Over here in the RPG Dreams thread,

Lxndr wrote: Parts of Fastlane came to me in a dream and/or hypnagogic state; same with good portions of Shangri-la and Mudsylvania, neither of which have been released yet.

I am still working on the Dictionary of Mu, a mini-supplement for Sorcerer and hope to have it finished this year, hell or high water.

And I have an unfinished, unnamed super-hero RPG that I'd like to get around to posting up here some time.

Jesus H. Christ, I have so many...

Argonauts needs to be finished and then published. It's a game about tragic Greek superheroes meeting their Fates and dying horribly. The first RPG to specifically do tragedy, as far as I know.

After that, it's Humble Mythologies, this game Eero helped me brainstorm on. It basically tries to show that a shared symbolic language and really aggressive scene framing are enough system to run a game on. Oh, and it's about discovering the little beauties in existence, in a "magical realism" kind of way.

Then it's probably Beneath This Facade, which Ramon Perez is doing art for. It's a game about the masks we wear and all the different layers of identity that stack up to make a person. Except these "people" in question are individuals that hack in stories, take on the roles of the people/places/things in them, and ride the story until it crashes, trying to keep in going. They take on a bit of every person/place/thing that they become, make it a part of their personal identity and then move on. It's an experiment in character development over character advancement.

Then there's Fingers on the Firmament, which I've promised Shreyas I'll finish. It's basically "narrativist Continuum without limits." The characters can reach out, grab hold of a star, and pull themselves towards it, up through space and back through time (because the light reching us left its home millions of years ago). In this way, they scramble across the heavens like rock climbers, shifting hand and footholds on the stars and exploring themes of awe, fear, and especially loneliness. Probably will be written specifically for a PBeM format, which might be another first unless somebody else beats me to it (like maybe Michael's HeartQuest Online, Neel already beat me to a Wiki game with Lexicon).

Oh yeah, and there's also We Regret To Inform You the Gamemaster Is Dead which I plan to playtest with the Forge guys whenever I actually make it to GenCon. You play a group of characters trapped in a roleplaying game world after the GM has died, killed by one of the PCs (who is controlling one of the characters)! An excercise in mind-boggling absurdity.

Besides that there's the basketball-based game that I want to write. Sports RPGs just HAVE to happen. They'd be so cool!

Also, I have this weird idea for a d20 product in which everyday people gain crazy powers by playing roleplaying games (specifically, D&D). Maybe this should just be a weird Urban Arcana game, or something, but I think it'd be cool.

And that "RPG about everyday people" that so many of us keep requesting...? I'll write it if no one else does.

What, no interest in what Shangri-la is? Heh. Anyway, I'll post more ideas (and more about Mudsylvania) tomorrow because it is late here and I am tired, but the basic concept of Mudsylvania could probably be summed up as follows:

"You, the players, play the player-characters in a fantasy universe that pretty much mimics the stereotypical MUD - you know the sort, with the invincible shopkeepers and monsters that reappear after a certain period of time. The kind that has instant resurrection, but you have to go back and get your stuff off your body. It'll have tropes and ideas stolen from MUDs across the world - cliches, and so on, but (and this is important) it's not a MUD. It's a real world that just uses MUD-style physical laws, all the way down to killing-and-quests being the only methods to get XP, which is then spent in ways that we would consider nonsensical.

"In addition to taking on various player-characters (and players have multiple PCs in their "stable", although they may only use one PC at a time), players also embody, more ephemerally, a 'Builder' - one of those who crafted the descriptions and objects and themes of the world in which they play."

From this thread at RPGNet, posted by Rafael Chandler (Dread RPG):

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14146&perpage=100

wrecked: after a bloody rebellion on a slave galley, a group of africans took control of the ship and tried to make it back home. they were yanked through a portal connecting our world with another. a few years later, the same thing happened in another part of the world: a chinese junk was transported to the same alien land.

now, over two hundred years later, you have been transported to the same world, a place of glowing emerald mists and three blue suns. the continent of arcadia is ruled by a council of humans: noble men and women of mixed heritage. however, they speak perfect english, and worship the departed spirits of father yared, mother ming-wa, and brother ambrose. they make ceaseless battle with the monstrosities that emerge from the lightless blood-pits of the north. they welcome you to your new home, for there is no known way to return to earth. they feed you roasted ox meat and honeyed wine. they hand you your spear and your amulet, and they tell you that if you want to live, you must learn to fight. they say this kindly.

Unfortunately, Rafael has dropped off the face of the earth to pursue his writing. Awesome for him, sucks for us, cause he's a fucking brilliant fiction writer IMO.

So I'm gonna do it instead. The rules are simple, and involve rolling 4d8 for all actions. The rules will be like Dread, with shared successes like Sorcerer. Simple, simple, simple. It's to be an "Out of the Box" game.

Hoepfully, between other commitments I'll have it done by December for PDF release. Out of respect for Raf, I'll throw it his way when I'm done to see what he thinks. :-)

-Andy

I'm still working on Danger Patrol -- my retro-sci-fi pulp adventure game. Running into the Forge has slowed down development considerably while I get a real education in game design and theory. The game will be much better for it, though.

Also in the works:
The Company -- a super-spy mini-supplement for InSpectres. Inspired by watching way too much Alias.

SPECOPS -- a gamist little number about special forces operations. Inspired by Rune and Ghost Recon.

Narc -- a mini-supplement for Sorcerer that does away with the metaphors and magic and cuts straight to the bone. Inpsired by the films Narc and Training Day, both excellent Sorcerer movies.

Those should keep me occupied for the next 3 or 4 years. :)

edit: darn BBcode tags...

Currently in the pipe:

Already Discussed in Game Design:
Tactics
The White Hart

Others:

Shadowlight -- not so much an RPG as an RPG-playing structure, designing to provide useful psychological insight through a Jungian framework.

Chorus -- A fantasy setting with a truly syncretic, rather than pastiche, mythology and cosmology. At least, I hope so.

Other things on the edge of sight:

Prophet -- A single-player multiple GM game about the one man who can change the world.

Okay, I'm going to just let out all my ideas out now so I can feel gulity about 'em later. In the works:
* my moby dick - SpacerPunk, by my vision (trying to coherentize an incoherent vision...)
and in the brain:
* Glyph: a wierd MMLARP where we stomp around in trenchcoats and draw chalk circles, and totally fuse with IIEE
* Red Mars for Dust Devils (writes itself), Renegade1990 for octaNe (fight Ross Perot's fascist army!), Vengeful Maker for Sorcerer (gunplay vegeance blood opera), Radical Schools for Active Exploits (kung-fu labor unions unite!)

ok, here's a round-up of all the ideas I've been working on in the back of my brain that will eventually see some form of publication:

Lux and Hyle is the tentative name for the gnostic RPG that Jonathan Walton wanted me to write. the basic mechanic is finished, actually, and I have a huge batch of gnostic quotes to use; but, as I said, I set it aside when it started to spook me...

Hughes High, a teen romantic comedy rpg, is something I plan on sticking in the GMless techniques book as a sample rpg.

Malignment is a sort of twist on the D&D alignment system in which there are only two alignments, Legend and Dream (instead of Good/Evil or Law/Chaos) ... and, although each has its benefits, both have a distinct dark side. this one uses the same basic mechanic as Hughes High and is a rewrite of the mechanics in Empedocles; I keep resolution simple and add detailed alignment and taint rules. this game is mostly setting and is kind of on hold until I develop the art assets for it.

Empedocles (formerly Daemons of Strife and Love) is actually going to get the same treatment as Malignment, pretty much, once I've finished rewriting my house system.

another game using that same house system with setting-specific modifications will be that Barrooms & Braggarts (or Level-Up, or whatever I wind up calling it); it's a game about what goes in in a heroic fantasy world in between adventures, with a focus on social esteem issues; all the dragon slaying and goblin wars occur off-screen. and, again, I mainly want to develop setting material on this one, so it gets set aside until I actually get Court of 9 Chambers tested and written up.

damn, I know there were others. I should probably do something about Troubadours of Verticaille; I'm kind of annoyed at the resolution mechanic, actually. and I'm annoyed at Talk Trash 2Nite; I feel I should totally rewrite both of these.

