Hello all,
My first post here
I'll shortly introduce myself before getting to the "meat" of the post:
Just a regular dude playing RPGS since the early 80's, my attention was brought to the RPGSite after stumbling on the RPGPundit's Blog.

Like many of us I developed my own personal game system:  "Under the moons of Zoon".
UTMOZ is a rules-light gamesystem complete with setting ( heavily influenced by ERB's Carter stories).
It's an 80 odd pages pdf complete with Illustrations and color cover that weights about 11 Megabyte.
You can find the game at my website, http://artikid.altervista.org
I'm more than willing to receive comments and criticism
Best regards to all
Artikid

Hey, that's certainly a nice-looking game and looks very complete, even with some useful examples. I've seen some commercial games that do worse. I'll have to go through the rules a bit more, but at first glance they seem to strike a nice balance between simplicity and comprehensiveness. Do you intend to flesh out the world a bit further or is it intentionall left vague, more as a planetary romance toolkit?

One pet peeve of mine: Word really does the worst justification ever...

I love the title.  It calls out to be shouted as a battle-cry.

"ZOOON!"

Wow! very cool. Thanks for sharing.

Hello all,
UTMOZ was thought of more as a toolbox than as a comprehensive and complete setting, I intentuionally left things vague.
Personally I hate it when campaign settings go down to giving you each and every important NPC's address, favored color and lucky number.
The game was written in a sort of "hurried rage" after re-reading for the nth time ERB's Carter novels.
Actually the game system is a overhauling of an old game system I had started writing at the beginning of time ;P.
At the moment I have not planned any sourcebooks or even adventure modules (I suck at writing them !).... yet I don't write anything off.
Please keep the comments coming and thanks for spending some time to reply
Best Regards
Artikid

PS: Yes, Word sucks... but I didn't want to use X-Press, I hate it!

Hello,
After a little playtesting I can say that Psionics seems to be the sore point when it comes down to game-balance.
At this moment I'm considering the reduction of Psi-Points from Psi-Index times 3 to Psi-Index times2.

The game as it stands allows for the creation of quite powerfull psionicists -something I like- yet the Psi energy reserve of characters might be excessive...

The revised version is on-line at http://artikid.altervista.org.
At the moment the Mind Control Manifestation has been de-powered and a few things in the Psionics chapter have been clarified.

Best regards
Artikid

That looks very impressive. Sosthenes is right, though--I think there'd be no harm in fleshing out the setting. This feels like a setting-driven game, a la Tekumel / Jorune, and you probably have it all thought out already anyway.

Well, I actually never suggested doing that. Not that it's a bad idea. The current game book is a bit more on the side of a specific setting than a generic Swords & Planet book, so a few more cool tidbits would be fine. A gazzeteer approach would probably be best. But one has to keep priorities in mind, a cool adventure should be done first
Since the first post here, I've been reading the game material a bit more thoroughly and really have to say that this is a nice product. Well done!
I kinda like the gonzo madness of Encounter Critical, but this is a more streamlined product, where the rules fade into the background and the possibilities for decent adventuring are definitely there.

"return from darkness..."

Just found this, and bumping this thread because I think Zoon is awesome.

Wonder if a PM to the author would spark him up to talk more about his game.

His website has an e-mail so I've contacted him that way to say discussion is underway here - I'm hoping that isn't too intrusive...

Cheers,
BSJ.

As you can see I received that e-mail
What can I add? UTMOZ is a very little game so there's not very much I can add:

Playtesting has not been intensive, and that's one of the reasons I'm not offering it as POD.
I've actually played UTMOZ a couple of times plus the few times I tested the game it stems from.
Nonetheless I've recently made a couple of changes to action checks introducing open-ended rolls.
I'm still not sure about psionics, and I probably should clarify mass combat.
Still I'm a lazy SOB and hate writing, so it may take me some time/years to actually do that.

Granted -of course- I get some testing done meanwhile.

Over the course of time some people have contacted me to make sporadic (and mostly favorable) comments.
I know those people played at least one-shots, but when I asked for some feedback -or even write ups of the adventures they played to publish along with the rules- I've only had vague responses or no response at all.

