Welcome to the Deathtrap: 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.