This new rule set is now entitled The Adventure Cycle. I’ve been a bit ruthless pulling out various mechanisms, to make available later as plugins. Here is the state of play for finishing up the text for the rules.
The Progress Track Using the Table of Contents
The things marked off have had some substantial play testing, as we are running four streams of play testers in groups of 3 to 6. Next up its pulling it all together into a PDF.
The development of the core rules and toolkits has followed a principle of agile / lean production. Large chunks of work broken down into smaller, doable modules, where customer reaction could be used to adjust the design of the existing and future components. This next slab of work will go the same way.
Here is the index to the Open Table Chassis – Fantasy as it has been cobbled together so far. Each section is mainly notes or bullet points in the actual document, although some is more fleshed out, having been used to play test the combat toolkit.
In order to get something out in a reasonable time this needs to be broken into parts, with plug in points in the core chassis for those parts to connect to.
Pulling out the magic stuff is a first item. That is getting fairly well developed but there is no point finishing it without the chassis being out there.
The Quest system is also a good candidate for break out, although its a really great and important part of the concept, the chassis can work without it. There is also a dependency from the Magic mechanics to the Quest System so the Quest System will need to get finished first.
The last 6 items in the index are all works taking the Chassis forward in more detail and adding content, so they can wait till further down the line.
The basic structure stays: Village Start, The Adventure, Village Return. The concept of reputations is important and the details for hireling and companion reputations stay, other reputations will be added to the relevant modules, such as quest reputation.
The adventure as an objective could be moved out to accompany the quest stuff, but its better if that remains in, along with encounter zones, wonders and various bric-a-brak.
Socializing in general concept stays, but there are detailed elements associated with quests and magic that get moved out into those modules.
Stuff about searching and spotting and hiding and evading should all end up in the toolkit that focuses on such things, and be part of that toolkit set.
So here is a rough breakdown.
Further down the track, we will be pulling the whole system together into a single print product, and creating an Open Game License System Reference Document for the core rules.
This is a sample of the first page for All Us Gamers – Inner Core Rules. It looks really nice. Phaedra has worked tirelessly on graphics, layout, and colour coordination.
Unfortunately you probably won’t ever see this released. Why? Two reasons.
The first is that the first release is a free pdf with the base inner core rules. That means people are going to want to print the rules out on their home printer. I printed these pages as an experiment and it killed my toner.
The second is that this layout is for A4. Everyone outside America uses A4 as a standard. Sadly US Letter is the paper size of choice for role playing games due to the US market.
You can see some discussion I have been having about this at RPGGeek.
All Us Gamers Role Playing Game 