I’ve been meaning to overhaul Extreme Future for a while now, and here that marvellous little sci-fi RPG is, finally done. I’m also writing a couple of genre novels too, one fantasy novel set in the world of Realms Fantasy Role Playing, and another for later release, set in the Extreme Future galaxy.

The Sci-Fi book in particular is proving a lot of fun. The background I’ve already designed for the role-playing game is so rich that it’s easy to come up with stories that’ll play out against it. The spaceships are particularly fun, with pages and pages devoted to them, which means I’ll have to include spaceships in the sci-fi book, as soon as the fantasy book is complete that is.

I’m already a third of the way with the book, and having the world already designed for the fantasy book makes writing it a lot easier, and as I’m into RPGs, I can publish this richly imagined fantasy world as a game, where other authors have their worlds in a pile of notes that nobody else ever sees. It’s a shame.

Updating the games does of course mean that I’ll have to redo the home page of the website, grr, but it’ll be worth it once everything is sorted out.

I’m working on a few fantasy pieces at the moment. This image is going to illustrate the concept of wizard, or magic user for the new edition of my role-playing game. I’ve done about an hour’s work on it so far, and I can imagine it going in a nice direction, whether it actually does or not is another question. I’m back to blogging again, because I’ve finally released the new edition of Realms. The image above shws how it looked after a few minutes blocking colours in roughly and trying to come up with a composition.

Here’s Realms the role-playing game to buy at RPGDrivethru.

If you click through the link, the nice piece of text I wrote explains what the game is all about, but basically it’s set in a fantasy world similar to the world of European legend, full of fairies, giants, goblins and devil dogs.

That’s why I need a nice magic user image, an image where the magic user is looking powerful and commanding. It’s to go in the section where the players roll up their characters, and I want to instill a bit of confidence.

This image shows how things stand at the moment, after about 45 minutes work putting the first few hints of detail into the image. The whole thing looks a little wimpy at the moment, like the wizard is attending certain well known magical school. I’ll have to feed him a few steroids and beef him up a bit before the picture is complete. I’m particularly happy with the lightning at the moment. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of lightning on a dark and stormy night in a fantasy illustration.

I just got a great review for the Heroes in Time role-playing game on RPG Drive Thru. Here are a few choice excerpts, but you can read the whole role-playing game review here.

“…[With]  extensive contents that includes the wide variety of settings for adventures – Primeval, Fantasy, Swashbuckling, Steampunk, Modern, Cyberpunk and Space Opera. While many would consider it ambitious to try and create a system that can deal with so many different genres, as the name suggests, it also intends to make it possible to have the same character be playable in all of them as the default setting has all the genres linked in a common timeline….

[E]ach setting gets a brief timeline of the main events of the era as well as a history, adventure ideas, information about the prevalence of Gods, the types of monsters as well as how special powers are viewed and how societies of the era tend to function…

Following the genres of play we reach details of the Temporal Lords, inspired by Dr Who and Sapphire and Steel, the far future human race with the ability to move backwards and forwards through time and the first mention of their adversaries, The Entropic Alliance…

[C]haracter creation – names, alignment (not just good vs evil, law vs chaos but also has suggestions such as logical vs emotional or detached vs engaged), suggestions for back-stories and the type of personality the protagonist will have (all nicely free of mechanics … so any suggestions could easily be used for any other game or as a simple guide for new roleplayers) and how they’re funded…

There’s a wide variety of examples for skills…

[T]he power list is extensive and covers so much it would be difficult to think of anything quickly that isn’t covered by the powers available. As I’ve been writing this review I cast my mind towards the X-Men but I reckon most or all of them could be made fairly quickly with the rules provided…

The equipment list is similarly extensive without feeling bloated – the main classes of weapon, armour and shield are all provided and extend through the genres and there is also a decent list of general equipment and magic items…

There are also pages devoted to robots, space ships …, poisons, diseases and environmental hazards as well as a small bestiary…

[A] simple system with a plethora of information and options to cover most genres and technology levels and manages to condense it all into a surprisingly small book for everything that’s contained within…

Rating: 4 of 5 Stars!”

