Blessing in Disguise

Chanbara. I've been working on this game in my spare time for nearly five years now. And I'm surprised that some of you are still reading this blog and waiting for its eventual release. Thank you! I probably would have given up on it during the dissertation writing process over the past two years if it weren't for the occasional comment inquiring about it, or expressing excitement about finally getting your hands on it.

As you probably read, if you follow this blog, I lost my USB that had the most recent updates to the game on it, and I'm slowly rebuilding the draft, trying to remember what changes I'd made and how I made them. It's coming along, if slowly.

And one thing that has actually been a bit of a blessing is it got me to re-read the previous version more closely. I've noticed, especially in the GM Section, that I have lots of sections where I outline a philosophy for gaming, rather than give the reader useful tools for running the game. While I think the game will play best in a certain way, it's not really what most people want when reading an RPG rulebook. It's not like many novice GMs are going to be finding and playing Chanbara, after all. Most of you are gaming veterans. And a rulebook is not a blog.

So I've been trying to excise those sections, and replace them with useful stuff you can use (or ignore) when running your own Chanbara games. A lot of it is getting cribbed from BX and BECMI D&D, because why not? The systems there work well. Right now, I'm revising the Dungeon Exploration section, and getting rid of the philosophical/theoretical banter and replacing them with charts and tables and guidelines. In the lost draft, I'd done that for Wilderness Exploration, but not for the Dungeon Exploration section. It's being done now.

So maybe losing that USB was a good thing after all. It's slowed down my progress, but similar to my decision to keep plugging away at the game while doing my dissertation rather than rush the version I had two years ago out, this will only make the game better when I finally get it published.