The game is afoot!

Lately a lot of my writing efforts have been directed towards the various Role-Playing Games I have on my plate.  None of them are being written for profit (well, maybe one of them will be), and all are just for fun.  Subsequently, they all kind of get nibbled on as time permits, and usually when I am not knee-deep into something else.

Well, today I put the first "playable" game of my own design up for criticism and comment.  Age of the Sword is a Sword & Sorcery RPG using a system I created years ago, and have been tweaking and playing with ever since.  The system itself has an interesting history (I think).  It started as an effort to put an entire RPG onto one side of one sheet of paper.  The fruit of that effort was called Wizards & Warriors, and it was a very rules-lite fantasy game.  No setting, no detailed descriptions.  Just the bare bones, geared towards those who were already in the FRPG Know.

W&W was lame.  I admit that.  But, it did spark an idea.  What if I took the core mechanic that I had come up with, and expanded it into a full-scale universal system?  Thus was born EGO: Endless Gaming Options.  I spent several months of unemployment in early 2000 (having just left my job to follow my then-wife to Salinas, CA from San Diego) working on EGO.  It turned out pretty good, and I even had a few people download it for use in their home-brew games (though no one ever got back to me on how it worked out).

Anyways, interest waned, as it always does, and EGO fell to the wayside.  I would look at it every once in a while; add some stuff to it; tweak the system.  But, meh.  Nothing major.  Then, a few years ago, I got another idea.  I wanted to create a Sword & Sorcery RPG.  So, I dusted off EGO, stripped it of all non-S&S detail, and started playing with it again.  Interest waxed and waned, along with my literary mood swings (see my last blog entry).

And today, after a few weeks on an S&S kick, I have finally made a (more or less) playable version, complete with some artwork (borrowed from Frazetta mostly) and some extra flavor text.  Still no specific setting attached to it, though.  The setting I was going to use got re-tasked somewhere else, and I lighted upon an idea for a new one last night.  So, while I chip away at working that up, I put the basic game on Google Docs and shared the link with my Facebook page. 

[Download/View it here]

A few people have already said they would take a look.  I hope they don't hate it.

Yeah, I'm a pretty "low self-esteem" person, especially with my writing.  So, I always start with assuming people will hate what I do, and then hope that I'm wrong.  It seems to work out fairly well for me.