The Physical Adept

Long ago - actually, in 1999 - I submitted my first bit of game design to a 2nd edition AD&D fan zine. That's it, right above. I was just looking back last night, and got a big laugh out of looking at this again.

If anyone has links to old, slightly embarrassing stuff they did "back in the day," feel free to post 'em.

And so, in the mists of time, we can see the distant origins of the Swords of Heaven...

Hey,

Sometimes I think that everyone is continually working on the first RPG idea that ever came to them. I have notes from the early 80s for a customization of The Fantasy Trip that cancels out all the spells except for the Image, Illusion, and Summon ones.

Oh, and Clinton, compared with the other offerings on that page, I don't think you have much to be embarassed about ...

Best,
Ron

Some of my first online efforts:

Cyberpunk angels (1997-98)
http://www.memento-mori.com/games/angels.html

Autopsy (~1997)
http://www.memento-mori.com/games/autopsy.html

Mage LARP (~1995-96)
http://www.memento-mori.com/games/mage.html

Smurf (1995!)
http://www.geocities.com/mandybrooks/smurf2.html

That's at least 3 people I've seen that did some sort of Smurf game now. Is the smurfiness a game-design stage that somehow I missed. Or, heaven forbid, one that I've yet to go through?

Clinton R Nixon wrote: That's at least 3 people I've seen that did some sort of Smurf game now. Is the smurfiness a game-design stage that somehow I missed. Or, heaven forbid, one that I've yet to go through?

My old Planescape site, it's not THAT terrible:
http://www.geocities.com/athens/7117/psindex.html

It's a shame I don't have the REALLY old one with the blue text on black background (ick). Truly awful web design from 1995.

Also, my Tribe 8 website. It landed me a freelancing gig, so it did its job.
http://zaknet.tripod.com/zbricircle/ The design is neat, but the content is pretty blah.

Lastly, my first Indie design ever: http://www.harlekin-maus.com/games/chthonian/chthonian.html

Ron's got a point about redesigning your first RPG. I'm redesigning my first Indie RPG right now. Though if we went in the wayback machine, the first roleplaying game I wrote (that sticks out in my mind) was back in the mid to late 80's: a Palladium/Battletech inspired game of primitive people in a post-disaster scifi world dealing with ancient war machines still following their orders. I haven't ever gone back there. A S&Sword supplement, maybe?

Ron is wrong.

Dear God in Heaven, Ron had better be wrong.

I don't think the market could handle a redesign of WORLD COMBAT!!

I'd put it online and post a link, but I like you guys and you've done nothing to deserve it.

Except Jared, but he knows too much of it already.

Jason L Blair wrote: Ron is wrong.

Dear God in Heaven, Ron had better be wrong.

I don't think the market could handle a redesign of WORLD COMBAT!!

I'd put it online and post a link, but I like you guys and you've done nothing to deserve it.

Except Jared, but he knows too much of it already.

I did a Marvel Superheroes game that was based off of the Jim Lee X-Men cards from the late eighties/early ninties and used a thirty-sided die. Any of the cards could be used for npc sheets or adapted to be characters in their "vanilla" form by adding one or two things.

We played it for months.

I've got a handwritten copy somewhere, and it would be worth revising, if not for the fact that no one probably has those cards anymore.

Jake

Well, you can go here to see some of my old stuff. The *really* old stuff that I did back in the late 90s is only available if you search through the back archives of RPG-Create. The very first game I ever designed is somewhere in the rec.games.design archive under the title Adventurer! RPG System! What you should really check out, though, are the Reflections on Role-plalying Rules articles up on my site, writen in the days before I'd ever even heard of GNS or Threefold or anything. Wow, have I come a long way since then! :)

Ron Edwards wrote: Sometimes I think that everyone is continually working on the first RPG idea that ever came to them.

Hrm...well, the first game I ever developed -- that wasn't D&D with the serial numbers filed off and more complexity and realism added -- was PEGASUS, which you can still see on my website. However, it has shades of WhiteWolf in it, though I've never liked WW's system, so don't ask me how that happened.

Regardless, I rather like a number of the things I came up with for it, particularly the way it handled skills. There are a number of things I don't like about it, too, which is likely why I stopped working on it for years and years. I made a couple changes to it recently, but I don't recall if I ever uploaded them...hrm, in fact, I just saw how I'm going to update the system! Whoo!

The second system I tried to develop doesn't exist...I'm, ah, still trying to figure out exactly how to make it work: the system is reflective of spiritual and personal growth, but I haven't found a way for it to avoid reflecting specific religious ideals, as that is something I want to avoid due to spiritual growth coming in numerous religious packages, or even hindered by said religious ideals. Yeah...so...

