Wednesday 1 June 2016

Chariot's Future

The varicoloured thief of shining things.
So now that I'm in the process of fulfilling backer copies of Chariot, the question of what comes next springs to mind.


What's definitely coming soon is Cosmic Memory, the first supplement, which is by the inestimable Malcolm Sheppard, and is a catalogue of strange and interesting supporting cast members. This was originally going to be part of the core book, but circumstances conspired to prevent that, so Malcolm's material got moved to a small supplement (and to be honest, it works better that way). Backers get that as part of their pledge; the rest of you are going to have to pay for it. But it'll be worth it.

Malcolm's nearly finished the first draft, and I'm really happy with what he's done so far.

The second supplement might be Dwellers on Two Planets, a guide to Atlantean superscience and off-world colonies. Stew Wilson still wants to write this stuff so a big chunk of the book would be his work. This is in the outlining stage, but I need to get more eyes on Chariot itself before doing the Kickstarter for this. This is in the kicking about stage.

What may or may not come before that book is what I've already sketched an outline for and started writing, provisionally entitled Chariot: City of God, a stand-alone game compatible with Chariot set at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, a time of saints and pagans, myth and miracle, a period when history became murky, inchoate, imbued with the supernatural in a way that it hadn't been for a long time. This was the time of King Arthur and St. Antony. This was an age when statues vomited blood and lions wrote the names of God on the earth, when shapes changed and the outsider trod the ruins of Empire into dust. Slavery, injustice, and intolerance had free rein. It was the end of another age of miracles.

It's also another setting that has a great deal of personal investment for me, since much of my life has been spent studying or teaching that period of history (I failed a PhD in its literature, in fact). When I've wrapped up Cosmic Memory I'll be drafting this in the hopes of Kickstarting it come the Autumn.

But those last two are ifs, big ifs, ifs that depend on people actually buying and liking Chariot, and spreading the word, writing reviews, making it visible. And that's out of my hands.