ZDL

A modern day police procedural, likely using either CORPS (if I want crunch) or FATE (if I want drama). Think something like Law & Order without the fascist apologia (but WITH Jerry Orbach!) expanded a bit to include peripheral characters including the criminals, the families of both sides, etc.

And then the world ends.

Well, not quite ends, but there's a rather sudden drop in the standard of living as the half of the world facing the sun gets burned to a crisp, in effect, while the ensuing massive wave of fire and plasma scorches most of what is left. Only very small portions of the world survive (and that only barely). Nobody IC will know how or why it happened (I naturally will—it's one of the scenarios taken from CORPS Apocalypse) but when it does, the characters will have to face living in a world where most of humanity is dead, the trappings of civilization are gone (most important of those being the supply chains that keep cities alive!) and all that's left are the buildings and a rapidly-dwindling supply of essentials.

I tried doing this once when some players were saying they wanted a campaign that would surprise them. And surprise them it did, but apparently this was not the kind of surprise they were looking for. I want to try it again with players who will be strongly warned in advance that the campaign will go completely off the rails and change genre after a few sessions of play establishes their characters, their personalities, their relationships, etc.

OK, I'm not understanding a word of this.

• Black & White print costs in the US will increase significantly
• Standard Color print costs will increase, by roughly 12-13% for US printing
• On the whole, Premium Color print costs will decrease slightly for US printing

OK, so print costs will increase, but print costs will decrease for the US. Clear as mud. Maybe the example will help:

• A 180-page large premium hardcover currently costs $32.10 to print in the US; after April 1, that same title will drop to $27.80.

Nope. Gets even more confusing.

Did nobody copy edit this? Or is a nearly 15% drop "slight" in USAnian?

I'm not sure how you could be in the '90s, walk into a game store to get your AD&D books, and not see at the very least the White Wolf books and Call of Cthulhu. And quite possibly a bunch of other smaller-press books. Even comic shops in the early to mid '90s had more variety and selection in RPGs than modern game shops¹ tend to have.

So there's "not being obsessed" and then there's "must be wearing some very heavy blinders". And the people who published those AD&D fixes in the '90s had to have been wearing blinders with pinholes in them.

¹ In my Summer 2024 trip across Canada I made a point of visiting many game shops and they were shockingly almost all board games with a few minor D&D selections; like not even the core rules of D&D. Ottawa and Calgary were the only two places that had respectable RPG selections in some shops; Fandom II in Ottawa and the Sentry Box in Calgary. In the late '80s and early '90s even a cow town like Regina, Sasksatchewan had three game shops with decent RPG selection.

But these games weren't published by "the general public". They were published by people in our hobby. Just people in our hobby who had somehow missed out on every game ever made since the publication of AD&D or AD&D2. I mean I know my general level of obsessive "I gotta know" is unusual, but I submit so is their degree of active avoidance of even basic human curiosity.

Yeah, that was the Forge clique's term for it, but I try not to use their jargon.

But it was so weird that they popped up in the '90s. In the '70s it's understandable. But with 15-20 years of good solid design to look back on, to come up with a slightly improved AD&D as "the ultimate game" was astonishing.

There was a whole phase in early "game design" where every game was basically D&D with a bit of a facelift here and there. Genuinely new games were few and far between (and are the celebrated games of the era now). Then the '80s happened and game design went all over the place with wildly creative ways of doing things happening (and like every wildly creative phase in any discipline, a lot of it was a really stupid direction to take things, so withered quickly on the vine).

Then this weird phase happened in the early '90s where people nobody had ever heard of or from came out of the woodwork to tout their "grand new RPG" that "solved all the problems of previous games" ... and it was always just another variant of D&D. These were people who'd been playing (usually) AD&D for over a decade building up house rules and then deciding that they would publish these house rules as a "new" game system. And it was clear they'd never even once been in a game store, not to mention talking with other designers or playing other games, over their entire span. Because they would "solve" things by proudly proclaiming the number of classes they had so you could play the character you want. (One game had 114 classes!) Or how you could play any race and class in combination. Or, you know, things that hadn't been an issue at all since the introduction of Runequest in 1978.

It was always so tragic. These games were amateur in the literal sense: the product of great love. A lot of time, effort, and money had gone into their publication. And they were doomed on impact because while they were, arguably, an improvement over AD&D (the king of the gaming castle at the time) they weren't sufficiently good to be worth switching to. I had about 20, maybe even 30, of these games on my bookshelf just as a mute testament to what happens if you try to hit a market without even elementary market research.

I had a similar arc, only I was introduced to it with D&D/AD&D in the '70s.

Today I don't play D&D or any of its derivatives, though.

The first system I played was the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which I tried with a cousin in 1978, but the first one I owned was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons which I purchased in 1980 or 1981.

• "Realistic" Fantasy: Chivalry & Sorcery
• High Fantasy: HARP
• Space Opera: Space Opera
• Science Fiction: CORPS or EABA
• Dieselpunk: Tomorrow City
• Modern: CORPS or BRP
• General Purpose: Spark, FATE (typically Accelerated Edition), EABA, or a BRP hack

Read George Polti's The 36 Dramatic Situations. It's a list of plot elements that have a snappy title, a list of participants in the plot element, a brief discussion of how it works, and then (unfortunately dated) references to dramas that used them.

Using this when building a world, or a campaign, or a local setting, lets you quickly set up a bunch of conflicts (ideally with interlaced participants so that single NPCs (or PCs) can be in different roles in different dramatic situations. Then you just let the events flow logically, and as the dramatic situations get resolved you get a plot. PCs can interfere with these dramatic situations and thus have an impact on resulting plots even if the overall setting is far larger than they are.

For depth in world-building I use a rule I call "Y-cubed". (I got it from somewhere else but can't recall the source anymore.)

For every detail you make, you ask the question "Why" three times.

So a village the characters have reached stop all work every 77 days for a festival. Why? It celebrates an ascended local hero who saved the village from a magical blight. Why 77 days? It took 77 days for effort for the blight to be defeated. ... And so on.

This is a rapid way to both build depth in your setting quickly, as well as inspire possible mysteries and intrigue for investigation later.

A slight modification works also for giving NPCs depth.

The number drops a bit when the polls are done in secrecy. Still far higher than any western government, mind.