Time to start this up, finally.
I'm starting out with some old stuff. Close aquaintances of mine will remember GURPS Maelstrom, which was a local GURPS Fantasy game started by a friend. He sketched out a rough world, and then encouraged us to make up our own races and lands, and define them. I ended up taking the 'living land' known as Arbor and sketching it out further, developing the Angora, Booshkie, Squwak and others. Some of this work is a mite silly to look back at, but it remains as it was.
A number of years later, I asked permission to take up the world from the same friend, and then worked on developing it into its own game. In doing so, I made some radical changes in theme. I had just come off running Legend of the Five Rings, and I realized how much players enjoyed having fun with the various techniques found in that system. I thought to myself: what if every skill contained techniques? So I opted to build a system based around every skill having magical techniques that could be learned...
If this sounds a lot like Exalted's Charm system, it is. It's near identical, in fact. The general idea was that in Maelstrom, anybody can tap into an innate magic about the world, resulting in all sorts of "cinematic" and fantastic abilities. Unlike Exalted, this was something achievable by anyone, however... no special heritage or incarnation was required. And, unlike Exalted, most powers had no limit - you could do them as much as you liked. I developed them more like superhuman powers than magic abilities, and wanted to keep bookkeeping to a minimum.
I also had attributes, advantages, and disadvantages; all pretty typical RPG material. Appearance was unusual for an RPG system in that it cost no points unless you were incredibly beautiful; I've always found making people pay for looks in RPG to be a mite silly, because rarely (if ever) does the attribute figure into anything - Charisma is always more potent. Of course, if I think you were to be 'realistic', I'd say appearance is probably more important IRL than having a way with words, but I digress in a remarkably jaded fashion.
Another more interesting mechanic was Aura, Harmony, and Maelstrom - three spiritual traits that defined your character's spiritual persuasion. More on that when I get to the actual system. Keywords were another neat thing I did, something to help clarify when bonuses or skills did or didn't work.
I'll probably not touch the game again unless there's major call for it. Certainly, as the system evolved (as you'll see soon), I planned to add character material that supported the newer systems.
Some side notes - the skill charts are probably off - way off. I ended up tweaking a lot of the techniques, and so a lot of them probably just plain wrong. Furthermore, there are some type gaffes, largely generated by the conversion of this document from ye olde Wordperfect to modern Microsoft Word.
Oh, and you'll need Microsoft Word to read any of these. Enjoy.
Next up: system material. I'm a little more proud of this part. Chances are the 'shift' system is too complex for its own good, and the "risk" portion duel system just leaves me scratching my head, but overall I like it. I relied on d6s because... I like d6s. Who would know d6s would seem so exotic in this age of d20s and d10s we live in these days? Big Eyes, Small Mouth is the only prominent system I can think of that relies on them, and even it's given them up for the most part.
I love how Disasters, Destiny Points, Fate Points, Training Points, and Drawbacks work. The whole method of Disasters and Fate Points gives a player a lot of control over the badness that happens to a character. Training Points is perhaps a bit too random, but I think it is potentially fun, providing moments of 'Eureka!' that a player might roleplay out, or the frustration of failed training... or maybe your character's just too busy slacking off at the local pub rather than perfect his sword skill. Whichever. They're not too integrated with the character generation, however, though it wouldn't be too hard to do so.
I have a soft spot for some of the ideas here, and chances are, I'll find a place to reuse them someday.
Lastly, for today: Races.
Maelstrom was partially conceived as getting away from the Tolkien-esque settings that dominate the fantasy RPG market. No elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, etc. Arguably, some races fill the same roles - the cain are similar to orcs, and the qui are similar to elves. In fact, in the original writeup, the qui were elves. But I tried to make things different enough, at least.
The racial stat block is disturbingly similar to what's now used for d20. Make of that what you will.
The races that were originally of my own creation are the Angora, Antelians, Karani, Melyan, Rahken, Squwak, and the Zali. All the others are developed off the original ideas from the GURPS Maelstrom game, though I did a lot of fleshing out in some cases; the Ingenia were originally just called Lizard Men, for example. I had a lot of other races planned, but most of them never saw writeups. In fact, some of what's included is still incomplete. The Karani (persectuted were-creatures), Melyan (drow-ish shapeshifters), and Zali (vampiric pod people) are my favorites.
As before, the conversion from Wordperfect to Word had some weird effects, but it should be largely readable.
More to come later.
