Ilkor: Welcome GameMaster Scott Huelsman
Welcome aboard Scott Huelsman: Ilkor's first Community GameMaster
We were approached by Scott just over a week ago, offering his services to get involved in the Ilkor project. Scott brings with him many talents such as vast knowledge and experience in role-playing, a gamemaster, webmaster and programmer. Scott has even developed his own 'Role-Playing Novel' which is a very interesting concept. You should really check out his work at: http://www.thehway.com/WizardReborn/RolePlayingNovel/PlaytheRPN/tabid/2924/Default.aspx.
So Scott is to be our first Community GameMaster. Early in the New Year he will aid myself (Sean) in populating the game with all the various metadata tokens such as; weapons, armour, shields, monsters, spells, settlements, magical items, etc. This is no small feat and will take many months to get the bulk done.
In the meantime Scott has wasted no time at all and has taken on board a very important job of constructing 'The Arcadia Gazetteer'. You can read more about this in the next section.
The Arcadia Gazetteer
The latest development from the Ilkor / HeroQuest project is the release of 'The Arcadia Gazetteer'.
For those of you, who might be a little unsure what a 'Gazetteer' is I've included a small extract from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer) below:
A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary or directory, an important reference for information about places and place names, used in conjunction with a map or a full atlas. It typically contains information concerning the geographical makeup of a country, region, or continent as well as the social statistics and physical features.
We have plans to release quite soon (sometime during the month of November) a wiki that will serve as a Gazetteer for 'The World of Arcadia' which is the setting for Ilkor: Dark Rising (http://ilkor.com).
To begin with it will be rather thin on content, but our first community GameMaster (Scott Huelsman) will be driving this over the coming months to bring it to life. This should prove to be an important area of the game for players to read, discover and learn about Arcadia.
So look out for this. It should be available within a couple of weeks with any luck. I'll keep you posted.
Cheers,
Sean.
Old School Rules…OK?
I don't know about you, but for a number of years I have found RPGs in general have in many ways lost the plot and forgotten about what makes a game fun to play.
There is no doubt that games today are big business and are now more polished and professional then ever before. The graphics and artwork are simply out of this world, truly amazing stuff. The options and choices available to the player are also endless and could not be any more open and un-restrictive.
However, are the games any better? Have the core rules changed that much and for the better? Are the games more fun or simply do they just give the player unlimited options presented in a highly polished finish?
Maybe it is just me or a sign that I'm losing touch with today's gamers, however I find myself often lost in the unnecessary complexity of it all. It just feels too overwhelming and trying to find the path to just pure fun is getting harder and harder.
I am craving for the good old days when everything in the world was less complex when you were happy to choose from a handful of classes instead of an endless list of classes, sub-classes, multi-classes etc. I say Old School Rules rock and it appears I am not alone.
I am reading more and more articles about this and maybe the tide is about to turn. There is a great website that deal with just this thing. They have devised a system called the Microlite20 System. http://www.retroroleplaying.com/content/microlite20-rpg-collection
What is Microlite20?
Do you remember when the gaming table was full of pizza and soda, not rulebooks, miniatures and dungeon tiles? Do you yearn for a role-playing game that doesn't require weight training to carry all the books? Do you want to be able to hold all the rules in your head - or in your back pocket? And do you still want to use all those lovely monsters, adventures and game worlds too? So do we!! -- Greywulf
Microlite20 is a minimalist role-playing game designed to be usable with the majority of the OGL/d20 supplements, rules and adventures with little or no advance preparation. The basic rules for character generation, combat, magic and level advancement take up a single sheet of paper, meaning it is perfect for introducing role-playing to new players, gaming oneshot adventures or tailoring into your own game system.
Ilkor: Dark Rising?
We have designed Ilkor to make use of the Microlite20 system. While we haven't followed it 100% we have learnt that we want to return to the basics, simplify the options and throw away all the clutter and noise. Talking about classes again. There are some really obscure classes that I know for a fact are rarely every picked such as the Bard, Invoker, Shaman, etc. Why have these when 80% of the players will never pick such classes?
So in Ilkor:
- Your character's race can only be one of 4: human, elf, dwarf or halfling
- Your character's class is be: fighter, wizard, rogue or priest.
It is as simple as that. Back to basics. We do have sub-classes that at a later stage of the game you can move into, but again the choice is small and limited to the well known and loved sub-classes of old.
So, without giving any more away, we hope you'll be pleasantly surprised with the choice of our direction. I know we are and we can't wait to get stuck in!!
Cheers,
Sean.