Knights of the Hidden Sun: Development Begins

Now that I’ve got the new site in decent shape and have some time between RPG freelancing and other work I’ve got time to work on Chris Challice’s space fantasy game, Knights of the Hidden Sun. Chris and I actually got the ball rolling back in 2007 when I published Mob United Media’s urban fantasy game, Æternal Legends.

I originally planned on a mid-2008 release (and for those of you who own the game, you can see the ad, mocking me, in Æternal Legends) but a couple of things got in the way. First of all, Knights (or KotHS) is much bigger than we originally imagined. It’s still simple to run and quick, but it grew as Chris worked with his playtest group and we went through the first editing and development round.That makes sense, because it’s epic. There are guys who can fly at interplanetary speeds and spaceships powered by ghosts.

After that, it mostly boiled down to work and personal stuff.

On my side, I took 2008 to think deeply about what I felt roleplaying as a form was really good at, especially in the intimate, friends-at-a-table sense, but unlike previous navel-gazing moments I’m now thinking of online and convention RPG play as parallel activities, not something secondary to the home table. I used to be absolutely venomous about guys who made big pronouncements about gaming but only played through chat and meetups and “camps” and such, but now I think they’re talking about different items in the family of gaming.

This thought and others all inform my development style. I see my role as the guy who says this:

“See that cool thing? Bring it out! Show it off!”

I think that’s the main chunk of what I do with these kinds of projects. The rest is technical – style, organization and such – but this is the root objective. Now, I’m thinking of it in broader terms – the whole “family” of play across multiple media. For instance, that means certain ideas need clarification right in the text to give distant or convention players an immediate idea of who and where they are. Normally I’d leave more room for the GM to mediate this, so instead that mediation will be an explicitly stated option – not something I’d normally do in a game aimed at people who already know what RPGs are, but it’ll happen here.

The great thing is that Chris already has a feel for this stuff. He’s a fantastic convention GM and when he runs KotHS there he gets the table pretty damn excited. I want to bring that feel out in his game and as I go through it line by line, I feel pretty confident that we’ll get that across.