Rajah Spiny Rat

A few days ago, I finished a game for the Random Cover RPG challenge. This game was Rajah Spiny Rat.

Like Guerilla Television before it, the game was another step in the evolution of Quincunx.

Guerilla Television was a good testing ground for a number of concepts and it taught me a few good lessons. I'm actually hoping that Rajah Spiny Rat will teach a few more things before I assemble Quincunx for GenCon Oz.

Looking back in retrospect, The Eighth Sea was a rushed game. It could have done with a lot more playtesting before it was exposed to the public, I'm going to ensure it gets a decent amount of further playtesting and revision before I put up a new version for publication. It will certainly get that revision before I make the game available on the assorted roleplaying web stores.

I honestly don't think Quincunx will be fully ready for release at GenCon, but I'll make some ashcans available at that time.

For the moment though...Rajah Spiny Rat.

A game about civilised animals embracing their respective paths of dharma to gain power within their society, while facing off against villains and antagonists drawing energy from their own dharmic paths.

In case you hadn't guessed, it is based heavily on concepts of Hindu mythology, which is quite a bit different to my usual Japanese concepts.

That's one of the reasons why I enter contests like this, they help me to break out of established patterns.

So with two months of fairly intense development, including a couple of playtest sessions, too much art direction and layout work...and getting a new job thrown into the mix. I've emerged with a new game. It's 88 pages long (plus a front and back cover), but a third of each page is filled with Sanskrit style epic poetry, there are a decent number of images and there is flavour text outlining a strange world. Actual rules and play examples probably account for 30 pages or so.

I'm hoping that it's playable, I'll post it up on a couple of forums and game archives (eg. Storygames, The Forge, 1km1kt, etc.) to see how many hits it gets and see if I can get any useful feedback from external sources.

Not sure what more to write at this stage...so I'll leave it there.

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