The Secret Life of Grapes: Or some other interesting food; this is my anthropomorphic, silly food game which might be written out as a TQB supplement.

Four: You can see through time. Discussed in IGD once upon a time; I'm still trying to wrestle the ideas of social-combat, timesight, aggressive scene-framing, and mad Gamist action into a coherent whole.

---.---mipmip---.-- I don't have a name for this yet; I've got a mishmash of crazy fantasy space ideas in my head. Picture this:

There are no stars; instead, prayer energy allows the gods to create glowing effigies of themselves that bring light to their worshippers. In the very centre of Cosmos lies the everchanging mandala that is the city of gods, a galaxy of sacred mansions, whose dances hold the universe in place. In their centre burns the great light of Day, toward which all the faces of gods are turned. Five great pentacles rotate through the worlds, the Houses of the 225 Constellations. On planets bare of worship, these provide the only light apart from that of Day itself.

Fragments of the broken worlds are scattered around the void in clusters, surrounded by pockets of air. Outside these havens, the drowning darkness consumes light and breath, and it cannot be travelled without a protected ship or magic. As the cosmos writhes in the grip of the External Void, these clusters shift rapidly; the sky is rarely the same from one day to the next.

Then, picture this:

A golden quetzal the size of a mountain leaps into the air; red mists of blood spray from its eyes. The screams of sacrifice propel it across the emptiness. Behind it, a legion of riders leap into the air, and their horses climb the Constellations whirling in the darkness. They are travellers.

It's tainted by Exaltedthink right now...but I want it to be a crazy Mayan astrological kung fu space game.

Tentacular: A jolly "I'll survive longest!" Gamist romp through undersea ruins, chased by something, big, slimy, and tentacular. (Is it worth knowing the secrets of the deep if it gets you and your friends eaten be something?)

After I finish my reworked heartbreaker E.rpg, I have a few ideas that may be developed into seperate games, or may be combined into a single design.

The Legend of Ballydowse
This would be a Nar/Sim rpg where you play robin hood-esque pirates in a monotheistic/ quasi-mythical/ steampunk/ celtic setting. It would probably explore issues along the lines of "What good can come from a broken/sinful world?" The setting would be on an island with alot of celtic symbolism. I REALLY like this idea/ setting, however, I may developed it into a story instead of an rpg. Another possibility would be to develop this as a suppliment for TROS.

My Gritty/ theistic/ fantasy setting (no name yet)
I have an idea for a setting, similiar to the Ballydowse idea, that would put a monotheisitc twist on traditonal fantasy. The setting would have alot of conflict between different group's understanding of the divine, "natural" magic, man's magic, & science. Would probably be Sim or Sim/Nar.

Mechanical ideas
I've also have a couple of mechanic ideas that I think work pretty good if I had a game to go with them. Most notaby is a playing card-based melee-combat system that produces IMHO a pretty good cinematic/swashbuckling effect.

Alright, Lxndr, are you going to make me beg to hear about Shangri-La now?

Alright, ok, this is my abject begging: please, please tell me about Shangri-La!

And anyway, I wanted to say, there are some cool game ideas in here. Now I could list off the ones I really like, but man, then I'd have to go read through the whole thread again to make the list, and I'd end up leaving someone's favorite game out, and someone would be pissed, and I'm all about the love. The love.

Rich

Revolutionary! -- But I fear that I'll never finish it. I think I'm not smart (or driven or focussed or something) enough to get it right or social enough to get you guys to do it for me. It's a game in which the PCs are modern, every-day folks balking at the crippling oppression of The Man that everyone around them ignores and the players are pushing at story about the stress of their characters and whether they want to just sit back and take it up the ass or do something about it. The notion that I have for the cover art is a guy in jeans and a ratty old army jacket (or maybe a 7-11 smock) looking into a mirror in a gas-station bathroom, from which a minute-man version is looking out.

Chris

Ninja Kitty, Samurai Dog: Anthromorphic oriental something...originally meant as a humor game, when I developed the mechanics, it lost that focus, and now I'm not sure where to go with it at all. Its been sitting and staring at me, screaming "Finish me! Finish me! Meow! Woof!" But to make it more serious and give it a new focus (something along the lines of duty versus freedom), I rally need to know more about traditional Japanese culture, and I know crap.

Dead Space: A gothic sci-fi horror game. Space is vast, empty, and black, and you and yours are utterly alone amidst the horrors that crawl the blackness between stars and writhe as endless armies upon dead worlds beneath black, dim suns. Man has travelled into the Abyss above searching for truth, and found the truth beyond Earth is terrifying beyond compare. No mechanics, but it does have a cover image in my gallery.

It's ultimately a science & religion game, and where they intersect (or don't)...subconsciously, I realized some of the ideas also come from this old cartoon I saw when growing up about a spaceship sucked through a blackhole (or something) into a solar system where the surviving crew had to face the trials of the Odyssey and creatures from the Greek myths.

A bunch of Sorcerer mini-supplements:

GoLeM: Based on Judaic myths about golems...the Qabbalh is used to summon spirits into human-shaped clay vessels, which grow progressively more powerful and free-willed (and dangerous) the longer you keep them around.

Dolls: The souls of aborted children are demons, you summon them into dolls. If that doesn't scare or worry you, then you're a sick fuck.

Drwyd: Sorcerer and sorcery among the ancient Celts. I mean, blood sacrifice, psychogenic drugs, sorcerers as the ruling cult (druids), and an endless number of spirits to be tamed, appeased, bargained with, and defeated.

Ancient Blood: Sorcerer as immortal gods, whose essence, power, and immortality are maintained by blood (sacrifices, drinking, bathing); takes a page from Aztec myths, and a number of others (even Norse), and even vampirism. I've remotely considered making this into its own game -- it even has a cover image "Anubis at the River" in my gallery.

Untitled: Demons are insanities, summoning them frees another human from the torture of a mental asylum but puts your very soul at risk, banishing them damns someone else.

Jesus Christ and Bhudda and other rare leaders of spiritual power had the ability to contain these beasts in other things...leading to hauntings, werewolves and supernatural effects. Saltwater destroys demons utterly, though it gives the sea their menace as they disperse into it.

The ideas for this one come from a number of sources, including Biblical ones, and Stephen King's "Storm of the Century."

Rich Forest wrote: So what about the rest of you? What games do you have that you'd love to design and write but (for whatever reasons) you just haven't done it yet? What are your unfinished, unstarted, or even half-assed game ideas, and what makes them cool? Join the fun and share your game ideas with no pressure to actually follow through and make them!

I'm looking forward to developing my <Insert Cool Pirate Name Here>. It's a no-centralized-GM, improvisational pirate game about desperation on the High Seas.

I also have ideas knocking around in my brain about an unnamed game of Edwardian scientific discovery. It's all about being obsessed with finding some truth or other, and the risks you take to find it.

Working on Crux, with hopes to have it ready for betatesting by june. This is the urban fantasy game using colored tokens, dealing with themes of: war vs. peace, us vs. them, home vs. travel, asleep vs. awakened. Which is a crappy way of putting it, but there you are.

Next idea in my head - narrative PvP something. Inspired by Humble Mythologies. Setting - probably traditional fairytale/folklore, mechanic is gonna be fortune/drama based on symbolic language of some sort. Maybe. It's just knocking in my head at the moment.

I'm also cogitating about Calvinball- the RPG. Something extremely mutable in its rules - more so even that Universalis and others like that. This may end up part of the narrative PvP fairytale above.

Considering how to do a real RPG/CCG hybrid, a la John Coome's Hobgoblin.

Really want to get the RPG rights to Chine Mieville and Clive Barker's novels.

Want to do something furry too.

All these vague ideas. I'm busy working on one thing at the moment, let me finish that!

Unfinished game ideas. Where to start?

Literati - The game where you play agents sent to hunt down rogue fictional characters in a 50s dystopia. I love the concept, but it falls down at execution.

Eberach - A city based fantasy game set in a hybrid Regency/Industrial age, where corrupt noble houses rule a declining empire. Grotesquery and dark swashbuckling adventure in a world of geomantic structures where the foundations are crumbling.

