Mearls on Design & Play

Like everyone has said, Mike Mearls talking on Theory From The Closet is really good. Clyde tries his best to keep up with him and the questions actually get better as it goes on. Very cool.

Book 4: Air

Dev and I have been talking about playing some Avatar, maybe something like this:

SPOILERS FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T WATCHED SEASON 3!!!

Aang is busy being the Avatar, while Zuko is busy being Fire Lord, but they each have a mystery that needs solving. Aang wants to know if any Air Nomads or sky bison survived the Fire Nation’s genocidal attack and, if so, where they might be. Perhaps they hid among the other three nations, hiding their identities, intermarrying, having children, but secretly preserving some relics of their heritage. After 100 years, it may be difficult to discover the truth but, if balance is to be preserved in the world, there must be Four Nations, not three. (Yes, a bunch of awkward questions about intercultural identity, the “rightness” of resurrecting a lost culture, and what it means to be an Air Nomad these days if you can’t airbend!) Zuko, on the other hand, is more interested in discovering what happened to Ursa, his mother and the former queen of the Fire Nation, which of course is related to the surviving Air Nomads / sky bison.

Since they and their close allies (the main characters from the first three seasons) cannot undertake these missions themselves, they have entrusted them to some other kids — the player characters — who can include both minor characters from the series (Haru!) and some the players make up.

We talked a bit today about hacking my original rules together with Shreyas’ Mist-Robed Gate to make a set of guidelines that we’re happy with. I’ll try to post about those sometime soon.

Updated Priorities

Now that Geiger Beta is out, it’s time to take a break from that and give people some time to play it and make comments. Which means I can finally think about other things.

Dev recently said that he wants to play the Avatar game, which means I need to tweak it a bit. I might just end up blatantly stealing the fight mechanics from Mist-Robed Gate, because I think they’ll work mighty well. Then a few other tweaks and we’re off. The Avatar game still gets the most hits of anything on my website, so perhaps I should just release it through Bleeding Play in PDF form, once we playtest it a bunch more.

Push is definitely near the top of the list. I want to get the other articles from Push 1 up in HTML format on Bleeding Play, make the link to the PDF more prominent, type in the edits to her article that Em sent me months ago, and get Push 1 set up on Lulu so people can order print copies at cost. I also want to start getting some of the stuff from Push 2 up. Eero and Bill’s articles in particular are things I’ve been sitting on for many months. I just need to edit them, ask for a couple corrections from the authors, and post them up there.

Currently, it looks like Transantiago development may move to Secret Wars for a bit, since Shreyas has agreed to help me work on the passages from the rules that are supposed to be read aloud during play.

And then there’s Fingers on the Firmament, which I’ve been thinking about a ton and can’t wait to get to. Development-wise, I think it comes right after Transantiago, since Justin is still focused on getting the John Rain game done. It will rock some serious socks. Honestly, after playing 4th some more, I’m also interested in seeing the changes they’re coming out with for the GSL, on the outside chance that Firmament might be able to mine some of the better parts of the new edition. We’ll see.

Then, on the outside, things I still want to finish some day:
– Agonia
– The Snow Queen
– Sorcémon