The Creation of the Canyonside Games: A History-Part 3 of 10

2003-The Tomorrow Project

This game was the beginning of the Canyonside saga, though I didn't know it at the time. It was the HiBRiD v2.0 debut and the game was a chase scene from beginning to end. The players started as X-Files type agents (#XFilesRipoff), starting in the financial district of downtown Chicago trying to capture a psychically endowed Siyuichi Koga with massive powers modeled on those seen in the anime Akira (#AkiraRipoff). The players chased Koga through the streets of the south Loop to the SavRx mail order facility in which I worked at the time, through a portal in an elevator that mystically ended up dumping the PCs in a high-rise apartment in the Canyonside desert.

Next scene, the characters saw Koga running through the parking lot out the window of the apartment, across the desert, and toward an obelisk where a temporal spatial portal experiment had gone wrong. The players had to figure a way to catch up to him. This was designed to push players to solve problems using "outside of the box" thinking and to show off the "heroicness" of the game by showing players how a fall over 150 meters could not kill them. The players then follow Koga to the obelisk, where they were supposed to  stop him one way or the other.

The obelisk in the desert would eventually become the underground facility in our 2011 GenCon game, however, rather than building a giant above-the-ground structure, I sank it into the ground and buried it in the canyon wall to represent it being transported to our own time. Incidentally, in my home game, I used this same kiosk as the facility for the Foundation-like government for the Brih'Ja'Dunians, a pacifistic mentalic race (read Asimov's Second Foundation to get a feeling for them) I loved it so much. What can I say...if you see a good structure, reuse it as much as possible. Kind of the way I feel about writing computer code.

For this game, I also created the research facility inside the walls of the canyons attached to the sunken obelisk and the temporal-spatial gates that I used to connect the world of the Showdown in Little Canyonside games with the game world I had been running my home games in since 1988 that were seen in every game between 2005 and 2015. This is also where I got the idea for the name of the city of "Canyonside".

From a HiBRiD game system development standpoint, this was the last year I would create characters using Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Gamma World, and FUDGE/FADAD system rules and then convert them over to HiBRiD rules. In the process, I discovered that the character creation rules were ready for prime time, and no longer needed  any of the last vestiges of all the other games, in addition to AD&D, that I had borrowed ideas from. The following year, I would stick solely to the HiBRiD character creation rules.

Finally, this was the year I figured out the pace at which I could comfortably create content without getting stressedout. As a result, I decided to make GenCon an every other year visit, so I could focus on documenting the character creation system, making any system tweaks I needed to as a result of playtesting at the convention, and writing the game story line and action scenes.  

FIVE MINUTE CHARACTER CREATION

I am taking a break from the GenCon entries this week because I was sitting with the boys watching Netflix shows this week and we noticed that every character we came across could be created in HiBRiD in 5 minutes or less. Once you get the hang of the rules and have played a few games, you will get to realize how STRONGLY HIBRiD is based on the character concept. With knowledge of a character concept, character creation can be very fast, especially if you have a list of aspects and their aspect point costs in front of you. (Of course if you are like us, you have those costs memorized, making it even quicker)

Presented here are the rules required to create a character to play in 5 minutes or less. Even if you don't know the aspect costs off the top of you head, you can bust out a character in five minutes and calculate the grades and action values for aspects on the fly as you are playing. You can also skip declaring the concept skills and aspects altogether and do them on the fly, making character creation even faster.

Step One: Record Genre Stats

The level of heroism and lethality of a game setting are reflected by three numbers. Record these three numbers on your character sheet.

• Heroic Factor: The heroic factor is 5
• Ité: All characters have 5 points of Ité
• Aspect Point Pool: All characters have 50 aspect points for Step 5

Step Two: Record the Character Concept

Your character concept is phrase that contains a descriptor, a role, and a mission. The descriptor is an adjective that describes your character in some way, the role is a word or two that describes what your character spends most of his time doing and the mission is what your character is willing to live and die for. This phrase takes the form seen in the following examples:  

• A telekinetic swordsman looking to remove his family’s curse
• A lovably overconfident truck driver who deals with extraordinary circumstances to help his friends
• A bald pharmacist who lives to do everything to make his friends’ and family’s lives better than his was.

