I keep having thoughts about what I want to get from the system, but the more I think about it, the more it gets fuzzy and, well, complicated (but in a good way I think).

Let me explain. People love roleplaying systems that appear simple and elegant but offer up potentially limitless (or more than easy to handle) complexity. That the system everyone aims for, easy to get into but endlessly flexible. But what is not necessarily obvious is that they also what a system that plays well. And you can come up with any sort of funky simple system, but it may not work when it gets into strangers hands.

So I dwelt on this problem for a while and decided that when I put together the “lost heroes” system, I’ll lob in all the ideas I can or want to include. Fill it up and having it overflowing with much of muchness. Because it’s easier to cut away than add later once you put something in the public (and the sad thing is, I picked this little piece of wisdom up from a reality TV show). The plan then is to play test it, either in person with friends or possible online over at the Fudge IRC chat room on otherworlders.org, cutting back on what doesn’t work until I have something that, well, does.

The system is going to be ostensibly Fudge. And there has been some recent free systems based on Fudge, like Marvellous Superheroes and Fudgepark2/SLUDGE that have come to my attention. (I plan to digest them for ideas! Muhahahahahah). And quite recently a new iteration of Now Playing in The Unexplained from Carnivore Games. So a nice little trove of stuff to dig through.

Thankfully much of the pieces of my system are already there or I’ve done work on them in parts. I still foresee a lot of work getting everything together in a system that appears coherent and aligns with the intents of the setting.

• One of the core parts of the system will be Fudge Passions. This is a system I developed to replace Fudge Points but more importantly as a way to link supernatural powers to characters emotions and environs. Something that makes the powerful lost hero characters part of the world.
• And then there is Story Hooks. This is tied to Fudge Passions but also to other ideas that have been knocking about in my head for years. I started them before I had heard of Fate and in many ways they are similar to Aspects but not as powerful as Aspects in play but are more malleable in the long term.
• I also wanted to do something about conflict and be able to turn any roll of the dice situation into a form of combat. TDO Combat is my first attempt. It suffers in that it’s hard to understand from the text, yet I know what I want from it. It pulls in ideas from Riddle of Steel and Shadows of Yesterday games, the old Fudge Factor and discussions from the old FudgeList. It provides a criteria for when to do “combat” and when just make a single roll, handling group and one-on-one combats and should be applicable to most types of situations from chases and battlefields to political gatherings and socialising.
• Another little titbit, but much more recent, was some thoughts on making Magic Characters interesting. It’s quite generic in that you could add it to any system: Magic Character Add-on. In principal it’s a way to turn a character who can do magic to a magic-based character. The difference is subtle, but IMHO important.
• And finally, at least publically, is a blog post on what I call The Big Pile of Skills Problem. Your character isn’t just a big list of skills you know and I really like idea of “professions” a character has. It’s more defining/descriptive though more abstract and harder to design for.

So I hope you’re now getting the impression of how much of a mix-bag the system is going to be.

Of course, if your more interested in setting-specific bits of the rules, I’d recommend checking back over some of these older blog posts, [1] and [2], for some idea what characters you can play and what sort of powers they may have.

You should really check those terms and conditions on websites:

A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.

The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the “immortal soul clause” to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul.

I have to admit, this is one of the best April Fools gags I’ve seen. But thankfully:

The company noted that it would not be enforcing the ownership rights, and planned to e-mail customers nullifying any claim on their soul.

Source: FOXNews.com – 7,500 Online Shoppers Unknowingly Sold Their Souls

I managed to finish the re-reading/editing the text of Lost Heroes RPG’s setting: “Book of the Gods” last week. My feeling is that’s mostly complete. The writing is spot-on in some places and others it’s terrible weak, hence why I say it’s only 68% complete.

But I figure, that’s okay. This setting I’m putting together is basically a baseline of all my ideas and the previous versions brought together in some sort of coherent draft. Using this text, I can start to playtest it (using any system) to get a feel for how the setting (as opposed to the system) works and feels in-game.

