Eidolon: the Dreamscape Opera
Ron Edwards:
Cool and double-cool! Compliance enforcement droid mode: off!
Thanks - I will be looking your material over as soon as I can.
Best, Ron
David Berg:
Hi Angelus,
I love the way your images are rendered. Definitely looks like a professional product.
That keyhole makes me want to open it. The rest of the cover, while pretty, is a bit non-specific for my taste. In another market, that wouldn't be true! But RPG land is somewhat saturated with olde-n-venerable imagery.
The inside cover, in contrast, is appealingly perplexing and visceral. What's going on there? I don't know, but it seems exciting and weird and I want to find out!
As for the game itself, whenever someone tells me they have 230 pages of setting, my first question is, "What am I supposed to do with it, relative to play?" The answer to this question will then tell me whether or not this is the product for me. Possible answers, to illustrate what I mean by the question:
Read it all because it's fun to read! And afterwards, you might be inspired to play too!Decide which small section is most inspiring to you for your game, and read that.You really need to know all this information in order to GM.You really need to know all this information in order to play.You should bring this to play to look stuff up and answer questions about what's in the world and how it works.You should read section A to GM, B to play, C for fun if you feel like it, one of D-Y once you've picked a province; and bring Z with you for reference.
And then, once I knew the intent, I'd want to know what the book does to deliver on that intent. Like, if it's a reference, the index had better be good!
Hope this is helpful. If you're looking for a different sort of feedback, just say so!
For what it's worth, "theories behind tech & magic from which to derive game content" sounds great to me if you can pull it off! I also dig the community contribution idea.
Ps,
-David
Morningstar:
Hi David,
I should be a professional look, as I commissioned a professional to do the artwork and layout. You can thank Peter Gifford from Universal Head for that.
I have also given some thought into the questions that you have asked and I have anticipated some of those needs.
Roughly speaking the game is setting is broken down into six areas... Scene (background, mythology, and setting information); Stage (physical places and environments), Actor (the characters and their roles), Prop (objects, and technology), Mask (society, politics and frameworks of social interaction), and Trope (mysteries, theories and lore).
It is a setting that engages in a broad reality, and all the chapters are designed in a modular fashion. This means that you only have to use a small part of it for a successful game. It allows you to set the game at a micro level of politics, in which case you probably only needs about 10 of the chapters for a good game. It also lets you broaden the scope of characters and their ambitions as players become more familier with the setting. Effectively, you can partician and cordon the game off in such a way to focus only on the parts of reality you wish to explore.
For example, Chronicle is one of the bigger chapters. It's a lot of history and most players won't find this immediately relevant to any of their games, but it does provide a huge resource for potential story hooks and historical artefacts that you can make relevant to your game. It's there to provide you with a sense of scope, but it can be reasonably assumed that (like real people) not everyone is on top of all the historical content. So if players just don't remember an aspect of the setting, it's like a person not knowing everything and this works (I think). If you're not playing a game with a huge historical context than you could easily skin over it. If you're playing a game that focus on trade and kingdom building, there is information there you can use (or gloss over).
Compare it to rules heavy settings where interruptions and delays can happen because players don't know the rules. Not knowing the setting is just a story hook waiting to happen, it's pre written story your players can explore.
So yes, all of this type of guideline is going to be put into a gamer's handbook.
Morningstar:
If people want to help support this project, I've created a RocketHub
http://www.rockethub.com/projects/4024-eidolon-the-dreamscape-opera
Morningstar:
Here's a copy of one of the pages in the book. Some of the illustrations are starting to come in.
http://eidolon.me/files/Basilisk-Hydra.pdf
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