Step Three: Record Human Traits

All characters are human by default. Record the following traits:

• Can Speak/Sign
• Can Use Tools
• Have sight (light), sound, touch, taste, and smell
• Can Walk, run, climb, crawl, jump, swim
• Fifty points (50) of STUN. When out of STUN, a human is unconscious
• Ten (10) points of PHYS. When out of PHYS, a human is dead

All characters have the following action values:

• Load: 10 kilograms (maximum = 10 kilograms)
• Range: 10 meters (maximum = 100 meters)
• Movement: 20 meters walk (maximum = 100 meters)

Record your character’s height, weight, age, and appearance

Step Four: Determine your character’s skills

All characters have the following 6 Common Skills. To determine how good characters are at these skills, they are assigned Action Modifiers of +0 to +5, where +5 is the skill the character is best at and +0 is the skill the character is the worst at.

• Academic-Tasks involving boomillk learning and memorization
• Athletic-Tasks involving movement not related to combat
• Combat-Tasks related to combat
• Fringe-Tasks related to living in the wilderness or outside of the law
• Social-Tasks related to dealing with people
• Technological-Tasks related to using tools and technology

All characters also have 3 Concept skills. To determine how good your character is at each of these skills, you will assign Action Modifiers of +6 to +8, again with +8 being the one you consider most important to your character’s Concept and +6 is the least important. You may declare any three sorts of tasks your character is good at to be your character’s Concept skills. The two conditions that must be met are as follows:

• They must be more specific than the Common skills
• Your Director must approve them.
• Examples include
• A swordsman might have acrobatics, rapier, and intimidation
• A truck driver might have truck driving, charisma, and power drinking
• A pharmacist might have chemistry, problem solving, and computer use  

Step Five: Determine your character’s aspects

All characters have 50 points to spend on aspects. As you purchase aspect, subtract the number of points you spend from this total and document each aspect on your character sheet.

• If the aspect is graded, it has a grade of 1. You may spend a number of points equal to the cost to upgrade it. If you do so, each time you spend this number of points, the grade increases by 1. Write the total grade on your character sheet
• If the aspect is either reactive or activated, you will need to determine the Action Modifier for the aspect. Aspects related to the character concept have an action modifier equal to the grade of the aspect +2. Aspects not related to the character concept have an Action Modifier equal to the grade.
• If there is a mode, you will need to document the mode of the aspect.

Step Six: Determine Your character’s possessions

• Clothes-If you don’t write them down, your character is naked
• Concept Kit-Write down the number 20 on your character sheet in the box entitled Uses and how your character carries his stuff on his person in the box entitled How Carried. Whenever your character needs a possession, he is assumed to be carrying it around with him if it is related to the role in his concept except for the following exceptions
• It is not related to combat
• It cannot be carried
• It can be consumed, such as matches, batteries, pitons, lockpicks, et cetera. For these items, you will subtract 1 Use from the total in the Uses box.
• Holdings-These are:
• Items not on your character’s person. If not within the distance your character can reach in an action scene of your character, you will need to designate them as holdings.
• Items close but not able to be carried
• Specified Items
• All weapons and ammunition are specified items
• Any items not related to your character concept
• Improvised Items are any non-unique, common items not related to your character concept that are not listed in the specified items. You may declare these items until the spaces on your character sheet are exhausted.
• There are 10 spaces on your character sheet for knickknacks, objects the size of a breadbox or smaller with a value less than $100 in value
• There are 10 spaces on your character sheet for Clutter, objects in size that will fit in a pocket and are less than 5 dollars in value. 

The Creation of the Canyonside Games: A History-Part 2 of 10

The Creation of  Canyonside, Part 2

Please enjoy part two of the history of the Canyonside games.

1995‐9

These were the years I went to Gen Con around professional school. I did not run any games but instead played in several games that influenced the Canyonside game.

The firs was a great game with my friend Ben that used only a single d6 to determine the event outcomes. There were between 20 and 30 of us standing around in a circle playing in a highly improvised Justice Inc. game with no character sheet and reinforced my idea that more than 10 people could easily be run in a roleplaying game if the game mechanics were simple enough. My friend, Ben, upon listening to me extolling the awesome simplicity of the single d6-based mechanic after this game ad nauseum, when I was debating scrapping the d100 mechanic of HiBRiD version 1.0 one night, told me "just keep the d20...because a d20...it just looks cool".

I also played in a tournament with my friend Terry where my character was cursed 20 minutes in, and ruined our team's chances at advancing to the tournament finals. I spent 3 hours distracting the players from their mission and had a ball doing it. While  the 2 children in our group were a bit disappointed (I would never do something like this today),  everyone else, including the kids' dad, shook my hand and congratulated me on a well-played curse and laughed at my character's crazy antics in which my character made himself invisble and went running around laughing like a hyena and distracting the players from their goals. This was where I realized that meta gaming could be so much fun and began writing game aspects actually based on it for my pregenerated characters, such as Catchphrase and Heroic Appearance. 

