A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step

In an effort to both increase my blogging and give myself incentive to actually finish a project, I am going to proceed to live blog my progress in developing a new game. Assuming that I can finish it, I will then put it together as a PDF and try and distribute it. Maybe even sell it, but I doubt it. In the process of doing this, I am very interested to get feedback as we go. Comments are love, people.

OK, some starting points. First, this is going to be d20 variant. Think of it as my own entry into the market already dominated by True20, FantasyCraft, and Pathfinder. Why am I challenging such a saturated market? The simplest reason is that d20 is the system I know best. I have done development and playtesting for it for about ten years now, plus spent quite a bit of time playing it. It is also a system that I happen to really like. Done well, it is excellent for supporting all sorts of conflicts. It has lots of moving parts that allow different characters to really engage with the system in different ways. I can balance it relatively easily. It has a relatively simple core set of mechanics that can be extended in nearly an infinite number of ways.

Second, it is going to use my Seven Kingdoms setting, that I have blogged about before. Check the list of tags on the left there if you don't believe me. However, I'm going to be tweaking what I've done just a bit. I am going to very intentionally shoot for "swashbuckling supers" as the genre mash-up here. The time period is roughly equivalent to 17th Century Europe. Rapiers and crossbows are typical weapons (there are no guns smaller than a cannon). Full plate has fallen out of style. There is a significant middle class that is coming to power. Oh, and there are a lot of pirates. I'll get into more details in a later post.

My favorite d20 implementation happens to be Classic Spycraft. If you are familiar with that, you are going to see a lot of elements in common. However, there are going to be some major departures, as well. For one thing, I really want to import Aspects from FATE. I need an overhauled system for gear (I like it to be more abstract than cash, but really dislike d20 Modern's Wealth checks, and Spycraft's system presumes you work for an organization).

What else do you need to know? What else, specifically, would you like to see?