Those are the two I've been working on longest with no actual results...

-Matt

ARg. I was writing a post, hit the wrong button, it vanished. First time in years that's happened to me. Anyway:

Shangri-la, since you asked, is a game set in dreams. It's the answer to a question I posed myself a while ago, although not the only answer for sure: "What sort of game can I create/plan that could handle massive changes of player attendance from week to week while still maintaining some sort of story continuity?" This was my answer - dreamers. Nobody dreams every night, so whoever shows up turns into "them who done dream."

The setting starts at the edge of the dream of the individual, and does not cross that line. It's exploration OUTWARDS, and each Lucid Dreamer (or Chimera) has a Quest he has to complete, a path that he or she is compelled to take (regardless of whether or not they DO, and certainly there are chimerae who have abandoned their Quest for the things that exist in the dream world, and there are many paradises out there).

Chimera themselves are defined, in addition to their Quest, by their knots and thread. These (both thread and knot) are metaphors, images that help define the chimera. "Heart of gold", "lions at the gate", "empty cage"... the chimera brings these metaphors with him as he travels, and they can manifest in the dreamworld around him. And if they do, they can impact (both positively and negatively) the task at hand. I'm still stuck on exactly how to do that, but I know I want it done.

It uses six-siders for resolution, because it came to me in a dream. What better reason is there?

More on Mudsylvania: There are two separate resolution systems, both d-10 based. The first is percentile, the second is a dice pool. Why two? Because I want to sharply define the difference between stuff that is a part of the world (spellcasting, combat, "skill use", etc., the standard MUD stuff) and stuff that is PvP (social influence and the like). The former uses percentile, the latter uses pools.

Next, Earth Too is another project of mine, inspired by my "Intro to Philosophy" class professor, although I somewhat doubt he expected me to take it this way. The basic question was "What if, after we're done on this world, we get a second chance - we get born on another planet and do it all again. Is it better, or is it worse? What lessons do we take with us, and what baggage do we accumulate?"

Earth, Too is the afterlife. Sort of. It's another Earth, right down to the geographical features (but not necessarily man-made ones), and has been around as long as the stars. When a human dies on Earth 1, their soul is transported to Earth Too, and brings about a conception (regardless of race, geographical location, sex, or anything else). You spend nine months in the womb slowly regaining your memories - the ultimate sensory deprivation experience. You then go through childhood, puberty, and adulthood all over again, but with all your memories of the previous time around intact.

It uses playing cards for resolution. Why? I'm not sure, it's just a gut thing at this point. The system itself doesn't exist except for "yeah, playing cards, yup, sure, cards, uh-huh." I want it to be able to handle, without a lot of fuss, the creation of both the life you had, and the life you have now.

Still Life is an idea that's been bouncing around my head since before GenCon '03. It's a Sorcerer Mini-supplement, or at least that's the current plan. The idea is that, shortly after Mars is colonized, Earth sorta... goes away. It's dead, it's kaput, there's no more Earth. Some refugees flood in over the next year or two, and the nthat's that. Ten billion people, dead in an instant, and if you point the telescope over that way, you don't even see any debris.

Since then, the people of Mars have been going through the motions. The death of ten billion people hangs over the colonies of Mars like a black cloud (and how), and even those who were born afterwards have to deal with the grief inside them. Some have given in entirely; others still hold on. Grief (or the ability to go on despite it) is one definition of Humanity. The other is good old-fashioned vulnerable emotional expression between human beings, anything from the desperation of a one-night stand, to crying on someone's shoulder.

What of demons? Well, they're the surviving spirits of earth; think of what the ghosts of humans would be if you smashed them all into itty bitty pieces, threw away 90% of it, and sort of melted the rest back together into rough facsimiles of people with a sautering iron. That's a ghost of Earth, that's a demon. It wants companionship, it wants to LIVE, and its very existence threatens the sorcerer, because it might bring them closer to Grief.

That's all for now. Happy now, Rich? :D

Okay, here's what I got, or rather, what I don't got yet:

1. The GM-Side System for Precious Fluid. Think of it as adventure modules (in a kind of liquid form) for no-myth play. If that sounds like an oxymoron, then you'll understand why it's taking a long time. It's an entirely new kind of role playing content authoring, and I'm trying to invent the format and learn to use it to its potential at the same time.

2. Chasms and Cottages. A conceptual game that's actually a test case for #1 above. To judge by most hypothetical examples of noncombat play situations that crop up in discussion forums, leaping over chasms and finding unexpected cottages are the heart and soul of role playing. So why not a game that's entirely about those two things? The first supplement will add Cliffs.

3. An as yet unnamed Arabian Nights game. Based partly on my favorite set of LARP rules ever, this is a Gamist fantasy pastiche (with strong supporting Sim) that brings metagame self-criticism of the outcome, and a few other social-contract-level issues, into the formal rules system. At the end of each "night" (session), players apply mechanics to determine whether the Sultan was sufficiently enthralled by the story to keep Shahrazad alive (i.e. continue the game in future sessions). Ideally, this game should also use the GM-side system from #1 but I'm working it both ways in case that doesn't pan out. Possibility of making this into a Transitionable game by modifying the Sultan's judgment criteria from Night to Night.

- Walt

The Fortunes of the Joneses: Roleplaying in the world of family oriented TV drama-comedy shows. Characters don't have any skills; just an ever increasing tendency for good or bad things to happen to them. It'll be my first game submitted for the Forge's inspection - hopefully in the next few weeks.

FameWhores!: Once I finally get round to ordering and playing Sorceror, I'd love to do a mini-supplement set in the world of celebrity - where you face the contradiction of living up to your star image or having a real, meaningful, normal life. Many pages of notes on this one and many directions (and versions of demons) to go in - from Big Brother to shooting an indie film, the relentless pursuit of the papparazzi and the deterioration of people like Callista Flockhart and Anne Heche.

Cheers,
Steve

Cthulhubabe-This is the primary reason for my series of Call of Cthulhu threads. Based on the mechanics of Trollbabe this will be a narrativist version of Mythos gaming. The characters will be have relationships with both the mythos and the mundane world and effectiveness will be based on balancing those relationships with each other.

Ship and the Stars- This will be a game that deals abstractly with serial science fiction based on the model of the 'planet of the week/story installment' science fiction that has had so many variants. The basic design elements for the game can be seen here and here. In S&tS player effectiveness will primarily be gained by creating the color for the campaign background and instantiating it in scenes of play. I am thinking of doing versions of the game based on the Pool and Prime Time Adventures. I am even working on a cover, which can be seen here

Flying Sorcerers- Based on Sorcerers the characters will be ufo contactees who must do things for thier alien masters. Plenty of peopl want to be picked up by aliens, but what would you do to maintain such a relationship? And what exactly would you want to get out of it?

Away Team - A star Trek game based on Wraith. You beam down and you tell whats happening, and whatever you do don't wear a red shirt....

C.Y.P.H.E.R. - Chosen Youths Piloting Horrifying Existential Robots - The Evangelion/RahXephon/Gasaraki game. The Big Robots aren't empowering supertoys; instead, they're sources of catastrophic Stress for the characters as they deal with friends, family, the pressures of growing up, and the iron-fisted tyranny of the Pecking Order. Get too much stress, you Snap, which lets you redraw the character in mid-session to reflect his new revelations.

Weird Alien Roommate - Inspired by too much anime, and by some of recent threads on "lighter" demons. A stripped-down Sorcerer variant in which the PC's have no Lore, the Demons are more annoying than anything... and Humanity is your ability to be civil to the demons you're stuck with, even as life grinds you down.

We Happy Few - "Band of Brothers"-inspired WWII game about cameraderie, trust, and sudden horrible death. I gave up on this one when I realized I had no idea how to keep it from being too depressing. I suppose there's always Godlike sans-talents, but I'd kind of like a more narrativist spin on the subject.

Well, before I rattle off some ideas, I want to say how great the ideas I've seen in this thread are. Wouldn't it be terrific if even one of each of the game ideas people listed actually got written and published in some form and we all got to play them sometime in the next year?

