25 June 2006

Doggone in 60 Seconds

So I'm living in Somerville MA (outside of Boston) now. Push is mostly done. Just have to add Brand's comments and, hopefully, Mo's comments if she gets them to me soon. The book looks very pretty and awesome. I'm super-excited.

I've been working off and on on my Avatar-based game, Four Nations, trying to get it from my head onto paper, but I've been so busy with work and settling in that it's been slow. Still, I hope to have a playtest version in a couple weeks, after I send Push off for test-printing.

And now I'm starting to think about the kind of game I want to organize here. Dev's in the area, so I should definitely try to rope him in. I've met one crowd of local gamers through my housemate Katie, who just happens to play Buffy and 7th Sea, so I don't think finding a crew is gonna be hard. Someone on the local gaming bulletin board was requesting that I run some indie stuff for folks here, specifically Dogs, so I was thinking about a quick mod for doing another genre.

I said, "Maybe Firefly?"

They said, "Maybe 24?"

So now I'm thinking about a compromise, Doggone in 60 Seconds. You'd escalate from Talking -> Fighting -> Driving, with things getting more deadly as you go. You'd gain Burnout instead of Fallout. Shooting wouldn't be seperate from other actions. If you threaten someone while pointing a gun at their head, you roll some big dice for the gun, but it's still talking. If you shoot at someone during a fight or a car chase, roll those big gun dice, but it counts as either fighting or driving for determining Burnout.

The game would revolve around the same kinds of local issues that Dogs does, where your gang of racers/thieves tries to keep control of your own turf and expand into the turf of other groups. You could even use the Town Creation rules to create unrest among the city gangs, where the Status Quo (important for preserving the peace and preventing violence) is disturbed by the ambition and arrogance of local gang leaders. They start thinking that can do whatever they want, and this causes friction with other gangs and, eventually, all out gang war.

Your group would still be on the move, but not as much as in Dogs, since you might get kicked out of your home turf or even have to set up shop in a nearby city, but you're not gonna move from LA to Tokyo (though you could go for a visit).

In any case, it could definitely be fun. I think we could run it with minimal system tinkering, which is important. I have too many other projects to get involved in a full-blown system hack.

18 June 2006

Push Cover

06 June 2006

Push: The End is Near

I haven't had time to work on Avatar: Four Kingdoms recently, because I had to go to graduation at the school where I teach, drive 10 hours back to NC, and, more importantly, because the "guest commentary" for Push is mostly in. I'm working on the layout now and it looks HOT!



So the final Push PDF should be ready in another week or so, and from there I post the files to Lulu and we get some print samples to look over. Can ya dig it?