It’s a great review, and I’m still working on the rules at the same RPG Drive Thru download link for anyone who already has the game.

My new role playing game is called Heroes in Time and has everything needed to role play across an entire span of history from brutal primeval barbarian sword and sorcery to space opera and its laser battles, but the cover needs work. It is the element of this project that has been most severely letting it down uptil now.

This is the old cover, and it has lots of space opera sophistication, but no primeval brutality, and that is what I am in the process of changing. The new cover already has a more atmospheric colour scheme, and I have hacked out a more action oriented pose for the two player characters depicted. In terms of composition I quite like the way the text of the game’s title leads to what will be a light saber blade then across to the axe before landing up on the player character’s faces, which will of course be contorted in the depths of fear and determination, as most cover art characters are in these situations. The game content is evolving too, and the game itself is available from RPG Drive Thru. I’ll be adding a lot of internal art to the game too, as I work on the rules and add content. The great thing is that because the game covers all RPG genres, I can add whatever crazy ideas come into my head somewhere or other in the game.

There is an ocean of starts, and this spaceship is designed to ride the swells. More work has been done on Heroes in Time again, and this time I’ve added a character sheet that can be downloaded for free.

The game itself is available here (just click the nice attractive banner, it goes directly to the Heores in Time page)

Naturally the first place I turned for inspiration in designing the character sheet was Wikipedia. The wikipedia page on character sheets is huge, and has a lot of useful information, but I wanted to keep the sheet as simple as possible. Heroes in Time is a cinematic and generic game where a barbarian could easily encounter an astronaut, and the character sheet needs to be versatile enough to accommodate these two very different types of player character.

The various genres that player characters can be drawn from include.

modern horror, and the legions of undead that have to be faced,

other planets, and the monsters that inhabit them,

the far future, and the droids that protect its treasures,

primeval fantasy, and the giants that still walked the Earth,

magic

sword and sorcery, and its beautiful dangers,

And what game would be complete without mech-on-mech combat.

The new role-playing game is ready for release and it is a generic system that nevertheless comes with a huge range of settings, all tied together by a time traveling/ alternate histories theme. It is a very ambitious project and it will be a project that will be undergoing constant revision for a long time to come.

The new game is selling for a rock bottom price for 76 pages right now, but the price of the PDF will go up as work is done on the rules, background and art for this new concept in generic game systems, so it’s a great time to get in on the ground floor.

The PDF is available from

RPG Drivethru provides a download link that is automatically updated as the newer versions of the game are released.

The conceit of the game is that characters will be recruited from across the timeline of a game world from primeval barbarians, through fantasy elves, swashbuckling pirates, steampunk adventurers, modern investigators, super spies, and cyberpunk operatives, to the psionic knights of space opera. All recruited by an enigmatic group of Temporal Guardians and all working together on the same team, ready to be deployed to any point in the history of the setting’s main planet, or the entire galaxy.

Each type of character from each point in game time will bring a different mix of skills and experiences, and weapons and armor to make for hugely varied adventuring.

I have had no time on my Wacom pad and computer and have instead been sketching this image on my phone on the tram to work and back. I’m using Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile on my ZTE Blade ‘San Francisco’ Android phone. Using the version of Android that the phone shipped with I was having all kinds of trouble sketching on the capacitative screen, even with a good quality stylus from Wacom. But then I upgraded the operating system to a version of Android Gingerbread moded especially for the blade, called Cyanmod, and now the phone can cope with sketching without lagging, crashing and creating monstrous pixelated and rasterised lines.

Upgrading to CyanMod was a traumatic process, and there where moments when all the phone was giving me were cryptic lines of text in green on a black background. I thought for sure I had bricked my device. But in the end I got everything setup, and it was all worth it. I can now sketch on the tram, and neednt have such trouble from my conscience about not getting any art done for the role-playing games I’m developing.