Also, it can't hurt for people to know that others are stoked by their ideas, so let me say I for one would love to see and play:

Sorcerer and Suspicion (i have some ideas in this regard - you should start a thread about it!)
Dictionary of Mu (been psyched for this for a while)
Level-Up
ALL of Shreyas Sampat's ideas
FameWhores (a friend of mine is running a UA game in this vein, but Sorcerer seems even more appropriate)
Literati
Cthulhubabe
CYPHER

(And the other ideas are great too, but if I listed them all, it would dilute the effect of my praise.)

I myself have two game designs on the go. In each case they're well past the idea stage, with semi-finished rough drafts written, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to finish them off.

One is Sorcerer Inc., a political Sorcerer supplement set in the world of cut-throat business and hyper-capitalism, where the demons are corporations. Contains rules for using the Sorcerer combat system to model the world of business. (You can play it with the corporations as actual sentient, malevolent hive entities, or you can play it with them as "just" corporations. If you just asked "what's the difference?" then you've already grasped the key concept of Sorcerer Inc.) I talked about it over a year ago here

The other is Abulafia, which sounds a little like Cthulhubabe, in that it's an attempt to solve some of the issues raised in the excellent CoC threads. But the inspirations are more InSpectres and Neel Krishnaswami's amazing Lexicon than Trollbabe. It's an attempt to make a game out of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum that combine the player control of InSpectres with elements of Lexicon and De Profundis for a player controlled story about conspiracy and paranoia, where game play both generates the conspiracy and the PCs' descent into paranoid fantasy. I talked about it in very vague terms over at the 20x20 Room.

Rob

Afterworld - Rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse.

Lxndr wrote: Happy now, Rich? :D

Until Today, a roleplaying game about people. ("Girly Universalis.")

Midnight Snacks, fun and bloody vampire roleplaying. (The current incarnation of my white whale. Inspirational images here, here at Bastet2329.com.)

Oak Ash Thorn. (New England pagan supernatural horror mystery, with contra dancing and sex. Inspirational image here at Anticide Illustrations.)

Quiet. (A ghost story rpg / divination technique.)

Untitled: Christians in Spaaaaace. (What would you suffer for your faith?)

The Labyrinth of Doors, wholehearted fantasy roleplaying. (This game is gonna be fuckin' cool.)

But no promises.

-Vincent

Ride Boldly Ride:
I want to do a western roleplaying game based around the central theme of my favorite Poe poem, Eldorado.

I actually had a playtest version about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way finished when Snyder beat me to the bunch with Dust Devils. Pretty much rendered everything I had irrelevant (though it was dice based and not card based). Don't hold it against him -- too much ;-) -- DD was far better than what I'd cobbled together at the time.

I'd like to think I could do it better now. But I'm still struggling with a way to mechanically represent the quest for Eldorado in the game effectively.

My most recent rumblings on it, before setting it aside again to do Robots& Rapiers was to swipe the Otherkind mechanics.

Of course, now the rough mechanics I came up with for Epic roleplaying are demanding to be addressed....

Hey, I forgot to mention, I'm dying to hear more about We Regret to Inform you the Gamemaster is Dead, Jonathon!

Oooh! I wanna play Quiet!

Hi all,

My first crack at designing a game is back in last year's Indie Design Forum. It was called Iron City at first, after which I started calling it Rogue. Cool name, but it was a horrible mess. Taught me a lot about game design and theory, though. Enough, in fact, to be able to pick myself up from the floor and go rushing for the wall again! Yeehaa!

Started mulling over the idea below about two weeks back. Things are still far from that point where I can bring it to the Indie Design Forum, but developments are going really great so far. No promises and no timeframe for the project, but I'd be happy if I can end up with a playtest-able version before the year ends.

Team K-O: Gathered from the far corners of the Earth, the daring young teenagers of Team K-O are destined to form the greatest robot fighting force the world has ever known. But first they'll have to deal with high school.

Man, I'm so pumped up about this! The game's really all about building a team out of a group of people with fragile egos. And it's going to have some cool anime action and giant multi-combinable robots and super deathblow techniques! (Ultra-electro-magnetic top! Yay!)

- W.

_Bleed - A .hack// inspired game where all the players, along with thousands of others, are trapped in interconnected, fully immersive MMORPGs. You can raise your power in the game, but at the cost of your memories of reality. You can increase your memories of reality, but at the cost of your in-game power. The stats would be split between right-brain/left-brain dichtotomies and the "experience" trait would measure disassociation from reality and immersion into the illusion of the game world. Players could also jump between gameworlds with sufficient disbeief of the game's illusion.

Take - A heist RPG focusing on the criminal underworld's social side in between heists.

Freak High - A public high school where parents send their teenage freaks, aliens, entities, mutants, and monsters to get a decent education away from those hateful mundanes. Stats are based on the archetypes from Breakfast Club (Jock, Rebel, Princess, Brain, Basketcase).

Age of the Dead - My All Flesh Must Be Eaten heartbreaker set in a world where the dead are taking over except for a few hideouts where survivors have banded together. The basic system is posted here.

Tribute - Post-apocalyptic cargo cult tribes emulate 20th century music stars.

I'm still working on my fantasy RPG The Orbs of Czaren. The amount of work that it takes to complete one of these games is enormous! Although we do have two groups play-testing it right now (for the past year actually) and everybody really likes the system. It's nothing especially new or groundbreaking, except for the fact that it is very flexible and fun to play.

I wonder if I'll complete it before I leave this world... *gazes into the sky*

If... : My struggling Sorcerer supplement in development about getting what you wish for-literally. Do you struggle to earn your place in the world, or take the easy way out? What does that level of power do to you in the long run?

Entry-Level Deities: Currently stewing in Indie Game Design, you play both the Believers of a brand-new deity and the Deity itself as your struggle to gain influence, market presence, brand loyalty, and a steady supply of Faith against (literally) cut-throat competition and the steadily-growing threat of Unbelief. Network-marketing meets religion, and the battle extends to every front. The first game I'm designing where I'm not grafting chunks of someone else's mechanics into my system...and I'm currently struggling. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Making Friends: Also based on Sorcerer, this deals with mind control and using people. The "Demons" are ordinary people you take over. Instead of a Lore score, you have a Use score. Possibly one of the nastiest games I've ever committed to get done. Loosely based on Dan Simmon's Carrion Comfort.

Psychofiction: Don't you hate playing conspiracy games where there's only One Big Conspiracy behind it all? One that has nothing to do with your poor character, who just got swept up in it? Hate games with metaplot that make you buy supplement after supplement to find out what the One Conspiracy is? In Psychofiction, each character creates their own conspiracy, from the mundane to the outlandish extremes of Phillip K. Dick. Loosely based on the mechanics of Trollbabe, the main question is: will the PCs throw themselves into their Conspiracy, bringing it closer to reality, or will they deny it, bringing themselves more into the "real world"?

Surreal Superheroes: Censoring the Language Virus: Language has become cancerous, and rogue nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs are chewing away at the fabric of Reality. Worse, some people have figured out how to focus the Language Virus to unsavory ends. Your characters are members of a government-sanctioned team of men and women who've become vectors for the Language Virus, channeling absurdity to fight absurdity. How long can you fight chaos with it's own weapons before it consumes you? How can you save the world when making breakfast might accidentally become a global crisis? Based on the Cut-Up mechanic by Robin D. Laws in the Over the Edge supplement Weather the Cuckoo Likes.

Luck-Eaters: Based off of discussions for Fate, Luck or Will and my viewing of the movie Intacto, this is a game where nothing matters but the elusive reserves of Luck. You can siphon Luck from other people, trade it, keep yourself alive and on top for a long time. But how far are you willing to go to do so? If Fate, Luck, or Will doesn't come out soon, I'll put this game into high priority, maybe doing something similar to Fastlane or trying a new mechanic altogether.

Transhuman Express: A game set in the world of Paul DiFillipo's Ribofunk stories.

Yay for at least a little bit of Shangri-la love! I really should start posting about it in IGD.