I may make this raw text available to the few who have expressed an interest in reading it (ask if you want it). But my plan next is to put it together as a single PDF. The advantage of a single PDF is that it is a binary blob, one that can be download to be read offline, converted to ebook and uploaded to various online sites for further distribution. I will put the text online in HTML format but I’m not sure yet how this will happen.

The other thing I’ve learned from reading though the text is that, I need to split it up. There should be a core text, the basic setting plus the Mad/Dark Gods and Dreamlands and then a separate supplement/book for each of the four groups of pantheons: Tuatha De Dannan/Fomorri, Angels/Demons, Olympians and Norse (Aesir/Vanir). Having these four large groups embedded in the same work means I don’t give them the treatment they need to come alive. Don’t get me wrong, the basic facts and info is there to use and play them, but it’s compressed and thusly very dry to read.

It also makes it difficult to approach as a written project as each of these pantheons needs it’s own flavour and should have it’s only feel (I know what that feel should be too, as I’ve hinted at it before).

My work rate is slow I have to admit. This is a labour of love for me, but must fit in-between all the other must-do stuff and doing 32% more work is a daunting task.

I’m finally finishing up the editing part of the setting for Lost Heroes and I discovered I hadn’t done up the family tree for the Norse Gods, the Aesir. I’ve already done the other family trees (and organisation charts) for the other Pantheons in Lost Heroes. So this Easter weekend I put together this. It includes only the gods and characters mentioned within the Lost Heroes RPG setting, so don’t consider it academically correct. Enjoy!

Update: It seems that the full image I uploaded was shrunk by the upload process. Which meant you couldn’t actually read any of the names in the bubbles. I’ve now uploaded the full version again. Enjoy.

Saw this via boingboing.net, a comic book treatment of Greek Olympian Gods myths, called “Zeus: King of the Gods“. Looks brilliant. (Check the original links for some more images of inside the comic).

I’ve been working my way through the current draft of the setting. I had hoped this would only take a week or two, but it’s taken much longer for various IRL reasons (including a car crash and its subsequent fallout), mostly because the only time I can work on it, is the few hours spare I get after the kids are in bed and I’m not always as mentally focused at that time. (I’m getting old, I fall asleep in the sofa at 10.30 in the evening!)

The first half of the text required a lot more re-work than later pieces, yet it was the later pieces I struggled with the most first time round. It seems as a general rule, depending on the length of the chapter, the more I struggled with it the less re-working it requires. With that in mind I started working on the Pantheon chapters in reverse order, hoping to populate the better changes and feel from the later chapters back to the previous chapters.

It was only when I got to the chapter on Demons that something started to worry me. Not the writing, but something I had put to the back of my mind since starting this run. Demons are nasty things. Not nasty as in anti-hero way (like Vampires are sorta cool yet there still “monsters”) but the worst of mankind, supernaturally empowered. Rapists, murderers, abusers, molesters and so on. While it’s possible to create “good” Demons (Fallen Demons or Demonic Bloodlines that avoided the influence of Hell for example), the vast majority of character types are bad, real bad.

Lets get this out of the way now, Lost Heroes is based on old mythologies. These old religions contain stuff that modern readers may find tasteless or even offensive. I can already think of several bits and pieces that might offend some. I’m aware of them but I didn’t want to PC-ify these old stories, just for the sake of writing an RPG. So instead I tried to emphasis some over others. I don’t know if this works or if I should be more cautious in how I treat these themes in the setting. In part, this is the purpose of trying to make this “Book of the Gods” so that I can present something to others and get a real feel for the reader’s reactions. To put it another way, when does editing become censorship? I can’t tell because I’m buried in the forest, checking the bark on each of the trees.

And here I am, reading through the Demons chapter, realising there is very little balance to this chapter. It is dark and it remains dark. There is, preceding this chapter, an chapter on Angels who battle constantly with Hell to prevent Demons destroying everything. While some parts of Angels are dark, there is much light. When I was writing it, I tried to get my head into what might be the motivations of these Demons and their masters. It did haunt my dreams for a while, imaging the horrific nature of Hell, but I felt it was important to get it down on paper. A starting point.

