If you haven’t read these, you can now – Nefertiti Overdrive: What Does it Do? and Nefertiti Overdrive: How Does It Do That?
This is a tough question for me to answer, because the very concept of wire-fu action stunting in Ancient Egypt was so compelling to me that I had to write a game for it. Nefertiti Overdrive came to me first as a story idea, then a cinematic rendition filled my head, and since there’s no way I could get the money for that, I did the next best thing – RPG that mother . . .
What I can say is that if you are a fan of very complex games, you shouldn’t care. If you want a game rooted in the history of the region and period (like Centurion: Legionaries of Rome), you shouldn’t care. If you are a GM who is out to beat your players by killing off their characters or if you are a player out to beat your GM by short-circuiting all his great ideas and using the rules as a bludgeon, you shouldn’t care. This is not the game for any of those peoples.
Nefertiti Overdrive is simple. Check out the Quickstart rules to see if that is something you could love.
Nefertiti Overdrive is based on the historical period and place, but it is not restrained by history. This is an action movie, not a documentary. There is certainly a place for historical gaming (again, see Centurion), but this is really action-fantasy in an Ancient Egyptian setting.
The Nefertiti Overdrive system is designed for cooperative play, in which the GM wants to challenge the players (the NPCs and obstacles are called Challenges!), but should be excited when the players use imaginative and entertaining methods to circumvent those Challenges. Heck, players are rewarded in the system for doing just that. Imagine being a director of a movie and an actor comes with a piece of improv you consider absolutely brilliant (“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain” or “I know”). Would you get pissed off, or would you be thankful that you have a partner in creation who has helped to elevate the whole?
And as a player, you are that actor. Do you want to tank the director’s movie? Do you want this to fail? Then why are you here? You are helping to build a story. And, guess what? Your character is one of the stars of that story. The better you make the whole, the greater your character’s spotlight moments will be.
Oh, wait, maybe that’s why you should care. If you like simple systems for action-fantasy in historical settings designed for cooperative play and targeting the creation of a great story with exciting scenes, you should care.
You can find the free Nefertiti Overdrive Quickstart rules here.
You can learn more about Nefertiti Overdrive here and here.
You can find the Nefertiti Overdrive G+ community here.