Mother Driving and a Good Game.

I took my Mother in for her check-up. Her new at home Dialysis is doing well. At 84 she is handling everything with good humor and efficiently. She should be around for a good while longer. Actually, she is the youngest of her generation in my families. Her sister is 90. My Uncle on the other side is 91 (and he has been declared dead once already) and my aunt is 92. All in all a long lived cranky bunch of relatives.

At about 5 PM we assembled for another session of the new game. It is working extremely well in the basic version. I am ever so slowly righting the rules as we play. I really want to sit down and get it out now, but that is unreasonable. We are playing now with nothing but Universal cards. These are the cards which will be the foundation of all the further campaigns. Each world will then have its own specialty cards added to that campaign world.

I am going to start explaining some of the mechanics as I go along here. It will help me organize them in my head and get people prepared for the differences between DS and the new game.

Initially we do not have any shape shifter characters in this game. Dragon Storm has covered that aspect well and there is no sense in duplicating that work. So far we have eight races, but I think we will wind up with about eighteen choices. Each race has some type of special ability, but we are not going to create additional racial cards. A simple distinction should be enough to make the game fun for everyone and allow people to play the variations.

We have eliminated Anchor cards and Boons from the game. Everything is run on Aces. As you gain Role-Playing Points (Experience) you gain card points. At certain points you earn a new "Circle" (Level) based on the ideas in the DS Lifeline cards. That is the only way you gain Stats. It is also the only way you gain additional Actions. Therefore how many "things" you can do in a round are tied directly to your prior experience. Everyone agrees that this works well, but the guidelines will have to be carefully written as the process is unlike DS and thus causes some early confusion at each new "Circle".

In general everything in the world starts with two Actions. i.e. they can do two "things". The characters in this first campaign (We are calling it the Genesis campaign) start with three actions. They can do three "things". We do not have Independent Actions in the new game. Everything takes an Action to perform it. Every Ace takes an Action to activate the card. The card tells you when it may be played.

The characters come from Dead spirits and have had new bodies grown for them (Using technology from the Blackwind Dragons). They get nine lives total, so we have resurrection in this game.

For right now I am going to post this and set down to carefully right up the Circle Guidelines and then turn it over to the alpha players next week. I should be creating pages for the new cards, but if I do not carve out the time for the new game it will never get done. So, something looses.