Stuff on this list that get "honorable mention" from me (although I'd grab more of them than I'm listing here):

* Making Friends (mmm, mind control)
* _Bleed (sort of the anti-Mudsylvania, and another excellent idea)
* Fingers on the Firmament (mmm, Continuum)
* Dead Space (holy shit, cool)
* Quiet

A few other random things that are coming down the pipeline:

(1) A Burning Wheel mini-supplement using one of my fantasy settings. Is the setting a Heartbreaker? I don't think so, but it might be. Can a setting be a Heartbreaker on its own? (I also wouldn't be against doing up other mini-supplements for other games; I'm sort of a setting-whore and have quite a few made up)

(2) A science-fiction scenario where the setting covers a good portion of the galaxy, and STL travel is the only thing available. Players would be traders on a single ship, traders who move from one star system to another, spending years and decades frozen in time, and in process watching whole societies rise and crumble. The only constants in their lives are each other; everything else fades away.

Well, I'm working on a game called CARDS is Another Roleplaying Diceless System. CCG meets RPG currently set in generic fantasy setting. I've playtested it a couple of times with friends and the combat works pretty well and you will be able to create your own character with lots of options. Developing the cards is what takes the longest and I really want to get some sample character and dungeon decks made before I posted it here. Its only "CCG" in that it uses custom cards. I don't plan on marketing it, but rather have the cards .pdf downloadable. Major design objective: no record keeping.

I had an idea for a "tough-shit" rollo game, where the players and gm receive autogenerated characters and adventure. Characters would even receive random personality traits. For one-shots.

I'd also like to make a gritty post-apocalypse game that of course examines lawlessness versus civilization.

Unfinished game ideas..

Well, there's this little thing I was kicking around for a while, Mage Blade..

Then there's a more recent project, ReCoil..

Heh. Yeah, I take forever to finish things. Mage Blade I shelved because I couldn't figure out where I was going with it. It's been knocking at the cranium lately though, so it'll probably be going back on a burner soon.

ReCoil, despite my realization that the text is woefully deficient, I was hoping to get more playtest input on. I think shortly, once I can take a break from some of the important scholastic focuses of recent times, I'll do the ReCoil rewrite, and put it back out for playtesting.

Then there's Blood on the Sands, a.k.a. TRoS: Gladiators. The rules pretty much exist, and have existed for quite a while, it's just waiting for me to get them organized and written into a coherent and useable format. Again, once I can take a break from school stuff, I'll put forth the effort.

Finally, there's Tidal. Only some of the people on indie net-gaming have heard of it. It's not so much a game at this point as a rough idea of a cool mechanic. The name is derived from the core of the mechanic, which has story focus/influence measured by a pool of points which flows between players. Whoever has the most points is the "main character" for that scene. As they use their points to make things happen, the points go to other players, until someone else has the majority of points. On the opposite side, whoever has the least points is the GM for that scene. It's got a lot of potential problems, but I think potential for cool things as well. I'm not currently working on it, but as ReCoil, Mage Blade and Blood on the Sand move toward completion, and as inspiration strikes, I'll flesh out the core idea.

reposted from my accidental New Topic "I've got a few..."

I *have* to get in on the birthday bash, and after a post about "stuff" I made earlier, this is my best bet ^_^

Unnamed Legend of the Pheonix material Got roped into helping out Pheonix Games on a community written, Christian based RPG. Wrote some interesting material for it, but group fell apart sometime when I lost my net connection. Can't find them again.
Arcadia, the Dreaming intended to be a Myst-like game online, initially used Javascript, not so cool but some useful story material I could steal ^_^ Involved an imaginary world created by a princess in a coma. Players were heroes who had entered the princess' dreamworld in the hopes of finding and rescuing her.
"Project Stargazer"/Final Decent Space-age RPG, somewhere along the lines of the Wing Commander series. Had some fun dog-fight rules, also started my trend toward simplicity and using only d6 for my dicy games. Humanity ventured to far in space too fast only to be beat down, almost to the point of extinction. Stealing technology from the invading race, we fought back and continue to keep an uneasy peace.
Chronicle of the Shattered Sword NOT an LOTR rip, originally a campaign for LotP, amended to fit a D&D campaign I was running. Players journy across the world to assemble the fragments of a shattered sword of a fallen legend to fend off denomic invasion.
MECH CCG another Mecha game, in two flavors: Tournament and Military. Players could either fight as in a tournament event or as a military encounter.
Final Twilight RPG Borrowing from all sorts of modern fantasy I've seen and my own world of Final Twilight, this was actually intended to be a diceless system, using the FT cards from the TCG. Working on a similar concept at the moment actually.
Backstage RP Diceless comedy RP based on my company, Neo Productions, and our self-parody comic strip Backstage. Still in the works, and shaping up to be interesting ^_^
Final Fantasy: Generations Computer RP, alternate world Final Fantasy combining nearly all of the FF games to that point (I think it was around 7 I wrote the outline for this). Also began work on a d20 conversion.
SeigeMaster: Lego Warriors Playing LEGOs...with rules!
Pokemon RP Nuff said, never finished.
Genetisys RP Actually another in the works, an extension of a MMORPG Neo is designing. Train and battle monsters, on and offline ^_^
Endarea Online Original worldsetting for Neo's MMORPG, based on a novel I started a good 8-10 years ago. Again, a lot of material, a lot collected, not finished sadly.

AND, Final Twilight has about 11 Expansions slated ^_^
Like I said, this was the post, if any, for me ^_^ If I can ever finish any of this it'll be a miracle...I'm just thankful I had the persistance to see FT through ^_^
This is also just the RP/Gaming stuff I've done, not counting the stories and comic books as well.

blush Thanks for all the compliments, folks. One more:

Children of the Mind: A terrible title, this idea is something like Pokemon crossed with Sorceror. The characters are players in a sort of Lovecraftian cockfighting league, who have the power to make their mental traumas into physical monsters that fight each other in the arena. The strongest contestants, therefore, are those people that can inflict the most terrible things on themselves without actually losing their grip so badly that they can't actually play the game anymore. Not sure whether this would actually be playable.

Away Team and Children of the Mind sound really, really interesting. I'd love to see them developed further.

Iscariot This is an alternate-worlds traveling game. However, rather than travel physically from world to world, your mind/spirit makes the leap and you "possess" your alternate self in the new world. All PCs have this ability.

Where it gets interesting: in each new world, your relationship with the other PCs may be different, and you don't know until you get there. Your sidekick who has guarded your back on a dozen worlds may be your sworn enemy here!

THe way I see it working is that each relationship trait, when taken, is defined by certain events (e.g., we're married now, but we moved from friends to lovers when my house was burgalrized and I had to stay at your place). In each new reality, these events are randomly shifted--some stay the same, some shift in a positive direction (e.g., we became engaged druing the burglary thing), some in a negative direction (e.g., I stayed with someone else), some in an extreme direction (e.g., you were the one that burglarized my house. I hate you).

The way I see it is that the players at the table won't know what their character's relationships are until someone makes a jump, then everyone determines it for themselves and plays out the new relationships.

Would work real well for licenced characters, I think. Of course, it would also work too-darn-scarily well for Playing Yourself. It gives me shivers to think about.

Oh! I forgot one particularly elusive game concept I had a few months ago. The idea is pretty much unplayable with a capital "un" from what I can see. Here's the gist of it.

Azure Dusk
In a cosmos filled entirely with water, there are no traditionally discernible directions of up, down, left, or right. There isn't even any gravity. Instead, there are two directions, on one side is a realm filled with blinding light, on the other is smothering darkness. The two realms blend into each other in a vast, liquid gradient. Directly between the extremes is a ribbon of blue where dolphins swim, practicing their choir-oriented magics and fending off invasions of the horrors emerging from both the light and dark realms.

Players would be dolphins.... Doing... something. I dunno. The whole idea of this setting really calls out to me though, and I want to do something with it. I see pods of dolphins racing around coral cities grown from the massive skeletons of ancient leviathans, singing powerful song magics and going on adventures for adventure's sake, rather than profit or "advancement." I guess it's sort of a RPG version of the Ecco video games.

