News — Building an RPG

I’ve certainly spent a lot of years doing a lot of things inside the gaming field, each time trying to one-up my last project. That is the way evolution works, the seemingly organic investment of time and energy into making yourself and your products better. For me, this goes back to that first RPG, but there have been other projects outside the role-playing genre that have also captured my attention and time along the way. One of these is a card game I began toying with back in probably 1993. It has had many different incarnations over the last twenty...

I started playing Robotech in 1986/87 and it has been a game that helped define what it was for me to create worlds as a gamemaster.  Typically, science fiction doesn’t hold the draw for role-players like fantasy settings, and I firmly believe that is because of two key components that are absent in science fiction, those being dungeons and treasure hordes. Robotech is no different, it simply being about giant robots fighting alien invaders, but there was something about the game that resonated with both myself and my DM Mark Timm.  Mark and I became infatuated with the game, and...

Today I’m taking a bit of a divergence from my standard RPG art reviews because I wanted to talk a bit about building an RPG.  Recently, I had the possibility of a RPG project fall to me here at Art of the Genre and I have to say I’m struggling with it.  Not, per se, the creation of the system itself, but instead what I want from a game I’d take the time to build.  Back in 1985 I built my first RPG, a post-apocalyptic shout out to Mad Max called ‘Future Warrior’.  It had roughly a hybrid D&D base...