in playtest look more and more likely to color the end result, and it looks like it might actually be a good thing…

Posted in Game worlds, Layout, Genre, Fourth Draft, Alice, Third Draft, Playtests | No Comments »

19. December 2009 by admin.

With the release (and subsequent adjustments and rerelease) of GEARS Third Draft, I feel I may have left the blog to drift a little. Third Draft took a greater effort than expected, mostly because of the first attempts to do a serious layout (the part that got the most adjustments, actually!).

So with that work pretty much done, there is only one logical thing for me to ramble about today: Fourth Draft!

And there is a schism here, a change of process from the first three drafts to this next one. It is probably not easy to see from the outside, but there is a massive difference between writing rules and writing games! Rules are about making sure as much of the gorund you want is covered as possible, making sure things fit together, make sense, and has a degree of balance (we are still working on the balance thing). Games are about writing something that otherscan easily understand, use and enjoy. That means that Fourth Draft will need better language,better organization, and better layout. Just saying “we need more/better rules” will not cut it!

So the writing procedure has been turned upside down, for one. The first three drafts were written as rules were needed and became possible; first the dice mechanic, then character creation, then all the other things characters might have, and onwards from there. Fourth Draft is about structure. Therefore, the first thing written for it is a complete and detailed layout of all the contents planned for it, set up in a way that seems logical and user friendly. Not surprisingly, the bulk of what is not only in Third Draft, but also what is mentioned but not finished in Third Draft, will all only be part of one section: The Rules

Originally, the core book being written was meant to have three major sections: The Game Engine and The Rules System, hence the name, GEARS: Game Engine And Rules System, and of course the Alice 2.0 setting. As things look now, a more detailed structure will benefit everyone much better, leading to five majorsections:

• The Game, describing how games can be played, how to organize sessions, what the roles and tools are for Narrators, how players tend to think, etc. Half of it is for beginners learning to handle roleplaying games without too many bad experiences, half of it is for skilled Narrators/GMs from other games wanting to get a better game going with less work. The section is about people, real people, playing roleplaying games; how they think, what they want, what they may need, etc.
• The Engine is a toolbox for the Narrator. It describes how to easily produce things from ideas, and how to get ideas when you run out. Methods, tricks and tools are delivered to quickly turn a general idea of a world, an adventure, or anything else pertaining to the game into something tangible and usable. It even goes into how these things can be set up to be shared between Narrators, to the point of how one might professionally publish them. The idea with this section is A) to ease the task of creating breathtaking campaigns, B) to kickstart a creative GEARS community, and C) to actually sow the seeds for writers who will come to write for the game! Most professional writers will already know the information in the section, and much more, but a lot of it will be news to those without publishing credits.
• The Rules, basically what is already in Third Draft, with many of the blank spots filled in. A serious rewrite is going to be done on many parts, for better phrasing.
•  The System, meanwhile is an extension of what is in The Engine and The Rules, providing a lot of different, creative uses of it all to create concepts for the game that have the complexity of ideas from The Engine, but are fully compliant with The Rules, using what already exists to create things like detailed poisons, hacking rules, character ethics/value systems, magic and divinities, and so on. This is both a collection of premade material that goes beyond the basic rules, and examples for how more can easily be made. Focus is on explaining ideas so that creative concepts can be reused and expanded on by others.
• The Settings contains both Alice 2.0 and multiple short world writeups, to get genre games going. Rules are going to be integrated into this, rather than the ruleless description of the Alice 2.0 setting included in Second Draft and Third Draft. The other, non-Alice settings will be picked to demonstrate genre and style creation and modification, giving the new Narrator a wide scope from the start, and an ample toolbox.

I will refrain from going into details about each section’s structure and subsections; that is what writing Fourth Draft is about, after all. But expect to see something much more like an actual game than a carefully crafted set of house rules next time!

Posted in Genre, Fourth Draft, Style, Design kits, Game worlds, Third Draft, Character creation, Alice, Second Draft, Magic, Narrator, Hacking, Conflict | No Comments »

11. December 2009 by admin.

… needed on several accounts, it seems!

The site was down Dec. 10 due to a miscommunication with our new provider. It’s up and running again, though, nothing lost. We do not expect it to happen again.

