Shared Lobotomy

So Dave, Pat, and I got together yesterday to hash out some stuff for what sort of PDF projects we want to undertake. Under the OGL, it looks like d20 Modern, BESM d20, and Mutants & Masterminds will be targets. Dave also wants to investigate licensing products for Feng Shui, Savage Worlds, and HERO. SW apparently has a pretty cheap licensing scheme, but I'm not sure if the things we want to do are generally what PEG/Great White/Shane Hensley would want to license. I'm thinking maybe my Occult Crimes Taskforce project could be done as a BESM d20 gig instead of SW, allowing us to release it as an OGL campaign pack. Or it could be dual-statted with SW as well. I think it is important that if we are going to do this d20 stuff we need to get playing some d20 right away. In practical terms I think Pat ought to run d20 Modern and I need to do something with BESM d20. And when we get our hands on M&M we need to play some of that too.

Looks like I might have to put out some money to get some of these rulebooks. M&M none of us own. I don't have a copy of d20 Modern either, though you can get a PDF of Modern SRD for only four bucks at RPGnow. I'd drop the four bucks, but my concern is that over 400 pages of PDF is a horse-choking amount to print or read on the screen. And if I'm going to tackle BESM d20 whole hog, I really need to take a look at the Slayers d20 and Everstone implementations. That's a lot of spiffy hardbounds, without even talking about the new HERO doomtome or re-purchasing Feng Shui. Curse me for a fool for selling FS!

Despite seeing my money about to walk out the door and general trepidation that we don't know what we are getting into, I'm feeling jazzed on the creative level. For once I can look at my BESM d20 book and know what I want to do with it. Up until now it was a toolkit without a purpose. Like I was looking at a socket wrench and thing to myself "Hmmm, I bet it would be fun to use this thing sometime, but for what?" Talk about putting the cart before the horse. Now I'm having madcap ideas like "What if Cyborg and FBI Agent we're d20 classes?" and finding BESM d20 to be the right tool for that jorb. Instead of seeing the unstructered parts of BESM d20 as evidence of chaotic design, I'm finally seeing the structured parts as proof of coherent possibilities. Did that last line make sense? I sure hope so.