March 4, 2024Mike Cantrell, my good friend and the editor of my RPG Design Patterns book, brought an article to my attention concerning the Creative Commons licenses: A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator. The article points out that there are trolls out there exploiting a flaw in older versions of the Creative Commons licenses. Fortunately, more recent versions of the licenses address the problem. Consequently, today I re-released the book under the most recent version of the license. In the process of updating the license, my word processor apparently screwed up some of the gauge diagrams in the book (probably due to the software having gone through many updates since I last worked on it). Consequently, I had to recreate some of them from scratch. I did my best to make them look the same as the old diagrams, and I doubt anyone would have noticed if I hadn't mentioned it. But, at least you know what's up if you see some changes. I also fixed a couple of typos I happened to notice while I was at it. But, I didn't make any significant changes from the earlier revision. August 12, 2023I uploaded revisions for all of Mythmagica's' core books. These revisions incorporate fixes for typos and other minor issues that were reported to me since the initial release. There is only one change that could have a significant impact on play, which is found in The Rules Reference. The feedback I recieved on the Milestone XP reward system indicates that the rewards are too small at low levels. As such, I modified the rewards to provide faster level progression up through about 5th level. June 16, 2023The Art of the Spiel card game is now available for purchase from the Game Crafter website! The Art of the Spiel is a deck-building game where each player portrays a very stable genius. The objective is to gain the most victory points by acquiring classified cards. On their turn, each player draws a hand of cards from their personal deck, plays cards to perform actions, and buys more cards to add to their deck. (The rules and play-style were inspired by the popular Dominion voting machi... err ... card game.) Some of the included cards are: Blame the Deep State, Declare Election Fraud, Declare Fake News, Exert Executive Privilege, Grab a Pussy, Have Mexico Pay for It, Hire the Best People, Make a Perfect Phone Call, Pardon the Best People, Spectate a Peaceful Riot, Stiff a Lawyer, and Tweet an Alternative Fact. The Art of the Spiel also has an expansion available for purchase: The Art of the Spiel: The Drain the Swamp Expansion. Although the basic game of The Art of the Spiel works perfectly well without this expansion, the expansion provides additional actions which vary the game play and enhance the game's replayability. Further, the expansion cards fit comfortably within the box of the basic game. May 29, 2023The first public release of Mythmagica is now available for download! Mythmagica is a Fantasy Role-Playing game that is the next generation of Legendary Quest. The game has been 20 years in the making. Like Legendary Quest, Mythmagica is inspired by the folklore and mythology of the European and Mediterranean theatres. Mythmagica's most unique innovation is its Guts and Glory system. Guts is a conflicted resource that can turn a failed roll into a successful one. But, spending Guts is a gamble. The more Guts spent, the greater the XP rewards. But, conversely, the more Guts spent, the more severe the consequences if the character falls in battle, up to and including permanent death. But, any such expenditure is always a player choice. As such, the Overlord (Game Master) does not have the authority to kill a character without its player's implicit consent. So, characters never die meaningless deaths. Mythmagica consists of a Quickstart Guide, nine books, character sheets, and other game supplements, all of which are available for download here. Aside from a few d20s, this is everything you need to play. Although Mythmagica is reasonably solid, the game is still in beta. As such, we welcome any feedback you might have on game play, both positive and negative. Mythmagica is licensed under the recently released Text Liberation License. The core books have a Text Liberation Date that has already passed, which means that the text of all the core books have already liberated. As such, you are free to copy, distribute, and create derivative works from its text. (On Mythmagica's original release, the only documents whose Text Liberation Dates have not passed are its four modules: The Silver Spoon Mine, The Hinkypunk Ziggurat, The Lohengrin Haunting, and The Curse of Merneptah.) April 4, 2023I am pleased to announce the release of the first official version of the Text Liberation License! You can download the license from the Homebrew Avenue website, or just use the following link: The Text Liberation License (version 1.0) I am planning on releasing a new RPG under this license in the near future, named Mythmagica. It is essentially the next-generation of Legendary Quest. As such, it is inspired from the folklore and mythology of the European and Mediterranean theatres. However, its game mechanics are sufficiently different that I felt it warranted a name change. February 1, 2023I released a DRAFT verson of a new open license, called the Text Liberation License (Beta 0.2) (version Beta 0.2), on a new website I created devoted to creators of homebrew content: Homebrew Avenue. I plan on releasing a public Beta of an RPG I have been homebrewing for the past 20 years under this license once it is finalized. But, I wanted to get public feedback on the draft license before doing that. The Homebrew Avenue website goes into detail about the philosophy behind this new