As I was reading the article the stories that were there were sounding like an awesome game. A team of highly skilled people with dubious morals are hired to break into a highly armed compound or airport to essentially steal back an aeroplane. Sound like fun to you? Here is an excerpt:

It was snowing hard when the bank called Nick Popovich. They needed to grab a Gulfstream in South Carolina now. Not tomorrow. Tonight.

All commercial and private planes were grounded, but Nick Popovich wasn’t one to turn down a job. So he waited for the storm to clear long enough to charter a Hawker jet from Chicago into South Carolina. There was just one detail: No one had told Popovich about the heavily armed white supremacist militia that would be guarding the aircraft when he arrived.

So I think I’m going to pull together a Savage Worlds scenario for just this set up. There will be:

• A team of 4 or 5 specialists
• A location or two
• A whole bunch of pissed off people with guns
• and three hours of fun!

I do love getting ideas for games from real life.

So a couple of years ago I bought a t-shirt from Threadless called “Derby of the Damned”. A few months later I went to my first KapCon and came away flush with ideas and concepts for new adventures using many and varied different game systems. One of those ideas was based on the t-shirt, partly because I thought it would be cool to play a Roller Derby girl and partly because I thought Derby of the Damned would be a great name for a scenario.

This idea bounced around in my head for months, every now and then I would try to make it work with an existing system. I tired All Flesh Must Be Eaten (the Unisystem zombie game from Eden Studios), Savage Worlds, True 20 and even Best Friends. But none of them quite seemed to fit with my idea with how this should play out.

It was around about this time that I was introduced to shared narrative games, most specifically 3: 16 Carnage Amongst the Stars. Something about the extremely quick character creation, low-fi stat/ability system and free for all nature of the game totally clicked with my idea of what I wanted Derby of the Damned to be. This minor epiphany also made me think that Derby didn’t need to just be a one off scenario, but possibly a shared narrative game in it’s own right.

I worked pretty hard on it after this change in direction, getting a set of rules I thought I could work with together with the intention of Derby making its debut at Kapcon 18.  However I totally chickened out at the play test stage and decided against it in the end. Since then I’ve pretty much shelved the project, and I think it might be time to pull it back off the shelf.

So I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts on the different elements that I’ve thought about during this design process to try and kick start it again. They will be around:

• Character creation
• How the dice roll
• Creating stories

Hopefully by the end I’ll be back in the head space to finish this off and actually get a game going.

The first post will show up sometime next week, so check back soon if you’re interested to see my somewhat bunny hopping creative process unfold.

The reason why I think Savage Worlds would work well with con games is that it has been specifically designed to a ‘generic’ system. Along with other systems like the Unisystem and True20, Savage Worlds was developed as a rules template over which you can plonk your game idea, or home brew setting.

At first I was convinced that this was the answer to all the issues I’d been having with DnD 3.5 and it’s limitations. Finally, I thought, I wouldn’t be a slave to the rules system. I could just make characters and create a game world and off I’d go. Though as time went on and I read more games I realised that this generic approach would work well with games with a certain pulpy, action movie feel but not so well with any game that required a certain level of darkness or investigation.

However with KapCon 18 fast approaching I started to think about what games I would run. When the third game idea came to me in a flash of inspiration I realised I had finally found the perfect vehical for using Savage Worlds.

The core mechanic of the game is that all skills and atributes are represented with die types. They start at a d4 and progress up to a d12 (that trusty die finally getting it’s day!). Then depending on the different modifiers from Edges and Hinderences you try to get a 4 or above. Easy as that!

The skill sets and Edges/Hinderences (like feats) are all pretty general and generic but more than enough for a one off game, and with the number of supplements and setting books they’ve released you can be sure that more specific and flavourful elements are out there just waiting to be discovered.

Put it together, add a bit of colour text about the characters background and before you know it you’ve got a handful of useful characters.

While I haven’t run a game using the system yet, the contact I have had with it tell me that this is the type of system that will be easy to explain to players fresh round the table who want to spend their time gaming, not looking up complicated tables.

So while I don’t think that Savage Worlds is the one rules set to end them all, it is a nice easy system to give a bit of cruntch but not so much that you’re battling the rules.