I’ve decided to take the Kalyr roleplaying game project off the back-burner and stir it up a bit. The original game were intended to have been an implementation of the Fudge RPG, but my ideas never quite gelled.
In the past year or so, FATE has taken off commercially as a flavour of Fudge – there are several FATE games on the market now. I’ve come to the conclusion that what I’m trying to do is insufficiently different from FATE to justify not using that system as a basis. So while the setting remains unchanged, the game rules will undergo a bit of retooling.
So what I now want to do is playtest a variant of FATE optimised for email or message board play rather than tabletop play. The challenge will be how to preserve as many of the good bits of FATE in an environment that has traditionally relied heavily on Game Master fiat. It’s also a design goal that characters and other game stats will be sufficiently compatible with existing tabletop version of FATE such as a Diaspora that people will be able to use the setting with those rulesets if they want to play the setting in a tabletop environment.
To start with, I want to run through several alternative character generation methods to determine which one works the best. There won’t, at least to start with, be any obligation to commit to playing those characters over the course of an extended campaign, so initially I’m not asking anybody to make any long-term commitments. If that’s successful we’ll move on to some actual gameplay, which will be focussed on conflict-resolution scenes rather than any longer story-arcs.
We’ll probably be using my old Kalyr mailing list on The Phoenyx to host the playtest chargen sessions. In the meantime, I’m going to be putting the whole playtest draft on this site, and enable comments.