Brad J. Murray (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} halfjack) wrote,@ 2007-12-27 15:21:00 |
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Spirit of the Far Future
After reading a great little article byrob_donoghue about software designed for getting down and writing, I gathered up all the disparate pieces of our Spirit of the Far Future wiki project and started work on a real document. By that I mean something that's designed to be read from start to finish (as opposed to flitted around in -- the wiki's cool for collaboration and reference but it hasn't got the linear structure a book needs) and something that's designed to actually describe how to play the game. The software, Scrivener, fucking rocks. I've burned out thousands of words, edited heavily, re-structured (and re-re-structured for that matter) and am verging on a document that might actually be useful. The current rev is always linked to at the top of the SotFF page.
Why do you care? Odds are you don't.
You might though -- if you've ever played Traveller and loved it but wished there was something just a little more modern to play it with, that's what we built. We tried to stay as true to Traveller as possible but with the far more flexible Fate v3 system (as embodied in the awesome game, Spirit of the Far Future) as its engine. The result is pretty awesome in playtest so far -- there are two significant sub-games as with Traveller and they are both fun as stand-alone wargames which is a target we very much wanted to hit. The man-to-man combat rules are a fun boardgame whether doing ship boarding exercises or military maneuvers and the ship combat is different enough to warrant being separate and captures specific aspects of that sort of combat (and the sort of stories we generally want to tell with it in Traveller) like pretty much nothing else I've played. And we have an excuse to use all those nifty Star Wars starship miniatures in a game that's actually fun!
It's all still a work in progress but as it stands it's pretty damned fun. I am interested, however, in whether anyone else can actually play any of it using what we've written. It's not clear to me just how opaque our game is.
After reading a great little article by
rob_donoghue about software designed for getting down and writing, I gathered up all the disparate pieces of our Spirit of the Far Future wiki project and started work on a real document. By that I mean something that's designed to be read from start to finish (as opposed to flitted around in -- the wiki's cool for collaboration and reference but it hasn't got the linear structure a book needs) and something that's designed to actually describe how to play the game. The software, Scrivener, fucking rocks. I've burned out thousands of words, edited heavily, re-structured (and re-re-structured for that matter) and am verging on a document that might actually be useful. The current rev is always linked to at the top of the SotFF page.Why do you care? Odds are you don't.
You might though -- if you've ever played Traveller and loved it but wished there was something just a little more modern to play it with, that's what we built. We tried to stay as true to Traveller as possible but with the far more flexible Fate v3 system (as embodied in the awesome game, Spirit of the Far Future) as its engine. The result is pretty awesome in playtest so far -- there are two significant sub-games as with Traveller and they are both fun as stand-alone wargames which is a target we very much wanted to hit. The man-to-man combat rules are a fun boardgame whether doing ship boarding exercises or military maneuvers and the ship combat is different enough to warrant being separate and captures specific aspects of that sort of combat (and the sort of stories we generally want to tell with it in Traveller) like pretty much nothing else I've played. And we have an excuse to use all those nifty Star Wars starship miniatures in a game that's actually fun!
It's all still a work in progress but as it stands it's pretty damned fun. I am interested, however, in whether anyone else can actually play any of it using what we've written. It's not clear to me just how opaque our game is.
