Okay, so I’ve decided to make an RPG.
Now what?
First steps are always the hardest, because you have a blank sheet of paper with nothing on it. When you try to think of anything, nothing is always the first thing you think of.
Pearls need sand, trees need seeds, every journey starts with a single step.
A little less than an hour later, Michael Donnahill stepped off the mag-train at the New Bath Airport, carrying a single briefcase and dressed in his lightest clothing. He had been cursing himself the entire trip, thinking about the lonely umbrella that sat next to the door in his apartment.
He had always traveled light. He had to; a government salary didn’t give him the resources to bring extra shoes or changes of clothing. Travel was expensive, and every pound counted. When it was possible, he didn’t even bother to bring his briefcase, opting instead to slip his computer in his pocket and be done with it. Packing, for Michael, could take hours as he inspected each shirt, sock, and toiletry to decide if he really needed to bring it.
This trip, however, had inhabited that rare paradox of being impossible to pack for and therefore easy to pack for. Michael knew nothing about what Antje wanted, except it was for more than just a drink. Free from the knowledge of what to expect, he was able to forego agonizing what to bring. Instead, Michael threw on the lightest clothing he had and stuffed an old jacket and tie in a side-bag. He could remote-terminal into his office if he needed to access information back at the EUSAA.
Sometimes, it’s the little things.
For example: when Michael Donnahill was seven, he saw the 2090 eclipse as it blacked out the sky over the English Isles of the EU, what was once called Great Britain before the food riots. He sat on a grassy hill on what his grandfather still called the Isle of Wight, surrounded by thousands of onlookers as they all stared up into the sky, wearing their thin black glasses.
It was moderately cloudy that day, but everyone could still see the dim burning disk as it was eaten away, sliver by sliver, behind the thick fog of clouds. Michael watched as the world grew darker and darker still, his heart racing as night fell faster and faster, until 4:56 on the twenty-third of September was as dark as midnight in winter.
Well, I’ve done it. I’ve decided to put my theory to the practice.
Woe to all who step down this dark path.
There’s a longstanding cliche about the separation betweeen theory and practice. Some people think about things, other people do things. “Those who can’t do, teach.” The bigotry and condescention between the two groups is just as longstanding; get a chemist or mathemetician talking about the differences between the “theoretical” and “applied” branches of their field, and watch the sparks fly.
Okay, let me first take a step back and say this unequivocally: I don’t think Errant Challenger is a bad game. This is a rhetorical device, yeah? Just go with it for a second.
Errant Challenger, by Fauix, is still in its Beta at time of writing. It’s a fairly straightforward system, easily graspable by most anyone familiar with RPGs.
It’s a bad RPG.
I mean, look at it! It’s not so much a rule-book as it is a word document exported to PDF. The cover is poorly structured AI mush. There’s no real setting, just a chunk of fantasy pablum. The system itself doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done twenty time over in different systems.
Damn my fingers, I never thought I’d write a journal like this. Not one for writing, me. Spent my life doing a bit of this and a bit of that, as they say. Never caught. Was always proud of that, nothing could ever get pinned on me. Now, here I am in the middle of the desert. Nothing but sand and wind. Going to die here, so might as well put down my life on paper. Some fool thing to do before the sun cooks me alive.
My name was Robert Chickering, though I never used it much. Always a different name, me. Took what I needed when I could from those who had too much, and kept what I had from those who wanted it. Traveled around a lot, from the Americas to Europe and even further east. Managed to always stay one step ahead of the law, got while the getting was good.
Against the Apocalypse, designed by Oleander Garden, is a game about war, last stands, isolation, and death. It is a game where the players are soldiers in a war against the Demiurge, who sends their hollowmen every Sunday in an attempt to kill the players. They have little in the way of supplies or hope, and the game will end the way all wars must, in death.
The game is, in a single (compound) word, Anti-narrative.
Divided into two parts — the fighting and the downtime — the game encourages the players to unfold their character’s lives in the manner things would happen, not should or could. The book asks players to be honest with both themselves and their imagined world: the goal is not to tell a story, but to simulate life.
Errant, published by Kill Jester, is a, quote: “rules light, procedure heavy, classic fantasy role-playing game in the vein of the first few editions of that role-playing game and its many imitators and descendants.”
Another one?
Not to complain, but the RPG medium is rife with OSR D&D-likes. Rife, I say. What is there to be gained with breaking down yet another one, when we could be talking about interesting games like Rosewood Abbey, LORDSWORN, Pine Shallows, Lumen Ryder Core, Edelweiss, The Long Shift, or All the While?
What is to be gained, I think, is purely an excuse to talk about that first line in the description: Rules-light, Procedure-heavy.
