Saturday, April 16, 2011

Sci-Fi Surprise

My group gathered today for the second session of my sci-fi sandbox game using the Thousand Suns rules I currently have in playtest. I'll post more about the specifics of the session tomorrow, but, for now, I just wanted to share some pictures of a pleasant surprise associated with the session. We'd previously been using a combination of the original un-revised rulebook and some PDFs layout proofs as our rulebooks at the table. Not only did that prove unwieldy but, truth be told, the original layout has such an awful layout that it's kind of painful to look at, let alone use. Since the last session, one of the players took the PDFs, uploaded them to Lulu.com and had a few copies of the rulebooks made for us to use. As you can see from the photos below, the book turned out really nicely:

Chapter 1 Spread
Chapter Five

Combat Chapter
I've quite delighted at how much nicer the new rulebook is shaping to be. in addition to the revisions to the clarity and content of the text. The whole thing is nearly done and, with the insights gleaned from this last quick round of playtesting, I have little doubt that this version of the rulebook will be one I'll be very proud of. And it's shaping up to be even shorter than the original, which I consider a bonus.

More later when I have the time to speak at greater length.

7 comments:

  1. Wow, the new layout looks great. A big improvement over the un-revised edition, to be sure. I look forward to picking it up when it's available!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looking good! Can't wait to see a final product!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Looks amazing! My biggest gripe with the previous version was its layout,
    now it looks like I might also order a print copy with the PDF.

    ReplyDelete
  4. A question for you James - do you plan to run a regular ongoing game with the new rules once playtesting is over? We see a lot about D&D on the blog (and there's nothing wrong with it) but I recognized your name from some of your RPG net column and as "the guy who wrote Thousand Suns". So I'm interested in seeing more of that stuff and I think an ongoing campaign report would be good reading if you do it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A question for you James - do you plan to run a regular ongoing game with the new rules once playtesting is over?
    <br<Definitely. A big reason why the campaign is starting is because I'll likely only get to play Dwimmermount once a month or so with my original group. Rather than sit idle and not run anything, I decided to start up a TS campaign and see where it goes. So, I'll be running this regularly and posting about it here.

    ReplyDelete
  6. My biggest gripe with the previous version was its layout

    Mine too, although there were enough little problems with the original that I felt it wasn't quite the book it should have been. Thankfully, most of those issues have been resolved now (others are in process) and the end result will be a book I think is better in every possible way.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I just saw a post from Adam Jury about this. It's a GREAT game and I'm very glad to see it get a hot new paintjob. :)

    ReplyDelete