In other news, THE PLAYER"S SPIELBOOK LAYOUT IS FINISHED! The final book is 222 pages, color, and has seven chapters containing the following topics:
- Chapter 1: An introduction to roleplaying: A lot of people think this is unnecessary, but I am not targeting those people and could care less; if they don't like, they don't have to read it.. I am targeting open-minded players and players that have newly heard of tabletop roleplaying games and want to learn how to play them bye demonstrating their basic concepts in fully a playable game system.
- Chapter 2: An introduction to the 5 Game engines. There are really only five major tactical engines that drive the whole game; everything else is game flow that is managed by the Director. This simplifies the game when rules lookups are required.
- Chapter 3: Game Flow: This describes how the game will progress by defining the game flow in terms of scenes, like a movie. It also discusses the order for operations of both types of scenes and how to use the game engines in action scenes to resolve combat quickly and cinematically.
- Chapter 4: Character Creation: These are the 6 steps to character creations. These steps as presented will work for most genres but are designed to be customized for each genre or game setting.
- Chapter 5: Skills: This chapter is designed to describe the 6 common skills possessed by all characters as well as a number of concept skills common to many character concepts, classes, archetypes et cetera. It also includes a section on how to design custom concept skills if you the one you are looking for is not described herein.
- Chapter 6: Aspects: This chapter describes a number of the common supernatural or cinematic abilities character may have that are not necessarily rotted in the real world, including psionics, magic, cybernetics, or mutations. The chapter also describes how the various aspects are reflected in the core engines and describes how magic fits in with those systems. Of note is that this chapter purposefully stays away from designating a default magic system for the game since the game is intended to by multi-genre and supports the idea that magic will be described in game setting sourcebooks created by authors or the Director.
- Chapter 7: Director's Guide: This chapter explicitly provides a default manual for how to direct games until Director have gotten their feet wet. One of the most common complaints I see and hear is "I don't know how to direct a game". I endeavor to solve this by providing specific methods for using the 5 core engines, general tenets to guide any judgements that fall outside the core engine, and specific examples for awarding flair bonuses, since tactical bonuses are explicitly NOT defined for any of the core engines.
It will be made available as a PDF on DriveThru RPG for $6.41 or as hard copies from me directly when I go to conventions that will cost the price of printing plus $6.41.
