Got the last of the votes in on the prospectus - or at least the last I'm willing to accept - with some unexpected results.  I sent the prospectus to thirteen players; two responded that they weren't interested in 2013, three never got back to me. That left 8 players. 

Of those, five (!) voted Mech & Matrimony as their first choice: two - Asha and Emily - as their sole first choice and three - Tom, Jim and Diane - as one of a spread of similarly voted games. I was flabbergasted by the response for what last round was such a niche game, but am more than happy to buckle down and finish work on the system and setting. Expect more notes of etiquette for corset and chain gun over the course of the year. 

For the remaining three voters, all three of them 0'd out Mech & Matrimony, and two - Karen and Rachel - put Gaslamp Melodrama as their first choice. Since the third has a solid, if not not first choice game, and the only other point of overlap was a) the other Gaslamp game and b) a worse voting for the other players made it clear that Gaslamp Melodrama was the right route for the other two. So sometime in the near future I have to make some tweaks to the Buffy The Vampire Slayer game for character creation purposes - which should be easy - and then work out the exact location of the game and crime for which our protagonist's parents were accused. I'm seeing this as taking place in the Balkans, in the political no mans land between Techo-Tsarist Russia and the Baron's realms, so it's both familiar to the players and just different enough so that I'm not treading all over the published works.

For those not in the know, our second child is due in mid-late December. That will give me through the end of the year to wrap up my two existing campaigns (which is, fortunately, right on schedule) before I have to start a hiatus that will likely last a year. So it's time to start planning for the 2012 campaign season. I'm soliciting ideas on what people might want to see now, since I think I'mm actually be handing out the prospectus in December 2010 so as to give me concrete projects for the next year whenever I can scrape together gaming time. 

In other words, I might use the break to do something broad and deep - or from the ground up - which I haven't been able to do in a while. It would also be nice to not have to go quite so episodic next time around, in contrast to the last couple years. 

I know I'm taking a risk that when we actually get to 2012 the people who voted for it initially might not be interested any longer, but it's one I'm willing to take. 

Some ideas on the plate are fleshing out Mech & Matrimony, which I know has two really solid players in the Cambias/Kelly household and the rest of my play group is tepid on. I recently saw someone float the idea of a SF game based on the Labors of Hercules, which might be the vehicle I need for actually running Traveller (where the PCs are the crew of the Hercules, with a contract saying they'll get possession of the ship after completing 12 missions for their patron), or at least a free trader themed game in some SF engine. (Possibly with an all Ferrengi crew in Star Trek....) I still like the core idea of He Escapes Who Is Not Pursued, the super-hero cold case mystery game but I think it's too episodic for what I have in mind, so I might go with some other broader supers game, perhaps using the League concepts I've been bandying about for years. A Girl Genius game is another strong possibility, using either the Amber of Buffy engines depending on what type of GG game the players want. Or actually buckle down and build ARCHIVE, the onion-skin investigative horror Cthulu game I started work on and then put down. Finally, there's the Pirates & Princesses game of high seas adventure, stormy but true love and political voodoo I've been noodling around the edges of for years. 

As I said, any suggestions - especially from the local player group of what they'd like to see would be appreciated. 

A&E readers will get a more detailed breakdown of exactly how the voting went, but I can safely post the outcome here: I'll be running "An Invitation, if you choose to accept it" and "The Fourth Voyage of Captain Fasaad" over the course of next year. One of these is much more of an experiment than the other, so in some ways I'm happy that I don't have to try to juggle two games with a lot of game theory/table rules/player agency issues at once.

So I shelve the James Bond modules and Mage Rulebook and pull down the CFalk rules and the copy of Conan d20 that drcpunk gave me (to edit me 3E character creation spreadsheets for the low armor rules). Should give me plenty to do for the next month.

31) Time Tunnel: A Murray Lienster effort from 1964 and another book from the house clean-out that provided End if Eternity. This was disappointing, and the fact that it didn't drag me in meant it took pretty much all week to get through. However, while the characters were cardboard and the writing was repetitive, some ideas in it are possibly stealable for a game. Plus, I don't think it's a classic that the players might have read, so I expect I can do so with impunity.

32) GURPS Time Travel: You can probably guess why this one came off the shelf. Several of the ideas in this are really good, but even the genius of John M Ford cannot overcome the written stylings of Steve Jackson, which I have previously described as a high school science teacher trying desperately to sound "Hip". If I do run a Time Travel game I suspect I'll be using some fusion of the ideas in this book, some from Contiuum and plot elements from Time Tunnel. Here's a question to the players who might be reading - would you prefer an episodic series similar to the Star Trek game where this month's time crisis/puzzle is wrapped up by the end of each game, or a longer, 6 session multi-layered time puzzle mystery?

Discuss.

I've been noodling around the edges of a Discworld campaign concept for some time now, looking for a good campaign hook. Pratchett's style is very difficult to emulate because the humor comes from a conversation of his ability to merge accepted genre tropes (such as the Newspaper as fictional centerpoint aspects) with eccentric characters (ala Otto the light obsessed vampire photographer) using such a keen eye for human nature that the characters demand to be taken seriously and the genere tropes illuminate our own world, all swimming in the stew of Pratchett's masterful descriptive prose.