These years were big for the game system in general. After remembering Ben's comments, I finally scrapped all of the rest of my d100-based rules, converting them to the current "roll-a-d20/always-add/higher-numbers-are-always-better" system that currently defines the HiBRiD system v2.0. 

These years were also when the kernel for my favorite NPC, Johnny Parkour, came into existence. By combining the Justice, Inc. character I had played, named Johnny Faaaaaaantastic with the antics of the cursed character so over the top that I mentioned above, I unknowingly created him as my standard NPC template for every Canyonside game I ever ran. After adding a heavy accent and the Catchphrases "Dees eez too crayzee for me", and "I'm going to go to de club" that I based on a coworker of mine back when I worked for Chicago's Computer Wonderland, this was the Johnny Parkour that came to be loved/annoyed at every Canyonside game over the years. I would also use him to test the speed and action rules, and he eventually became the character creation example for the Player's Spielbuch.

These would also be the last years I would ever play a roleplaying game as a player.

The Creation of the Canyonside Games: A History-Part 1 of 10

A Guide To the Creation of  Canyonside

As I was preparing for our last GenCon game, I had to research all the games I ran at GenCon over the years. Throughout the scenario, as I wrote it, I threw in references to each and every game I ever ran. As a treat to those who were there at the beginning as well as a quick historical reference to the story arc of the Canyonside adventures in general, I offer the following timeline series of posts.

It all began in 1994.

1994-The Twists of Tui-te

This was the first GenCon I ever ran a game at. I ran a 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons scenario that would eventually become the basis for our 2013 Snakes on Plane scenario. That scenario had originally been designed to be a three part tournament. I had made 36 pre-generated character sheets and only 4 players of the 12 qualifiers showed up. I was dejected and about to begin with a  sad heart when interestingly, a number of players were walking around like homeless gazelles looking for a place to play on the arena floor. They would come and ask "is this game open" and I said "Yes, but you have to know the rules, if you don't have your character action ready, your character does nothing, and I don't want any fights on judgments of how magic items work because I don't plan on looking anything up". Surprisingly, everyone actually seemed more excited by the prospect, with one younger kid actually exclaiming "Oh Yeah!!!" like the Koolaid Man. I collected their generic tickets and I ended up running 18 players/characters for a 4 and a half hour game. It was incredible because everyone knew every magic item and ability and all I had to do is determine NPC actions; the mechanics were for the most part handled by the players! That was when I realized that the d100 system for HiBRiD 1.0 needed to be scrapped for something easier to use. I also began hacking the system apart and wrote the HiBRiD mentalics and damage systems that year.

This was when decided that I wanted to run games where the players would help me rather than have a traditional adversarial game where it was my creation against the players' knowledge of the rules. I also decided I wanted to run big groups of improvisational players instead of rules lawyers, and that I wanted to get rid of D&D altogether as it had too many rules. This was the last D&D game I would ever run.

HiBRiD Progress Update

Hey Everyone:

I know it has been a while since I have blogged anything, but now that things on the game front are progressing, I really wanted to take some time to catch you up.

Decisions Decisions Decisions...MADE!

As many of my past blog posts have iterated, publishing a book requires a LOT of decisions and work. I went through the various blog entries and made a list of all the decisions and blocks to progress I have had over the years. It was only recently that many of them were overcome, and now that I have done so, final layout is progressing at a fanTAStic pace. Due to the large number of requests I have had recently for a status update, I wanted to take a blog entry to list and describe them here in the interest of full transparency so everyone can see exactly where I am in the process.

Prose, Organization, and Content

The prose themselves were finally finished in 2016. The biggest holdup was how determining the scope of each book and the number of books I wanted to create, and how I was going to organize the various books. I also  wanted to include rule examples, little comments clarifying why I made some of the decisions I made, and small commentaries that reflect the spirit of the game alongside the concrete rules and could not figure out a clear and coherent way to do it. I finally overcame this hurdle with the idea of "Hujraad's Hacks", small colored boxes of text that provided  all of these things in a single format. 

