Cleaning out the garage, and I thought folks might find this interesting.  This is the very first game I designed.  Some of my friends watched Predator and wanted to make a game in a modern setting.  Some key observations?  My 13 year old self at the time was not a good speller, I borrowed liberally from other games, and the most interesting rule was that you had a -30% to hit any target that was a ninja.  Ah, gotta love being a teen in the 80s


In all of it's hand written glory here

Huh. Everyone has a PMS-stat.
Good you posted it here instead of.. Sorry, couldn't resist;)

I'll be reading this. Won't promise that I'll play it.

Quote from: baragei;680148Huh. Everyone has a PMS-stat.
Good you posted it here instead of.. Sorry, couldn't resist;)

I'll be reading this. Won't promise that I'll play it.

Oh good lord, I wouldn't expect you to play it.  And if so, it might be awful


It's really nothing more than a bunch of lists.  Heck, I have a rule that says no outrageous damage.  So even if you have 35 hit points, if you take 10 to the head, you're still dead.

I was a MEAN GM at 13 years old

My earliest manuscripts and designs are all lost. My entire portfolio up until the early 2000s was lost in a storage unit, both hard copy and digital.

Which is a shame, because to this day I'm still proud of some of the work I did on Bane of the DragonSun's fluff.  The game itself was a mess, an attempt to directly translate a CRPG's mechanics to tabletop, but I did like some of the setting bits I wrote. It was early practice in mastering specific tone.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;680149Oh good lord, I wouldn't expect you to play it.

I really hadn't planned to play it, no:)

Quote from: J Arcane;680150My earliest manuscripts and designs are all lost. My entire portfolio up until the early 2000s was lost in a storage unit, both hard copy and digital.

Which is a shame, because to this day I'm still proud of some of the work I did on Bane of the DragonSun's fluff.  The game itself was a mess, an attempt to directly translate a CRPG's mechanics to tabletop, but I did like some of the setting bits I wrote. It was early practice in mastering specific tone.

Oh man, that sucks hard.  I found another copy I did two years later when I had access to a word processor.  (Those of you "older" folks may remember the old typewriters with a flip up b/w LCD screen that could fit like 5 rows of text before actually printing it.)  That second reprint has a lot more details for specialties, but man.  These rules really hit home that we just made shit up as we went because there isn't a lot of rules for anything.

I can't imagine losing all of that.  I'd be pissed.

Oh, this is cool.

A few years ago, I rediscovered some of my 80s game design work during a move. It's fun looking back through them. In my case, it was a mix of hand written stuff and some bits "fully laid out" with GeoWrite on a Commodore 64. I even have the original files that I archived off of floppies.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;680152Oh man, that sucks hard.  I found another copy I did two years later when I had access to a word processor.  (Those of you "older" folks may remember the old typewriters with a flip up b/w LCD screen that could fit like 5 rows of text before actually printing it.)  That second reprint has a lot more details for specialties, but man.  These rules really hit home that we just made shit up as we went because there isn't a lot of rules for anything.

I can't imagine losing all of that.  I'd be pissed.

I was. In addition to my entire early portfolio, literally everything I'd written since at least high school, possibly junior high, I had a freakin' pile of old homebrew games from the 90s I'd downloaded and printed offline, many of which are now completely unavailable even to Internet Archive (in some cases due to bullshit lawsuits forcing IA to wipe out whole freaking webhosts from the archive).

But the piece at the beginning of BotS was my favorite, I think. It was an in-setting creation myth, written as if from the pages of an actual religious text, and I was deeply proud of how well I nailed that Biblical tone. Fictional religion fascinates me, if its well done, and it so rarely is. One of these days maybe I'll try my hand at that again.

I wish I could've drawn fighter jets like that when I was 13.

And I found the revised copy!  This one was after I got a hold of a word processor, so I'm guessing around 1989 (which would put me at about 16).  Ours was like this:



Some key differences I noted: the specialties were more detailed, there's a bestiary, and the rules for combat is that you had 20 seconds of real time to do your action or the next side went.

I've made dozens of games over the years, but having copies of this first one is what's awesome.  Your first game always holds  special place.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;680766I've made dozens of games over the years, but having copies of this first one is what's awesome.  Your first game always holds  special place.

It's brilliant! You should run it, exactly as written.

First rpg I designed was with a friend of mine I haven't seen since I was 11, based on the comicbook Groo. I remember us sitting around pouring thru the small collection of Groo comics I had at the time, looking for elements to throw into the game. The system was like a lite WFRPG riff. Wish I still had any of those papers.

Quote from: TristramEvans;684908First rpg I designed was with a friend of mine I haven't seen since I was 11, based on the comicbook Groo. I remember us sitting around pouring thru the small collection of Groo comics I had at the time, looking for elements to throw into the game. The system was like a lite WFRPG riff. Wish I still had any of those papers.

Groo is still one of my all time favorite comics.