The Heartbreak Projects - Fantasy and otherwise

Since this is a place to collect and annotate the various projects I have in the works, and maybe give them some focus, now seems like a good time to actually outline what the cellars currently include.


But first a little background as to where this stuff will be coming from:

• Old School D&D - I'd always liked the aesthetic of old school D&D related games,  for most of my life generally chalking it up to nostalgia and a love for low-brow fantasy art.
• Gamma World 4th Edition - (no, not Gamma World D&D 4th Ed., which is actually Gamma World's 7th Edition) is my favorite iteration of the post-apocalyptic genre, though several of the others have their moments (e.g. 7th Edition's two-background system).
• 3E - I liked a lot of things about how 3E and it's relatives cleaned up and standardized things.  Also my little freeloading communist* heart finds the open game movement a thing of joy.
• 4E - D&D 4th Edition may have a few interesting elements here and there, but overall I don't find it's style of play particularly appealing.
• Old School D&D again - And more recently, thanks to the Old School Renaissance movement, I've been reading up on the discussion of older edition D&D and rediscovering, or even discovering for the first time, some of the really interesting even elegant ways in which certain play styles were stressed by those kludgy old mechanics.  There's some really thoughtful (and occasionally opinionated) wheat-from-the-chaff analysis going on out there in the OSR movement.

All of these sources contribute in some way to what's going through my head while writing this stuff.

The projects themselves are as follows:

• Crude Simulation Engine (CSE) - Yet another universal rules set based loosely on the 3.5 System Reference Document, with heavy theft from Microlite20, and Ken Hood's Grim-N-Gritty hit point rules among others.
• Wyrms & Warrens - The general fantasy system based on the Crude Simulation Engine.  The weird cousin of 3E era D&D.
• Owl Light - A vaguely post-apocalyptic, "points of light" style, high-fantasy setting based on Wyrms & Warrens that tries to give some justification to the usual kitchen sink approach to world-building.
• Cherenkov Twilight - A post-apocalyptic setting based on the Crude Simulation Engine.
• Dangers & Dweomers - A pretty neat sketch of a quazi-retro quazi-clone by this Italian guy named Luigi.  The plan is to run a heavily house-ruled version of this while Wyrms & Warrens is still in the works.

If history is any guide, these are loosely related pieces and parts will get recombined again and again in various ways until nearly unrecognizable from their original forms.

* - Note: posts on this blog may not accurately represent the author's political and personal views on non-role-playing subjects.