Hello New World

This blog aims to be a design and consolidation space for my game of clockpunk space adventure. At this point the game is pulling my mind in a number of directions and I want one place where I can refer the people who want to help me to discuss them.

I will try to get all of the parts which I have thought about on here as soon as possible. They are not fully baked yet let alone cool enough to build a ginger bread house from. Don't worry about that at this point I am looking to get all the things I want in the game together then we will decide how to do it all.

The bits of the idea for the game had been sitting in my head together for a while. I played in a Flashing Blades campaign up in Ann Arbor and found the setting delightful but the system ugly. I had been thinking about how to bring swashbuckling adventure into a game that was fairly static. About the same time Paul Czege had been talking about doing an old school Traveller game and I was really into it but it never materialized. While thinking about Traveller, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the system was for a future from our past and was no longer our future. We already have computers that put anything in the game to shame and communications devices that weren't even thought of. Somewhere around this time I was also thinking about clockpunk. the three things seemed to fall together and in about two conversations became what the game was going to be.

The design goals for the final game are two fold. First I want the setting to be as much about the future of that time period (the 1600s) and not about the future of our time period. By that I mean that even though we live in a world where atomic theory explains the make up of the universe ( or quantum mechanics, or string theory) the world of Leonardo da Vinci was not that world. at the same time I want it to be a very science fiction-y world doing science fiction-y things. Robots, space travel, aliens, ray guns will all have a place in the world, but so will Aether, the four humors and Aristotelian motion.

Second I want a game where the parts make you feel like you are doing the things in the fiction. By this I mean that I want the fencing to fell like fencing and the inventing to feel like inventing. At the same time I don't want anyone to have to become an expert on fencing or alchemy to play the game. At this time I think that there will be mini games to play when doing some of these things. There is a card game that will stand in for fencing that will have the lunge and parry feel without having to learn to fence or to know/guess what your opponent is going to do.

Some of the things I want the game to address: patron systems, romance, exploration, clockwork people, swashbuckling adventure and other planets.

I will try to address the setting next and start to populate the blog with resources to get us all together.