We've been thinking a lot lately on what we're going to do for CyberGeneration 3.0. We really want the game to do well and a new sourcebook is just step one in this process. The game was over 15 years old and desperately needed a new face and a little bit of clean up to make the game feel a little more immersive.
Here are some thoughts that we're exploring right now and I'm going to share them to see what people think, if there are any left over after the Game Chef thing. =p
1. Two Books instead of one.
No, I'm not going the Burning Wheel wrote which required you to buy the Character Burner and the Burner ... Burner to play the game. That I found frustrating, coupled with the fact that there were some skills that required the Monster Burner to use which just upped that level of WTFery, and annoying and is still one of the reasons why it sits on my shelf gathering dust. However, that is neither here nor there.
What we want to do is put forth a rule book with what you need to play, the rules, the setting in brief, some characters, some yogangs, some gear and go. The price point will hopefully be 15.00$ and you can buy that and get right into the game.
The second book would go more indepth. It would add more yogangs, it would add more detail to the setting but what it won't have are any rules on how to play the game. The reason for that is you would have already purchased the main book to buy the second one, or you already have a copy of second edition that you want to play it with. Hell, chances are you could probably play the game with a fair bit of tweaking in any system that you want.
2. Instead of Sourcebook we'd do a "Magazine Subscription"
Not that it would really be a subscription, but that is an idea, but instead of doing a sourcebook we'd do a magazine update where there are a pile of different options that you can get, information and flavour and gear and the run down of what's going on without having to have it be too centralized. It's kinda like the Eden Cabal itself, decentralized.
At the end of the year we could slap the pdfs together and make it into a book, organized by type of information. Say that if you bought all 4 pdfs, you'll get the book for free or something like that.
Good ideas? Bad ideas? Thoughts, comments, concerns?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
INDIE PRESS REVOLUTION
Posts
3 comments:
I really like the concept of a mechanics book and a setting book.
The original game seemed really connected, mechanics with setting, but I suppose you could put general equipment in it, show what defines a yogang, a few examples of yogangs, stuff like that.
What makes it cool for me is then the economic and political details, ecological details, cultural details, and most especially details about what the carbon plague is, can be left up to individual groups, so if you want to play in a world like the cannon setting, with cybernetics and the carbon plague only affects humans, that's fine. If you want to play in a world like Greg Bear's Blood Music, where the nanotech is taking ecosystems (including people) apart to build new creatures, but there were no cybernetics, that's cool too. Any world where the characters are children on the run from people they threaten with their mere presence on the bleeding edge of transhumanism is cool.
Then the second book is proper setting details, brand name stuff, detailed write-ups of a dozen or more yogangs, socio-political stuff, ecological stuff, some rules maybe, but more just examples on how you use this stuff in the rules presented in the first book. If someone wants, they could buy this book just for the setting and play Misspent Youth or something if they want. That kind of thing.
Hopefully, you'll read this and think, that's exactly what I was going to do, or yeah, that makes it even more crystal clear in my mind. But if you read this and think, that's impossible, the setting and rules were too tied together to make a clean split like that, then just do what you feel.
That's exactly what I was going to do. ^_^
In a fit of being more serious I was thinking of that kind of split. The first book will have what you need to play the game including a list of the yogangs, but it will have a quick run down and the skills.
The second book will go further in depth as to what's going on and you can use it with any rules that you want.
My one concern is that it's going to feel too nWoDy. Where you need that one book to play the rest of it.
Post a Comment