OpenQuest for the WIN!

Ok so its time for the monthly update and peak behind the scenes.

OpenQuest
is grinding to a conclusion. Hope was lost, Hope was refound:)    remains patient as ever during the final edit, the first part of which finished yesterday. Now a review of the document as a whole and production of the plain text version that will go on the website for developers and interested folk to download and use for free under the Open Gaming License. Of the course the first developer to use it will be me to produce the fully laid out version with Simon Bray’s charming artwork (which I’ll put together as a preview soon). 

The best news ever is that the game is going to be supported by Adventures/Campaigns a couple of months after its release 🙂  John Ossoway, author of Cthulhu Rising and fellow Mancunian Oxford Road Games Designer, previously ran a seven adventure RQ3 Conan adventure for his group earlier in the decade. The mad nutter actually wrote up all the adventures and recently submitted one of them for Hearts in Glorantha. The cogs in my mind started whirling in my mind and I realised that converted to OQ (a simple mater) and with the Conan IP filed off it would make an ideal OQ Adventure book. So the Savage North a 100 page book of adventures written and illustrated by John is on my release scedule, either late this year or early next. I’m going to be writing a mini setting for it, portions of which will be availiable for free under the OGL since its part of the setting that’s going to be in the core rule book.  John’s currently sending me adventures/maps as he finds them on his hard drive, were currently upto Adventure 3, and its all good old skool Sword and Sorcery action. Neil F will be especially pleased since I can extract one section from the lastest adventure I’ve been sent to form a demo adventures for cons. So look out for ‘Headless in the Mist’ at a con near you 🙂

I’m going to be pimping OQ and cheering it more that I’ve done in recent months. I guess part of my lack of joy was the release of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying last year, a very fine and well written game which pushes so many of my d100 buttons. I even went as far as making some quiet inquiries about getting a license to publish, but have found its well out of my reach and would be the worst kind of vanity publishing. After a short sulk I got my head sorted and realised in OQ I have the BRP I want and for FREE. No licensing fee for either myself or anyone else 🙂  So this puts a couple of projects back on the table, which was one of the objectives for OQ from the beginning, that it forms the basis for more D100 nonsense if I want to.  I also know of a couple of small publishers who are interested in using OQ so I’ll be putting more effort into supporting their efforts from now on.  In short OQ is the WIN and its time for me to tell you the great gaming public that and stop being bashful to the point of despondency.

I get to play the game this weekend with my regular Sunday Group. A bit of last miniute playtesting of the adventure ‘The Road less travelled’ that will be included with the core book.  Will be very interesting to play since its a very different and streamlined beast since I last run it.  It will also be nice to play a trad game after all the narratist nonsense we’ve been running latly (HeroQuest, Otherworlds, Wordplay and even Cortex which powers Battlestar Galactica to an extent)

One bad bit of news is that since the editing has been longer than expected, though no fault of the valiant  this probably pushes the games’ full release to May/June. It will be all the better for it for it will be a complete game, core rules, setting and adventure.

More concreate news soon. My excitement over OpenQuest is back 🙂