Now this is a bit of a rant :) As Ben will no doubt announce shortly he'll be publishing his excellent Sion setting for Savage Worlds. What he won't be doing is publishing it as a Black Orifice production. Why? Because PEG don't think the name is suitable. Now I wouldn't interfere with Ben bringing his game to market, but from my personal perspective this is pathetic! Are role players so sensitive that they have to be protected from anything which might offend a few. I'd prefer to think not. Even so, forcing a company to change it's name before you'll grant a license is censorship of the worst kind and I dislike censorship more than Frank Miller, if such a thing is possible :). So in conclusion while you sadly won't be seeing Black Orifice games in the shops you will see the games Ben produces and my personal message to Pinnacle is Fuck You, Fuck You Very Much!

Etherscope has always been Ben's and my baby. When we first created it we were very into our D20 and naturally designed the mechanics around that system, as it was the one we wanted to play with/contribute to. Since Gateway and Midgard however our interests have shifted back to creating our own systems. Unsurprisingly, we're returning to Etherscope to give it its own system that we feel fully captures its themes and feel. Our first couple of design discussions have already taken place and the basic structure of the mechanics is in place, in our heads if nowhere else yet :). That said, as usual Ben has crunched some enlightening probability sets to test our mechanics theories and instinctual setups, we're big user of tacit knowledge when it comes to design. The fact that we're already having 'vigourous discussions', or arguments as I like to call them over the system, is a good sign, These 'vigourous discussions' and thinking on the fly gave the original version of Etherscope its best features, passion is a major key to our game design philosophy and it's good to see it at this early stage with the new Etherscope system. Going forward we will be presenting our ideas and processes as they occur, through these blogs and the sites we frequent, to give people an insight into the new system and how games are designed, well by us at least :) We will be looking forward to feedback and discussion so check in from time to time and see what's going on. And D20 fans need not feel left out, we will still be putting out material as inspiration strikes, a new article is due to go up shortly as it happens! We hope people will enjoy our ramblings and the new system when it's done, in the mean time enjoy the ride!

Well haven't done that for a while ;) Spurred on by enthusiasm, I wrote up the ideas me and Ben have been discussing for the new Etherscope system over the last few days. Chatting to Ben on the phone I was amused by the comment 'I can tell your enthusiastic, your sending documents on your emails again :)' Sad to think it's been that noticable. That said it's going to be some movies this weekend, I'm particularly looking forward to Chocolate, the latest high action martial arts movie to catch my attention, the last one being Legend of the Shadowless Sword. We're thinking of putting some of our ideas on the site for feedback as we work on the new rules, would this interest people? Thats it for now. More as the muse inspires.

Nigel

Its nice to be enjoying playing with RPG ideas again. Like Ben I was pretty sick of working to the demands of 'the industry' and now I'm free of it the creative juices are starting to flow. In practical terms this means that as well as putting up the stuff I've done for Etherscope in the past few months, I'm very much commiting time into developing a non D20/OGL rule system for the game as well. Also like Ben, it's been nice to play some games on a regular basis, it's very easy to loose sight of why RPGs are so much fun when your table time is lacking. While not the blogger Ben is I'm sure some of my rants will make it on to here from time to time, you can judge whether thats a good thing :0.

Nigel