Friday, March 26, 2021

What's Happening?!

 Hi All!

We've moved out of the year of Doom and its time to apprise you all of what's been going on at RGG! 

Regardless of 2020's troubles, I was able to work on Reaver regularly and have a number playtest sessions completed and ongoing. Those sessions revealed certain problems and inconsistencies that led to some moderate rewrites, which also let me clean the rules up quite a bit.

  • The player's portion of Reaver is completely drafted and I have been tinkering with layout styles. From the Introduction, through character creation, and inclusive of the Sorcery chapter comes in around 70,000 words.
  • Skills have been completely removed in favor of a narrative style of skills based on your class and careers.
  • Except the attack roll, all die rolls in the game operate on the die chain. Why not the attack? Because I favor the familiarity of the old-school d20 roll.
  • Sorcery has been the most difficult aspect to "get right"-- meaning supportive of the S&S genre and the feel of dark magic. Vancian magic is completely abandoned. Spellcasters must make checks to successfully cast spells, may suffer ill effects if they fumble the check, but can pull off unearthly feats of sorcery with success. They are not easy to play and require some careful use of their spells and abilities. More of that in another post.

What's Next for Reaver? 

  • I'm currently working on the GM section--monsters, treasures, advice, special rules, and the like; as well as a basic setting to be included in the book.
  • More playtesting! I'll continue running the game myself and plan to recruit some additional GMs to run it.
  • I also plan to release a "Quickstart" this summer to get the game in people's hands and support the official playtest.
  • Because I want this book to be high quality, I plan to take it to Kickstarter in spring of 2022.

Eldritch Tales has been on the back-burner since last year, but I do have issue #2 of The Eldritch Inquirer partially in layout and in the works. I plan to release this after the Reaver Quickstart. The issue will include support for pulp adventure games and an exciting, pulp scenario written by John Large of Red Dice Diaries!

All the best!

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