For a moment, I thought about making it a d20 game and the characters' alignment would be reflected as a sort of gravity. If you're edging towards the "good" end of things, you're pulled more heavily to the light realm, where your individuality is discorporated into the collective. If you become "evil," you're pulled to the dark realm and perpetual, maddening loneliness. I was even thinking about expanding the game to include other "races" of sea mammals as player characters, but I wasn't too sure about that.

Anyway, the concept just felt too alien to be playable.

You must find a way to make that game playable, gobi.

You must.

Heh! I didn't think there would be any interest, actually. Then again, that's hardly a reason to not design a game.

My trouble with the concept is that it's so huge in scope. It almost feels like it is better written as a description of some kind of subrealm in the Elemental Plane of Water or something.

I guess the one truly major stumbling block is figuring out what the PCs would do. The tricky thing about that is dolphin psychology is so alien that it's hard to think about what a dolphin would want to do. I think it would be cool to have some elements of real world marine biology in the setting, but I don't want to get too technical at the expense of a certain dreamlike quality. Gah! It hurts my brain. :(

Gobu's post reminded me to two game concepts that I thought up for Skotos Tech when I was thinking about making a text-based MU* for them.

Beasts of Eden was about the lives of the animals in Paradise before and after the Fall of man. The Garden was divided into specific Courts (Sky, Water, Underground, Forest, Desert, Icelands, etc.) and specific animal types had specific affliliations and social connections to these Courts. There's no death before man's Fall, so there are no predators... yet. Part of the fun was to be having the game change in midstride, incorperating player-predation and death. Also, once man Falls, the beasts could leave Eden and spread out to the plains beyond. They could also start procreating and having baby animals (the only way to ensure the herbivore's survival in the face of Predators). The idea was for the entire storyline to run over the course of a month and then it would restart at the beginning of every month with a new group of players. I still like the concept, so it might show up in other places.

The second one Mobius: Life on the Strip, was weirder. Imagine it kind of like Flatland: the RPG meets Tetris: the RPG. Play takes place in a 2-dimensional universe shaped like a Mobius strip (a loop that's be given a half-twist). Players play various kinds of geometrical shapes that are grouped by shape and color (blue square, blue circle, red square, red circle) to create complex, overlapping alliances or, at least, the potential for player to self-segregate along those lines. The setting would be a kind of interactive puzzle world. You could push various knobs, levers, blocks, etc. around, and it would effect the world in various ways. Perhaps the strip would contract or expand, or other levers/switches would appear. Perhaps it would change your color or shape. Also, many puzzles would depend on which way you were "oriented" relative to the strip. The cool thing about Mobius strips is that, if you travel all the way around them, you end up on the underside of where you started. In this case, since the universe is thusly shaped, traveling around ends up "inverting" you relative to everything else (what was on the left is now on the right, etc.), which means all the puzzle are slightly different. In any case, the game was supposed to be super-Sim, all about exploring the world, teaming up with others, and manipulating the environment. Don't know if it could work in a non-MU* format, but 2-D (or even 1-D) universes sure are cool...

Damn this login stuff! That was me. And yes, I know how to spell "Gobi."

Always in the back of my mind is "Argghhh or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pirates." The whole thing is modeled on the humorous characters in Dr. Strangelove, but with pirates instead. The characters are all stereotypes of pirates from pop culture, just like the characters in the movies.

Seriously, who doesn't want to play a game where you get to be the Sea Captain?

Keith

coxcomb wrote: I'm looking forward to developing my <Insert Cool Pirate Name Here>. It's a no-centralized-GM, improvisational pirate game about desperation on the High Seas.

Rise Up sounds like it makes for some intense role-playing, definitely for a mature group. I'd love to see some more stuff.

Okay, since the b-day forum is about to close, I thought I would mimic Rich and give a short list of games that I'm really looking forward to. If you're not on this list, don't despair. I hate you and everything you believe in, of course... but that's no cause for despair.

Fist of the Assassin -- Dude. C'mon... what's not to like?

Argonauts -- The game I'm looking forward to the most. So very, very cool.

GoLeM -- yeah... that's the stuff.

Walt's Arabian Nights game -- cuz I loves me some Arabian Nights.

Cthulhubabe -- Mmmmm. This sounds delicious.

The Labyrinth of Doors -- I admit it: the name got me.

Robots and Rapiers -- You know why, Ralph.

Making Friends -- Spooky, I want to have your babies.

Azure Dusk -- Man... what a freaky idea. I always loved Ecco, so this gets the nod.

Now. Go. Write.

I second those requests for Azure Dusk and Walt's Arabian Nights game. Rock on.

Finally: Mridangam, my Vedic supers game, I actually have ideas for this now and it might actually happen.

I've been waiting anxiously to hear more about Mridangam. That game got me interested in the whole concept of mythic gaming, inspired big hunks of Gears & Spears and really brought home how well-selected trait-names can create a more immersive play experience.

I'm honestly surprised by the support for Azure Dusk. I guess I'll have to move that towards the front burner now that PUNK is finished.

I had been hung up on trying to recreate authentically the different parts of the traditional dance-drama structure; I realized recently that that was domb and I should be leveraging that anatomy to do work for me instead of trying to just build a game around it. Once I've gotten a skeleton of this heaven thing together (hopefully soon), I'll get back to that and really do something with it. Thanks for the interest!

Matt wrote: Unfinished game ideas. Where to start?

Literati - The game where you play agents sent to hunt down rogue fictional characters in a 50s dystopia. I love the concept, but it falls down at execution.

I only have one real game idea floating around in my head but I've got tons of unfinished projects, taunting me, throwing their poo at me from their cages. Now that I got into grad. school, there will be a tremendous push to get these puppies finished and done before masters work begins.

My only game idea:

Dimestore Katanas: A game about violence and how it spirals out of control, inspired by the tons and tons of newspaper articles every year about some schmuck snapping and going on a stabbing spree with a cheap samurai sword.

Projects:

Dictionary of Mu: Its rounding the corner...really it is.

Wyrd West: It was the first thing I ever thought to write up, as a kind of mini-supplement for Dust Devils and I should really just put it out as a kind of old fashioned newspaper.

d20 Project: I've got a d20 setting that should be done soonish too, a refugee from when I wrote something up for the WOTC Setting Contest.

Riddle of Blood: Nothing's official about it coming out but I wrote a ton about it when I ran it and might as well finish the little blood-sucker up just to be done.

I want all of the projects done by this summer but I'm more than happy to let DK percolate for a while.

Paka wrote: Dimestore Katanas: A game about violence and how it spirals out of control, inspired by the tons and tons of newspaper articles every year about some schmuck snapping and going on a stabbing spree with a cheap samurai sword.

Shreyas Sampat wrote: I had been hung up on trying to recreate authentically the different parts of the traditional dance-drama structure; I realized recently that that was domb and I should be leveraging that anatomy to do work for me instead of trying to just build a game around it.

(double post deleted)

I was working for a while on a Karma + Resource driven fantasy game where each player gets a god and a hero to play...but then I saw that John Wick had already designed Enemy Gods.

My friend and I wrote a dice pool fantasy game with a tarot-driven metagame mechanic for his setting called Under the Azure Flame. I don't know if he's ever going to use the mechanic for anything but his own house rules, but we had a lot of fun with the fledgling system when we played it.

I've been chatting a little bit with Paul Czege about Posthuman, a science fiction game idea I've had for a while. The conceit of the game is that since genetic engineering makes everyone a physical near-superman, and since memory chips and computers you can load into your brain make everyone a functional Einstein, the only thing that differentiates people other than appearance is their passions. So your character is just a list of passions.

But somehow my obsession with D&D has taken over my life these last couple of years, and what I'm really working on most is The Darkness Beneath, which would be a fantasy heartbreaker if I wasn't self-aware about what I was doing.

My unfinished game idea is an "Elizabethan fantasy" game, influenced heavily by the movies Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, as well as The Princess Bride, and the second series of Blackadder. Also, the novel The Worm Ouroboros. The first idea I had got severely mutated by my reading of Dogs in the Vineyard.