Take out any one of those and it's not really Pratchett's discworld. The trick is trying to capture all of them without it seeming forced. To do that I think I would have to exit Ankh-Morpork and the Ramtops. I think I could hadle Ankh Morpork a little better since there's more social room for our characters to not be overshadowed by the existing protagonists, but I suspect I'd be happier filling in somewhere that is known but not well known. Hence Sto Lat. And the very true statement that it is the "Second City" of the plains both encapuslates a dynamic with Ankh Morpork and opens up the tropes of Chicago to be running in the background of the game. I include the great Sto Lat Pastry School just as a reason for adoxograph   to kill me.

The current operating premise is Susan Sto-Helit (or someone else) opening a practical school to educate tradesmen in Sto Lat, the first college for nights and weekends for people to better themselves in the century of the anchovy. The PCs would be a combination of professors and students in a setting mirroring the "working class/outcast kids bettering themselves" movies with "adults getting a second chance" films. Students would be people trying to get away from the primitive Ankh Morpork theives guild, seamstresses looking for a real profession, edisonade kids working on engineering projects that will change the world, aspiring artists in bad situations (the line from Moving Pictures about the "saddest thing in the world is being born with innate talent in a field that you will never encounter" sticks with me here) and similar archetypes, while the teachers will be earnest and hardworking tradesmen banished from their guild, an ex-assassin passing along the culture and refinement without so much of the killing and so on.

Thoughts? Input? whswhs  , how is your Discworld game going?

Based on the groups responses to the first two sets of questions, I formulated the following game options. Each skewed a little from the groups more or less consensus goals in an effort to give them a broader array of options. I also wrote the entries with Story Arc, Metagame and Mechanics segments so the players would know what they were signing on for up front and understand how their choices earlier had shaped these options.

( Options behind the cut )

 I recently read about a paid of engineers who have manufactured instant concrete shelters (essentially their tents impregnated with concrete mix - you set up the test, wet it and give it 12 hours to dry into a permanent building), with an eye towards being able to use them in refugee crises. Since they only weigh a few thousand pounds (1000 for the smallest, 5000 for the largest) they can be quickly moved to situations where people need housing that is more secure than regular tents but where normal building materials would be too difficult and time consuming to deploy, such as earthquake zones. It's fascinating and useful stuff - the sort of engineering that seems obvious once someone does it. 

It's also the sort of thing that makes me think about modern-era treasure hunting games. OK, most things make me think about gaming one way or another, but this you knew. There's so much new, neat stuff available now that I'd have an urge to run a contemporary treasure hunt/dungeon crawl where the PCs have access to bleeding edge modern tech. (This would be instead of magic, in an urge to limit the wackiness.) The best example I can come up with is Tomb Raider, but perhaps with reasonably sized breasts. 

I figure the world would have to have a pre-ice age human history that produced advanced tech (to the nanotech levels) and many underground vaults for various purposes. Over the years the discovery of any vault would give the country that found it a massive technological edge - even if they couldn't figure out a fraction of what was in there. In the contemporary period there are corporations and nation states hunting for them - along with private reclamation companies like those that hunt for treasure-laden shipwrecks - combining research in dusty old archives with satellite imaging and GIS cartography to find them, and then teams of highly trained experts to enter them and uncover their secrets. Of course, if the location of a tomb is leaked it becomes a race to see who can claim it first. 

This may have to end up on my next prospectus, assuming that I can find a mechanic that captures the feel. Anyone have any experience with d20 Modern to let me know if it's worth considering?

Here are the scores and analysis of the voting. 

Here's the prospectus I just handed out for the first 6 months of 2008, before we go back to our regular games. For the actual player list, please send your votes via e-mail rather than post them here.

You have 18 points to spend on your options. 0 means you'd rather not play than play this game; 1 point means you'll play but there are other things you'd prefer. 2 points and up indicates increasing preference.

( The options are:  )

edit: clarified the point spending rules, 11/18

I'm giving another pass to my upcoming prospectus and ran into a problem. The goal of this prospectus is to shake things up a bit, since my groups will already be shaken up by babies in both groups in January 08. Thus an open voting that might well slot the players into different groups for 6-7 months of entirely episodic games before we settle back to our original groups (once the babies are older and their parents are likely getting more sleep). 

I planned on 10-12 options, but as I read over them I find that many rely a lot on player input - more setting ideas than fleshed out campaigns. for example, the prospectus entry for Blood Red Sand says PCs are settlers on Castle Falkentein's martian desert, but the game changes a lot if they're Civil War veterans looking for a fresh start , or if they're an Irish family tying to make a place for themselves and their celtic magic, or if one PC is a mad scientist looking for a place where his experiments will go unnoticed while another is a Prussian agent mapping the landscape for conquest.

Sometimes this works fine and the player ideas gel into what sort of plot I'll develop. Other times they don't gel and the campaign fails early, even when everyone is abiding by the same initial concept. I'd hate to have an already episodic short term campaign fail, because I don't know where I'd go from there for those players. 

Does anyone have suggestions? Should I trust that this work work? should I force shared PC creation sessions (and somehow use mind control to keep the players from developing PC concepts in advance of that)? Or should I tighten up the campaign premises, making them more sturdy while denying myself the energy that a clever PC concept or two might add to the mix?