With Nefertiti Overdrive 2.0 finally complete—the last adventure went out to backers a couple of months back and is now available to the general public—I’m once again looking at my “Game Development” folder trying to decide what to prioritize.
The main effort is to Intervention: Tomorrow’s Yesterday, a cyberpunk TTRPG that is more robust, with a more structured framework than most of my story-forward games. The players still get a fair amount of narrative control, but the structure for characters is more set, with pre-defined Roles, Skills, and Gear. It’s somewhere between Fate and D&D 5E, and is the most structured game I’ve ever tried to publish. I’ve designed them or kit-bashed them, but never pushed this far along with playtesting and an intent to eventually publish it.
Intervention will also likely power a new version of Direct Action, my game of special missions teams and military action. That is the core of it, but the playtest group was more amenable to cyberpunk, and the intent was simply to stress-test the mechanics, so it evolved into a cyberpunk game. Along with Direct Action, I could use the mechanics to also re-release RESISTANCE: Earth. I don’t think there’s a huge demand for either of those, but I’d be happy to see them out and available. I like both of those ideas.
I’ve also pretty much completed a re-write of Kiss My Axe. I’m still not sure what to do with it. It remains a Sword’s Edge game at its core, but is fundamentally different than the original Kiss My Axe. It diverges more from the baseline and I’ve tried to incorporate the Scandinavian worldview into the structure of PCs. I could publish it without new art or editing, but that’s sub-optimal. At the same time, I really don’t want to do another crowd-funding campaign. Maybe the sub-optimal is the optimal?
So while we wait for Intervention, Direct Action, and maybe Kiss My Axe II to happen, I’ve got other projects I can pursue.
On the TTRPG front, I’ve got three games in various stages of development.
The one that has completed playtesting and could be expanded into an actual game—playtest was with barebones playtest doc, not with what I would consider a full game—is The Fall and the Rise. It’s a TTRPG about finding power and what one does with it, with self-image playing a part both in the mechanics and advancement.
Also having completed playtesting and also requiring a fair amount of extra writing before it is publishing worthy is Wayward. I wrote this fantasy TTRPG for a specific group, aiming it so that beginners wouldn’t be overwhelmed but with enough meat for veteran players. Initial reporting suggests I was successful.
Finally there’s Torc Wearer, a TTRPG inspired by the historical and legendary Celts. This is in its very early stages, and rather than being a historical game like Centurion or Kiss My Axe, is closer to Nefertiti Overdrive, in that it is set in a historical period but is very ahistorical. There’s so much of the Victorian vision of the Celts that’s compelling, but so to is more recent work that has disproven or adjusted a lot of that old view of the Celts. So rather than try to do a game of historical Celts, let’s take all that cool stuff and try to build a game from it.
There’s also the possibility of writing and releasing another adventure. I’ve still got Vandalissimo, a Centurion adventure set during the reign of Marcus Aurealius, which sees the PCs go to the aid of a client king of the Vandals in Pannonia Superior.
Current conditions means it’s super easy to write adventures for F#ck ’Em Up. Thinking about doing one with high school kids following a raid on a high school party in which students were disappeared.
And finally there’s the possibility of packaging up the Nefertiti Overdrive adventures related to the fall of the 25th Dynasty. Put those all together in one package that could also be a print product. I could do the same for the CASE files for Sword’s Edge—a modern action-thriller campaign.
Decisions are tough.