Dungeon Master Forum

Dearest Masters of Chaos (and stuff!),

I have been working on a massive wargame project recently. It is called Warhost - The Runestar Saga. To summarize it, I would say it veers drastically from the usual fantasy battle of good vs evil, more toward authority vs freedom. It is not as dark as some fantasy out there, but there are some rather gritty psychological analogies involved, and it is far from gleaming high-fantasy. I try to make all of the factions and characters attract the gamers sympathy, especially the tragic, doomed characters!

The magic-system is strongly inspired by Dungeon Master itself! In fact, it is the only rune-combination magic system I know of in the wargaming world.

Yet though I am a writer of rulebooks (of 100+ pages!) and a creator of fantasy worlds (with decent philosophical clout), I cannot draw for the life of me. This is where my eternal search for artistic allies has taken me.

The entire project of wargame + complete fantasy world, is being put out totally free, purely for the sake of creating an enduring piece of art and a great game. I think it could go somewhere - I guess you never know until you try.

I would be eternally greatful for allies from this spring of creative minds, and genuine hearts. I search for artists, and maybe writers to help flesh out the world further. And if you need inspiration for some material, within the context of one massive overarching project, maybe this will be for you, and maybe it will encourage great thingies. Naturally everyone will be fully credited, and if the project gets lots of gamers interested, it can bring them over to your sites too!

When the project is complete, there will be one mega-site/blog, and then thirteen (!) smaller satiliette site/blogs - one for each playable faction. Here is what I have so far (the 'Twelve Factions' section is the most fleshed out, and has a link in it to the Underworld Empire page):

http://therunestarsaga.blogspot.co.uk/

I doth look forward to your responses, old timers.

Yours with candour,
Dungeonmaster Dungeonmaster

Well, I'm nothing amazing when it come to artwork, but if you need any writing done then let me know - this is the kind of stuff I love to do!

Wordweaver, I think a story-spinner will be useful

For I am appalling at prose, but good at creating original-ish worlds and characters,concepts and themes, and that sort of thing.

The thing is, there is quite a strict course of events. There are also some fairly set characters. So in effect, I am looking for other peoples creations, but more so I am looking to see the skeletons I have created fleshed out! For the actual saga itself, I would need a writer to be familiar with the world and get a feel for it. I hope that doesn't seem too restricting, because I hate closed worlds, copyrighting laws, and that kind of IP paranoia.

It's all a bit WIP at the moment, but this kind of thing should be a good place to start. From it you can get reference points. For instance, a short story of the Aer Elves living-city, Phoenibenea, landing and connecting with the world, crushing the landscape beneath it would be rather epic, and is beyond my skill: http://therunestarsaga.blogspot.co.uk/p/z.html

Please let me know your thoughts

Skeletons? Perfect! That's actually pretty much how I analogise my writing stories for other people - they giv me the bones, in whatever configuration they've got so far, and I'll work on adding in all the muscles and organds and tendons and whatever, possibly rearranging the odd bone here and there, until it's a completed creature. Story. Whatever . Basically, when I write stuff for someone else (I've done a few backstories for people's dungeons on this forum, plus the occasional story here and there for other people in the past), I get them to give me all the info that they definitely want included, and I'll then take that and write something that incorporates all that stuff (plus anything else I think of) as best I can.
When I have more time, I'll have a proper read through of all the fluff you've got so far, and maybe we can talk about exactly what you'll be needing so I can see about providing it .

This is news most jolly Wordyweaves. When you are free of time, I shall send a specific event to bring to life! Also if you have ideas for altering the world, adding characters, and that kind of thing, please do say-say!

Yay And if you know of any bored artists lyin' around...

Well, I'm not at work on Thursday so I can probably have a read-through of your fluff then .

Just a note about mechanics...

Personally, it seems like it'd make more sense to just have your rolls be SnS + d6 vs. an enemy "Defense" stat + d6. This removes the awkwardness of each player having to first ask/know something off the other side's character sheet in order to make the roll (because you just announce your total and compare) and it also removes the weirdness of "a bigger stat is actually worse" like some kind of AD&D armor class. Now, in all cases, a bigger number wins. This also lets each player roll one die so everyone feels more active and involved, I think. This new "Defense" stat would just be 7-Vul, giving an average unarmored humanoid a defense of 0 which increases with armor and such. That feels logical to me, too.

That is indeed an equally good way of doing things Sophia which had not occured to me!

The only reason I would stick with the current SnS + Vul roll equal/under on 2D6 is that it is one quick dice roll. Also thre are a number of special mechanics in the game (critical hits, parry, mortal wounds) which work on the 2D6 mechanic and would need adaption.

There's a whole rulebook in here to pick apart if you wish

http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/87734 ... -saga-v1-0

Not to be overly cantankerous but I'd contend it's a better way of doing things due to the reasons I mentioned. Roll-over has some conceptual advantages to roll-under a lot of the time, because you can encapsulate your entire effectiveness, i.e. (my skill + my modifiers + my roll) into a single number without having to know anything about the opponent.

Of course, if you want only one dice roll, Defense values would just be 7 higher. One side's SnS + 2d6 vs. a Defense value, with a basic human being 7 and going up from there. The other mechanics might adapt more easily, too, then.

Thanks for the link. I'll try to make my way through it eventually.

This is actually the best forum I've ever really seen ever. There's something so warm and intellectually stimulating 'bout it. Random tangent complete!

Thanks for the warm regards.

Graphics aren't my thing but I can contribute good storylines, and I've also studied Java, C++ and some scripting languages like Perl, JavaScript and PHP, so I could also help out with extra functions, small add-ons, or other bits of code you might need as well.