This is the time of year to be thankful. And I want to express my thanks to a beautiful wife who loves and cares for me. For my family and friends, for being there. Even for work, who has provided me income for the last thirteen years. I am thankful for my health, even though it isn’t always the best. And, of course, for living in the greatest country in the world!

Thanks to my friend Jeremy over at MMOVoices (http://mmovoices.ning.com/) I got the opportunity to gain access to a 14 day trial of Champions Online.

I have been playing for several days now and have created three unique super heroes (heroines?). The first guy I created was a robot with mental energies and a large laser cannon called Meganaut, from my days playing Villains and Vigilantes (an old pencil and dice game). I enjoyed him for a while getting him up to 8th level. Then I created a super hero called The Wild Wild West that was part cowboy and steampunk. He has old steampunk fashion gadgets, but looks like a rumble-bumble cowboy. I really enjoy playing him. Finally, I made a devilish, impish girl called The Dark Princess which has magical powers. She has the ability to teleport around and throw ball of electrical energy.

You can create a million different super heroes in the game, though I have found serious limitations in the creation process. You are very much limited to a human, bipedal constraints. I wanted my robot to be a more of a floating computer box with no arms or legs, and I couldn’t figure out how to do that.

As for game play, it is like most MMOs in the sense you get quests and experience with the treadmill of doing kill X mobs for X experience. Although I found I could go around and just beat up bad guys, the game really frowns on that and gives very little experience for doing so — the quests are the mode of level advancement.

Sadly, from what I have seen thus far (pre-10th level content) there is no community in the least. In the hours of play I only occasionally read a chat commented, and most of those were in French.

You see, the entire game is on 1 server which makes for a grand experience, but then they shard each zone into microcosms of 50 people each.

This brings us to the two major content areas — neither of which is in a city but stuck out in the wilderness, one frigid and one barren. I am not sure what their intentions were on this, but super heroes need city landscapes as much as elves need forests and goblins needs caves. I just could not get into the story, and I felt the entire affair was staged and contrived. As a player I knew this was just a static story being played over and over. The character should feel that their environment is alive. City of Heroes did this much better with their large city scapes that offered a feeling that life moves forward, not stuck in a continuous loop of a destroyed camp in the wilderness.

I have dealt only slightly with the crafting system in the game, but what I have experienced as left me indifferent. Similar to World of Warcraft, you select the item to make and push a button. Make sure you have the raw ingredients, found on bad guys you kill and make your item. Perhaps at higher levels things change. There are several fields of study, with each having areas of specialization so everyone will feel that they have their own unique little crafting method.

I am still out with a verdict on this game. It looks fun, plays well, but I am not drawn back to it like I am to Everquest II. I will continue for another 10 days and keep you informed of my findings.

For those that stop by here infrequently, and perhaps for those few who stop here often, you may have noticed scarce activity on my thoughts and progress on my many hobbies at the Emerald Tablet.

Alas, I have been stuck in the world of Everquest II all summer and have toiled and wasted hours journeying in the world of Norrath. It was not a bad little excursion and I had allot of fun. One of the greatest accomplishments for me was finally reaching the end game on multiple characters. Up until this last expedition into Everquest II, I had never had the focus to complete a quest or stay on one character. I have dozens of characters in Everquest II, but none had ever reached 80th level (the maximum level as of this time).

Recently I found some interesting ways of staying focus and more importantly finishing quests that I started. Within short order, I had nine 80th level characters — Yes, can you believe that. I also found myself rather rich, with over 400 platinum coins. Sure there are others that have more 80th level characters and many that have thousands of platinum, but for me this was the “Jumping of the Shark”, or otherwise known as the beginning of the end.

Hopefully I will return to more writing and less game playing. My eyes are set on playing a couple of months of Champions Online, and then eventually returning to Everquest II in March of 2010 with the release of their next expansion.

In the mean time, I am still trying to sell my novel, “Amish Johnson and the Pegasus Chamber” as well as finish my many RPGs that I have been working with on and off since 1979!

So much to do, and so little time.

Troy Christensen

I am a Neogi … “Neogi see the world in terms of ownership. The strong rule and possess the weak. Slavery and trade form the foundations of neogi culture, making neogi reliable merchants to devils, giants, drow, and other dark forces.

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/monster/index.asp

Take the quiz and find out yourself. I would love to know what monster you turn out to be. . .

