I’m ready to play test a new collaborative role playing game, called “Death of the Vele,” which draws from Blood Red Sands, Spirit of the Century, and Lady Blackbird.  It’s collaborative, but with a goal of feeling like a single-GM role playing game; you have a PC, you develop it from session to session, but you also have a set of story characters that are “yours” the same way your PC is “yours”.  Here’s the premise:

The Vele were a long-lived race and worshiped the god of knowledge, mercy, and compassion.  They befriended the Scrow, a “lesser” race, worshippers of a barbarian god of schemes and warfare, and gave to them knowledge and fantastic, almost magical, devices.  The Scrow executed a plan lasting more than 1600 years, culminating in the destruction of the Vele during a single night, destroying the Vele and their cities with their own weapons, followed by world domination.  Now, there are few, if any, Vele left, and their cities are in ruins.

Given that premise, the setting is up to you: Steampunk, Old West, Ancient Japan, Space Opera, Postapocalyptic, Egyptech, Renaissance, Dark Ages, Aztec, Pulp, Dystopian Future,  Multiplanar,... whatever works.

If you’re interested in play testing or if you have any questions (really, any questions at all :) ), please send me an email: bill (dot) burdick (at) gmail (dot) com

Bill Burdick

Here's a link to a fairly recent copy of the rules,  Send me an email and I'll share the latest, reformatted one with you -- I'm trying to make it a lot more readable:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O4LjdOqwz0wm89hTXjY654bJ4oNMIGqDIwmHDF_YRWc/edit?hl=en&authkey=CMGCy_IO

Bill

Hi Bill!

I know your schedule's a bit constrained at the moment, but when you get the chance, post a bit about what features worked well in your latest playtests.

My current thinking is that external playtesting works best when it focuses on what is working, rather than on what isn't, until the final stages.

Best, Ron

Hi, Ron!

That's a tough one because the stuff that works, just... works.  It's the stuff that doesn't work that sticks out!  I'll try anyway, though.  I suspect that I'm secretly facilitating during play and that maybe, things that flow easily for my groups won't for others, so I'll list all the stuff that we have done that has worked well, like you asked :).  We've been testing the mechanics since March and the Vele framework only since September, and only with one group at a time, so it hasn't gotten huge playtesting.

1) story guidelines: this has flowed very well for us.  Sometimes there's a warm-up period of 10 minutes, or so, but then the ideas really start to flow.  Guidelines are very important -- they define the justifications for your story objective and how your story fits into the background framework of Vele.

2) PCs: this is just making role playing characters -- never had problems with this

3) Story objective: the guidelines have usually suggested an objective, directly or indirectly

4) act names, objectives, and starting events and act matrix: this seems smooth -- I put suggestions in the rules about these, based on what we figured out

5) map: seems fine

6) act guidelines: seem to work fine

7) creating groups: works well; again, I included suggestions, based on what we've done

8) spotlight cards: this one is new.  So far, we've only created spotlight cards; next session we're going to try them out

9) fiction: this has been smooth for us

10) simple actions: this has been straightforward for us, like D&D, FATE, Fudge, etc.

11) hitting and buying off aspects: this has worked, but I'm hoping spotlights will create explicit opportunities for this

12) extended actions: we haven't done any of these, yet!  Again, I'm hoping spotlights will create explicit opportunities for this

So far our game play has seemed to alternate between fiction/story telling and combat.  We haven't used the action mechanic for much else, except for a few basic "skill tests" -- actually, this is pretty much what happened with our TFT group in the 80s.  I was really hoping to see some extended contests, especially involving  the characters' non-combat skills, but with 3 players, there are 15 characters to keep track of (3 PCs and 12 story characters).  I think it has been pretty difficult for the players, being in both the position of player and narrator, to be able to effectively spotlight the PCs and story characters.  This is why I added the spotlight mechanic, and I'm hoping that it will make it easier on the players.

Bill

Here is a link to the reformatted and expanded rules, which also includes the spotlight mechanic:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B32MRkbkRMqbOGUwMWZlOTYtZjhkYS00Nzc4LWFhMmYtOWQ2ZTVmMjU1N2I3&hl=en

Bill