Lonesome Robot Press :: Science Fiction

Every truly hardcore RPG gamemaster I know has a shelf, box, or other receptacle full of games they never play and never will play. In a lot of cases, they’re great games, or at least games that would be fun for a one shot, but there are three barriers to actually dusting them off and getting your group to play them:

1. Your players don’t know the rules and don’t wan to invest the time in learning them.
2. Your players also don’t want to build characters for a one shot.
3. You (the potential GM) don’t have the tools to overcome problems 1 & 2.

I’m thinking about this problem right now because last night, my girlfriend & I consumed several glasses of wine each while watching the David Eccleston Dr. Who episode where they chase the alien disguised as a fat lady in Cardiff. Afterward, we got to talking about gaming, had more wine, and somehow ended up on the subject of Bunnies & Burrows, an RPG from 1976 where you play a rabbit. While still a tad snoggered, I ended up on the Fantasy Games Unlimited web site (yes, they still exist, and yes, they have an online store, and no, you should under no circumstances go there after sharing two bottles of wine with your gaming-enabler girlfriend egging you on).

The result? I am now the proud owner of a copy of the Bunnies & Burrows PDF, and apparently I’ll be getting copies of Bushido and Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (thanks for that last one, Melody) in the mail soon. Drunk while I bought them or not, I’ll be damned if I don’t get some use out of these games.

But how do I get anyone to play them?

Proposal: Retro RPG Quick Start Guides

What if you could hand your players a party of pre-generated character sheets along with a rules cheat sheet that explained the character sheet well enough for anyone who’d gamed before to jump into plaing then & there?

I would like to work with others on coming up with a format for this.

My main insights on building a cheat sheet usable by any gamer are these:

1. If you write a good short guide on a system that tells players only what they need to interpret the info on their character sheet, this ought to be enough for any player who’s played more than one RPG in their time as a gamer to jump in and play any system thus described. They’re not going to have total rules mastery over the system. But they’ll be able to sit down and play, given a pre-gen character and a GM who does know the intricacies of the rules.
2. Since the 1970s and ’80s, when most games falling into the retro category were written, RPGs have undergone some standardization. Gamers expect rules that break things down and present them in a certain way, and the better and more intuitively a game conforms to these standards, the faster players learn them. But retro games pre-date this neat standardization of how to present rules, making them harder to learn. A good quick start guide for a retro game would do an end run around this problem by giving players a cheat sheet on the game’s rules organized per the (relatively standardized) logic of contemporary RPG systems.

What do you think? What is the best format for standardizing discovery of retro RPG systems for the typical gamer? In my next post, I’m going to take a crack at the problem, using Bunnies & Burrows as my model. Feedback is welcome!

Lonesome Robot Press is pleased to announce Empyrean, a pen & paper science fiction role-playing game set in posthumanity’s distant future. Inspired by influences as diverse as Cowboy Bebop; the original Traveller RPG; and the writings of Vernor Vinge, Peter Hamilton, Bruce Sterling, and Alastair Reynolds, Empyrean uses a richly developed Milky Way galaxy as backdrop for the meeting and clash of humanity and numerous alien races. Players can choose to portray characters from one of humanity’s many cultures and subspecies, AGIs, or aliens designed to be culturally distinct yet playable.

Although the possibilities for an Empyrean campaign are nearly limitless, the default campaign casts the player characters as the crew of an FTL (faster-than-light) ship. The rules and setting material focus on the challenges and opportunities for such characters, whether they choose to seek hire as mercenaries, ply the galactic trade lanes as merchants, or pursue more obscure goals. An elegant system of rules for modeling the technology levels and available resources in various star systems helps to determine the challenges and potential rewards of the missions upon which characters embark.

Player character roles are designed to encourage a cohesive “adventuring party” style of play, with some or all of the following possibly present within a PC group:

• Starship command crew: commanders, navigators, and helms
• Groundside ops personnel: drop ship pilots, groundpounders, infiltrators, and even bounty hunters
• Spacing professions: salvage crew, fighter pilots, and fleet ops specialists
• Social & sciences professions: biologists, linguists, astrophysicists, infobrokers, and trade negotiators
• Sentient starships whose robotic avatars can accompany the rest of a PC group groundside

A range of races and human subtypes are available as playable characters:

• Humans from planetary cultures, including the Normans, Aztlánistas, and Vegans.
• Humans from spacefaring cultures, including the technology-trading Ming Lu and the awesome mercenary fleets of Kombine Mercantile Marine.
• Lynn’Ryn, a race of tradition-bound blue skinned humanoids whose ancient culture teaches the discipline of manipulating physical reality at the quantum level.
• Al-Mogur, entrepreneurs and merchants who grow their ships from organic matter and whose science appears weirdly mystical to outsiders.
• Sovizen, humanoids descended from arboreal amphibians. Their aptitude for macro-scale building is unparalleled, extending to the planetary scale.
• Bagduarh, a race descended from flightless avian carrion eaters. They are new to the stars, having rapidly assimilated new technology gained from other races.
• Dholi Ghat, the children of the Mold, a race of rudimentary humanoids connected by slime mold implants in their bodies to the Bloom, a self-aware information network that is the only known method of faster-than-light communication.

In addition to unique PC races and a variety of interesting antagonists, Empyrean will eventually include spaceship combat rules at two scales: micro, for GMs wanting to include small craft and fighter combat in their games, and macro, for star system-spanning battles between capital ships. This and other features of the game setting and rules allow GMs to decide on what balance of hard sci-fi versus space opera elements they wish to include in their game.

Empyrean was co-authored by Jack Graham and Derek Swirsky between 2003 and 2009. The core Empyrean book will be released in two sections: a setting book detailing the game universe, and a separate rules book. The rules book uses the Eclipse Phase game mechanics published by Catalyst Gamelabs and developed by Rob Boyle and Brian Cross of Posthuman Studios. In accordance with the Eclipse Phase Creative Commons license, the Empyrean rules book will also be distributed under a CC license. Wherever possible, rules for Empyrean material will be made backwards-compatible with Eclipse Phase, allowing EP gamemasters to borrow from Empyrean.

Empyrean material will be released online starting in Autumn of 2009.

Eclipse Phase has officially gone to press. Although I’ve done minor writing and editing work in RPGs before, this will be the first time I’m credited as a writer. Although my word should not be taken as official, I imagine the core rules should be showing up in stores by August.

Go, little game!