license, and has a FAQ to answer the questions that I currently anticipate concerning it. I will update the FAQ to be a true Frequently Asked Questions page (rather than a Frequently Anticipated Questions page) as I gain feedback. In short, though, the Text Liberation License (TLL) requires a work licensed under it to have a Text Liberation Date, which can be any date up to 25 years after the work's release date. Once the Text Liberation Date passes, the text of the work becomes liberated, allowing anyone to use the text for any purpose, provided it retains the TLL. So, it embraces the share-and-share-alike philosophy common to many open licenses. The TLL is a successor to the Viral Sanity License (VSL) mentioned earlier. It improves on the concepts that the VSL initially presented, but focuses only on the text of a work, as requiring the entirety of a work to be liberated has issues I did not originally anticipate with that license. My lawyer and I have gone through several iterations of the license to ensure it has the proper legalese to accomplish what I envision for it. After I gain feedback from the community, I'll go through another round with my lawyer with any needed changes to make sure its verbiage is up to snuff. The game I am planning on releasing under this license is called Mythmagica. Its design is highly influenced by Legendary Quest, and is essentially the next-generation of that game. But, the game accumulated so many changes over the years that it's fundamentally a differnt game altogether. Thus, the name change. Even so, if you want a rough preview of the upcoming public Beta, Legendary Quest will give you a good reference point. Mythmagica is still very much a tactically-oriented game. Just so you know: Mythmagica is crunchier than Legendary Quest, even though Legendary Quest is pretty crunchy itself. Rules-lite it ain't. Some folks like crunchy games; some don't. I personally like both. June 17, 2016MacGuffin™ is now available for purchase at the Game Crafter website! MacGuffin is a cooperative storytelling game. It provides a framework to guide you in creating a gripping story with intertwined plots and character development. It is hysterical at times, tragic at others. Unlike most games, there are no winners or losers, only cool stories. The game takes advantage of the fact that there are only a relatively small number of plots used in all stories, from ancient myths to modern-day movies. MacGuffin provides 10 main plots and 18 sub-plots from which players can choose to mix into their story. Each of these provides very general guidance and questions about each step in each plot. Players improvise what happens at each step, inspired by the various personality traits of the characters involved in the story. You can download the game rules for free (either from the Downloads page or from the Game Crafter site)! So you can see if you think you'd like the game before you buy it. June 1, 2016MacGuffin™: The Quidnunc and the Hounds™After years of work, I am very pleased to announce that I have developed the storytelling game MacGuffin™: The Quidnunc and the Hounds™ to a point that I am ready to show it to the world! MacGuffin is undoubtedly the most original game design I have ever created. It's a storytelling game that works. It really, really does. But, you don't have to take my word for it. You can download the game rules from the Downloads page of this site. However, the game also requires a game board, cards, and tokens. The artwork for MacGuffin is on the Downloads page as well (100 Mbytes worth). So, you could print the game elements yourself. But, I would recommend you wait a few weeks until I can get a professionally printed copy available from the Game Crafter website. If you just can't wait though, feel free to print them out yourself for your own use. Incidentally, MacGuffin™ is the name of the game system. The Quidnunc and the Hounds™ is the name of this particular incarnation of it, in the same way that D&D is an incarnation of the d20 system. Viral Sanity License (Version 1.0)I am also pleased to present the first version of the Viral Sanity License (VSL), the license under which MacGuffin is made available. The VSL is intended as a grass-roots effort to address the problem of neverending copyright durations. Any work licensed under the VSL is accompanied by a "Liberation Date". This is the date at which the work is stripped of all licenses (other than the VSL itself) and becomes available to the general public to make derivative works from. The Liberation Date can be no later than 20 years after the copyright date of the work, but may be earlier if the work's creator desires. You can view the license in all its glory at the end of the MacGuffin Game Rules document (available from the Downloads page). September 13, 2009A new version of Design Patterns of Successful Role-Playing Games is available for download, for those interested in RPG design. The work is not quite where I would like it to be. I was wanting to write up some more patterns, some of which I feel are important for game design, and others that various readers asked me to cover. Further, there are a number of games that people have suggested that I evaluate and write-up because of their significance in the evolution of RPGs over the years. However, I have to say that I have spent so much time on this project that I am sick of it. I haven't made any significant additions for over a year, and since I have my hands full with other projects, I don't see myself getting back to this anytime soon. Even so, the book as it currently stands is in far better shape than my earlier release. So, I felt it was high-time I got it out there for others to read and, hopefully, benefit from.
