Heh...certainl be one intresting game of D&D that is for sure... And the names that it was given have made me giggle..."Veloci-Reporter" Epic | |
And yet there still isn't a remotely decent Steampunk RPG on the market... | |
Did they get the name of the gamer who said that? Being able to pop off a line like that off the top of your head shows some creative chops. | |
Awesome! Dino's! That's the only thing I can think of right now! | |
Know what would be awesome? An open-world game with dinosaurs, like that one Jurassic Park game a few years back. We need more dinosaurs in the gaming world. | |
My idea for an RPG is about steampunk fruit farmers. In the game world scurvy is a big problem due to people living in dark crowded mega steampunk cities where the steam blocks out so much sun that fruit does not grow well. You start out as a revolutionary apple farmer on a flying steam powered orchard who gives away his fruit for free to the poor underclasses. Your only help in this is a friendly steam powered robot with a super advanced steam powered brain. The final goal for the game is to collect enough steam to punk your way to the moon where there is enough sunlight to grow oranges. Brass goggles must be worn at all times for some reason. | |
Since when has Steam-punk been an actual thing games, I mean granted I don't play table-tops (I'd like to) but seriously, the only steam-punk games I've seen in the last few years have been awful and few. Hell it even came to the point where I designed my own one for college. I can only hope that because he said "everyone is doing Steam-punk right now" that it means there's currently an influx of steam-punk games in development. Also dino-journalism is a funny idea. | |
... I would play that. Too bad I don't think this would ever get fully fleshed out and published. | |
For some reason that was exactly what i though... | |
That sounds pretty interesting and fresh, or maybe I'm behind on RPGs..I'd love to see it getting published. | |
First off, Victoriana is a pretty good steampunky game. Also, my friend Shawn Gaston is making an RPG based on his supercoolawesome webcomic "Clockworks." It'll trump anything I could do on that front, he's a steampunk aficionado. Second off, I had a blast. I've done this panel over a dozen times now. I can officially say that yesterday's iteration had more attendants than every other time I've done it, combined. It was a really interesting experience to do it in such a large scale environment, and I'm so excited to do it at future PAX conventions. On that topic, I did similar here on The Escapist. You can find the article here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/days-of-high-adventure/6817-Stop-Complaining-and-Make-Your-Own-Game My wife, Filamena Young, who was taking notes and snarking through the whole thing, has an article on preschoolers and imaginative play: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_206/6171-Roleplaying-Free-Play-and-the-Preschool-Gamer | |
Quote: "Hill has worked on some big name RPGs for companies like White Wolf and Shadowrun..." Shadowrun isn't a company; it's a property. | |
I have to make it a point to BE at future PAX conventions. Side note: You should totally do Scoop after you wrap up Maschine Zeit. | |
Yeah. Weird quote. I've worked with White Wolf (Vampire the Requiem, Werewolf the Forsaken and Hunter the Vigil,) Catalyst Game Labs (Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase,) and a number of other things in various places. | |
Ditto, just not a lot. (WW: Orpheus; FASA/FanPro/Catalyst: Shadowrun; a few others.) Congrats on the article! The PAX panel sounded like a lot of fun. | |
I could see an investigative journalism game. I would think it would have something like a point-and-click control system to collect clues, or maybe a platformer that turned first person so you could take pictures of whatever it was you needed to, but an RPG sounds cool. "Frank West. I've covered dinosaurs you know." Edit: Wait, wait, wait, I heard time travel. Why not just make a game about that? It could have everything, futuristic and completely awesome weapons, mounts and vehicles, tons of enemies, sprawling landscapes; I am bewildered as to why no game has been made about it yet. | |
This sounds like so much fun, I wish I was there! At first my favorite name was 'Tyrannosaurus Rolodex', but Scoop! is more evocative and the slug line that guy threw out is just priceless. | |
""Did they get the name of the gamer who said that?"" I was the guy who came up with "A game of cold-blooded journalism", I'm glad everyone liked it so much. It was an awesome panel. | |
