(March RPG candidate)

I leant on the rail, watching the stars spin on by underneath me. The mist was lifting. Finally. The captain had been crazied up by the weather, probably because it has screwed up his efforts at navigation. For all his bluster, I'd probably spent more hours at sea than him. Seems like anyone with the flash to buy a boat these days fancies himself as some kind of helmsman.

There was shouting from the crew; another vessel had been sighted beneath us. I slammed a carabina onto one of the rails loops and let myself fall over the side. Sure enough, two white sails and a distant flash of light. I climbed the rope back up onto the deck just in time for that kid to run into me.

"What's going on?" he wailed, eyes wide.

"Just a little piracy," I grunted, "Nothin' we can't handle."

A beam of light flashed past us, then one of the masts fell down in a tangle of ropes. The lad looked fit to piss himself. Called himself a mage but I'd be surprised if he was more than a month out of apprenticeship. Guess lasers were more than he could handle.

I span the chambers of my trusty .357. I'd been getting antsy, and this looked just the thing to let me stretch my legs. The pirate ship had risen alongside us and its crew was preparing to board us.

Worse luck for them, really.

It's a tough one, but I think it would have to be Fall-From-Grace from Planescape: Torment.

I've gone over to Google+ for the voting this time, as I think there are more interested parties there these days. Vote here.

There are many difficulties that face an emperor of a vast evil interstellar empire. Planets that need subjugating or destroying. The ever-present threat of a rebellion. Unreliable troops and scheming minions.

But none more challenging than having to live in a house-share in Coventry with the rulers of other, rival empires. They are not always reliable with their share of the gas bill. Someone keeps leaving the milk out of the fridge.

But by the Eye of Dread, you will endure. And find out who keeps leaving dead rebel leaders in the recycling.

So, I have approximately 90,000 words of novel, most of which I am reasonably happy with.

At some point, I intend to submit it to a publisher or an agent or something.

It's a sci-fi adventure yarn, in one of those rare far-future settings with niether Utopia nor a return to feudalism. It's a bit polticky in places, but I hope not too leadenly so. I also tried to inject more than a small amount of humour.

Would anyone be interesting in reading it? You don't have to be intimidated by the length; it is doesn't hold your interest for very long, then that's also valuable feedback.

It's November, when I generally participate in National Novel Writing Month. I've enjoyed it, but have been wondering if there's something else I can do with it. I've got three novellas set in the same universe out of it from previous years, and I think I stand a decent chance of polishing one of them up for potential publication. On the other hand, National Game Design Month also runs in November, and by now I know I can do that in my sleep.

Poll #1787534 Novelmber?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 10

What should I do in November?

So, all of the freshers chose the traditional D&D, CoC or Paranoia option. Annalise was popular, too, which was promising. So in the end I ran for some old hands who didn't have a slot in any of the other games.

Every time I run Ring of Changes I like it just that bit more. The pregens really worked well. There was some problem solving, applying the rules of alchemy in the game to the problem of an irate fire alchemist climbing the stairs to kill you because you attempted to assassinate him. There were a couple of stand up, knock down fights. I drew the characters in by tugging at their Most Important Things mercilessly. The Hermetic Alchemist, in destroying some chimera in the villain's hidden lab, unwittingly destroyed the mind of another character's sister, leaving a wolf's mind in her body. The other character did not respond well when the soldier executed the beast/woman to put it/her out of its/her misery. But that allowed him to key off the loss of one of his most important things, turning him into a powerhouse that held the line while the alchemists flooded the staging ground for the Evil Plan. The villain could only be killed when his phylactery, his pocket watch, was destroyed. The Hermetic alchemist could then fulfil her oath of vengeance against another alchemist, and in the end the Colonel simply had his men shoot everyone involved as highly suspicious, except for the apprentice alchemist who had remained blameless.

Not bad for four hours' play, all in all. I might keep this scenario as a con game, as it seems juicy enough.

Ideas sandbox #2: Another potential RPGiaM is 'Last Flight of the Nukumanu'. The concept is something like Pitch Black- crashed ship on an alien world that will soon prove to be hostile.

This is a bit of a weird one, because the idea is that almost everything is pregenerated- characters, places on the planet, everything. But which pregens are chosen by the players and which dangers are in play change from game to game.

The basic mechanic is that you roll dice according to the emotional intensity of the scene for your character - 2d6 for calm, 2d8 for angry, 2d10 for desperate. If you fail, you always have the option of upping the emotional intensity and trying again- if you're desperate, you stay so but can roll again. This applies for rolls against hazards (a fixed difficulty given in the place description) and in altercations with other PCs - leading to escalating tension. For each 1 you roll when you're angry, you drag someone else into the conflict. For each 1 you roll when you're desperate, you take damage. You only lose tension by leaving the scene- encouraging players to split up more than they would otherwise do in a survival horror type game.

Each character has some HP-like stats which deplete with damage, a special skill that rolls 3d6 and fits between angry and desperate but can only be used sometimes, and a reason why they are ambivalent about fixinf the Rescue Beacon- not enough for them to seriously consider dooming themselves and everyone else, necessarily, but a reason hy they might want to delay help arriving or try to put things on their terms first.

When I write up the blurbs for prospective RPG-in-a-month project, I usually only have a rough idea as to what the mechanics might be. The atmosphere or core activity of the game is vivid in my mind, but the specifics have yet to be decided upon. As the vote wears on, ideas will form or previous systems considered for appropriateness.

These are my thoughts so far on 'Leanheart Edge', one of the recent candidates (http://queex.livejournal.com/205280.html). The premise is a low- to mid-fantasy game where the player group are lords and captains given charge of a dilapidated fortress, with the goal to make it thrive and hold off enemy forces.

Each character is picked from a portfolio provided in the book, a la AW. These templates provide a history and the character's role in the politics of the setting. Each comes with a set of attributes, which may be tweaked with free points within a narrowly-defined set of options.

There is no standard list of attributes, rather each character has a set of descriptive ones most of which will be unique to that character- "Master Archer", "Third Imperial Army", "Strategic Genius" and so on. Each is rated as a single die, from d4 to d12.

Tasks are assigned a risk. Personal tasks have a risk from 1 to 3, tasks that affect the fortress' fate run from 3 to 5. The risk determines both how many attributes must be put at risk (equal to the risk), and what the target number is (risk * 5). Characters must justify the use of their attributes for personal tasks. For group tasks, no character can contribute more than 2 dice, and again all attributes must be justified somehow.

If the roll meets the difficulty, the task succeeds. If the roll fails by 5 or less, the task fails unless one of the attributes put at risk is 'stressed', in which case it is a success. If the rolls fails by more than that, then a number of attributes must be 'stressed', depending on the margin (in chunks of 5, naturally). After that, then there is still the option to stress an attribute to claim a success.

After a suitable 'rest', the 'stressed' condition on an attribute is removed. If an already stressed attribute is stressed again, then it is permanently reduced by one step.

That's the meat of it. I'm not sure whether the fortress itself should have attributes, or whether it only has the attributes that the characters provide it with.

Any thoughts?

Merchants' Reach is finished, 52 pages of glory.