Shards of Thimbral update, combined arms.

Those  of you who read this blog.. I’m talking to both of you… may have noticed it has been a kind of slow around here as of late.

I have to blame that on end of the winter blahs. I have a very strong desire to suck up some sunlight as soon as I can and get back on track.

I am SO pale.

With that in mind I want to talk about a change in direction.

Over the winter I worked on Shards of Thimbral, and play tested it a couple of times. I really like the game, everyone who played seemed to enjoy it.  

Here are some of those posts:

Post 1: Play test 2

Post 2: Stalled Progress

I appreciate all of the fed back from these, if any of you see this, thank you.

The feedback and comments, were not all positive, and I don’t think that’s because the people commenting would not enjoy the game if they played it. I think it’s as much if not more because I have had a hard time communicating my design goals. There is also the very real chance that it did suck and was broken, but to be very honest I have not played it enough with enough different people to be able to tell. With the very best of intentions I designed a “story game” type of mechanic that even though it seemed to work well at the table, was difficult to describe clearly, and to be honest lead to more confusion that it may be worth.  Never marry a game mechanic.

The truth via Mario

Let’s bounce subjects, please forgive the digression. In the middle of working on Shards I had a conversation with some friends about random things and charts in role playing games and how much we love them. Over the ensuing weekend, this thought became “Amazing Adventurers and Incredible Exploits.” (AIEE) It’s a game of the “B team” heroes of the world going off on very random adventures.  I wrote the game in a weekend and did not agonize over at all, it was a just for kicks process. We played it and everyone really dug the game, it was a ball to play. In short, the game easily passed my laugh meter test.

(The Laugh meter test is a very scientific affair,)

“We are laughing VS we are looking in the book for rules. 

Laughter > rules reference =  good 

Laughter < rules reference =  bad.

And this,  the laugh meter involves a bunch of this...

My change in direction is this, I’m going to merge the two projects. 

I will be keeping the base system and general insanity of the AIEE game (the 3d20 resolution system, character gen,  and so on)  and I’ll blend it with some of the core concepts (The party sheet, character  goals used as adventure kickers) and most importantly the setting from the Shards of Thinbral game. 

I was thinking what kind of setting could support A.I.E.E. which is designed to create pretty random scenarios and locations. Considering the name Grognardia was already taken, (who wouldn't want to play in a setting called that.. huh .. who's with me!?)
I did not want to place the game in the setting I normally use for Sword and sorcery style games, I was at a loss. 

It was one of those thoughts that just kind of fall into place.

I cannot tell you why it took me over a month to realize I was already working on a setting consisting of thousands of unexplored magical sky islands that could be anything. “Shards of Thimbral,” is perfect for a game of random madness simply because anything could be floating around out there.

So that’s where I am at with my game “projects" now "Project.”

As always thank you for reading!

Comment if you like.