Diary of a Failed Game Designer

I have undertaken the daunting task of combining AAIE in space, and AAIE Fantasy into one tome. The basic structure will be  All the how to play rules Rules options and examples. Character generation for Sci-Fi Characters. Character generation for Fantasy Characters. The rules for player star bases in Sci-Fi. The rules for the  player towns in Fantasy  The Gm section. Setting up a space sector (Sci-Fi) Setting up a "Land" (Fantasy)  All the rest of the GM advice and such from both games. This is going to be a long process involving a ton of editing decisions. Some quick examples form just my surface run through: I have had to unify the  Attributes. Giving Sci-Fi Characters the leadership attribute and the  option to roll Myst and Focus. While applying the Mutation limit to Fantasy characters. Getting the Table of contents to look even half way decent and be usable. Bring Fantasy weapons, skills and Armour in line with the updated AAIE IN Space rules. I currently have 2 separa

Two years ago, almost to the month I wrote my deep dive on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition Players Option Skills and powers. (TSR 2154.) An article I was pretty proud of at the time, even if only Russian web bots ever read it. Then the world fell apart. A pandemic made camp here in New York, hasn't left yet. For about a year my job went from how I make a living to how I lived. Furthermore, I have by any real measure stopped gaming. I even took this Blogg completely down for nearly 2 years. It's been a strange, sad, busy time. I kept occasionally thinking about The Players options books. How they seem to have been forgotten. Or if not forgotten dismissed. In reality I would love to ask the author how the Players Options books came about. I would like to know what their internal dialogs and the internal discussions at TSR were while the books were in production. With that in mind, I'm going to embark on part 2 of the AD&D 2ed Player's Option deep dive. Featu