Readers may recall that I’ve spent the past several years helping my friend Chris Challice design and develop an RPG based on my Ready 2 Run system, Knights of the Hidden Sun. It suffered from numerous delays as I made commitments to do other work. I kept putting things off for a future period of free time that never came. Chris deserved better so I released my contributions to the game for him to bring to the table. Knights of the Hidden Sun has always been Chris’ concept and world, and I’m glad he found the Ready 2 Run system a good fit for it. He devised some great innovations such as scaling.
No drama, by the way. I couldn’t simultaneously commit to this project and move forward with my own stuff. The fair thing to do was to let Chris have the freedom to move forward. He can run with it and I can move forward with my own stuff without dividing my attention.
I’ve left Chris with a developed draft, ready for the editing and layout stage, along with step by step notes on the people, sites and businesses I think he should contact to move forward, along with a crowdfunding plan I hope you’ll get behind if/when he puts it up. The game is pretty cool — so cool that Geoff Grabowski, who developed a sizeable chunk of it, thought I was foolish for not keeping a hand in. Artist J. Doleman has produced some fantastic art for the game. After end stage production, it should be ready to go.
Yes, that was a sneaky way of telling you that Geoff Goddamn Grabowski vouches for this game.
Stick with Chris’ blog to see where it’s going after this.
This news brings us to the fate of the Ready 2 Run system, which is the engine for both Knights of the Hidden Sun and Stew Wilson‘s Aeternal Legends. Between these games and some private uses of the system (it was used for a Star Trek-like game by friends of mine, and was originally developed to support an unpublished trilogy of SF games) Ready 2 Run has grown into a pretty big general RPG engine. Accordingly, I plan on releasing the generic system with some form of open license to ease future sharing. (Which one? I’m open to suggestions.) So there’s that to do, while I look forward to seeing a finished game I have looked forward to for a very, very long time.
