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My petals are wilting
My physical health isn't too good today, which didn't help with my project progress, or
actually just finishing the setup. But on the other hand, it also meant that I didn't use
my regular for-work system as much...
Which meant that I had some time for reading and research.
Looking at old role-playing games
My premise for the project accompanying this year's OCC is making a small tabletop RPG
that would've fit Y2K-era Pinkdaisy-me. As with many Germans, I started out with
Das Schwarze Auge a game that started out as a kind of German Tunnels & Trolls,
with plenty of solo adventures and anything-goes mentality, but got increasingly
"naturalistic", influenced by games like HarnMaster. But in the late 90s, it was still
stuck in a level-based rule system, never mind people got tired of a setting where it
seems they knew every square mile. Still, quasi-realism certainly had a big impact on me.
Another influence was the trend away from fantasy systems that we saw a lot in the 1990s.
The World of Darkness games with its vampires and werewolves were a big thing, as
was cyberpunk, mostly manifested by Shadowrun in my circles. After being someone
who ran games a lot, both games were ones where I participated more as a player. And both
games had interesting world-building beyond what I know. I didn't agree with all of them
and generally never got around to really liking either game line, but they were still on
my mind a lot
The third big factor in play here is the internet, of course. There was a lot of
discussion about the major players and all the aforementioned games on the first forums
and Usenet -- I remember asking US gun nuts about a few things not obvious to most
Europeans for the sake of more realistic Shadowrun game play. But we also found the first
attempts at homebrew games distributed over the internet. For the sake of this project,
I want to point out three particular games:
- Fuzion - This was the proposed merger of the systems for the Cyberpunk 2020 game
(recently the basis for a very successful video game), and the HERO line of superhero
games. I didn't knew the latter back then, but there was a free PDF with a somewhat fancy
layout and quite "realistic" rules with a "plugin" system. Very suited for IT nerds.
(System still
available at one of the publishers)
- FUDGE - One game not mentioned directly here is GURPS, the "Generic Universal
Roleplaying System", for years the pinnacle of "realism" in the tabletop realm, and known
for rather finicky and science-oriented rules (and boy, this only got worse in the new
millennium with its fourth edition). One author of a few well-received GURPS products
already decided that he wanted something as generic, but less fiddly, and came up
with FUDGE. It had some rather unique rules, but very importantly here: There was a
text version distribution on networks, with decent usage rights (which only got better
afterwards), so this would both be period-correct and would allow me to release whatever
I do nowadays. (The 1992 version is
available on textfiles, the author's
pages are very low-tech and thus easily viewable by OCC participants)
- Mystic Earth - The odd duck here. While both Fuzion and FUDGE were somewhat
popular and still around, this game is known to relatively few. As a matter of fact, I
looked for it a couple of years ago, only to find a forum thread I started as one
of the first links. This I found on some BBC or "Fido Net" before even going on the proper
interwebs, and it came packaged as a DOS application! Basically a primitive text mode
hypertext viewer, with the page data included. And there was a lot of data. The author
tried to create a hidden magical version of our earth, similar to how White Wolf was doing
it with their World of Darkness games (especially "Mage"). But then every magical tradition,
both real world (chaos magic, shamanism) or quite fantastical ("Darkover" magic, elves etc)
was present. At times, it certainly didn't age well, I'm pretty sure the Romani got the
shaft once again with the magical "g-word" tradition.
(ZIP file with DOS app at archive.org)
The RPGs that are forming the basis for this experiment
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Alchemical wedding
My plans are to build something out of these influences:
- The realism of Fuzion.
- The rules skeleton of FUDGE.
- The world-building and hypertext of Mystic Earth.
...but also add my own design issues in line with the PinkDaisy persona, at least my
pink-tinted version of it. I'm still brainstorming those, but as a more prominent
feature, it won't be set in a version of our world, but a fantasy setting.
Tomorrow I'll talk a bit more about the technical aspects, what editor I ended on, what
TexInfo is all about etc.
What I did today
- Re-arranged my room. To create a desktop setup, you first have to build the universe.
- Played around with editors.
- Read a bit more of "Tomoe Gozen". I should read this way faster, I either blame the
whole world, undiagnosed mental issues or just the fact that I'm not that well today.
- Tried to get Dosbox running on the T60, to checek Mystic Earth. Not done yet.
- Found that w3m is quite neat. I think I discovered this half a dozen times in the last
decade or so.
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