Hello everyone, merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all! I hope this reaches all of you in good health and spirits. I have made my gradual return to writing, and I bring with me a gift. A one-page rpg!
POISON is a side project that I have been working on for quite some time. It is the child of an exercise I was practicing for writing. I wanted to conceptualize what something that is the exact opposite of what Trekker is. And after a long time working through and brainstorming, we now have POISON. You can find the core rules here, I have every intention of adding additional documents to really flesh out the mechanics and rules a little more. But right now, you can go try it out for yourself. And if you would be so kind to, give me some feedback, that would be the greatest gift you could give me.
Aside from that, I want to let you know that I am still hard at work with Trekker, and you will be hearing more from me as the new year approaches.
Have a wonderful rest of your year. Until next time!
I recently underwent a surgery on my wrist, which has severely limited my ability to update you all on, and work on Trekker. This post is more of just a flare shot out to you, letting you all know that I am doing well, and I am still hard at work on Trekker.
The more I spend my evenings brainstorming ideas for and writing about Trekker. The more I get to know the game, or the concept I am creating on an almost personal level. This has led me to the conclusion that at some point throughout this process I will have to kill my darlings (in a figurative sense) and trim the fat from Trekker. Currently the primary resolution mechanic involves rolling two ten-sided-dice (one for the tens place and one for the ones place) and comparing to see if the result is less than or equal to your characters stat in the respective skill. This is a quick and clean way to move past scenes that require checks at all. I realized though that at some point while writing, “maybe I don’t want for the players and the storyteller to rush past scenes with friction for their characters”.
Games like Mothership use the same system for resolving checks. And that game has been a huge success! Why wouldn’t taking what works in that game and bringing it to Trekker work? And I think that question is kind of loaded. Trekker is just fundamentally different than a lot of its inspirations. And at some point, during my creative process with this game, I lost the plot. I began looking at what is in essence a conversation with some rough guidelines and treating it like a reference document (it is both but for the sake of this post I am ignoring that fact).
During my free time I enjoy climbing as a hobby, which is hopefully evident considering the subject matter of Trekker. And in climbing, specifically bouldering, a particular “route”, or boulder, is referred to as a ‘Problem’. Most of the time, a challenging problem can take anywhere from a few days to months to complete in the intended way. And as I sat thinking about Trekker, and its relationship to climbing, and my interest in climbing, I realized that I had become too focused on the minor aspects of it and that the big picture had become lost on me.
All this to say. I am still hard at work on Trekker, and I hope to be back with more news soon. Thank you, guys, all for your support.
In my last post, I told you all about my game, Trekker. But today I wanted to go more in depth with what it is as a system and my goals in making it.
To begin answering the question of what Trekker is, I would like to first go over the origins of the concept for it. When I decided that I had wanted to create an RPG, I did quite a bit of polling and research, as well as some soul searching. All this was to decide what I wanted the meat and potatoes of my game to be. After I spent some time thinking, I decided on a Divine Comedy inspired, almost-western, almost-fantasy, action RPG. And you may very well be asking “Is that what Trekker is?” No; Trekker is the grandchild of that game after some time spent on really thinking through what I wanted to add to the RPG community. And eventually I decided that there were enough weird west RPGs for my taste (no hate it’s just not exactly what I wanted to make).
So that leads us to the conception of Trekker. I want to take some time to describe in better detail what the end goal of Trekker is. When I started this project, I had decided that I wanted to create a system that would really prioritize the relationship the player characters have with the world they inhabit, games like The Wildsea were great points of inspiration for me. But fantasy is not what I wanted to write either, so after some more polling and research I decided on making a semi-historical system. Trekker unlike some other games, does not have a set setting which is certainly nothing groundbreaking, but is a concept that was important in this stage of development.
So, in Trekker, the rules to create a mountain and the area surrounding it are a significant part of the early stages of a campaign. I wanted the storyteller to feel like they are also a player, just playing a huge, ancient rock. But lets take a look at the players and characters that they will inhabit. Mountaineers are what players, play as. Character creation is pretty light, it really is composed of a few things at this point. Naming your character, then rolling for their stamina. I am aware it seems pretty lack luster, but the breadth of choice comes during the preparation phase of a campaign where I intend to have player develop skills alongside their character. That is about where I have ended in terms of concepts really put into something real, there are a couple pages of unfinished work. But those are not yet something that I feel are deserving of showcasing.
Thank you all again for reading, I really appreciate any input or ideas you have. And if you would like to keep hearing about what we are doing here at Bellhost, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when we post.
Josiah
The idea of a climbing rpg, where the dm is essentially crafting the literal obstacle for the players to overcome, sounds so endearing to me. Really fun concept. I look forward to seeing where it goes.
Hi there everybody! I’m Asher and this is Bellhost Games, the name for the numerous games I am working on at the moment. I decided to start this blog to chronicle my work and the process of creating an RPG.
Currently, my primary project is a game called Trekker (somewhat of a working title), it’s a semi-historical, climbing RPG, which is indeed very niche. But I noticed a severe lack of both non-fantasy historical games, and climbing games in the RPG scene. Which led me to start Trekker! It is nearing an early playtest stage, which I do intend on posting to this blog as I would love to get some feedback on how it feels to run and play.
I hope my comments are working correctly because I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions on what you’d like to see/hear from a game like Trekker.
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The idea of a climbing rpg, where the dm is essentially crafting the literal obstacle for the players to overcome,…
Sounds sick, can’t wait to see what you do with this!
The idea of a climbing rpg, where the dm is essentially crafting the literal obstacle for the players to overcome, sounds so endearing to me. Really fun concept. I look forward to seeing where it goes.
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