Saturday, April 9, 2011

Inspirare Septimana and Incoming Playtest



Shimizu Corporation is busy building larval megadungeons.

In other news, I'm planning and wheeling out DUNGSHOE 2.0 tomorrow for a short test run campaign, set in a sword-and-planet style campaign called Panjandrum.

Some of the basic ideas surrounding Panjandrum been kicking around in my head since university, like this guy. I'm tossing together the Marses of Brackett, Lewis and Wells (and LXG, Vol II Ish 1), Dune, especially the extra-weird bits of Dune Messiah (the Tleilaxu were always my favourite) and all this cool concept art and stuff from thirty years of Star Wars. It's kind of all mooshed in there with some reskinned D&D stuff and hipster paleontology and orbiting a Warm Jupiter for cool night skies.

The result of that is that I have to stat up telepathic Greys and Tusken Raiders as PC species for tomorrow.

Regarding the game mechanics, after playing around with more regular stat-like modifiers, I'm sticking with the point-spend approach I'm used to with GUMSHOE. For tracking hit points, I'm switching to a True20 or Skullduggery-like 'additive damage' approach, since 'going negative' in just two stats always seemed awkward to explain, especially as I'm trying to encourage people to spend points more.

The skills are going to be the same type of thing as version 1.0, since they're tiny enough that I can make them up on the fly, or change them midgame without a total rethink. I'm thinking that, in addition to the 'brew potions' and 'make/disarm traps' knowledge skills, I'm going to add some that cover the three investigative ability categories (or rearrangements thereof) to try and keep interrogating the game environment cheap for characters. There's always that one guy in the party that wants to be the one who knows everything about stuff, too. Or at least wants it written on their character sheet.

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