One thing, from the beginning, of Lost Heroes is that I didn’t want to restrict your choice of characters. Of course a GM may apply their own restrictions for the sake of the game, but I wanted there to be a choice. Even if that option was only really available to allow the GM to create antagonistic NPCs, it should be there. Choice is also an incredible important theme in the setting. Everything is about choice. A True Chosen Demon… is a human who accepted to become a Demon. The evils of Demon are the evils of humans, amplified by the supernatural. Do you chose to be the monster or the hero? And so the gamer is already making a choice.

Reading about the monstrous Demons of Lilith, wife of Satan, I started to have doubts. I posted this on twitter:

Just re-read the Demons chap. in Lost Heroes. Am a bit worried that u can create evil and disturbing demons as PCs. Should I take chap. out?

Which it later got imported into Google Buzz where some discussion occurred.

I have no conclusions so far. I’m going to keep tapping away at this drop, hoping in the end that the bits will fall together. What do you think?

I just finished “The Night Watch” series of books by Sergei Lukyanenko, a Russian urban fantasy that rocks socks (if you like urban magic action books that is).

They follow (mostly) the story of Anton, an “Other” or more specifically a Light Magician, as he works in the Night Watch. The Night Watch patrol the actions of Dark Others, Vampires, Werewolves, Dark Magicians, etc. (The Dark Others have their own watch called “The Day Watch”, hence the name of the second book). Sounds all black and white, but nicely isn’t. For a Light Other to do good, they have to let the Dark do something bad, for example the Night Watch give licenses to Vampires to hunt.

They also share several similar concepts with Lost Heroes, which is why I’m talking about them here. If I had read these a few years I’m pretty certain they would have been a big influence. But now instead I can point to them as being examples of what Lost Heroes is about.

In the world of Night Watch, there are humans and their are “Others”, those who are supernaturally different. And so too in Lost Heroes, though I haven’t differentiated between “Light” and “Dark” per say and the types of Others are different too.

There is also the “Twilight”, a realm that lies across mundane reality but only accessible to Others. In the movies (did I mention there are two movies based on the books?), this is translated from Russian as “the Gloom”. I like the word Gloom, it conjures up some great mental images of a sticky grim alternative world but Twilight makes more sense within the world of the books; a multi-layered spiritual planes of existence. In Lost Heroes there is the “Veil” and crossing the Veil you enter the Spirit World. In these books, there is a complex relationship between Others and this Twilight and similarly in Lost Heroes there is a power-play between Others and the Veil (which will affect how powers work too).

I’m amazed there isn’t a PnP RPG based on this world. It’s nearly crying out for it and I’d certainly pay for it. (I do believe there is a Computer Game RPG though).

Oh and by the way, there made two movies. I’ve seen the first one and thought it was good (but the book is infinitely better and more compelling). I haven’t seen the second one.

The internet does throw up some wonderful things:

• Are anagrams the key to the Voynich Manuscript? The Voynich Manuscript Decoded?
• A lost culture? Culture of Old Europe Is Uncloaked in an Exhibit at N.Y.U. – NYTimes.com
• Christmas wasn’t really a pagan feast originally you know: How December 25 Became Christmas
• The Ancient Greeks had incredible devices! Advanced Imaging Reveals a Computer 1,500 Years Ahead of Its Time
• Was there really a race more intelligent than us? What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us? (Note: a good friend pointed out to me that the evidence for this “smarter” race is pretty dodge and has long been discredited. Still the idea is quite cool)

A week into 2010, and I’ve finished the first draft of “Lost Heroes RPG: Book of the Gods”. I just wrote and wrote until I finished and that journey was 13,000+ words long! My. Hopefully parts of are actually decent.

There is a lot to do before I release it publically. I’d love to just put it online in it’s current form, warts and all, and let people tell me what’s wrong with it. This being a first draft however it’ll be unreadable. (Just read my blog for an example on how bad my grammar and readability can get!). It’ll be plagued with unnecessary “junk” words (“actually” is one of my particularly overused favourites), mixing up “their” and “there” (I drive my wife mad with this one), past and present tense and “effect” versus “affect”. And with such a big load of words to read through, everyone who read it would be just telling me what I already know, but not what I need to hear. At this stage I’d rather hear about if the ideas work, as a whole is it good, do the character concepts grab you, encouragement and so on, not the pedantic grammar and readability issues. (Though if there is anyone out there who wants to read it and willing to ignore the grammar and readability stuff, I’d be more than happy to share it).

