Ruminations & Realisations

As you might have heard, my life has taken an interesting turn recently. As a result of me becoming involved in the The Secret Fire Beta test I blogged about previously, I’ve also become involved in helping to develop the game in some small part. Without breaking an NDA, I’m actually enjoying the creative process, and have already passed on a few good ideas (see The Secret Fire’s website). For me, its quite an interesting challenge and something I’ve always liked to do.

Whilst I would love to develop RPGs or games full-time, I don’t think I’d be able to keep focussed upon it as a day job. Some of the fun would then go out of it for me, I think. With L&L, I’m dealing with small aspects of the game at a time and I’m finding it very rewarding as a result.

I’ve never actually considered submitting adventures or supplements for publication, but maybe I should. It is a notoriously difficult market to break into and the whole D&D 3.5 OGL affair has lead to a lot of rubbish being produced. A lot of the stuff isn’t even spell-checked or proofread (often with really awful grammar as well). The production values are often a joke and the artwork is usually infantile or poor: even the New World Explorers Guide I put together was better than some PDFs I’ve seen for sale.

So if anyone is looking for a collaborator on a commercially viable RPG, supplement, adventure, let me know!

However there is definitely one product that I’m looking forward to seeing: from Wildfire (the folk who did Cthulhutech) is a game called The Void. Again it’s Cthulhu Mythos related but this time it is set in space, based on the Chthonian Stars product they released for Mongoose’s Traveller RPG (think Event Horizon meets Outland, with Deep Ones in space!).

Published by Bill Heron

Wannabe game designer and would-be author. I've been playing RPGs for over 25 years and have recently started creating my own RPG called Mandragora: Ashes of Freedom. I also run a number of RPGs: Cthulhutech, Call of Cthulhu, WFRP, and D&D. I'm active in the Edinburgh RPG community at http://orcedinburgh.co.uk and regularly play RPGs.

3 replies on “Ruminations & Realisations”

  1. Good luck with the game development. I always felt we had lots of good ideas for Nova Games – just never enough time to do anything about them.

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