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.
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.
