Time for a little project, time to get something done with Echelon that I can point at and give people.
The core rulebook is likely to be a while yet, but I don’t need one. Instead, I’ll create a quickstart adventure. Instead of publishing all the rules ahead of time, and material enough to make a playable game, I’ll present an adventure and a set of sample characters for the players to choose from, and explain when needed how the different rules elements work.
Mechanically, this means I don’t need to define all tiers of the various talents that can be chosen. I don’t even need to have a big list of talents! I just need enough that the characters have different abilities, and that there are differences within the talents from tier to tier.
On the other hand, because I want to have opportunities to explain the rules and let players use different talents, I’ll want to include a fairly wide range of activities and options. I expect some will seem contrived, since they’re being included specifically to exercise certain rules, but that kind of comes with the territory. This initial adventure might be more in the nature of a tutorial than an exciting quest.
I’m okay with that.
Oh! Are you making a whole new game? A kind of Cones of Dunshire thing? Cool!
I am creating a new game. Echelon has been in the works for an embarrassingly long time now, and I’m now pretty dedicated to getting it to the table to see how it plays.
It won’t be complete and ready for publication for a while yet, there is a great deal of work left to be done before that can happen. A quickstart adventure, on the other hand, gives me something to at least play.
Hopefully it’ll be fun, maybe it won’t and I’ll have to rework things, but even if it’s not fun there is still a certain satisfaction in having actually played something I made.