The exercise of creating your own Fantasy Heartbreaker has got me thinking. I started to design my own (and liked it - I'll put up my initial notes tomorrow), but realized I already had a Heartbreaker sitting in my closet: The Nutcracker Prince, which I co-authored with Peter Seckler.

About two months before D&D3E came out, Peter and I wrote this little gem. We collected all the information on d20 we could, and took all our house rules, and added a few new things that we thought D&D could have used, and made a game. The rules section was primarily mine, although a lot of the races and such was Peter's.* It embodied the idea of a Fantasy Heartbreaker.

One reason I think d20's been a good thing for the industry as a whole is that it has let all those old D&D juices flow out. Game designers who would had scoffed at D&D 3 years ago are writing for it - writing their own house rules and settings they always wanted to play in, within a framework that they can sell those house rules and actually make money (perhaps.)

I'm sincerely hoping that the last 2 years of catharsis will lead into something better. We'll see - reports from my retailer are that non-d20 sales are way up, although non-d20 production is still down.

--

* For those that go and download this beast, here's the breakdown on who did what:

Races
Bugbears and goblins - Clinton
Everything else - Peter

Classes - Clinton

Rest of ruleset - (for the most part) Clinton. I'm most proud of the clerics. I gave them a fix I always wanted in D&D: they cast spells only from lists dictated by the god they worship, giving them a lot more flavor.

Setting
Cinder - Clinton
Everything else - Peter

Adventures - Peter

I've often been sorely tempted to re-release this whole thing as a d20 setting, but co-authorship makes it kind of hard.

This is, I think, the game we played Sunday morning of Apartment!Con? It ran very well. I'm afraid that as soon as I got home someone borrowed the CD from me, and I have not seen it since, but it will find its way back eventually (I hope). I didn't see the rules set then, but as a player I found it enjoyable.

--M. J. Young

I'm very proud of the fact that I spent money on The Nutcracker Prince. Although I'm not sure where the CD has gotten to, & I seem to remember that not all of the files loaded correctly. Nevertheless, I loved the setting. Absolutely gorgeous. I love the name, too--it evoked the feel of the setting without referring to any part of the setting specifically.

M.J. and Josh:

All the files that should have been on your CDs are (for the first time since Gargoyle13 went tits-up) all on the web at the URL above.

I'm also proud to say that Josh was my first paying customer for any RPG-related thing whatsoever. For that - for basically inspiring me to think, "Hey, I can do this" even before I got involved with the Forge and whatnot - I can't ever thank him enough.

Ach, I'm blushing! (And yet I still haven't gotten off of my ass & bought Paladin, despite jonesing for it in a big way. Note to self: buy Paladin!)

Thanks for putting that Nutcracker Prince stuff up, Clinton. It's really fab.