How BG&S ties in to other projects
I still want to do work on The Law and Walkabout, but I have this nasty habit of changing my plans mid-stream. Often not delierately, often it's just an evolutionary offshoot fro one direction to something a bit tangential, then a slightly new course correction that seems unrelated to the original plan unless you're able to see the flow of logic in my head.
The thing about this new BG&S 'zine is that its directly meant to provide a source of in-world data for players in a game of The Law... but I want it to be more useful that just a supplement for my own game. There are a range of great 'zines and sources for the OSR movement, but they have the advantage that they're all basically clones of the same basic concepts. A single stat block might be appropriate for a dozen (or more) different games. In trying to generate the same sort of concept for assorted cyberpunk games, there needs to be a minimal connection to specific game mechanisms of play. That basically led me to the notion of an in-world 'zine, because no-one in-world talks about essence loss (unless they're some kind of psychologist or parapsychologist wthin the setting), or a body stat, or character levels. Everything is descriptive and qualitative rather than quantitative.
In the week since it's release, the BG&S Guide has been downloaded 126 times from DrivethruRPG, with a few more in wish lists and shopping carts (I don't know why though, it's free). I've also managed to get half a dozen people to join up to the Discord group.
Hopefully by the end of this month, I'll have the first issue of the zine available online. This one has mostly been written up by me, but I'm hoping that it will give enough ideas that other writers can start to run with them over the course of the first few issues. Once we've got those introductory issues out of the way, we'll probably start looking at specific theme issues... and maybe a couple of supplementary guides that link this work more specifically into existing cyberpunk roleplaing games, starting with The Law.
The thing about this new BG&S 'zine is that its directly meant to provide a source of in-world data for players in a game of The Law... but I want it to be more useful that just a supplement for my own game. There are a range of great 'zines and sources for the OSR movement, but they have the advantage that they're all basically clones of the same basic concepts. A single stat block might be appropriate for a dozen (or more) different games. In trying to generate the same sort of concept for assorted cyberpunk games, there needs to be a minimal connection to specific game mechanisms of play. That basically led me to the notion of an in-world 'zine, because no-one in-world talks about essence loss (unless they're some kind of psychologist or parapsychologist wthin the setting), or a body stat, or character levels. Everything is descriptive and qualitative rather than quantitative.
In the week since it's release, the BG&S Guide has been downloaded 126 times from DrivethruRPG, with a few more in wish lists and shopping carts (I don't know why though, it's free). I've also managed to get half a dozen people to join up to the Discord group.
Hopefully by the end of this month, I'll have the first issue of the zine available online. This one has mostly been written up by me, but I'm hoping that it will give enough ideas that other writers can start to run with them over the course of the first few issues. Once we've got those introductory issues out of the way, we'll probably start looking at specific theme issues... and maybe a couple of supplementary guides that link this work more specifically into existing cyberpunk roleplaing games, starting with The Law.
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