State of D101 Games address 2008 pt1 : SimpleQuest

Its been a while since I’ve posted, and to be fair things slipped considerably in the run upto XMAS, with home and work taking up much of my time pretty much 100%. It taught me some hard lessions about how much freetime as a working father with young child actually has. This in turn has lead to some hard decisions being made.

So this is the first of four posts detailing where I’m I upto with the games/stuff I’m working on:

SimpleQuest
– My main focus at the moment. Looking at a March release. Slipped badly, due to SimpleQuest almost becoming ComplexQuest with lots of ‘clever’ rules almost being grafted into the draft. Ironic after spending alot of time stripping out some of the more twiddly parts of the MRQ SRD the game based on. Also I got an over inflated sense of the importance of the game. Suddenly in my head it became an all important project, my legacy to future rpgers…blah, blah , blah. Had a couple of weeks with that bouncing round my head. What a load of crap. Well heads are screwed back on again, back to basics – Take the MRQ SRD, rewrite the bits that don’t work for me, add a bit of user friendliness and approachability for people completely new to rpgs and GET IT DONE AND DUSTED.

Given myself the writing deadline of the end of Feb. Bad news this means Herodotus is not going to be part of the book.   Herodotus was begining to look more sense to do as a seperate supplement, so its likely that it will get picked up with this in mind in the second part of the year. Instead I’ve got a quick workable fantasy setting that I developed for a BRP game many moons ago which is going to make an appearance, along with a nice scenario I worked up this week while I was on holiday.

While I was on holiday I also got to grips with the section that was giving me the most fear and I skipped during the first draft. The Creatures section. First off i picked about fifty of the creatures from the MRQ Monsters SRD, which I believe will give a good start. Good classic Fantasy stuff; Elves, Dwarfs, Giants, Goblins etc. None of the Gloranthan creatures will be in SQ. Wrote up the descriptions of the Humaniod group (Goblins, Hobgoblins, Trolls, Orges) and felt 100% happy with it. So the final bit of development work has been done 🙂

So overall about 60% of the explanation/examples text is done, so its that difficult 40% where I wrap it all up that needs doing. Most of this is the GM advice section where the potential to go off into the deep end of pretentiousness and not resurface is huge. However since I already did this before XMAS, not planning on doing this again 😀

Good news is that my friend Simon Bray has come up with the goods and I’ve got a set of black and white illustrations for the interior 😀  Simon is also doing the cover as well. I’ll post some examples later.

So SimpleQuest is still on the way, despite my best attempts to sabotage it 😀

Next: The Shattered Lands

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Newt

Games Designer, Publisher, Web Developer, Dad.

One thought on “State of D101 Games address 2008 pt1 : SimpleQuest”

  1. Good stuff! I’ll be interested in seeing this when done – occasionally I ponder the idea of publishing for other systems, but what I’ve heard of MRQ has always put me off checking it out. (Plus the fact that I have plenty lined up to keep me busy anyway.)

    50 beasties sounds like a lot – I wouldn’t push yourself to do that many if you haven’t. It could be a later supplement if the core does OK – or folks could presumably just adapt from the Mongoose material.

    In general I think presenting the rules with just a small amount of setting as an example is going to do better.

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