Ron Edwards' Current prjects

[sirogit]

Excus eme if there's some obvious place where I can find this information, but I wanted to ask Ron a few things

Are you currently working on any new RPGs?

Are you working on any new supplements for Sorcerer? What mini-supplements are in the works by other people?

Have you thought about but not finished other games? Or just have several that you don't sell or make public knowledge of?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Cool questions.

1. More Sorcerer books? God, I hope not. The original plan was to start with The Sorcerer's Soul, and then I got this horrible urge to write Sex & Sorcery. I think I may have recovered, but it was touch-and-go for a bit there.

2. Mini-supplements? You need to bother Mike Holmes a lot regarding Sorcerer & Space, which only lacks a little editing and re-writing to be fully publishable. He even has great cover art already! So bother him a lot. Write him private messages.

Two other mini-supplements are in development by other authors and I'm behind in getting comments to them. Both look really good and have very ambitious features. I hope to get comments to them by the end of the week.

3. I'm working on a possible short comics story for Sorcerer with an artist. I hope we get it done in time for publication in a small-press combination comic later this year. I have some long-term hopes for comics, actually, but you won't know much about that for at least six months to a year from now.

4. If I can get myself organized about this, then a beautiful Sorcerer poster may be available by the end of the year. It's much more likely to happen if you and others tell me you'd buy it, and if you tell me you'd pay a fair bit of money for it.

5. As far as new RPGs go, I'm enjoying writing these alpha-level "notes" RPGs for the GNS essays. Mongrel and Black Fire are currently available and (barely) playable; a third one will accompany the Narrativism essay some day. I'm toying with the idea of developing them all a little further.

You know about Trollbabe and Elfs, right? See the Adept Press website and click on those links if you haven't. Both are being released as books over the next few months; Elfs is almost all set to go.

I have written two or three much older role-playing designs that have not been made public, including Gray Magick, Fantasy for Real, and The Human Machine. Most of their parts have been cannibalized, actually, for later games, but it would be nice to have them available for people to see the evolution of my thinking about some things.

If anyone has any questions about any of this stuff, old or new, let me know.

Best,
Ron

[Lxndr]

Ooooh.  I've so been waiting for Sorcery & Space, even if it turns out to not be a generic space supplement (as I think I heard through the grapevine).  I'm glad to hear there are other sorcerer mini-supplement projects in the works.

(I've got one "planned" but not currently in development)

Question:  Has any further development happened on Mongrel, beyond the alpha stage pdf that was included in the Simulationist article?  It looked like an interesting game, and one I'd want to dabble in... is that "all there is"?  Has it ever been played?

(Feel free to answer these questions regarding Black Fire as well, as I'm sure people are going to ask, but I can't say that game grabbed my interest the way Mongrel did, so I'm not as fired-up about it)

I am interested in seeing the "Older Ron Edwards Designs" if you could deign to put them up where we rabble could view them.  :)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Alexander,

Mongrel was played by Clinton and a few folks, and apparently they had a great time. The action-point order/initiative thing worked really well, which to my thinking is the part I care about (the original part). You can find threads about it by doing a search on Mongrel, I imagine. I plan to develop it mainly through play, as this game is intended to fly mainly on Setting and Color.

I played a tiny bit of Black Fire last week, enough to be satisfied that the Black Point - Black Dice system actually flies, but also to see that scene management is a bit problematic. I need to establish more in-game context for player-character activity, which I think will come from more playtesting. I'll be posting about that session soon.

As for the older games, if you can believe it, they exist currently in hard copy and somewhere in some disks dating back around ten years. That means WordPerfect on 5-1/4 floppies and MacWord in cruddy falling-apart old disks ... and I don't even know exactly where they are. Scanning and then correcting the current hard copies strikes me as a horrible task.

Oh yeah! I just remembered two others: a fantasy homebrew from the late 80s and my original personal Lite game called "BSL," for "bullshit-less." I've got hard copies of the latter and probably could find the scribbly notebooks with the former ...

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

The action-point order/initiative thing worked really well, which to my thinking is the part I care about (the original part).

The part that I promptly stole almost in its entirely and put in Robots & Rapiers BTW.  Should have a chance to test them out in that context this weekend.

[greyorm]

You need to bother Mike Holmes a lot regarding Sorcerer & Space, which only lacks a little editing and re-writing to be fully publishable. He even has great cover art already! So bother him a lot. Write him private messages.