It has also been quite a while since I updated the site, and some folks have queried as to the status of my various
other projects. Most notably, I have been asked about where Legendary Quest stands. Indeed, it has been so long since
my previous posting to the site that some people have asked whether LQ is completely dead at this point. I am happy to say
that LQ is not dead. I have actually been diligently working on 8th edition as my free time permits. There have been a
number of reasons that 8th edition has taken me so long to get out. First, it took me the span of several years to design
and play-test various new systems to find a set of rules that I thought was worthy of forming the basis of LQ. I cannot
recount the number of systems that my play-testers and I tried out only to have me reject them in the end. I am happy to say that
I did, eventually, find some rules that I believe provide a significant enhancement to the play experience of 7th edition
LQ. However, once the rules were identified, it has been a grueling experience in the re-write of the Grimoire. I had
thought it would be only a few months of effort. But, it has proven to be quite a bit larger task than I originally
anticipated. Let me just say that, if the initial play-tests of the full-blown 8th edition rules turn out all right,
I believe that the LQ'ers out there will be in for a pleasant surprise.
Some people have also queried me about Gnostigmata. I have to say that I have been disappointed in the play-tests
of that game as it stood several years ago, even though I was quite excited after the early play-tests. I went through
several incarnations of the game since the previous release, but I can't say that the game has improved significantly.
However, I did spin off another game from Gnostigamata based on some of the same story-game ideas. This new game is
called MacGuffin, and I hope to have a download available for that soon. Briefly, MacGuffin takes the plot and sub-plot
concepts from Gnostigmata and strips away everything not directly related to that. In play-tests of this very minimal
rule set, MacGuffin has worked well in having a group of players ad-lib full-blown stories from beginning to end
with plots and intertwined sub-plots within the span of a single session. As with all games, though, it suits the palates
of some players while others don't find it appealing as it is quite demanding of all the players sitting at the table. Most recently, I have been working on a board game called Gods of Olympus. This whole game came about as a final project to a free on-line game design course I just completed. For anyone interested in game design, I highly recommend taking this course. Ian Schreiber provides course lectures as a series of blogs which you can access from here. I'm not sure yet how I am going to provide access to Gods of Olympus, since the game requires quite a lot of fiddly-bits such as boards and tokens and cards. One possible idea is to make it available for purchase from The Game Crafter website, which is a new upstart website devoted to applying Print on Demand principles to board games. September 9, 2006A new version of Gnostigmat (Beta 6.0) is available for download. I think this version is very close to final. There aren't many rule changes from the previous beta, in fact. Mostly, the current changes consist of additional explanatory text. The previous version is no longer available. UPDATE: Play-tests showed that Gnostigmata had problems with its core rules. After much thought and experimentation, I figured out the rules had a serious internal inconsistency. Essentially, there it contained two contradictory systems that broke the game in some circumstances. The good news is that I was able to split one of those two systems out and created a whole new innovative storytelling game from them. The result is MacGuffin: The Quidnunc and the Houngds. June 10, 2006A new version of Gnostigmata (Beta 5.0) isavailable for download. This version allows players to specify sub-plots for their characters and provides more guidance in structuring the overall storyline. Also, some new rules concerning Healing are incorporated, to better enable teams of differing numbers to compete fairly against one another. Overall, these rule changes doubled the speed of play! The previous version is no longer available. May 1, 2006A new version of Gnostigmata (Beta 3.0) is available for download. This version incorporates some improvements made as a consequence of our recents play-tests. The Trauma system was greatly simplified, which allows us to keep track of attribute values using poker chips. Also, the trauma categories were renamed and the Virtue and Vice traits must now be stated as verbs. The previous version is no longer available. April 18, 2006A new game, Gnostigmata, is available for download. It is sort of a blend of "The Matrix", "Stigmata", and "The Da Vinci Code". Currently, the game is in a beta state and I'm looking for playtesters. So, if