I looked at my previous post, When Directions Change, and I found myself thinking that I wish I had saved that post title for today. There are some big changes coming for Sand and Steam.
I had a talk with a good designer friend late last week (one Lenny Balsera, the dude who worked a lot on the Dresden Files RPG, and is currently working on FATE Core 3.0), and we were bandying about ideas for the directions that I could take Sand and Steam. One of his suggestions rocked my world, and after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to take his idea and run with it.
When I first conceptualized (look at me, with the big words) Sand and Steam, I thought I was going to be designing a full, open setting and then offering support for that setting via the release of books for various systems, much in the same way Green Ronin did with Freeport. The systems I was planning on supporting were Pathfinder, Savage Worlds and FATE, all of which provide very different gameplay experiences. It was my thought that Sand and Steam would just offer those different gameplay experiences within, effectively, the same sandbox. What I am going to do is take things a few steps further.
Instead of using the same open setting for each system, I am going to take parts of Sand and Steam and marry them to specific rules so the systems can shine by providing the kinds of experiences at which they excel. For example: Savage Worlds is very, very good at pulpy, action-packed adventures. To that end, the Grand Cavalcade, and specifically, the Getters will be joined with Savage Worlds so the kinds of stories that location can provide can best be expressed. Similarly, the Undercity, along with the thieves and scavengers that live there, will be joined with Pathfinder. Lastly, the Collegium, with all of its machinations and scheming, will be written using FATE.
These choices, along with any future systems and portions of the setting that I may choose to use, will let me do something very important for me as a designer: maintain my focus. I tend to be all over the place with my ideas about, well, anything. Choosing a specific part of Kage and expressing that part using a specific rules system will allow me to narrow my focus and produce the absolute best material that I can for that system. As well, if there are any setting-specific rules changes that I feel are needed for the area, that can be accomplished with few problems.
So what does this mean for the open setting ideals that I have been espousing since day one? Not much, really. Even though, for example, the Undercity will only be included in a book using Pathfinder rules, I will still have all of the Undercity information available here, for free, on the Sand and Steam website. The same goes for the Grand Cavalcade and the Collegium. Absolutely nothing is stopping any GM or player from deciding that I made a horrible decision in using FATE to tell Collegium stories. That fictional person could easily take what I put up here (or in the Collegium book) and use that material for a Pathfinder game set in the Collegium.
I do not want to ever dictate to any player how they should play the game I wrote. What I am doing with these changes is making a set of choices that, as a designer, will enable me to make the best product I feel that I can. It lets me focus on specific aspects of the setting, join them with the system I feel expresses them most effectively, and to write the best books I can for people to use. Everything I write will be Sand and Steam, but it will be expressed in different ways (often with a different viewpoint of Kage and the rest of the setting), depending on which system I am writing for.
I love what I have done with Sand and Steam so far, and my hope is that things only improve from here. As per usual, if you have any thoughts, ideas or feedback, please let me know. Only with feedback can I hope to improve things.
As a final note, The Left Back Tooth of Sizzle Watts is nearing completion. The funny thing is that it is a Getters adventure that I am writing for Pathfinder, as I scheduled the games and decided what the adventure would be about well before I decided to make the changes detailed above. So, before it gets published here, I will be converting it to Savage Worlds so I don’t stray from the design choices I have made. Oh, delicious irony. =)