Observations of the Fox

20. Describe a mechanic you would put into your Science Fiction Heartbreaker.  Kaylee. Oh, maybe you mean a game mechanism... There are a lot of ideas that have already been incorporated into science fiction games over the years. But most of them are generally ignored during the course of play...so I guess the question is what I'd make sure appeared in a heartbreaker, and what the definition of a heartbreaker is. One of the many definitions of a heartbreaker is the kind of game that basically replicates an existing game, but renames a variety of elements and adds one or two specific twists to the game mechanisms to claim the game as "original". The whole of the OSR is basically heartbreakers. What are we trying to emulate with this game? What type of science fiction? If we have multiple races, I'd want to make sure they were alien and exotic to each other. Roleplaying to me is about getting into alternate thought patterns to explore ideas outside your re...

If I say that I'm going to "storify" or make a "story-games version" or any existing crunchy mainstream game, what does that mean? Does it mean simply coverting anything an everything in the system to the "Powered by the Apocalypse" engine?  That might be a valid way to point in the right direction, but misses a lot of the point. My disdain for games that are powered by the apocalypse is well known in a lot of circles, but it's a bit misrepresented. I'm not sure where I made the comment recently, but I'll repeat a paraphrased version here because the intentions still hold true. It came from two artists that I had conversations with a long time ago. Both artists I had respected for their work, but after a half an hour or more of conversation with them, I really respected them as people too. The first artist was James Gurney, among other things he wrote a book you might have heard of called Dinotopia, and a couple of sequels. The ...

I love the ideas behind the Sabbat in Vampire: the Masquerade. Even more, I love the ideas behind the True Black Hand, and the city of Enoch. So, I really appreciated this. I'd love to run a game, or even write a new game revolving around the ideas in this article. But for the moment I'll just add these thoughts to the primal soup of ideas that I'm always drawing inspiration from.