Yeah, I'd like to see my cover in print, damnit! It's an awesome piece. So write him a alot of private messages.

And what are the other two mini-supplements? I realize that telling us is not Ron's call, so I'm shouting out to the authors: get us interested! Love to hear about them!

[Mike Holmes]

Gah!

<Runs for cover>

My only excuse is that I've been playing RPGs too much online. PBEM lately. Yeah, that's lame, I'll get on it. :-)

Actually, I have to talk to Ron about it some....

Mike

[Spooky Fanboy]

And what are the other two mini-supplements? I realize that telling us is not Ron's call, so I'm shouting out to the authors: get us interested! Love to hear about them!

I have a supplement which cranks up the volume on Sorcerer quite a bit. It involves wishes, and the drawbacks to having anything you want handed to you (more or less) as you wanted it.

I think my writing is good, and I believe it's playable. Ron can take his time getting back to me, as I'm going to be moving shortly and will not have access to the Internet. Plus, I crave a thorough review to catch any glaring errors in my first supplement.

[Judd]

I am working on a mini-supplement for Sorcerer and Sword called The Dictionary of Mu.  It is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom through a dark pulp fantasy lens.  The world-book is laid out like a dictionary written by a madman out in the wastes.  It has taken a whilebut  the book is coming along.

I think it will be something to be proud of once we're all done.

Here's a link to the birthing thread:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=3506&highlight=

[Ron Edwards]

Yup, those are the two mini-supplements that I'm currently delaying. Which is bad, because they're really good.

Best,
Ron

[xiombarg]

I'd like to mention in passing that tho it's waaaaaay on the backburner, I'm still planning on doing Exile. I even have some ideas on how I want to handle the "flashbacks from real life" thing.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Ron,

I've got Fantasy For Real for certain, and I think I have The Human Machine. If you want them available somewhere, let me know.

[Lxndr]

My Sorcerer mini-supplement project/idea, tentatively entitled "the Ghosts of Earth," is also rather on the backburner.  I haven't posted the idea anywhere, so I can't point y'all to a thread, but I think it's a nifty idea nonetheless.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Kirt, after reviewing the "Exile" thread, I'm really eager to see this material. I think it could be quite awesome. One thing I don't really get, at the moment anyway, is what demons look like, smell like, feel like, and similar. Are they entirely abstract programs? Can you talk with one?

The other mini-supplements I'd love to see happen would come from Tim Denee's Sorcerer ponderings thread and Rob McDougall's Sorcerer: Incorporated thread. Oh yeah, and Jesse Burneko's The Asylum: a first pass Sorcerer one-sheet game, too, would be tres cool, as well as his currently-developing Sorcerer Unbound.

Mike, get in touch about Sorcerer & Space. Everyone else, you sent him private messages, right? Heh heh. Send'im some more.

Judd and Carl, I swear, I swear comments are coming soon.

I'm thinking about putting up a page at the Sorcerer site about "old stuff" that will make all those older designs available, with some notes about what I was thinking at the time as well as what got looted out of each one for later games.

Oh yeah, and I had an idea today, which I really should have come up with a year ago. A combat/conflict interactive program at the website, much like the one at The Riddle of Steel website. Good idea, huh?

Best,
Ron

[Rob MacDougall]

Ron, I'm pleased to hear you're still interested in Sorcerer Incorporated. I haven't stopped thinking about it, and would love to make it into a mini-supplement at some point. The main issue is whether I'll be up to playing it any time soon. I'm wrapping up a year-long Unknown Armies campaign right now that has been very intense and gritty and dark, all things I'd want Sorcerer Inc. to be, and at the moment I just can't face jumping right into another game that would probably be even more heavy. (I'm thinking of running Starchildren with Hero Quest rules instead.) But I'm sure this will pass, and in the meantime maybe I should start a new thread or two with the Sorcerer Inc. stuff I've been thinking about.

I myself want to see all of the above mentioned mini-supplements, in particular Tim Denee's modern Japan setting. Tim, if you're reading this and still thinking in that direction, I highly recommend the novel Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell, which, besides being a great book, is all about where the real and the imagined Japan meet.

But I guess I'd better not turn this thread into "Sorcerer stuff we'd like to see."

Rob