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Knave or Maze Rats?

This week I have an interesting bag of options. Yesterday I bought Knave and Maze Rats. I have only read Knave so far and made some notes. I am a big fan of rules-light games and feel the translate to solo play better than rules-heavy monsters. Which brings me to my next secret desire. I have a long history of playing Champions. In my folders here is a person set of solo rules for the system. When I wrote them publishing was not an option, but now there is the Hall of Champions. I would need to buy the latest version of the rules, mine are old and then refresh them. I think I could get a Champions set of rules knocked into shape inside a week.

This throws up another quandry. Do I create a really generic set of rules for all of Hero System, or make Champions Universe Specific rules? The big difference is in how you handle creating NPCs on the fly and NPC reactions. Battles between super heroes and villains are normal in Champions, it is almost the default conflict resolution. Move things to Victorian Hero and you cannot run around smashing up the Royal Albert Hall, not every week anyway. What about Solar Hero or Alien Hero? I think Horror Hero would need different rules and support material as well.

What I am looking at now is four possible projects to work on:

  • Knave
  • Maze Rats
  • Champions (specific)
  • Hero System (pick your favourite)

The first two a few days work to write, a few days to try playing and then put them together into something presentable.

The third (Champions) is already written but would need refreshing and maybe updating and then layout and publising. I think that would take a week.

The last one would be a mountain or work and cost a small fortune to buy up all the Hero System books, read all of the setting material and then create custom books. Is this more of a long term project where I write and release books setting by setting as I have time to write them?

If that is the way to go, what order would make the more sense?

I suspect that doing them in order is the best option. I can create the Knave and Maze Rats books quite easily. Champions I already have, after that I can try and gauge if there is a Hero System solo role play community. If I am the only player, it makes no sense to go the expense of creating the books.

I think this has been brought on my BESM and GURPS. Both systems have that same feel as Champions did. I have always been a fan of Point Buy and customisable powers skills and abilities. To my, biased, point of view, GURPS and BESM are just variations on Hero System, configured for their speciality, GURPS is more crunchy and possibly gritty, BESM is more setting rich.

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