New (old) Projects

 I'm sitting here at my desk at work, taking a break from research, and fiddling around with game stuff. Thinking about what I could do to add some new content to my Hidden Treasure Books store.

I'm still making slow progress on my East Marches megamodule. I have ideas for most of the 120 keyed locations on the map, and the ones I have left to decide on are in the farthest region, which will be for Name Level PCs. I plan to recycle a few small locations from earlier games I'd run of Flying Swordsmen and Chanbara, plus some new ones. The first region (for 1st to 3rd level PCs) has 14 encounter areas keyed on the map. Once I get those areas done and flesh out the home base a bit more, I'll release it as the first installment. That should give me more motivation to keep working on the other four regions (for levels 3-5; 5-7; 7-9; 9+ respectively) and get each installment out sooner rather than later. Once all the installments are done, I'll also be putting it together in a comprehensive package. 

So while I'm doing that, I'm also fiddling around with my TSR and TSR-East homebrew rules. Jeff is rolling up another PC, and was asking if he could have a multiclass with one class from the regular TSR and the other from TSR-East. I hadn't really given that much thought. In fact, TSR-E doesn't even have multiclassing rules yet. So that's something else to work on. And if I'm going to better integrate the rules, I should finally figure out how I want to do the "thiefy" skills. Thieves, Assassins and Acrobats get % based skills, while the Ninja and Yakuza have x in 6 or x in 10 skills. 

I've also still got the idea in my head that instead of selecting class and race, there should only be classes, and each class has sub-classes/kits/archetypes to choose from, and demi-human versions are subclasses. For example, if you're a Fighter, you can be a normal (human) Fighter, or you could choose to be a Ranger or Dwarf Fighter, for example. Then TSR-E would just be adding new sub-class options like Ronin and Tengu Warrior to the base classes. That's a lot of work for very little real gain, though, so I'll probably just keep it as it is now with lots of classes, and races separate. 

I am also working on my DM side rules for TSR-East, and realized that I should give them an edit to make them generic to TSR. Anything traditionally European or Asian can be in separate TSR-East and TSR-West players books and monster/treasure books, if I ever publish this thing. [I was getting some pressure from players to run a kickstarter or something to get this out.

Oh, and I looked through my old Caverns & Cowboys game from a few years back. The play testing on it seemed to work well enough, although we didn't really put the magic system through its paces. I think I might try to find some time to go through it once more (there were a few things players pointed out I could add) and get it up as a cheap PDF/POD game. 

So I'm looking at plenty of gaming-related stuff to work on this year. We'll see how much time I end up with to do these things. C&C is probably easiest, I just need to make a few tweaks, then format it and add in art (which I've got some PD images saved, and Jeremy Hart has done some mock-ups of potential pieces I could commission from him). But at the moment it's the project I'm least enthused about. 

Ghost Castle Hasegawa, the first adventure I made to play test Chanbara, also is in need of a small edit, then formatting, and art insertion. I should get that done, soon, too. Should, I say, but will I? I've been sitting on it for several years now.