I have returned from this year’s summer vacation full of renewed energy and inspiration.  Each year I head towards Traverse City and spend a week reading, eating, and enjoying the sun without a computer or game at my side. This year it was a bit more cold and a bit more tiring than in years past, but I have come back with a fresh mindset.

I need to concentrate on getting the first book done on Phantasm Adventures IV and also find a publisher for my novel, Aaron Johnson and the Pegasus Chamber.  After that I have a slew of short stories that I need to write, edit, and once again try and find someone to publish them.

Of course you can always publish them myself, but I wonder how that appears to agents and other people in the publishing business — does it show initiative or failure?

Troy

Phantasm Voyage:

Amish Johnson and the Pegasus Chamber

A Summary

Phantasm Voyage is the story of Aaron “Amish” Johnson, a student of the twenty-second century, and his rather exciting journey into a virtual world fraught with danger.  Aaron is content to live on his family’s wind farm but is forced into going to school in the ultra-tech burgeoning city of New Detroit.  With reluctance he attends the new high school in the Kamen Tower, a one hundred and eighty-six story skyscraper on the outer rim of New Detroit.

There Aaron meets up with Bruce Greene, a kid who is as opposite to him as any of the other twelve hundred students at the school. Aaron is accustomed to the simple life on the farm, while the kids at the school have lived their lives within the steel and glass towers have lost all connection to the natural world. Bruce has the nickname of Cirrus, for he lives within the clouds of the megalopolis, befriends Aaron and introduces him to his pals Qin, Jack, Addison, and Chloe.  Although shy and awkward, Aaron tries to  become part of the gang.

By accident, he obtains a secret code to the Pegasus Chamber, a virtual simulation so real that participants cannot tell reality from fantasy. What was meant to be a party in a virtual beach in paradise suddenly becomes a tooth-and-nail fight for survival.  The kids find themselves in more danger than any back alley of New Detroit. Forging together, the gang head off on the wildest adventure they could ever imagine.

As Aaron tries to discover why the simulation has not ended, he is determined to convince his new friends that the virtual world is just as real as their lives in New Detroit. Along the way, Aaron meets up and falls in love with Anne, a mysterious girl that for all practical purposes should not be in the simulation.  As the group of kids comes to grip with their own mortality, they experience breathtaking vistas, savage beasts, and ancient ruins filled with danger.

As the gang fights their way to a beacon of hope, they unravel a great mystery on who and why they are trapped within the virtual world.  From the confines of an ancient ruin, a maniacal scientist conspires to somehow bridge the gap between the real world and the simulation. The demented scientist believes the sacrifice of the children will allow him to return to reality. The doctor captures the kids and with the help of bloodthirsty priests prepares to sacrifice the kids one by one, until the mana needed to bridge the gap is sustainable to open a doorway back to his laboratory.

Aaron must overcome his shy and introverted temperament to battle the mad scientist, freeing his friends and finally escaping the virtual simulation. Aaron discovers that perhaps there is very little difference between either realities and must make the decision to go home or stay in the virtual chamber with the girl he has learned to love. As he stands in the threshold between the real world and the virtual chamber, he is torn between the world he calls home and the place he has found love.

Aaron returns in the sequel of the Pegasus Chamber, in the Leprechaun’s Legacy to once again battle the evil Dr. Morgan, this time to save his young brother’s life.  Relying on both virtual and real friends, he battles the mad scientist this time in a world of the fey.

I sit in front of my computer looking at the first book of Phantasm Adventures, and marvel that most of the book is completely done.  What is left to do is editing and formatting the basic text.  For me this is the endless battle that I engage in.  I pour over each page looking for ways to tweak the rules, to clear up cluttered language, to sharpen the expamples, to format the rules to fit better on each page.

I think I will slip on the June release of the game since we are almost at the end of the month, and next month I have a week where I head up north to a place with no computers — alas, I just found out that it will not have any heat either.

Major portions of the game are done, including character generation, races, classes, faction, and most of the skill description.  Some big battles are still ahead, however, with the looming equipment section still to be hammered out.  In the past, I simply scanned the original pages that I made twenty years ago and used them from one version to the next.  I think this time, I will need to do something different.  I am unsure if I want to continue to use Word for this or perhaps use a spreadsheet and import the tables into word and ultimately Indesign.

Sometimes I feel like I am treading water with the editing, retracing my steps over and over, and amazingly finding new things to change each time I re-read the rules.  At a certain point I will just admit that it is good and push on to the next step — publishing the game.

