Time to air out the ol’ sweatshop as it’s pretty stuffy in here. We kind of lost the keys to the front door while we were on our jetsetting vacation to Europe with smart and ultrarich supermodels. But now we’re back and…uh, we might need to get some new employees…

But first, the news! Next week is the inestimable Jiffycon and the ISS is making a grand appearance! Jim had the brilliant and crazy idea to whip a game for the con “in a jiffy” that we could hand out. You know, as proof of this whole playstorming thing.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to do! Last night, we playstormed a brand-new game. By next week we should have a the rules in physical paper form to give away at the con. Of course, if you can’t make it to the con, we’ll be posting the rules here on this site the week after.

Finally, here’s a little taste of what’s to come:

Within the organizations of criminal justice, all people, be they living or undead, are represented by two separate yet equally vital groups: the detectives who investigate supernatural offenses, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.

War Eternal is a warstorygame set in a grim future after humankind has crossed a thousand stars only to find endless war. (And has apparently reached the theoretical limits of shoulder pad technology.) You know the one.

The players field miniatures and duke it out, vying for position and dominance on their homemade battlefield in order to gain control over the personal tales they are telling about the soldiers fighting their war. When the battle is at its grimmest, you choose a hero to rise from the ashes and spur your troops to mold a victory out of their own anguish.

(more…)

With our other projects firmly in the “being written and fully tested” category, we wanted to put something together that could go from playstormed idea to full game as quickly as possible. And I had just the half-baked idea: something to do with Scrabble tiles.

The basic idea started with characters being wizards of some sort and manipulating the names of the things to do magic. Players would get Scrabble tiles and spell words for points, trying to beat a target number. That’s about all I had before we started.

Epidiah and Jim made characters (a bookish halfling and an elf mercenary, respectively) and starting pulling letters. As we started to play, the rules began to take shape. I think we went through about three incarnations of rulesets before landing on something with which we could all agree. Most of my original ideas got scrapped, but it was for the best, as we ended up with a fun little game for people with good vocabularies.

Oh, and it wasn’t until after we had finished and we ready to get some lunch that I was able to come up with a name for the game: Spell. Nice and simple, eh?

All in all, it was a great success for our first true playstorm. An alpha version of the rules should be available real soon.