I’ve been meaning to get better about blog communication stuff, and this will be the place I do so. I’ve got a number of projects underway right now, and some I’ve got brewing in my head and I may or may not start once I get stuff done.
Before I get started, I’d like to point out that working on multiple projects is a good thing for me right now; I write whenever I have a good idea or inspiration for design, which means that individual projects grow a little more slowly, but mechanics get more polish and I have much greater net productivity.
The first project is obviously Street Rats. It’s published already, and I’m fairly happy with it. It needs more content, and a few final rules elements. My goal is to keep the core rulebook to a length of around 300 pages, which by the time I finish up setting and the remaining rules should be pretty close. It’s looking to be on track for text completion by the end of April, and then there may be a Kickstarter or other funding drive to get art to pretty it up.
Second, I’m working on a revised version of FOURS for publication over at DriveThruRPG. It’ll sell for $1, being an experiment in pricing and marketing over there, and also getting the Homoeoteleuton name out again. There’s not a whole lot of stuff to do, but I do want to improve and expand it into what it could be, as well as implement some of the scratchpad ideas that didn’t make it in. I’m contemplating also including diceless and d6 rules for the game, to give some more flexibility to when and how it can be played. I believe FOURS Revised should be finished by the end of March.
Project Eight, as the working title goes, is coming along nicely. It’s a setting for a CC-BY game that brings far science fantasy into a very high quality ruleset. I hope to have it ready for formal announcement by the end of the month, though since the game it’s based on is still in development it may be a good amount of time before it can be truly published. It’s being made as a Google document, rather than in my traditional LibreOffice setup. That’s another experimental side of it. It’s about 60-70% of what I would consider the minimum size for the book, but it’s about 50% feature complete, give or take. My main gripe with P8 right now is that it’s
Project Ace is also in the pipeline. It’s still in very early concept phases, but is a dark fantasy game with a d12 pool mechanic with strong inspirations from Degenesis and the upcoming 7th Sea, with a focus on abstract character designs akin to 13th Age and an effects system inspired by Magic: The Gathering and Open Legend. I hope for it to be a “newbie” friendly game with tightly unified rules and structures that only take a short while to learn. We will see, as it’s still early in development; Project Ace stems from a homebrew campaign setting and a Street Rats supplement draft, and there’s a good bulk of setting documentation but only a small portion of mechanics drafted.
At some point, I hope to draft my own open license. I’m tired of CC’s arbitrary crap; 4.0 got rid of some idiotic clauses in 3.0 only to add a need to specify what was used and how it has been modified, and that’s a heck of a lot of work to foist on people. My goal in using a CC-BY license has been to allow people to modify my work freely, not force them to get a lawyer or make a line-by-line account for where work has been used, and 4.0’s too vague in how that works. I also object to the CC-0 license because I feel it to be an usurpation of the actual concept behind the public domain. I’ll probably base my license off of the CC. I had a personal license I was using for a while not too long ago, and I plan to bring back FAULT, my own personal licensing disambiguation system, while making a CC-BY analogue that meets my needs.