Getting started

So I've been working on a little story-game called Age of Steel, a sword-and-sorcery thing intended for pick-up-and-play, one-off sessions with a potentially fluctuating group of players. I built the bulk of it months ago, and posted about the early playtest here and here, but then I let it fester for a while.

Now I'm back to it and want to get the damn thing finished, so I thought I'd put up a blog about the design process so it's public and I can be mocked if I slack again. The aim is to do a bit each day on the game, and get it to a state where it can be properly playtested.

The game has a few specific design goals:-

1) To encourage action-packed, self-contained sessions.
2) To hit that Conan vibe of non-continuous stories that bounce back and forth between different points of a hero's career.
3) To encourage player input, particularly into the development of the campaign and the start of play.
4) 15-minute adventure creation, so a session can be played the same night as characters are created. (This is the tricky bit)
5) An atmosphere in play of boisterous, slightly competitive cameraderie.
6) Allow specifically for one-on-one (the lone hero) and one-on-two (the hero and his sidekick, or two boon companions) play that feels like the source material.

Its inspirations are primarily the Conan and Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, which I've been rereading and taking lots of notes from for the adventure-building chapter, although I recently came across Charles Saunders' Imaro books, too. They're interesting stuff, an attempt to correct some of the classic failings of traditional sword and sorcery.

Working on the section on Horrors at the moment, so that should be the subject of the next post.