Rise, Fellow Geeks!!

I am the Warden and I am a geek!!

Monday the 12th has become the first Speak Out With Your Geek Out blogfest where all us geeks rebel against our jock overlords and proclaim our... well, geekiness. And I don't just mean buying Season 4 of Big Bang, no, no. Anyone in their 30s who knows all about d4s grew up under the stigma of not going out and getting drunk on a nightly basis. You can find out more at the Speak Out site.

A Thing of Beauty (AKA The Tracker)

A quick screen cap of the Thing, or the Tracker.

I am the Warden!!

Phew. It has been some time since this much work has been poured into... well, any project. There will be a significant update to Optional: Playtest on Monday and I'll be spending the weekend getting the Version 0.5 PDF ready along with prepping a post for Speak Out With Your Geek Out on Monday.

But today is a special post. The unveiling of the very first Thing, or the Tracker. Behold its glory to the right and click here to download your own copy (including a full-colour and greyscale version) when you're ready to try out your own Optional System game. Each grid is large enough to handle your common poker chips and we are working on making our own chips for the Tracker.

While the Tracker hasn't been officially playtested, we have been working off a crude version  for a few weeks now using poker chips to keep track of each Team's options. Combining this with the edge (in red) and marking which Team declares a readied or defensive option (in blue), I'm hoping this tool will allow for some dynamic fight scenes in future playtesting.

Racial Creeds

I am the Warden!!

(And if you didn't know that by now.)

An incredibly productive day yesterday with all the revisions to the Optional System plugged in and ready for more playtesting. But that's neither here nor there, because my only reason for telling you that is to start moving on to new material. And since I'm in a crazy creed-building mode, I'm gonna stick with that theme.

As the majority of my playtesting at home consists of fantasy campaigns, race plays a factor in our stories. Our monthly Friday night game doesn't really stretch the boundaries of the imagination: two humans and a tiefling from D&D. Yet no fantasy game seems complete without a wide variety of races, both classical and modern, to demonstrate the depth and scope of your world. As a human fan, it's rare for me to branch out into something else other than the adaptable human, but there's no denying the love for dwarves (aye, with a thick Scottish accent ta boot!), elves (though I feel their immortality or longevity has been poorly overlooked in nearly 95% of all settings), halflings, and for most others, gnomes. (I can't stand them myself. Long story.) Therefore, the time has come to start looking at how creeds can bring these races to life.

Revolutions: Drastic Changes to the OS Team Mechanic

I am the Warden!!

It's been close to a month since any updated Optional: Playtest has been posted here and that's weighed on me. Perhaps it may be unrealistic on all of us to have an updated version of the rules posted every week (I might not have a life right now, but you guys surely must), but I wanted to have something ready for this Labour Day Monday to demonstrate some of the massive changes to the core mechanics of the Optional System.

And there's still more to come, rest assured. Work continues today on revisions to Chapter 2: Base Die and Chapter 3: Master Dice as stats are reversed to work with master dice with a more applicable method instead of its original, abstract version. I've left out the creeds from Appendix IV at this point as their options still need some work (particularly the Spell option and numerous other specialty options).

Optional: Playtest Version 0.4 is now available under the Optional Library to your left (or click here if you're lazy and/or on a mobile device). Today, I'm going to discuss one of the most dramatic changes to the game thus far. A change so dramatic, it needs visuals to explain it properly... and who doesn't like visuals?