Anything else I can do for you guys?

Well, I thought it was a great setting, really good artwork and system - one of the best free RPGs I've seen, and I've certainly paid money for worse.

I suppose my only specific system question would be why skills are valued at 1/2/4 for basic/expert/master, rather than 1/2/3, I suppose. And maybe consider renaming the "purple moon of Zartru"...
Mass combat/psionics looked pretty good really to me. It does seem like a PC can positively influence how their side fares in battle without it being too much. Perhaps the way a PC can be taken out by a unit casualty result might seem unfair to a player on the receiving end. Psionics - I'll have to look over more before I can try and helpfully nitpick Maybe 'astral projection' and 'possession' should be separate powers.

I chose a 1/2/4 progression because I wanted a Master level skill to have a bigger impact.
I think that high levels of skill should have a heavy influence, in this way a character with Body 2 and master level skill can hold his own against an unskilled guy with Body 6.
Actually it's a sort of compromise, I would have liked for skill levels to have a higher impact.
The problem was that I wanted UTMOZ to use small numbers and a simple system, so that a newbie could play it with little or no effort.

Mass combat: well, it is not that I don't like what I wrote, it's just that the whole chapter has a messy presentation. Regarding player casualty: war is hell, guys! Remember that PCs have Epic points though.

Psionics: in the playtest sessions I run we had a min/maxed psionicist. He did not have a huge impact, but my impression is that he could have.
I'm toying around with the idea of lowering the psi-points reserve.
My intention was for Psionics to be powerfull at high levels but that it should not dominate the game.
This is intended to be a Barsoom pastiche, not a D&D one.

Best regards

artikid

OK...well, even +3 on 2d6 is a fairly big jump (average 7, and chance of higher or lower rolls falls off quite quickly). Other options could be to have four levels of skill +1 to +4, or have an untrained penalty (say -2 penalty if you don't have the skill, for some skills). Or you could reduce the range of attributes to 1-5 or even 1-4 so that attribute doesn't have such a dramatic effect.

On increasing effects of skills: I suppose they could have other effects beyond the bonus, anything from choose to specialty giving another +1, to letting characters reroll on 11-12 as well as 12, to unlocking special uses for Epic Points (or something).

OK fair enough on the mass combat! I hadn't factored in epic points either.
I could see a chart or something to see if characters get captured, or lost and believed dead, but I suppose that could be a matter of GM intervention.

And..Psionics: I'm not sure if I'm reading the psicrystal rules right but if a character somehow has Cannibalize, Regeneration, and a Psicrystal they can activate the psicrystal to regenerate 2x [1 power level + attunement level of crystal] hit points for 1 Psi point, then cannibalize those for half that many psi points - giving them infinite psi points - and HP? Or is a psicrystal limited use? (Hmm...also Psychosurgery could also do this in place of Regenerate - actually that seems to be just better than Regenerate since you can use it on others).

Pg 49.."Any character touching an attuned crystal..receives a number of d6 of damage...". Is the psion who owns the crystal exempted from this?

Warp: time travel is potentially a game buster. 'If its 1 century in the past or future..." can this be used to time travel anything up to that distance e.g. before the princess was kidnapped to destroy the GM's adventure? Possibly specify how accurate/inaccurate this is meant to be.

Boost: doesn't look very useful as it adds to an attribute but also causes a -2 on all rolls while its Maintained. At best you can get a +2 to one stat and a -2 on all other rolls for 4 points.

Sacrifice: should probably specify that the creature killed should be sentient (or at least noteworthy), to limit it to Bad Guys rather than PCs with backpacks full of fluffy bunnies...

Precognition: why Epic Points here rather than the usual psi points?

Psi Index can be very expensive at up to 6 attribute points, but doesn't seem to do anything unless a character also buys the Psionicist skill.  A possible trap in character generation since its just a waste of points initially - indeed, even the example character suffers from this.
Potentially you could at least use Psi Index for psionic defense (I think currently e.g. with Mind Reading the defender uses Presence?).