The other kind of organization is Organizations, large structured groups that characters in a game may be involved with somehow. They may be allies, enemies, bystanders, victims, interests, power factions, or anything else one might imagine them for. And I want creation tools for them, just like we have for characters, equipment and exotic powers! Why? Because with such a system in place, it becomes possible to distribute fully designed Organizations for game worlds and adventures, or modular ones that can be assembled for any campaign. Like a collection of monsters or a set of premade characters for use in adventures (as people encountered by player characters, presumably), such Organization collections would allow immensely detailed game worlds to be set up in minutes.

But also, because proper structure allows quicker and more versatile use in adventures! If an Organization is described well, and there are meaningful rules and guidelines in place, the Narrator can quickly assess what it means when the characters blow up a secret lab, recruits a key expert, affects a vital operation, etc. It makes the Organization a vibrant, dynamic part of the adventure, instead of some nebulous background explanation for where the ninjas come from!

Sadly, the Organiation rules that were ready were made for the Relations rules that were voted out as ‘bland’ during playtest. The new Relation rules are much, much better, thanks to extensive player feedback, but they do not fit into the old Organization rules. So they need rewriting! When they are done, players can deliberately assess how to cripple giant Organizations by cutting out vital operations, they can build and recruit their own, they can join up, infiltrate, sabotage, have dramatic stand-offs with and generally have fun with Organizations, from the local mercenary outfit to the intergalactic alien religion or the secret conspiracy of the Elves! I have an old character, made for a different game, in which house rules were used to design an agent who could call in orbital strikes, if and when he could explain why the act would be absolutely vital to his Organization. Of course, they more or less owned him in return, but tense situations are where adventures are born! I want characters like that to be modelled with the basic rules in GEARS; the advanced rules will take it much, much further…

Posted in Aliens, Relations, Design kits, Game worlds, Dammit!, Monsters, Equipment/Gear, Narrator, Superpowers, Character creation, Playtests | No Comments »

9. December 2009 by admin.

Things are coming along fine, Relations are being expanded, and the rest is being filled in nicely. Nothing really to report there. So what do I use this entry for. Hmm….

Just kidding, I never really run out of things to ponder loudly on

What I want to have a go at today is a bit off the usual wagon, though. GEARS is, at its root, a roleplaying game. But in today’s world, you have to grow beyond your own little bubble, and that is the intention for GEARS, as well! Observant visitors to the (still WIP) website will already have noticed that there is a link, still inactive, that says “Software”, and even one that says “Merchandise”. These are some indications of plans for after the releases start coming! Software refers to the plans to builddigital tools for the game. The basic ones aretools for creating beautiful (or just easily assembled) sheets for characters, complex items/vehicles, game worlds and even adventures & campaigns. The point is to make the whole effort behind a game move smoother and give results that will be cheerished even outside the game. Who wouldn’t want their favorite GEARS character turned from a worn collection of scribbled papers into a neat and stylish personal file? And the opportunity to create a string of adventures easily and in nice format is not only a comfort for many Narrators, it also makes it much easier to hand the adventure to another Narrator for using! Digital assistants and easily accessed lists of, well, whatever you want, it all makes for a sweeter, cooler game…

But there is no plan to stop there, really. Today, things like Instant Messaging and forum games have become a strong force in roleplaying, and the world is apparently holding its breath in wait for Google Wave to be released, so no doubt it will be a new digital platform for traditional roleplaying games to evolve on. Games should embrace that. In fact, they should promote it and push for the exploration of it. The world is changing, and roleplaying games should be at the forefront of that change. Face it, we’re the original geeks, and we’re proud of it. No way technology gets a say without us aboard!

Merchandising is a time-honored tradition that might well be older than roleplaying games themselves! Today, there is a million and one options to take your favorite game, character or the like out of the game and into your home, your wardrobe, or your life in other ways. T-shirts and posters are the simple stuff, already in the works; figurines for painting, or even tailored outfits inspired by game worlds, now that is a challenge worth a game for the new millenium!

Of course, all this is for the game, but it is not the game itself. The rules are coming along, and soon, Alice will grow and worlds will rise up around her, and around GEARS. Digital toys and beautiful (or terifying. Or hilarious!) merchandise will follow logically from that. This is the time we have to revolutionize roleplaying, and around here, the ideas are flying, and we are always out there looking for more

Posted in Game worlds, Character creation, Narrator, Alice | No Comments »