I don’t have an editor and I don’t have the funds to hire one, I’m going to have do it myself. Even if I consider this version to be a “beta”, I still need it feeling professional when I share with people. So my plan is to do a read-through and fix up anything I find. Then put it aside for a week and start reading it again. I found this trick really useful, it’s like you’re reading someone else’s work (whose writing style is very familiar).

And once I get through that, I’ll read it backwards. Well when I say, read backwards, I mean read the chapters in reverse order. I know that during writing it, some concepts took shape later in those 13,000 and got a name, but apply across the board. This way I can make sure concepts and ideas are consistent throughout the setting.

*phew*

And then I get to lay it out. Again I don’t have an art director or a graphic layout guy on hand. So again, I’ll be attempting this myself. I’m going to keep it simple however. Rob Lang’s guide seems like a very good starting point for me. Plus I have some artistic ability.

So hold on to your britches, Book of the Gods may be out soon… ish.

Over at the rather cool "The Free RPG Blog", Rob Lang posted a new article called "How to turn your stock fantasy RPG into a unique delight".

The Lost Heroes setting is basically a fantasy setting and it does include elves, dwarfs, magic and has the potential for adventuring. So as a mental exercise I went through each of Rob’s points and see how it compares to the setting that I’m working on.

Write a Setting

This one is the easiest to answer. Seeing I’m concentrating on writing only the setting first, I can check the box straight away.

Avoid standard fantasy elements

Oh dear. I’m not sure I’m checking this one. Lost Heroes has dwarfs and elves. But hopefully I offset this by the fact that I also have giants, valkeries, amazons, satyrs, meanads, demons, angels and many more.

Also elves and dwarfs fell out of the rest of the setting, they are not a fundamental part of it. In fact I’ve twisted the concepts around a lot, as in you can have Sidhe (the celtic fae versions) and Light/Dark Elves (the elves of the Norse Freyr) and as for dwarves, they are based of the Norse mythic version, dark greedy master craftsman who live deep underground. This might annoy folks, but dwarves and elves are actually the same type of being: Dreamlings.

Go back to the folklore source

Big tick for this one, though I’m less interested in “folklore” but in “mythology”. Angels and Demons, Greek and Norse Gods, Celtic heroes and others form the basis of Lost Heroes’ setting.

Read other games

Fail for me. I’ve read many, but I’m pretty certain, I haven’t read enough. We’ll see if this brings down Lost Heroes RPG.

Invert a popular theme

What makes Lost Heroes different from other mythic-like settings? It’s set in the modern day, not an ancient or “golden age” like the few settings I have managed to read. I’ve done my best to try and keep the modern day as much as possible like the real world yet allowing a place for gods, heroes and magic to exist without breaking suspension of disbelief yet also maintaining internal consistency.

It also brings together four distinct mythologies too, not just focusing on one mythos. I think it works and hopefully others will think so too.

Optional Mechanic Crunch

This one isn’t applicable to Lost Heroes right now, seeing I’m only writing the setting. But I guess it will feature in the next part of Lost Heroes when I start putting together a system.

Borrow from outside the genre

Do I do this? I’m not sure. I think I have done so, but not overtly. The point of taking old gods and putting them in a modern context is a similar process to taking them “outside of the genre”, I think. For example Hephaestus and his love of technology or Hermes and his duty to a truly open market.

I’ve also always considered Lost Heroes setting to be a mashup of “mythic” and “modern day” too.

Take from the natural world

This one sounds more like advice than a general guideline to me. I haven’t really delved into nature as a source of inspiration. Legends and myths provide more than enough weirdness and freakiness for me.

Get feedback

I’m working on it!

Once I get the “book of gods” done, I’ll be able to get some real feedback.

Conclusion

I’d recon that is 5 out of 8. Pretty good right?