Saturday, December 2, 2006

And Loud said "Let There Be Blog!"

At last, we have a blog.

As it has fallen to me, CheeseLikeSubstance, to devirginize the blog, I will kick it off with some basic background.

This blog is to discuss the as-yet-unnamed-RPG that Loud, myself, and a third party who is currently sans nickname have been working on recently. The game is still in extremely pre-alpha stage. So what we're going to be doing is posting design session results (Tuesday, January 12. Today we argued about dice some more), pose questions for you all to answer (Wednesday, February 4: Can you tell us how to use dice?) and possibly occasionally ranting about politics and our personal lives (Monday, July 5: Girls are weird. I hate the Conservative party. Still no answer on the dice question.) That last will hopefully be confined to interesting or relevant subjects, but the more space we have for ranting on, the better, right?

Quiet, you.

Anyways, so you all know where we're coming from, this is what we have so far.

The RPG is based in a futuristic setting, perhaps a thousand years ahead of our time. The planet Earth has become mostly uninhabitable due to pollution, and so the human race has taken to the stars. There, we have discovered that iinhabitable planets are immensely difficult to find, and so we have taken to terraforming planets in order to provide us with habitable space. Unfortunately, terraforming is a long, difficult process, which makes planets extremely dangerous and unpleasant while it is gonig on. To make matters worse, there is nowhere near enough space for the teeming billions of humans in the systems under our control.

Factions have formed in order to try to control the available planets. The further along a planet is in the terraforming process, and the more habitable it was originally, the more valuable the planet is. Territory wars are common, and the biggest market in the universe is land.

In our never-ending expansion, humanity has run into several alien races living on the fringes of our territory. They are, for the most part, considerably less technologically advanced than we are, although some races are also pushing outwards and expanding. The weaker races are being destroyed by the stronger in a desperate attempt to find room and resources for their enormous populations.

The really interesting thing about our design, though, is that players will control not only characters, but entire organizations. Eventually, we want to have rules to support everything from the enormous, immensely powerful empires that rule the galaxy to tiny groups of settlers, struggling to survive on a hostile world. Corporations, armies, intelligence agencies, pirate fleets, any group you want, you can control. Players will also take the part of a few key characters within these organizations, or even just a few characters they feel like playing.

This game is going to take a lot of effort, both to create and to play, but I think it could well be worth it.

I grow weary of writing at present, but the next post will describe the mechanics we have designed so far. Hope you all like the concept, and will be willing to and have fun participating in the process of bringing it to fruition.

~ Cheese