Thank you Vile!

Quote from: Spinachcat;510312So what's on the horizon in 2012 for SWN?

Do you have any plans for a SWN magazine?

Any plans to publish adventures?

As Vile mentioned, some time-generous fans put together Infinite Stars as an excellent SWN fanzine, and the Facebook page is something I wouldn't have the time to manage myself. As a one-man operation with a day job, I'm more or less in the position of zero-sum scheduling; anything I want to do means giving up something else.

For 2012, late spring or early summer will see Other Dust, a standalone companion game to SWN. It's going to cover Terra circa 200 years after the Scream, giving a setting and framework for post-apocalyptic sandbox gaming. It'll have all the customary trappings of the genre- nanomutations, scavenged tech, crazed raiders, hardscrabble survivor enclaves, and so forth, but what I really want to explore with it are some techniques for leveraging world creation. I want the least amount of GM creative effort to create the maximum amount of good table material. Some of this is already getting explored in An Echo, Resounding, which is a campaign region creation/domain management/mass combat sourcebook for Labyrinth Lord that should be coming out as soon as the proofs come in mid-month.

As for adventures, Hard Light is already available for folks who want to ease in with a an old-fashioned site-based exploration adventure with a developed home base. Polychrome is mostly tools for doing cyberpunk with SWN with the core book world of Polychrome as the worked example, but it's got a short adventure in there. I've been entertaining ideas for another adventure revolving around the world of Hutton and the not-so-straightforward rescue of a Gateway senator and his daughter in the clutches of the perfidious Everlasting, but that's on the back burner right now.

After Other Dust, I'll likely be turning my attention to mercantile campaigns, doing them up the same way that Skyward Steel did naval ones and Darkness Visible did espionage. More free Mandate Archives can be expected, and I'll probably get five or six of those out over the course of the next year.

And way at the back of the back burners, I've got this niggling, goading little curiosity in my head about what the results would be like if you wrote an absolutely over-the-top, epic-heroes-dodging-sunshine-and-juggling-angry-ninjas game a la Exalted, but built it on an old-school framework. What would happen if you shoveled all the mechanical cruft overboard and just focused on the fact that PCs are ungodly scary people who can do almost anything they please up until they run into other ungodly scary people?

I think a situation like that is just crying out for a sandbox perspective in a game. Exalted tried something like that, but the global sandboxing didn't work; it had an uber-crunchy Charm framework that could shove around cities full of people and remake geography overnight, but all that uber-crunchiness went instantly fuzzy as soon as GMs and players tried to interface things. The Mandate of Heaven domain rules and the mass combat rules simply did not work as advertised, so you ended up with PCs who'd forged epic marvels and invincible legions in their hometowns but had no mechanical certainty in how they actually affected anything. There was no coherent continuum of mechanical effects from the individual to the global. Thus, the ultra-dense individual conflict systems turned into mark-1 eyeballing above the individual level, and I think the dissonance hurt.

But for now I've just got it in the mental cupboard as something to try after I'm tired of working on SWN. I've still got to get this cover finished for An Echo, Resounding, and then I'll send it and the bookblock off for proofing.

Quote from: SineNomine;510384And way at the back of the back burners, I've got this niggling, goading little curiosity in my head about what the results would be like if you wrote an absolutely over-the-top, epic-heroes-dodging-sunshine-and-juggling-angry-ninjas game a la Exalted, but built it on an old-school framework. What would happen if you shoveled all the mechanical cruft overboard and just focused on the fact that PCs are ungodly scary people who can do almost anything they please up until they run into other ungodly scary people?

I think a situation like that is just crying out for a sandbox perspective in a game. Exalted tried something like that, but the global sandboxing didn't work; it had an uber-crunchy Charm framework that could shove around cities full of people and remake geography overnight, but all that uber-crunchiness went instantly fuzzy as soon as GMs and players tried to interface things. The Mandate of Heaven domain rules and the mass combat rules simply did not work as advertised, so you ended up with PCs who'd forged epic marvels and invincible legions in their hometowns but had no mechanical certainty in how they actually affected anything. There was no coherent continuum of mechanical effects from the individual to the global. Thus, the ultra-dense individual conflict systems turned into mark-1 eyeballing above the individual level, and I think the dissonance hurt.

All of your plans sound great, but this one would really interest me - really just now getting into Exalted and I love the setting but the rules... eh, not so much. Not horrible, but could be done better I think.

Let me say that of all the things you could be doing, the Exalted type game would be the last thing I would buy.

What I'll send you pre-order money for today would be
Power Armor Rules
Mech Rules
anything else Sci-Fi you can think of.
Basically rounding out the stuff that would make SWN usable for all kinds of Sci-Fi goodness.

Quote from: CRKrueger;510805What I'll send you pre-order money for today would be
Power Armor Rules
Mech Rules
anything else Sci-Fi you can think of.
Basically rounding out the stuff that would make SWN usable for all kinds of Sci-Fi goodness.

No pre-ordering needed; the SWN Core Edition has rules for using and designing mechs and mech-based powered armor. Mongoose is selling it in hardcopy if you like it better that way. The core edition also includes a chapter on generating societies for the worlds you create and a chapter covering robots and AIs as PCs and NPCs.

Other Dust's content will also all be completely cross-compatible with SWN, so you'll be able to loot that for your radioactive hell-worlds and ancient Mandate tech caches. And just for fun, I've been mulling over putting out a short transhumanism supplement, largely for the entertainment value of running transhuman sci-fi in a system directly compatible with Keep on the Borderlands.

Quote from: SineNomine;510909And just for fun, I've been mulling over putting out a short transhumanism supplement, largely for the entertainment value of running transhuman sci-fi in a system directly compatible with Keep on the Borderlands.

I like your style. Finally did download SWN and made a character for fun - very smooth system.

Quote from: SineNomine;510909No pre-ordering needed; the SWN Core Edition has rules for using and designing mechs and mech-based powered armor. Mongoose is selling it in hardcopy if you like it better that way. The core edition also includes a chapter on generating societies for the worlds you create and a chapter covering robots and AIs as PCs and NPCs.

Other Dust's content will also all be completely cross-compatible with SWN, so you'll be able to loot that for your radioactive hell-worlds and ancient Mandate tech caches. And just for fun, I've been mulling over putting out a short transhumanism supplement, largely for the entertainment value of running transhuman sci-fi in a system directly compatible with Keep on the Borderlands.

Damnit, you bad man.

I'm trying to do game design over here and you go and link to another book I now want to read?

Bastard.  

Quote from: SineNomine;510909No pre-ordering needed; the SWN Core Edition has rules for using and designing mechs and mech-based powered armor. Mongoose is selling it in hardcopy if you like it better that way. The core edition also includes a chapter on generating societies for the worlds you create and a chapter covering robots and AIs as PCs and NPCs.

SOLD!

Quote from: SineNomine;510909largely for the entertainment value of running transhuman sci-fi in a system directly compatible with Keep on the Borderlands.

That's a transhumanist game I'd play.  :hatsoff:

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