So, rather, here's one page to archive all of the m20 games that I've developed and still doing something with, or at least want to keep preserved and handy. Other games I may have worked on the past not linked here tend to be lost; either they were on a wikispaces page, which crashed, or they weren't saved, or something. They may still be lingering around on the hard drive of the old desktop computer that I don't get on very much anymore (and actually, they probably are; I should make a point of seeing what I've got archived there and putting it on one of my portable drives) and if it turns out that they are, well, I can always update this page with links to them, I suppose.
Anyway, without further ado, here's the games, mostly m20 games, that I've developed over the years that are still available online.
DARK FANTASY X
The main rules set, for my main game, which has replaced the various Dark•Heritage game.
DARK•HERITAGE HACK
Based on Old School Hack, Red Box Hack and DINO PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND rather than m20. It was an earlier rules-lite approach that I flirted with, and still quite like in many ways, before discovering and migrating to m20. I actually thought I had lost this game entirely, but I rediscovered it lurking as a pdf archive of an old wiki I had created on the hard drive of my old desktop PC that I don't even log into very often anymore.
DARK•HERITAGE
The original purpose of this blog (which is why the blog has the title that it does, naturally.) This long-running and often evolved setting comes in two flavors. The first Dark•Heritage ruleset is my very first attempt to make an m20 game at all. It's available here.
Of course, that is now very out of date as both the rules and the setting have had major upheavals since. The new Dark•Heritage is strongly impacted by the Fantasy Hack rules, and should probably be referenced instead. But, since the first edition is still available on Google Docs, there's no reason not to link to it, right?
And just for the heckuvit, here's my really out of date d20 Modern houserules document that I once made as the definitive ruleset to represent the setting. I actually went back and forth between this one and a heavily houseruled d20/D&D variation, but I never actually made a decent archived pdf of those rules (or if I did, I don't remember what I've done with it; I probably didn't, because it never completely solidified.) Anyway, although I now don't even recommend any d20 game for my setting (or any other setting, quite honestly), the files are sitting around out there online, so there's no reason not to show them to you.
STAR WARS REMIXED
Long, long ago, on a discussion forum far, far away, I talked about "remixing" the Star Wars setting to be something I'd like to play in. Basically, it involved advancing the timeline considerably so I could posit major political and social changes—although what it did was basically make the kinds of stories told in the Original Trilogy and Knights of the Old Republic easier, actually. Knights of the Old Republic was the major inspiration; if they could find fertile ground by going 3,000 years (or however many it was) into the past, I could do so by going 1,000 years into the future. Later works that followed this initial idea, like the Star Wars Legacy comic books and the Old Republic MMO/RPG influenced it as it developed. At the time, I wasn't specifically looking to create new rules, but after playing with my old group in a 3e-derived houserule set, I decided that I really needed them after all. The D&D-like paradigm, at least especially as shown in 3e, was too constrained, punitive and tactical; it absolutely did not encourage, and in fact actively discouraged, exactly the kind of swashbuckling action that the movies are famous for. So, I took m20 and made my own version of the rules.
CULT OF UNDEATH
This system is one that I developed when I decided specifically that I wanted a more D&D-like experience out of m20, but not one of the m20 models already in existence, which were too... traditional, I guess. Because it was developed specifically for an adaptation of a Paizo adventure path that I was going to modify extensively, I wanted a D&D-like m20 that was geared very specifically towards that kind of horror vibe. This is now out-of-date too, because this is the system that got expanded into Fantasy Hack, but because it's online and "frozen", there's no reason not to link to it.
FANTASY HACK
I was happy enough with Cult of Undeath that I decided to expand it into a full-blown alt-D&D, with rules that were specifically m20 in nature, but a format that was loosely modeled on the B/X books, including appendices for wilderness exploration, a small sample setting, etc. The small sample setting was the setting, an alternative to Paizo's Ustalav, but utilizing similar themes, that I developed for Cult of Undeath. In an odd case of full-circling, this Cult of Undeath setting started converging more and more with a region in the Dark•Heritage setting, and the two have now officially become the same thing. I guess it would be fair to say that Dark•Heritage 2 is the final (for now) evolution of this same stream, but Fantasy Hack still stands alone as a slightly more generic take on the idea of "what would I want D&D to look like if I were designing it myself?"
AD ASTRA
If it seems like I'm going back and forth, it's because I'm trying to do this chronologically. My m20 game development timeline looks like the following, actually:
- Dark•Heritage
- Star Wars Remixed
- Cult of Undeath
- Fantasy Hack
- Ad Astra
- Dark•Heritage 2
But I've got to talk about Dark•Heritage 2 as part of Dark•Heritage, even though it's really an evolution of Fantasy Hack and Dark•Heritage being merged. Ad Astra, on the other hand, is a development out of Star Wars Remixed; what happened when I decided to actually divorce myself from the Star Wars setting and go my own way with the rules I'd developed. The rules (and even moreso the setting) eventually started diverging a fair bit, and while I've not been working on this recently, it's also not quite done. The rules are, but the rules document includes the setting in this case, so it's best (for now) to refer you to the webpage rather than the document. One of these days, I'll need to figure out how to keep those straight, but here it is.
3 comments:
I came across your blog a few weeks ago, and have been catching up and following your Ad Astra posts with interest. If you get to the point you're ready to publish, I'd like to offer assistance with editing. Let me know if you're interested, and I can send you more information about my experience.
Seems like the link to the Star Wars Remixed document is broken? (Leads to just a character sheet instead.)
Whoops! Fixed.
Post a Comment