With that figured out, the final content and organization came easily. There will be 2 game books required to play the game: The Player's Spielbuch and the Direktor's Guidebuch. The Spielbuch will have 3 chapters, one including a tutorial for learning to play a tabletop RPG, one for rules, and one for character creation. There will also be a glossary and an index containing all tables required in one spot for quick reference while playing. PDFs of the full ruleset will be offered for free to past players at various GenCons, however on RPGNow and Amazon, for $6.66 per chapter. I will also publish genre descriptions, a rules supplement, and game scenarios (including those from GenCon and Origins) at this same price point. I plan on printing books as well, with all three sections as an omnibus volume for whatever it costs to print them on demand in color on nice, shiny, clay-filled paper and a hardcover 8.5 x 11 format. I do not plan on making any money on this project; only to recoup costs of printing. 

Color Scheme

I chose the final color scheme for the game books in 2017. Originally I was just going to do black and white to cut down on costs, but instead decided I will use teals, light greens, blues and grays. The background will be in a lightly patterned teal and gray with accents in green, borders in dark teal and black and white pictures with one major color for accent, depending on the artist who is creating the art to determine what color will be  added and where it will be added. I am still looking for banner art, but banners will be across the top and bottom. The top will have Chapter number on the left page and section number on the right side

Fonts Styles and Typography.

I finally squared this away in 2017 as well. Once I had the prose completed, I was able to determine all my fonts, styles, spacing, lead, and number of columns per page. I knew for the longest time I wanted a sans font for headings and a serif font for text. I have settled on size 10 EB Garamond for primary text, bold, and glossary terms and headings will be in Barlow Semi Condensed.

Tables and Charts

This has been the biggest holdup, and I can now saym in 2019, this has been resolved.

Desktop publishing software is in a horrible state! Forget you, Adobe!!!!!!!!!!!! It used to be, a hobbyist could create a professional level document, using Quark on Apple, Adobe Indesign on Apple and Windows, and everything else was a has been. Quark now costs over 900 dollars, and it hasn't been updated in years, no one uses it any more, and its lack of modern features and "bugginess" make it unavailable for hobbyists that want to create professional grade documents. The second option is now getting stuck with a g******n Adobe monthly fee for 20 buck a month. This is stupid for hobbyists. Thank you Adobe for moving to only professionals and discontinuing the one tool option for hobbyists: a version that charged for half of what Quark was charging one time. It simply is not feasible for a hobbyist to pay 20 bucks a month for something they only work on when they have time! 

My original dream was to write HiBRiD using all open source tools and GNU/Linux. I have attempted to do this since 2001. While the art and word processing was easily done this way, unfortunately, the only open source tool out there is Scribus. I have spent almost 20 years learning Scribus and hoping, praying for a way to do tables.They failed. They never managed it. Such a simple basic function and all they managed was to have a student do a half baked nod to table functionality. It STILL doesn't work. They keep importing color profiles but can't work on the basic functions for making tables. Really? 

Finally, an application called Affinity Publisher came along this year. It works a lot like Adobe so a lot of people love it, but it is missing some really good technical features that I really liked in Scribus and has an inconsistent user interface that is frustrating when you are learning the application, requiring stupid workarounds.  I am going to make a Youtube video for you all to see outlining all of the things Affinity needs to do to be truly ready for prime time. In any case, te biggest problem was that it only runs on Windows and OSX. 

As I am getting older now, I realize my life 5/8 over and I just need to get the books done. As a result, I have jumped off my idealistic high horse to get my work done. Since I now have a new PC running Win10, I have turned to this application (only costs less than 50 bucks. Again, Forget you Adobe!!!!! A5540735!! I have been going full speed ahead. 

Character Sheet Designs

One of the biggest problems I have had with HiBRiD over the years was that I could not churn out character sheets for players as quickly as they needed or wanted. Most of the reasons revolved on the lack of resolution of the above issues. But now, with these issues resolved,  especially table functionality, fonts and color scheme chosen, and the ability to now get real work done, I have been finally settled on the final design of a character sheet I can be proud of. I am offering it here for all of you to see and use if you wish. (If you want PDF versions, email me at hujraadjohaansen@gmail.com and I will hook you up!) You can see the fonts are different as the character sheets are specific to different Genres but the layout and color scheme reflect the game book colors I mentioned above:

Generic character sheet for the Spielbuch:

Character sheet for At Twilight, the Aspens Come...