It occured to me that most fantasy RPGs have very little direction about what one does with the game. You've got a fantasy world, you create characters, and then...you do stuff. Whatever you want! Reading Vincent's "Structure of the Game" bit in DitV, I thought, "If I were creating a fantasy board game, you'd have a good idea of how to play it and what to do--so why not do that with a role-playing game?" Also, DitV's "poker with dice" mechanics seemed to fit really well as "fencing with dice"--that is, instead of Raises and Sees, Block & Dodge, Reversing the Blow, Taking the Blow, I saw it as Attack, Parry, Riposte, Taking a Hit...that sort of thing. (Hey, Vincent, you don't mind if I steal your mechanics, do you? I'd totally give you credit.)

I also wanted to create a fantasy world that threw lots of imagination inspiration at you without overloading you with "here's MY world, now do something with it."

So, I've been imagining & working on this game in which you play a courtier in the court of a queen who is very much like Queen Elizabeth in a country that is very much like 16th century England. The other countries and places don't have names, just titles that sum up vaguely what the place is like--and it's up to each individual group to name the places and fill in the details. The PCs try to better their relationship with the queen by foiling treasonous conspiracies and going on quests to other lands. I'd also like to have some sort of PC endgame kind of thing, sort of like Transcendence in TSOY, but with a reward for the player--but this is the part that's giving me the most trouble.

I'm actually quite interested in finishing this, if only because it keeps nagging me to finish it.

Joshua wrote: (Hey, Vincent, you don't mind if I steal your mechanics, do you? I'd totally give you credit.)

Jared A. Sorensen wrote:

Matt wrote: Unfinished game ideas. Where to start?

Literati - The game where you play agents sent to hunt down rogue fictional characters in a 50s dystopia. I love the concept, but it falls down at execution.

Hahaha! YEAH! That's who came up with it. Okay.

I've been working on it.

Two projects structurally done (torn and P/E), two still being developed and unfinished:

Web of Power (working title). A game about power struggles, intrigues, and debauchery at court. Based largely on drama point awards that augment rolls, but that people can also invest in suggesting events or goals for other players, thereby serving as marker currency. Seduction, for example, builds up as a large drama point award over time that serves as the temptation for the player (or GM) to give in and claim the reward, but it's never out of the player's hands. I.e., the whole foundation of the game is marking and rewarding, while the stakes of the game are personal as well as political.

I've got the basics down for skills and rewards, need to figure out a political stakes resolution. Players can then decide if their characters are more interested in playing out their protagonists' personal needs and interactions, or spend their time and resources for their faction on the larger scheme of things.

TEMEG. Originally I thought of making this for the Mech A RPG Contest, but it would not fit with the art. It's a three-part game: 1) mission preparation and character interaction that earns bonus points; 2) investigation within a predetermined amount of time to find alien infiltrators, traitors, or criminals (in a Dog-like-created town); and 3) showdown mech battle with the aliens and traitors, where the protagonists' position is helped or hindered by how well their investigation went and how many bonus points they have from character interaction.

Most mechanics still need to be developed for this one. It's a backburner project, at this point in time.

The latest idea that got hold of me is for a game tentatively named Drifters. It's about people who're drifting through life finding out what really motivates them and gaining the confidence to act on that. Play take place in a series of dream journeys which act as metaphors for things that need to be done and sandboxes for experimentation. I so want to do this, but my design-fu is not strong enough -- I have no clue how to implement it. Bah.

Still plugging away at Song of Ethera. It's a game that emphasizes lateral thinking/problem solving. Kind of the same type of thinking needed for Donjon, but with less mucking with reality. I'm trying for a feel that's a cross between Chinese martial arts fantasy and more traditional Western fantasy. I think the mechanics need an overhaul. My poor darlings.

Much like John Kim, I'm often more interested in just getting my game designs to where I can use them, rather than to a publishable format. But lately I've been bucking that trend: I got really motivated and put together Clay of the Gods (was "Lego") in two weeks of intense work. So I hope I'll have the time to do that again soon, though all of my ideas will make for longer games than Clay.

My ideas are:

Amber Shadows -- A takeoff of Shadows in the Fog, set in Zelazny's Amber -- but with all the powers being a bit unpredictable. I have scads of notes for this, and even have the play aid done.

Dogs in the Rigging -- A pirate takeoff of DitV, set in the real world, 1575 to 1700. The resolution mechanics are down, but detailing the setting and the roles of the PCs will be a ton of work.

<Unnamed> -- A heartbreakerish concept here as far as basic resolution mechanics go. The game has several key features: rotating GM responsibilities, a structured way to introduce character backstory, and no rules for character advancement. The latter is predicated on the idea of just give the players the characters they want.

Pony Hello
After the bomb the President of Capital City recruits the pluckiest pony riders she can find and sends them out on a four year trek across the country to find and rebuild the remains of society.

The girls get tied into the GM's community conflicts in every town they visit (they're Government representatives - everyone wants them for allies on their side). They also start off conflicts of their own with the building and development projects that they work on.

The single rerollable d6 resolution mechanic demands that the players make value judgements about the community they're in - who is the villain? who is the hero? which animals are pests? which factory is uneeded? which natural resource is vital? which building is crucial? etc

Oh and the ponies have powerz. All the animals (each pc has a pet animal as well as a pony) were changed by the radiation (no room for them in the shelters) and now have pokemon like powers.

Its all written out but I'm a long way even from a pdf playtest version as I'm still working on the two below.

Shoujo Story
It rocks - GMless playing card game, roleplaying Shoujo manga type stories. Our two and three player games can get wrapped up under 40 minutes but we still spend the rest of the night talking about how great it was.

My print version with decent art and revised text is barely a month away, hope to do it through lulu. Yipee!

Samurai Badges
Baron Munchausen influenced Gmless gamist Samurai roleplaying. I've played it through several times and its fun but... still so much to do on it. Working on some proper art for it just now trying not to think about the mechanics too hard.

My favorite unfinished game idea is not a game, exactly. It's a diet system for gamers, called the D20 Diet. It's based on the notion that there are many gamers out there who would cheat on a conventional diet at the drop of a donut, but would never dream of cheating on a die roll or failing to behave as dice and a game system dictate. The other inspiration was the Weight Watchers "points" system. It occurred to me that Weight Watchers tries very hard to keep it as simple as possible for general audiences, but it would work better for some gamers if it were instead made really really complicated.

The D20 Diet uses a set of tables indexed in some convenient way, most likely by type of food item and/or calorie range. So if you want to eat a Milky Way bar, you reference the Candy, 200-250 Calories table. Roll a d20. Depending on your roll, you might get to eat the Milky Way bar, a substitute item from Table C, or nothing at all. The result also tells you how long you must wait before you may roll again.

The tables are calibrated so that on average, over time, a healthy reduced calorie diet results from the interaction of the player's choices with the random die roll results. By adding chance and risk (will you go for a bigger snack, at the risk of getting no snack at all?), it should help keep dieters interested and focused. If common experiences with role playing is any guide, some gamers should be able to stay happily on what amounts to a strict diet for months or years, as long as they get an occasional chance to brag about the time they managed to roll for seven slices of pepperoni pizza in one afternoon the year before last. Also, there should be inital stats that are based on the "player's" current weight and weight loss goals, and an elaborate tree of special privileges (extra rolls, rerolls, alternate tables, and so forth) that can be purchased by selling back food permitted by the system instead of eating it, with which players can minmax and boast about their accumulated powers to their heart's content.

So... if I were to develop this fully, would anyone here be interested in "playtesting" it?

- Walt

Holy Shit, dude, I actually had a very similar idea.

Actually, mine would be an "add on" to ANY d20 game, where diet and exercise in the real world translates to XP in the game world.

Basically, you set goals, do exersise, and maintenance (of weight, power, stamina) nets you XP, while GAIN (loss of weight, increase in power/strength/stamina) nets you even more XP. So you can get to an ideal weight, maintain it and still get XP.

Basically, this XP bonus would be brought to the table weekly, shared with the GM, and added to the character.

The nascent idea name was d20 Fitness.

-Andy

I've got this game idea to make a game that encourages stories similar to Jane Austen novels. Lots of social conflict, very little of anything else, set in Regency England. I'm calling it Regency Park

Do you end up marrying for love, marrying for money or position, both or do you end up a spinster/confirmed bachelor? Does your family's name crash in the process?

