Game Writing

[ultranos]

auguris, you're going to hate me for this. Consider this fair warning.

One would think, with how steampunk is becoming more and more popular (er, according to it appearing suddenly in a weekly newspaper here. As my friend DMark said, "wait, does this mean we liked it before it was mainstream?"), that it would be easier to find media within the genre. Actually, scratch that. One would think that with some of the first great "sci-fi" novels being steam-driven (Jules Verne-inspired works, I'm looking at you), and with series like Neal Stephanson's Baroque Cycle, there would be a decent tabletop RPG system that uses steampunk.

Apparently, they're all either out of print or just plain suck. And no, DnD 3.5ed Eberron campaign setting doesn't quite fit the bill. Trust me, I've played it.

It's getting to the point where I'm getting ready to just throw my hands up in the air and say I'm going to write my own system. Actually, that might be the best way to go. I just need a decent idea of how/what to base the mechanics on. (A friend of mine is starting a campaign in the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 'verse, specifically one based on Persona 3. Combination of dice and essentially gin rummy...with tarot cards. Rules doc is about 12 pages, and it'll be neat to see if this works.) I'd just need to get off my phobia of writing mechanics for non-LARPs. This may be because I don't trust myself to have enough experience to draw on for tabletop mechanics, having only really played d20 and Shadowrun, while I've got a decent sense nowadays on what mechanics work or not for a LARP. Do I want to keep dice? Probably, because they're great for random number generation. But how everything interacts, what kinds of rules, etc? That's going to take some work. It'd be far, far easier to find a system that mostly does what I want and tweak it.

On the other hand, creating my own system for this allows me to make up all the rules and make the universe feel like a coherent...thing. And since I think for this game I want to focus a bit more on the role-playing aspect than mechanics god-modding, I can vastly simplify the rules and mechanics to force that aspect. Because the simple fact right now is that I can't find a rulesystem that will work for a world that is very steampunk, has Lovecraftian horrors lurking perhaps, but is set in essentially Boston circa modified 1950s or even modified present-day (modern technolgy, only steampunk. Yes, this means we have airships. Because airships are cool.) Some come close, but actually getting my hands on a rulebook might require a minor Act of God.

Then again, I can always put this on the backburner and work on "Pirates of Dark Matter" campaign setting, which I've been promising people. Also, on a minorly different note, I think I'm writing yet-another-LARP. Yeah, this always happens.