Like a teacher!

Yesterday, while flipping through my little Age of the Sword booklet, I noticed some things that needed to be fixed.  Then I saw some more.  And even more!  And before I knew it, I was attacking the pages with my red pen, leaving a bloody swath of edits in my wake!  As the last one fell, I was panting in disbelief that I had put this crap out for public consumption at one point.

Most of the edits came in the form of leftovers from EGO.  The original text was for a universal system, so there were a lot of references to non-S&S genres (like guns, and vehicles, and turret mounted autocannons).  I cleaned all of those up, clarified a few of the rules, and rearranged some of the content.  I also created a form-fillable version of the character sheet, mainly so I could create premade sample characters.  Over all, it's pretty good now.  I might still work on fleshing out some of the content and flavor text.

But, as always, the art will be the hard part.  Yesterday I had this idea of creating original art by freehand copying the Frazetta art I have in there now, but adding in details and modifications.  So, basically I would be borrowing Frank's poses and layouts, and that's it.  I think that might work.  And this will probably take me the entire summer to do.  Age of the Sword might be ready for release into the wild sometime around August.

In other news, I am thinking about putting together a little Basic D&D adventure to run my 10-year old daughter (and probably her mom) through.  She has expressed interest when we go to game-night on Fridays at our friends' house.  Of course, that interest kind of falls off as soon as her own friend shows up.  But still, it might be fun to give her a shot at Basic.  I have the PDF of B1 - In Search of the Unknown, so I might just run her through that.

I'm off to Vegas this weekend (driving from Wisconsin, ugh!) to see my oldest daughter graduate from high school.  But, I have all of next week off, so in between family stuff, I might get some writing done.  And then we have our regualy bi-wekly game next Friday night.

Until next time, keep rolling!

Swords & Sorcery

On a whim, I opened up the PDF of the play test version of my complete S&S RPG, Age of the Sword.  And then, on another whim, I decided to use Adobe's "booklet" printing feature, and print the thing out.  I now have in my hand (well, on my desk, as holding it would make typing difficult) a 5.5" x 8.5" RPG, just begging to be played.

It currently sits at a whopping 23 pages, plus covers, Introduction and Forward pages, and a blank character sheet.  The only section that is still empty is the "Sample Characters" which I never got around to building.  And the whole thing is laced with pencil and ink drawings by Frazetta and other fantasy artists, with a legal disclaimer at the front stating that they are just there for illustrative and place-holding purposes, please don't sue me.

So, now I am trying to figure out what to do with the dang thing.  The layout is pretty nice, and the whole thing looks pretty good (though there are some big, blank spaces that could use some text or illustrations).  In order to finish it properly, I would mainly need to fix the art issues; replace the copyrighted art with original art, and do a full-color cover image.

The game was designed to be minimalist, and bare-bones.  But, I think there is some room for expansion.  Maybe some more detailed options in game-play, a few more monsters and foes to fight.  And the world I created as a setting is intentionally vague and abstract (without even a proper name, it's simply called "The World").  There are defined nations and regions, but each just gets a gloss over, with a general description and not a lot of detail.

The mechanics are based on a dice-pool system that uses d6's exclusively.  You're basically looking to roll over a target number for any given task.  There is a lot of leeway for how to employ that mechanic, as the whole thing was based on a universal system I wrote ages ago called EGO.

Over all, I like the game.  And I think fans of the genre that Howard built would like it too.  I think I might dust it off, polish it up, and see what I can do with it.