Even after a couple of hours work, the images are nothing like the quality that camn be achieved on the computer of course, but hopefully I’ll be able to find time to add the finishing touches to turn them into proper completed bits of game art.

Dragons come to town

The word on Illustration Friday this week is Midsummer Night, and it reminded me of an illustration I included in ‘Realms’ – a fantasy role-playing game using a simplified version of FATE 2.  The idea behind the illustration is that a band of traveling entertainers comes to town, flown in by dragon.

The traveling entertainers are a cross between a circus, a theatre and a magic show. As the theatre is run by a mage powerful enough to have dragons as pack animals, the magic is, of course, the best part of the show.

In a role-playing game the dragon theatre could be a source of news, and the mage running things could be a powerful patron to a group of player characters.

Realms is available from RPGDriveThru, a really big store full of games to download, and producing illustrations for the game system is one of the great pleasures of game design. as you can see from the cover of the core rule book, dragons are a favourite in my illustrations, and they are relatively common in the monster infested world of Realms. Coming to town on magical midsummer night they are a source of wonder, but encountered by the player characters as they delve into a deserted forest glade and wake the majestic and short tempered beast, they are a little more worrisome.

So check out Realms for dragons and a bunch of other fantasy monsters!

Who Needs a Spacesuit?

To Infinity and Beyond

I’m writing a new role-playing game. It’s going to be a game that tries to capture that special genre of superheroes who fight for truth and justice in a far-future sci-fi universe. I already have a role-playing game that simulates the type of far-future space opera setting where anything can happem. It’s called Extreme Future (and it’s available from the biggest RPG site out there RPGDriveThru).

I don’t just want to make a supplement to Extreme Future though. I have done supplements for the Extreme Future RPG before, such as the Fuwalda Spaceship Handbook. I want to do a whole future superhero themed game, so that I can build the whole game around a detailed superhero creation process. The game will be compatible with Extreme Future, and also with the fantasy RPG Realms too, and the most difficult part of all is that I want to include an entire episode of a superhero comic.

I’ve never really done sequential art before, but I’ve read a lot of comic books, especially from the sci-fi future hero genre, and I’ve always wanted to have a go. I’m going to be aiming for a style with the art that’s more Mike Mignola, and McMahon than the usual Eclipse style art you see in indie comics, and I’m hoping it will give the finished role-playing game a lot of character.

It’s going to be a challenging project, and as soon as it’s done it’ll be going on my RPG Publisher’s Page at RPGDriveThru, oh and of course their comic’s site too.

Ramming Speed, Captain!

Starship combat is an important element in the Extreme Future RPG, and I’ve been thinking about ramming rules lately. Initially I was just thinking about including the rules in the finished role-playing game core rules to cover all the eventualities. I thought it ramming would probably be used in actual play, just as a tactic of last resort, against extremely powerful spaceships and other foes that could not be harmed in any other way. But then I started to think again… It turns out that ramming is a tactic often used in naval battles, so why not with space navies as well. Ramming has been used from antiquity right up to almost the present day, with numerous incidents of ramming being recorded throughout WWII.

The speeds involved in ramming attacks by starships  in space would be unimaginably faster than those of a dreadnought on the high sees trying to ram a submarine however. There would have to be some element that made these encounters more like that between a boat and less like modern jet fighters, where ramming is suicidal and pretty much never occurs.

The answer is shields. If energy shields can deflect a few tons of mass being hurled at the target by a battery of gauss cannons, then perhaps it can cushion a ramming attack enough to result in a breached hull, but not instant destruction for either of the two starship combatants. That’s the theory that ended up convincing me, and that’s why ramming is a tactic that can be decisive in spaceship combat in Extreme Future.

Of course once you have breached the hull of your target, your job isn’t over. Boarding parties, power armour and droids have to be sent in if you want to stand a chance of taking your prize.