If anyone was interested, here's our Kickstarter campaign release for Machine Age Productions' first completely independent RPG: In addition to the various RPG work I've done with White Wolf, Catalyst, Paizo, Green Ronin and a number of other publishers, I've been working on a thing of my own. It's called Maschine Zeit. It's a sci-fi horror game, in the vein and genre of Alien, Event Horizon, Dead Space and Pandorum. The game engine is all about giving narrative control to the players, and exalting movie logic (IE: the cheerleader is just as, if not more, capable of taking down the Big Bad at the end.) You can find a bit more about it at my website (as well as plenty of samples of text, art work and other assorted goodness,) http://www.machineageproductions.com/. White Wolf fans might place some of the writers that have collaborated on this book. Chuck Wendig, Christopher Simmons, Stew Wilson, Eddy Webb, Jennifer Brozek, John Kennedy and Filamena Young were all contributors. Duane O'Brien is another contributor to the text. The art is by Ruth Lampi, George Cotronis, David Russell and Emel Akiah. Layout's by Mark Reed of Heroic Journey Publishing. Jennifer Brozek is doing editing. All that said, instead of taking traditional preorders, we're doing a Kickstarter campaign to handle printing costs. The Kickstarter offers plenty of options that include rewards like a custom flash drive, t-shirts, being killed in a promotional film, or even dinner with the designers. Here's all that: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/386174176/maschine-zeit-a-roleplaying-game Thanks for your time! | |
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Name Game
Scoop! An Investigative Reporter RPG, With Dinosaurs!
At PAX East, a group of gamers created the design document for a tabletop RPG in under an hour set in a world where dinosaurs never died, and are crack reporters.
Led by David A Hill Jr, head of the independent game publisher, Machine Age Productions, the group brainstormed original ideas for a new game. Focusing on the big ideas like who the characters are and what they are good at, Hill solicited ideas from the crowd and his wife Filamena Young, also a writer and game designer, took notes which were projected for us all to see. Hill asked for suggestions and, if decisions were needed, he solicited a show of hands from the crowd.
In an hour, we hashed out that the characters are investigative journalists in a world where dinosaurs never went extinct, possibly due to a time traveler messing up the first extinction. You could play as a human or a dino, and your party is out for the next big story that "The Man" is trying to suppress. You have attributes such as Intrigue and Moxie, and use a resource based system to determine success and get the story in on time. Other than the great dino conspiracy, deadlines are the biggest enemy in Scoop!.
Hill has worked on some big name RPGs for companies like White Wolf and Shadowrun, as well as far too many third party D&D products to list so he was able call upon his experience to veto certain ideas and encourage others. For example, when he asked for ideas on what kind of game we were going to make, a hapless gamer shouted out, "Steampunk!"
"I'm going to veto that right now," Hill said to applause from the crowd. Despite his wife remarking that he hated money, Hill did have a good reason. "For one, it's the first thing that everyone comes up with. It's a real big fad right now, we've done that a million times. We're going to try for some new challenges.
"The biggest part of game design is overcoming challenges," Hill said.
The panel was certainly an interesting exercise in crowdsourcing. There were probably around 200-300 people in attendance, a much bigger crowd than Hall was used to, but I estimate that only about 20 people were active in offering suggestions, with 5 of those pretty frequently. Yet everyone voted and I really think the best ideas bubbled to the surface.
It wasn't until the end that Hill asked what the name of the game would be. Several suggestions were thrown out including "Veloci-reporter" and "Tyrannosaurus Rolodex" until the crowd voted for the more simple and evocative Scoop!. When Hall asked for the one sentence "slugline" which would describe the game in one fell swoop, he added a bit of gravitas.
"Whenever you are going back and you're filling in the details, you can use that sentence to help you make decisions," Hill said. "If you don't know whether you want to use an "apple" or an "orange," whichever one is closer to that sentence is the answer."
With that in mind, one gamer in the front said, "A game of cold-blooded journalism." Everyone around him ooed and ahhed and the room applauded.
Hill said, "Done."
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