Where The Antelope Play: My Personal Old School Renaisance

It has been a while since I last posted. For that, my dear readers I apologize. Life has gotten in the way, as it so often does and I have less and less time to do all the things that bring me joy. That being said, I have not been Idle this last month or so. I have been writing a couple of short stories that I hope to publish soon. I have been plugging away at Jade World(Jadepunk for the Apocalypse Engine) and a major adventure for Jadepunk. Also Jadepunk has just been released for sale in pdf format! How exciting is that?!? Once those projects are done, I have a couple more I am working on, for Jadepunk and for another game that I have been asked to help out on. Busy busy, all the time around here. All that being said, I will try and post more on this blog and hopefully get more than one or two posts a month going on up in here.

I know that you all know of my love, nay obsession, with Gonzo Post Apocalyptic madness. I cut my teeth on After the Bomb, Gamma World, and all sorts of other games, like that. Heck I even built Omnis Mundi, my Fate Post Post-Apocalypse campaign setting. All of that was well and good, but it failed to scratch that itch in just the right way. It is fun, and it does exactly what it said it was going to do, but it felt...too unified. It lacked the craziness that stemmed from the mechanics I loved as a kid.

While all of these thoghts were going on I felt the urge to reread some of my old books, from back when I started gaming. I pulled out my copy of Rifts, dog eared, battered, and curling. I started reading through it. In fact I am currently doing a read through of Rifts over on rpg.net. In reading through it, and writing down my thoughts as I went, i discovered some things. There were parts of that game that I really loved. Parts that are hard to duplicate in the games I play now. So I dug down into my early books and started to suss out what it was I loved about those games. And a great deal of what I loved was the weirdness of the rules, how swingy and random it was. I loved the random tables and the house rules we had to build to shore up these older games. Mostly I loved the sincerity of the games. These games may not have been amazing, though some were, but they lacked that ironic streak to them. They are pure in a way taht is hard to describe, but you know it when you see it.

And then I began to write.

Over the course of a weekend I managed to write something like eleven thousand words. It was game design, sure, but it was stream of consciousness game design. Since that fateful weekend I have gone back and tweaked a thing here or fleshed out a bit there, and it is almost playable. Actually it is completely playable as it stands. However it lacks a few things I will add in later.

So here it is the game I wrote in a weekend. I would love to here what you think. I have left it open to comments, should you wish to make them directly to the game document. If you play it, i would love to hear how the games go.

Where The Antelope Play