Revised GM's Guide

Discussion on the Fading Suns game line, errata, and feedback not related to playing or GMing.
First Age
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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby First Age » Thu Jan 02, 2014 5:19 pm


Amlost
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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby Amlost » Sun Jan 05, 2014 11:09 am

Overall a nice looking product.
Things I liked
Chapter 2; Hazards adds some nice, easy to use (or ignore), setting relevant threats to a GM's characters.
Chapter 3; Antagonists managed to nicely summarize, in 36 pages, the settings major opposing forces for easy access and digestion.
You handled Fiefs. This has been needed for a long time.
(I feel that it may take a separate book to assist GM's in running Fief based dramas or even full campaigns.)
You made a solid and honest attempt at getting dates into the planets sections.

A few gripes.
The Quality of the planet map images is so bad they are completely unusable.
The "Index" in the back appears to have been an alphabetical version of the "Contents" and IMHO adds nothing to the book.
You forced the subsections into the planet history's in a way I find kind-of, well forced.

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Angelman
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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby Angelman » Mon Jan 06, 2014 9:45 am

Hi Amlost, and thanks for the feedback :)
On sample fiefs: This has been one of my darling projects for years, and it is good to finally see it materialize. Actually, I wrote up one or two more for the FSR GMG, but I think they arrived too late to be included (and in any case, there would probably have been no room for them anyway). It is safe to say however, that more sample fiefs will appear in the future (I've also written several for other projects). As for a dedicated sourcebook for running a fief, that would be fantastically fun to have, although it would be a major undertaking ;) An option I've been toying with is to do a sandbox location setting with say... 3-4 minor house fiefs, a bishopry, and a few other features, written in such a way that the GM could use any of the factions as the players' home team. This would not detail any fief-running rules as such, but could contain a fair few dramas revolving around local politics, family plots, provincial culture etc. Would that be interesting, do you think?

Quality of the planet maps: I agree, they didn't turn out too well... I bet they were scanned off the original books (as HDi has lost the original text and arts files as I understand it). I hope we can get better pictures of these in the future.

As for forcing sub-sections into individual planets' histories, I am not entierly sure what you mean here. We didn't rewrite or add too much to these articles, altough there was the odd added paragraph and such. Is it the headlines that you find forced? They were indeed slotted right in where I found the room, to make things easier to reference. Did that perhaps turn out to interfere too much instead of clarifying the text? Or perhaps it is the section headings you object to? Please clarify and advise :)
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Amlost
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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby Amlost » Mon Jan 06, 2014 11:11 pm

Last time I remember "fief" settings as in depth as you are describing were the old MERP City/Region modules; however their was never a "how-to" manual on how to make your own module. (And they were so "stat" focused they were marginally useful as they didn't allow a GM room to "scale" a drama to his characters. I'd think a Fief's Campaign book would be a refreshing viewpoint for campaigns in the fading suns world.

It would have to allow a GM to create a fief, add to it should it become important to an epic, and would need to have the rules scalable to allow the GM to take campaigns from as little as a drive by raid, an abandoned home, as far as a Downton Abbey like setting, but rules for running the fief would be... well more cumbersome then they are worth. Going into them in depth would be against the first "maxims" laid down in the GM's guide. I think it would give the fading suns universe something that is missing from alot of other sci-fi settings out there.

Sorry I had to bring up the maps quality but it had to be said. Perhaps this is something (should better copy's be found) that could be published by FASA as a download.

I was referring to the subsection headings. In many cases individual subsections had a half page of text while others had a paragraph or less giving it what I felt was a "forced" feel. While they work for the Hawkwood fiefs (and enough was added/expanded on for the Li Halon Fiefs); they are pretty broken up for the Hazat and al-Malik write-ups. IMHO.

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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby Bogie » Tue Jan 07, 2014 11:26 pm

Ask and receive! :) The higher quality Jumpweb map is now available for download.

http://fadingsuns.fasagames.com/downloa ... umpweb.jpg
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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby Angelman » Wed Jan 08, 2014 8:39 am

Great to see Simon's Jumpweb map in crisp detail :)

No need to appologize about flagging issues, Amlost. We'll see what we can do with them when we get around to it. Shouldn't be too hard to fixt, I imagine (although art is not my field so I am speaking out of my... pants here).

Fief campaign: A sandbox setting with lots of options and a high degree of adaptability would be very cool to do. I am not sure we'd need to have scalable rules as such, as there would be little need for rules I imagine? I mean, the fiefs we have written thus far have no rules in them - I just follow a checklist of things I would like to have in an article and the GM can fill in the blanks as needed. What sort of rules would one need for a fief project do you think?
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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby Digger » Wed Jan 08, 2014 4:17 pm

Amlost was talking about the planet map images not the Jumpweb, Angelman.
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Angelman
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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby Angelman » Wed Jan 08, 2014 4:30 pm

Yes, and so was I - "planet maps" as I said. The Jumpweb came out fine IMO, although having it in a larger formate now is very nice indeed! The planet maps became fuzzy in the print it seems, which is unfortunately. The jumpweb map (which Todd put up in a new crisp/large format) was another comment not related to the fuzzy planet maps. I'm just happy that Todd made that available.
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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby Digger » Wed Jan 08, 2014 6:34 pm

I mucked about in the past and did a few like this, I should add them too the Deviantart page

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Angelman
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Re: Revised GM's Guide

Postby Angelman » Thu Jan 09, 2014 5:25 am

The rings do slightly obstruct the text, but the color and clarity is beautiful! Very pretty indeed! Please say you have one of those for Criticorum laying about? :mrgreen:
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