Too Many Irons - Too Little Time

So I have been toiling away at assembling the bits that comprise F&F when I realize that I have hit a wall.

What am I trying to do?

Make a 'retro' game that reflects play within my gaming group in the early '80s.

So I study what has come before and realize that I'm working on a pointless project. The last straw hit the other day when I saw one of the primary ideas on display at some elses blog and that tore it.

At least 5 times I think I have arrived at something fresh but still loyal to the original ideas and find a few days later someone else has already done it.

So...

I think rather than try to develop another system (that most would agree we don't need) I'm going to shape up the material for use with systems already out there. And it will have to take a back seat.

For now.

I feel I need to work on what I consider to be my four primary projects:

Forsaken Souls - The beast that brought me here in the first place

Classic Realms of Adventure - started and stopped and started again ezine on RPG gaming and its surrounding culture

Darkness over Dunwich - A journal devoted to HP Lovecraft with an emphasis on gaming but covering other related material as well.

Untitled Arkham Book - Yes, I'm trying my hand again, this time attempting to provide a guide for beginners of the Arkham Horror board game. Divided into three sections and to be serialized in the DoD journal. (Yes, I am that crazy about that demon in a box game and my dream job would be working for FFG on new material for the system.)

I believe that the whole D&D/Wizards noise has just tainted fantasy gaming for me right now and that Forsaken Souls is different enough I don't have to think too much about bumping heads constantly with it.

I even considered ditching the whole fantasy thing for now and working on a pulp system or some such craziness.

So-for the time being this will be the posting ground for items for use with 0e/BX/BECMI/Etc systems and clones.

Who knows. Maybe I will pick it back up. But this has turned into a headache and it needs to be made fun again very quickly.

What Is Fiends & Fireballs

This title is a rules lite system designed to emulate the classic fantasy rpg games circa 1974-1984 using a custom O.S.S. (Old School Style) rpg engine (designated as MX83) that I have had on multiple burners.

And now it’s time to finish it.

This style of play is based around the methods and manners during the peak gaming period in my group (1983) when we were using our imaginations and everything else we could lay our hands on to create massive sessions (many lasting 12 hours) of role-playing fun.

We used material from a small handful of game related sources (TSR, Judges Guild, Mayfair, Dragon Magazine) and all the ideas we could pull from books and movies (we were watching Lord of the Rings when it was animated) to create distinct campaigns from. We were notorious for cutting out rules (we used 30%-50% of the rules tops).

Our poison of choice was Advanced 1st edition and we played like mad men (and mad ladies-don’t let anybody tell you that the women folk didn’t play back then. At least half of every session was female).

We drank cheap beer and ate cheap pizza and took on the powers that be to bring home the booty and stories that would last a lifetime.

I hope that this rendition will bring some fun and good times into your life and that you too go home with some stories to tell of mountains high and dungeons deep and the secrets that lie within.

More as the first draft coalesces.

And as always, thanks for reading and please feel free to contact me at blurrpg (at) gmail (dot) com.