I haven't figured out how it works yet.

Trevis

joshua neff wrote: My unfinished game idea is an "Elizabethan fantasy" game, influenced heavily by the movies Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, as well as The Princess Bride, and the second series of Blackadder. Also, the novel The Worm Ouroboros. The first idea I had got severely mutated by my reading of Dogs in the Vineyard.

...

I'm actually quite interested in finishing this, if only because it keeps nagging me to finish it.

Trevis Martin wrote: I've got this game idea to make a game that encourages stories similar to Jane Austen novels. Lots of social conflict, very little of anything else, set in Regency England. I'm calling it Regency Park

Sigh.

Maya

A "save the dying earth mother goddess" sort of thing akin to Princess Mononoke, Ferngully, Dark Crystal + Otherkind. Pregenerated NPCs, ala Mountain Witch, pregenerated locations, all in glorious full color like an artbook or fashion magazine. Endgame scores ala MLWM to determine if the Great Forest survives or falls, or whether the Empire stands, is transformed, or crumbles, etc.

The 10 Level Heresy(working title)

Sort of my take on D&D. Tossing all the BS, reworking classes so that everyone stops at 10, keeping the multiclassing options from 3.0+, but making them all class abilities ala C&C. Why? Because I'm a sucker and I keep coming back to D&D even though it burns me everytime. Maybe I keep telling myself I can change it. Well, now I am.

Phantom Hearts

A Chinese Ghost story. You play either a mortal or a spirit(maybe everyone plays 2 characters, haven't decided), and of course you're in love with someone from the other side, and all kinds of social repercussions try to break you up. Drama ensues. Classic.

Mayhem High

Anime humor game, mixing sci-fi, and every in-joke I can fit. Teenagers from Outer Space + more structure rules for conflict and narration.

Dark Spirals

The Call of Cthulu I've always wanted. Each session ends with a roll of Hope vs. Doom to determine whether the world is saved or gets crushed under the Outer Ones. Hope is generated by the PCs sticking their noses into trouble (destroying cults, hiding uber artifacts, etc.) While that is happening, each PC has a "Dark Fate" rating that rises by physical or mental danger. Doom rises every session. Period.

Players have to start choosing to either let their characters fold under Dark Fate early, which results in setbacks for the current problem, or let them survive longer, which means when they do fall, they probably raise Doom by becoming a demented cult leader...

<shame>Another Birthday Forum comes along, and again, I am able to post Afterworld on this thread.</shame>
It is coming along, though. If by coming along I mean continually altering its shape in huge ways. . . *sigh*

Walt Freitag wrote: The D20 Diet uses a set of tables indexed in some convenient way, most likely by type of food item and/or calorie range. So if you want to eat a Milky Way bar, you reference the Candy, 200-250 Calories table. Roll a d20. Depending on your roll, you might get to eat the Milky Way bar, a substitute item from Table C, or nothing at all. The result also tells you how long you must wait before you may roll again.

The tables are calibrated so that on average, over time, a healthy reduced calorie diet results from the interaction of the player's choices with the random die roll results. By adding chance and risk (will you go for a bigger snack, at the risk of getting no snack at all?), it should help keep dieters interested and focused. If common experiences with role playing is any guide, some gamers should be able to stay happily on what amounts to a strict diet for months or years, as long as they get an occasional chance to brag about the time they managed to roll for seven slices of pepperoni pizza in one afternoon the year before last. Also, there should be inital stats that are based on the "player's" current weight and weight loss goals, and an elaborate tree of special privileges (extra rolls, rerolls, alternate tables, and so forth) that can be purchased by selling back food permitted by the system instead of eating it, with which players can minmax and boast about their accumulated powers to their heart's content.

So... if I were to develop this fully, would anyone here be interested in "playtesting" it?

- Walt

Tony Irwin wrote: Pony Hello
After the bomb the President of Capital City recruits the pluckiest pony riders she can find and sends them out on a four year trek across the country to find and rebuild the remains of society.

The girls get tied into the GM's community conflicts in every town they visit (they're Government representatives - everyone wants them for allies on their side). They also start off conflicts of their own with the building and development projects that they work on.

The single rerollable d6 resolution mechanic demands that the players make value judgements about the community they're in - who is the villain? who is the hero? which animals are pests? which factory is uneeded? which natural resource is vital? which building is crucial? etc

Oh and the ponies have powerz. All the animals (each pc has a pet animal as well as a pony) were changed by the radiation (no room for them in the shelters) and now have pokemon like powers.

Its all written out but I'm a long way even from a pdf playtest version as I'm still working on the two below.

I'm working on a design for Chick Flick (working title), so I'm excited to see how many other romantically-focused ideas people are kicking around.

I'm thinking about elements like intertwining stories, heavy Author stance, romantic complications introduced by other players invoking some kind of currency, etc. I have a strong feeling there's going to be a map or a board of some kind, representing where your heroine is on her Campbellian journey through the traditional romance plot, but branching (or even circular) because there's no reason the story has to turn out the same at the end every time.

I almost have an early playtest group together, and it looks like I'll be the only male.

The idea came about when we were watching Love, Actually, of all things, and we realized the structure of the movie was exactly what we were trying to do in our Sorcerer game.

Andy Kitkowski wrote: Holy Shit, dude, I actually had a very similar idea.

Actually, mine would be an "add on" to ANY d20 game, where diet and exercise in the real world translates to XP in the game world.

Basically, you set goals, do exersise, and maintenance (of weight, power, stamina) nets you XP, while GAIN (loss of weight, increase in power/strength/stamina) nets you even more XP. So you can get to an ideal weight, maintain it and still get XP.

Basically, this XP bonus would be brought to the table weekly, shared with the GM, and added to the character.

The nascent idea name was d20 Fitness.

Tony Irwin wrote: Would there be an Atkins version? I might try it then.

Well, the main game system I'm 'working' on is called Option. I've posted about it a couple times here. It's essentially a generic system that is loosely inspired by D20, but without most of the things that make it suck. I freely confess that it's a 'what D20 would be if I had designed it' game: It started out life as an attempt to combine GURPS character creation with the D&D system. It's since mutated beyond this so that it shares almost no common mechanics with either except a basic resolution system very similar to D20's and character point based creation, but the feel is still there. The main point of it is that it allows you to describe characters who are very versatile if you wish to but still allows specialisation, and character progression is more of a learning process than a 'I get kewl new powers and can hack stuff up more'. It's also got a couple nice unifying ideas. I'm particularly fond of the magic system.

A thematic idea I'm playing with at the moment is that I've always had a soft spot for orcs as a race, and would really like to create a game that is about them. In particular the PCs would all be orcs or related races (e.g. goblins, ogres, etc). Possibly one in which there are no humans, or if there are humans then they do not feature strongly in the game at all.

I generally have dozens of settings I'm tossing around as concepts. Embarassingly the only one I can remember at the moment is one that when I describe it sounds like a really blatant DitV ripoff. (I don't feel that it actually is. They share a common starting point of being a western game in which a christian-like church is prevalent, but rapidly diverge from there both in setting and themes. I just can't seem to explain it in a way that makes this very clear.)

Currently in the works / Betatesting:

Echoes: Narrativist, Immersionist horror ala Silent Hill. Your ordinary everyday world is turning into a nightmare that reflects some terrible trauma that someone's experienced. Your character has related issues or they wouldn't be there at all, so dealing with the situation necessarily involves confronting or dealing with your problems. Not intended for campaign play. The conflict resolution mechanic is somewhat inspired by Otherkind; roll 2d6 and choose one for Success (the higher, the more likely you win the conflict) and one for Horror (the higher, the less Trauma your character takes from bad stuff).

Still pondering:

Ill Winds: I would love to have a house system for the animist tribal game I'm currently using HeroQuest for, but HQ seems to be doing the job perfectly well, so this isn't necessary.

Steam: Post-apocalyptic steampunk, the Road Warrior meets Jules Verne, hijacking armored trains carrying rare and precious coal and water in steam-driven gyrocopters, etc. At one point I had a proto-mechanic for it which bore some similarity to Capes, but it didn't work nearly as well as I thought it would.