Friday 18 December 2015

The Cities of Atlantis

Eight of Pentacles: a Noble of Leagh.

The rules section of Chariot is done, and is out with some of my friends for Alpha Playtest; the Beta Playtest will have a wider audience. Now, well. Now I am writing about the world. My son David, a pretty gifted cartographer, made me an amazing map, that I'm working with. Everything has a place. It is the fun part. So Here's the introduction to the section on Atlantis.

Monday 14 December 2015

The Catastrophe List

Some time ago, It struck me that a game about the run up to a terrible world-breaking disaster needed some structured sense of urgency. So I came up with this.

Sunday 13 December 2015

Friday 4 December 2015

Fates #3 (The Iconic One)

VII. The Chariot
OK, this is the last of my Fates previews, and I sort of had no choice about which one to post. It's the Chariot. It's my card, the card of victory through struggle.

It's also the character type that owes the most to a fiction outside of esoteric literature and my own juvenilia, namely The Metabarons, Jodorowsky's saga about that family of ultimate warriors who could destroy galaxies in the blink of an eye but who absolutely couldn't get their relationships in order. Ironically, if the game's played as the rules direct, the Charioteer is the one who gets to see the least combat (because if you're the Charioteer, you don't get to play out fight scenes).

Thursday 3 December 2015

Fates #2

Second of three extracts. Note that in theosophical magic (and hance in the magic scheme of Chariot) physical bilocation is considered impossible.

Wednesday 2 December 2015

Fates #1

More extracts. This time, the first of the Fates. A couple more later in the week.

Tuesday 1 December 2015

That Relationship Mechanic

Ok, so I've wanted to include a relationship mechanic in Chariot from the beginning. I like relationship mechanics. The question is, how do you do them? Dogs in the Vineyard, which is still one of my favourite games, gives you dice for doing things if you can bring in a relationship, as does Monsters and Other Childish Things, in a slightly different manner. I wasn't sure that I wanted it to work exactly like that. Vampire and its siblings, for which I wrote, well, quite a lot have a set of optional "people you know" stats, Allies, Contacts, Retainers and so on. I felt that was a little too vague, too easy to drop.

This is what I settled on. Feedback is welcome.