you're interested in providing feedback, please contact me. Beware, it is a trifle different than what you're probably be used to. It doesn't even have a Game Master. I started writing the game as an appendix for Design Patterns of Successful Role-Playing Games . The intent was simply to provide an example of how RPG Design Patterns can be used in game design. However, as I got more and more involved in its creation, the game took on a life of its own. I hope you September 27, 2005Over the past year or so, I've been preparing to write 8th edition LQ. A large portion of this work has been an extensive study of other role-playing games, both traditional and cutting-edge. As TS Eliot once said, "Minor poets imitate, great poets steal". It would not be unreasonable to say that I've been casing the competition to see what's worthy of pilfering. In so doing, I wrote a book, Design Patterns of Successful Role-Playing Games, which is currently in draft form. I have made it available on the downloads page in hopes of getting feedback. I've got a feeling that the book has a long way to go before I'll call it finished. But, if you're designing your own game, I hope what's there already might help you in your current projects. August 2, 2004I am very pleased to announce the release of the final book in the 7th edition of Legendary Quest: The Handbook of Hazards and House Rules ™. This book presents the best of the House Rules that have been proposed over the years as well as a whole host of traps and natural hazards. Due to all the feedback I have received since first releasing the game, this book also includes rules for piecemeal armor, spiritualists (who wield psychic powers), and a new heroic idiom system that I feel will have a huge influence on the game now and in the future. It was the latter three sections that caused the delays in release. I hope that, once you read these sections, you find them worth the wait. November 2, 2003An updated version of The Grimoire of Game Rules™ is available for download. This version is much smaller (11 Mb vs. the previous 22 Mb). It also displays much more quickly in Adobe Acrobat, for those of you that prefer using the books via computer rather than printout. In addition, a number of spelling and grammar errors have been corrected, due to some excellent proofing work done by Mike Patrick. Thanks a bunch, Mike! October 31, 2003Happy Halloween! I have a special holiday treat for you all. I am re-releasing The Tome of Terrors™. The new release does not have any rule changes, but the entire book has been absorbed into a single document that is dramatically smaller than the previous version. It is now only 10 Mb total (9 Mb zipped) as opposed to the 50 Mb of the former file collection. Those of you that have felt frustration with the speed of the Tome displaying in Adobe Acrobat will suffer that fate no more! I plan on doing the same for The Grimoire of Game Rules™ and will let you know as soon as that work is done. Also, as you may have noticed, I've decided to move to a journal format for the home page so that those that haven't visited us in a while won't miss out on any major events. October 28, 2003We are pleased to announce the release of The Monsters of the Mediterranean™, an LQ supplement that describes a whole new zoo of monsters taken from Greek, Babylonian, and Egyptian mythologies. Take a look! Whew! With the release of The Monsters of the Mediterranean, there's only one book left for me to finish. That's The Handbook of Hazards and House Rules™, which contains some popular house rules, new classes and skills, traps, and other hazards. Yes, we are planning on making it available electronically for download as well. But, this last book has got quite a ways to go before I'll be able to call it complete. Don't expect it before January or February of 2004 at the earliest, and possibly later. I do plan on releasing the Handbook in beta form in the near future to anyone willing to playtest its contents. There will likely be a couple of beta releases before the final release, so please understand that these early version will be far more crude than the finished works you've already seen. If you want to obtain a beta copy when they're available, send me an e-mail with your request. I will require you to obtain an account on the LQ Discussion Forums so that you will be able to participate in the discussions about the Handbook. After all, the point of a beta release is to obtain feedback, so I hope you can understand this restriction. August 13, 2003At long last, Celtic Creatures and Nordic Nightmares™ is now available for download. I hope this new book will delight you with the wide range of beasts found in Celtic, Nordic, and Slavonic folklore and mythology. |
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Mythmagica, Legendary Quest, MacGuffin, and The Quidnunc and the Hounds are trademarks of Loreweaver Games, a business based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. |