Heh. The first game system I ever developed was strongly influenced by TSR's Top Secret (the original, not S.I., which didn't exist then), with its ridiculous number of derived statistics. Champions may also have been an influence. It anticipated GURPS in its goal of genericity, but not in any detail of construction.

Thankfully, all copies have been expunged.

Paganini wrote: The *really* old stuff that I did back in the late 90s :)

Valamir,

That's totally funny. I was actually more embarrassed that people would see the date on my earliest bit of game design - it's only 3 years old - and realize my relative youth.

I do still have my first full game - a really poor generic system called Too Much Coffee Role-playing System - up in the Game Bookshelf at my site. I keep it there, not because it's good, but because it still strikes me as funny when I read it.

heh...I can't provide links to my first game design. It was written on a manual typewriter with a cloth ribbon spool on onion paper and bound with a Swingline between two pieces of cardstock cut from a shirt box. As I recall it was a straight riff off of Star Frontiers.

It has a place of honor in an old trunk right next to my hand drawn Dungeon! map rip-off and several riffs on FASAs Star Trek Simulator, and several spiral bound notebooks full of Twilight 2000 rip offs.

Some of my not quite that old stuff is available electronically. On 5 1/2" floppies for my old Apple IIC written in Bank Street Writer and printed on a Smith Corona d200 dot matrix printer on accordian paper. Anyone who knows how to get THAT stuff into a PC readable .txt file would earn my eternal gratitude.

Wow! I've got some old rpg files for some word processor on the Commodore 128, but that's about as old as it gets from me.

Looking back on game design, I remembered some other stuff, too:

Huge "Fantasy Heartbreaker" designs, that approached Rolemaster in terms of number of stats. I would think up three or four basic classes (fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard) and draw up tons of venn diagrams and create a zillion classes based on their various combinations. Things like "2 parts fighter, 1 part rogue = Bandit." That and schools of magic venn diagrams to turn some basic concepts (illusion, evocation, necromancy) into a zillion different schools.

I also read a bunch of Lawrence Watt-Evans, who wrote a great pulp series (Lords of Dus) and writes a lighter-hearted, fun fantasy series (Ethshar I think). His Ethshar had particular types of magic, like Warlocks, Oneiromancers, Wizards, Witches, Illusionists, Sorcerers, you name it. They all had their own weird rules. I was heavily influenced by that concept. My games never had a straight wizard/cleric split.

Okay, so I wrote tons of RPGs as a kid. I could go on for pages, probably, but I'll save myself the embarrassment. :)

The first game system I ever developed was strongly influenced by TSR's Top Secret (the original, not S.I., which didn't exist then), with its ridiculous number of derived statistics.

Oh my god! My first game, dating way back to when I was in junior high in the late 70's, was called Espionage. Every skill was derived by performing a complex calculation on multiple attributes. Tragically, the only manuscript of this treasure of design and innovation has been lost.

My second game, dating from the early 80's, was a fantasy heartbreaker (in the "never published" sense of the word). But with this one, every skill was derived by performing a complex calculation on multiple attributes. And I still have it, the entire painstakingly hand-lettered complete manuscript. If my scanner wasn't down (due to a fried SCSI card), I'd put up some scans of my illustrations. I was particularly proud, at the time, of my race of four-armed, hairless, halfling-esques. If I recall, they were called "darklings," despite pale, semi-translucent skin that revealed their blue veins. Coolness incarnate.

Paul

I was a test monkey for my roommate's strange game designs in the late eighties. The most memorable was Space Tourists. It had several stats, several figured stats (nine, I believe), tons of professions and races, and a randomized virtue/flaw table. I still fondly remember playing Carmen Randello, a formerly great porn producer who was desperately trying to get funding and cast for his magnum opus he felt would bring him back on top of his profession. (The Next to Last Temptation of Christ: Getting Down in the Temple)

On reflection, the system sucked. Most of the session problems I can now see were caused by it. Oh, but what we could have done with a narrative system!

Maybe I should get in touch with Nick again. Might be interesting to see what he would come up with now...

My first game design was a Fantasy Heartbreaker, which evolved with every other RPG I was exposed to. It went through phases of being a sprawling multi-genre nightmare (Superheroes in a modern fantasy setting, yay!)

The first non-heartbreaker was a called Celtic Shadows, a game of Druids in the modern world. Very WOD like. But quite a good character advancement system if I recall, you only got xp if you had behaved according to your five personality descriptors during the session.


-Matt