I look forward to the first book being done, but my pleasure will only be short lived since I still will have three other books to publish.  Most shocking is that book three and four are mostly unwritten and will take herculean effort to finish.

Troy

Just a quick note to all that visit here: I am still plugging away at Phantasm Advetures, but it has been slowing down in the last couple of weeks.  I seem to go into bouts of feverish work then wander off to explore other avenues of creative thought.

Then there is times like now where I do nothing really except work, come home, and twaddle on the computer playing computer games.  Being an ametuar game designer, I profess that playing games is fun and theruputic but one must also persue other things in life than just playing games.

I find it ironic that some of the richest and most successful MMO players are people that are holed up in a dark little shadow of reality living their life through the game.  I often wonder if they used the same enthusiasm and people skills to organize a raid to slay an uber boss, what they could achieve in the real world.

But enough about my philosphy on life.  I am taking some time here in a few weeks to really go through the rules and start whipping them into shape.

Troy

When I started looking at my fourth edition of my classic role-playing game, I wanted to make some interesting decisions when it came to the game principles.  During the various iterations of the game, I have always struggled with the concept of making the game more or less a derivative of Dungeons & Dragons.  It its first inception, I wanted the game to feel familiar to those that played the famous title but also contain rules never seen before.  In my second printing I moved grossly away from Phantasm Adventures being anything like Dungeons & Dragons, in the hopes that people wanted something fresh.  On my third attempt, I moved closer to adopting more D&D game mechanics but also made the rules overtly complicated, with dozens if not hundreds, of intricate rule expansions for each rule.

In the third edition of Phantasm Adventures, for example, I used very familiar statistics to represent the qualities of a character. Taking the familiarity of D&D, I then turned the generation of the scores upside down with a highly complicated set of rules starting with rolling two ten-sided dice, then adjusting the generated scores with innumerable modifications and ultimately converting the value back into a number very close to 3 through 18.

In the fourth edition, I removed much of the complexity leaving the basic roll of three, six-sided dice.  The values are not converted, but simple adjustments are made. Because of the tried and true mechanics of the game, I do take the three values and apply some rule changes on to how they are added together and the final score generated.  This is just one example of how I am moving back towards a more familiar concept of game mechanics, yet still offering unique rules for play.

I made an early decision not to use the open 4E rule system offered by Wizards of the Coast.  First, I find the acceptance of such to be horribly constraining, both intellectually and creatively.  Each role-playing game must have its own set of core rules accentuating specific aspects of the game that differentiates it from other rules.  

In the future,  I will be showcasing a new role playing game that I wrote fifteen years ago called Troy’s Enhanced Dungeons & Death, with the acronym TED&D – pronounced Teddy (like the bear).  Even with this tongue and cheek naming convention, the game will not use the 4E rule system but will have its own set of unique rules (though they will be more familiar with old school players, drawing upon their memories of the first edition Dungeon & Dragon rules).

In Phantasm Adventures, there will be many concepts that will be familiar to players of Dungeons & Dragons, but the rules will be unique.  For a system to stand on its own legs, it will need to garner its own unique following among players.  Some may find the rules complicated, while others will want to add their own “house” variants. Hopefully there will be enough room within the set of rules to allow people to play the game and feel comfortable enough to experiment with the game. I can attest that people that have tried the game, all find it fun and enjoyable, and they find it no more difficult as a whole than Dungeons & Dragons.

The true test of the game is ultimately time and the number of players that consistently play it.  I know from those that still play games and who have had the opportunity to play the game, they still have active campaigns in the world of Monokon.

Over the weekend I made the decision to release my greatest role-playing game I have ever designed. It is the quintessential game of high fantasy with more than fifty-five player races, thirty factions, two hundred skills, a magical spell system unmatched in any game ever published. It also comes with the world of Monokon: a rich and delicious world full of mystery, discovery, and unbounded adventure.

I am also very excited to have some top notch artwork finally gracing its pages. As I look at the project, I foresee five books each about 100 pages long. I will release them in various quality from the basic pdf (containing just the rules), a grand edition (containing rules, art and simply page flashings), to the premium pdf (all the pages in color).

Best of all, I have decided to release them series of books all free.

My plan is to release each book every couple of months, with the first one being ready in early June. If you wish to receive the game, simply drop me an email at: tchristensen616@gmail.com and mention Phantasm Adventures in the subject.

Troy