Summer of Game Development

 Summer has come and gone. And like many others, I'd hoped I create more content than I did. Especially here on Welcome to the Deathtrap,

Over the Summer I ran a campaign set on Hot Springs Island that I specifically structured for more casual play. I framed every game session as a foray onto the island from a neighbouring colony. If players didn't get off the island in time, the boat would leave without them.

I used dynamic rumour tables to give them several some things they could choose to do except would only necessitate one or two city encounters or possibly a small five room dungeon. As it was the summer and many of my players are parents, it was quite hard to wrangle enough people and a few sessions ended up being nothing more than a cat between them myself and one or two players.

Overall it was fun and my players came out of it with a few excellent stories, which I consider the mark of a game well dungeon mastered.

Pitching New Games

Now that the summer is over, I don't particularly care too continue with Hot Springs Island, however. I've had an itch to do some World building and some rules hacking. And, as it stands, life is a little hectic for some of my players and have not been able to show up for many of my Silver Gull campaign sessions. Creating a game with that same ability to just drop in and out is critical if I want to keep playing games with players aged 34 to 60 on weeknights.

So, I prepared for game pitches in the last week of my Summer travels that would both meet my desire to try and create something new, and continue to enable players to drop in and out, while taking advantage of the fact that they will be available a little more often than they are over the summer.

The pitches were as follows:

• The Temple of Elemental Evil played in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, eventually fused with the giant saga, and the underdark saga, possibly going all the way down to the demonweb pots.

• A Norse themed campaign running in Low Fantasy Gaming where the player characters would play new arrivals to a colony at the edge of the world we are humans work with the easier to drive the frost Giants from midgard.

• "Undeadwood," A pulpy Weird West game where the characters find themselves in an extra planer realm parallel to Texas where creatures from American folklore like hodags and jackalopes and thunderbirds are real, the hungry dead walk the desert at night, and the Devil himself will gamble for souls.

• And finally, a two-fisted post Noir set on a 1950s science fiction Space Station. Essentially a fusion of Babylon 5 and LA confidential. With a twist of 70s SciFi Sleaze, which I tentatively called "Two-Fisted Tales of Omikron Station"
  

For those last two prompts I decided that system would be to be determined. Whenever I was going to settle on, I would need some heavy customization to make it work the way I want it to.

Jumping the Raygun

I got excited enough about that last prompt that I put some serious thought into it and started creating a game for it using the Drakken engine, with liberal borrowing from Star Adventurer and Alpha Blue.

I was, after 4 or 5 days of tinkering in my free time to the point where everything that needed to be overhauled for Drakken had been, and I'm to the point where I'm adding new content and tables to make a complete game. 

I figured that it was the most likely pick for my players, and even if it wasn't, it's a setting I will pitch again in the future, and something that my readers might enjoy playing.

Hold on There a Minute, Pardner...

Of course, they surprised me and went for my Undeadwood pitch. Quite frankly, the only game I have that even remotely if it's a weird West setting in my collection is Cowpunchers by the Basic Expert. 

Now, I suppose I could have tacked hey magic system is a monsters onto Cowpunchers and done just fine. It's a cool system that I bought ages ago and haven't had a chance to play. But, I wanted something just a little bit lighter on the rules, because I play in a very limited time window, and want to keep the burden of character generation down to an absolute minimum.

And so I have started writing not one but two games and already made significant progress on both.

I will be posting a lot of thoughts about the development process as I go, as it has really got me thinking about Word-Building in particular.

The Appendix -N Rap

I use the AI music generator Suno a occasionally to set my poetry to music and create things like faux commercial jingles for my podcasts 

Lately I've been using it to make up silly songs to entertain my kids... And to engage in the odd rap battle over D&D theory with BrOSR guys.

It occurred to me that while I was tinkering away with writing a little D&D related music, it might be a fun one-off to do an article in the form of a rap piece. And so I did.

The Appendix -N Rap is a quick discussion of some of the ways the writers listed as most influential on D&D have left a mark on the game. Namely Abraham Merritt, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft.

The lyrics here are mine, and I managed to get the Suno AI to arrange vocals and music to my taste after about 30 iterations.

Sourcebook Review: Hogwater: Village of Secrets

 

Author: Travis Miller

Publisher: Self-published

System: Swords & Wizardry

Marketplace: Lulu, Square

I'm going to start this review with full disclosure. I consider Travis Miller to be an internet friend. When I was trying to start an OSR actual play podcast a few years ago, he volunteered to play, and played three sessions of Lamentations of The Flame Princess with myself and Stephen Smith. I've also written guest articles on Grumpy Wizard, and featured guest articles from him on Welcome to the Deathtrap. Travis gave me a complimentary copy of Hogwater: VIllage of Secrets hoping that I would review it, and in the process give him the kind of feedback that people like about my articles.

I will also confess that the article I did on factions with examples from Temple of Elemental Evil last week was to set this review up.

Hogwater is a slightly different way of setting up a home base for the first phases of a campaign.

Rather than provide a map of the village off the bat, and then go place by place describing the people who live in it, Travis Miller describes the village in terms of the NPCs and factions within it. Every NPC of note is given clear motivations, preferences, quirks, and goals with the first few steps described.

What he describes is a small, unfinished keep surrounded by a young borderlands town situated on a new highway that serves as a midway point for some relatively new trading routes. It's a place where merchants pass through to resupply on their way to other places.

The hero that established hog water a generation ago has recently been usurped by the current lord of the keep, who enforces his law through a dangerously skilled marshal, and an incredibly corrupt Reeve.