Character sheet for Big Showdown in Little Canyonside, the game I have been running at GenCon since 2001 and will now be running at Origins and smaller local cons for my gamer friends I have met over the years:

Remaining Stumbling Blocks:

Layout:

I have laid out the first of the three section of the player's Spielbuch, all 55 pages worth with tables and text boxes which has taken me about a month to complete. I just added the character creation section which also runs around 50 pages and when that is complete, will finally add the Introductory section which will also run about 50 pages. Given my current rate, I predict the book will be laid out by the end of January. Then I will just need....

Art 

I currently have image boxes placed where I want art. Once the three chapters are laid out, I will be labeling each picture for a general ida of what I need, format and size of each picture and then begin hunting for artists.

I am looking for a certain style of art that is not too Anime-like and am unsure how much I will be able to pay for it. If anyone knows anyone interested in doing either digital, drawn, or hybridized highly stylistic pieces of art, that likes to draw settings and environments or action scenes, anthropomorphic lifeforms like plants, mosses, fungi or animals (but don't look like stupid furry sexual deviant garbage) doing cool heroic things, please have them reach out to me. 

Until then, I will keep on working...

Gen Con Indy: A Final Decision, unless...

All:

There have been many good changes in my life over the past 2 years since the last GenCon, and with these changes have come a number of decisions I have had to make. It has been hard to make them but I am not just comfortable with them but excited to try a bundel fo new things in my life. With that, I wanted to take a minute and share one of the biggest things with you all, as you have been with me on this journey to make HiBRID a reality.

The biggest decision that I wanted to share with you all is that this will be my last foreseeable GenCon in Indianapolis. While the experiences over the years have been great, it has become too much: too busy enjoy the demonstration floor, too crowded to move or breathe, too difficult to find parking and housing. If the convention gets back to a reasonable size. or my experience this year is much better than that of 2017, I may change my mind, but given that attendance continues to rise, I am not optimistic and do not want to raise anyone's hopes. My joy over the years was once having people play my game but now comes from seeing familiar faces of those who come to play year after year, seeing the younger players grow up, seeing the players get married, meeting extended families brought into the HiBRiD fold and playing together...those are the experiences that move me and bring tears of happness to my eyes as I look back over the years; those are what give all the work I have put in over the years value. The joy it has given me to make people happy and share their lives with me has given me joy, and I just want to thank everyone. I have to say I am a bit teary just thinking about it.

As for the future, instead of GenCon, I will be attending Origins in Columbus Ohio. I have embarked on a new career, one that has me working part time in Akron Ohio and at the same time given me more time with my family and more time to work on and finish the game.I have spent a lot of time in Ohio the last few years, in Akron, Cleveland, and Columbus. I am comfortable with driving to Ohio as well as flying there, and the city of Columbus is great with its smaller size, friendly people, the beauty of the Ohio River Valley, and Cincinnati-style Chili dogs-it has me excited to explore it more! From the convention standpoint, Origin's smaller size, tighter focus on gaming and novel games in general (which seems to have been lost a bit by GenCon in its desire to draw bigger crowds), and its larger number of available hotels, have convinced me to give it a try. I am looking forward to trying out its registration process and enjoying the experience as a convention goer, comparing it to both GenCon Indy and GenCon when it was still in Milwaukee. 

I will miss all of my GenCon friends (and understand what a trek it is to drive to Columbus so would never expect them to come with me), but at the same time, in the HiBRiD spirit, I look forward to making new friends and introducing the HiBRiD spirit and the Canyonside characters to a new convention in a new local area. I know my games will not sell out in hours, maybe they won't sell out at all..heck, maybe no one will even come. But I am trying all sorts of new things in my career, and am excited to start a new adventure with HiBRID as well!

For those of you who have been with me over the years and would like to continue to follow me, our Origins games, and the game system in general as it moves towards publication, you will still be able to join me either on Instagram (@hujraadjohaansen) or on our Ite' Gaming Engine Facebook page, or email me at hujraadjohaansen@gmail.com. 

Also, finally, I leave you with one last note: there are a number of smaller conventions up in Lake Geneva and Milwaukee, and on the even years, once the HiBRiD Spielbook is complete, I currently plan on attending one of the them, as a tribute to my years going to pre-Indy GenCon. Though I am unsure yet which one it will be (Suggestions are always welcome), I will keep you all posted as this develops right here on this blog page.

Until then, keep throwing dice, keep making things hapen, and I look forward to seeing you at the gaming table. If you ever find yourself in Mokena, IL, or anywhere close to that neck of the woods, give me a holler...who knows, maybe we can throw a game together and we can sling dice and stories together again one more time!!

Until then, may your Ite' flow wildly!!