omorka | This Summer's Gaming Project:

(Ran into T. the cute gamer guy at dinner tonight, along with his girlfriend. I never see him outside of gaming events! Nice to know he exists. Between that and seeing C. the 7th Sea player at Middle Market more frequently these days, I'm feeling that old urge to get out the dice again.)

I am going to do a GURPS Space Opera setting. I'm also going to try to polish GURPS Jorune into playable shape; it's actually mostly done - just needs stuff like equipment lists.

If I finish both of the above, then I'll also try to start back in on my old, old GURPS Bronze Age fantasy setting. I need to figure out which of the standard GURPS Fantasy races would be part of that world, how the magic system actually works, and all that - given how many of my old notes I don't have (I now suspect many of them didn't survive the fire) and the change from 3rd ed. revised to 4th ed., I'll be basically rebuilding the world from the ground up.

Now, for the space opera setting, I can either work on my own Three Masters setting (the galaxy is being colonized via jump-drive, by humans, an aquatic race with cephalopoidal and echinodermatic traits, and a bizarre race of methane-breathers), or borrow wholesale a universe that's already largely fleshed out and just adapt it. If I do the latter, there are two obvious choices: Master of Orion, or Star Control (in both cases, it'd be the version seen in the second game - MoO II: BaA, or StarCon II: the Ur-Quan Masters - since, oddly enough, in both cases the third game is widely seen as inferior, and in the case of StarCon3, written by someone other than the original authors). Both have interesting universes. The MoO alien races are better fleshed out as races (meaning that they'd be easier to put into game terms); the StarCon timeline and universe are richer, plus I wouldn't have to create a starmap from scratch. There are fewer MoO races, which has both good and bad aspects. StarCon would require that I pay more attention to starship combat than I really feel like, but I can sidestep that by setting the game outside of one of the two wars in the in-game timeline.

Hmm. Thinky thinky . . .