The AARG site is back up, sort of.

The last few months I've been doing a lot of work on the Narrator's Guide and the first setting book, Amity. I'd like to have these two books done when AARG goes officially public. Halfway through the Narrator's Guide work, I realized that the notes I was compiling on writing adventure plots were extensive enough to fill their own book, so I've been working on that as well. I also wrote a movie. And then I spent a little bit of time on my money job to pay bills.

All of this means that the AARG website, which I have some serious plans for, have been sort of put on hold.

But I just finished editing a play-through of Wushu (I'll have more on why I'm posting episodes that don't use the AARG system later) and I wanted to share it, so I finished some of the blog functions so I could put it up. That's the previous post.

Like I said, I've got plans for the site, so check back in a month or two and see if I've made any progress.

So a while back, we tried playing Lucid, Chad Wattler's RPG based on the movie "Inception". After reading Chad's synopsis, I decided I really liked the Jenga tower idea for the dream stability, but I wanted to encourage more gameplay rather than simple storytelling.

I knew AARG wasn't a good fit for Lucid, and after searching around for a while I landed upon Wushu Open, which is designed to encourage gameplay while still heavily favoring storytelling. It was a good match.

Our first game of Lucid went well, but I wasn't really happy with how we used Wushu. We still relied too much on dice rolls and skills to accomplish what we wanted to do.

So I got the idea of playing a straight forward Wushu game, full of fists and kungfu and explosions, to get my players used to the idea of Wushu's "Narrative Truth".

I think we did pretty good. There's some hesitation at first as we tried to get used to the idea of narrative playing, but by the second fight scene I think it was covered pretty well - even with Rae's super powers.

In all, I think it was one of the best gaming sessions we've had in a while.

Standalone Podcast : Fists of Deadly Fight

Rest assured, AARG is still moving along. The Spell Book is finished and proofing, the Narrator's Guide is is 80% complete, and the first few completed books are being proof-read right now. As soon as the Narrator's Guide is complete I'll be compiling my notes for the Amity setting into a book, then doing a soft release of the first five books.

In the meantime - my playtest group was wondering about adapting the AARG rules for existing universes and I took that as a challenge. The playtest group was sufficiently impressed with the way the AARG skills could be used to faithfully recreate a well known character.

The MP3 below is the result of that session. All of the players were given Han Solo character sheets in envelopes and told them not to reveal who they were playing.

And now I proudly present a little something I like to call

Standalone Podcast : Han Semble

AARG is still coming along. The rule book is done, the skill book is on the final proof, and the spell book has gone into first proof. I'll be sending it out to my gracious early readers within the next few weeks.

That (I believe) is the hard part! The spell and skill books together clock in over 150 pages. I'm debating some serious editing, although I'm not sure what I can cut. I want everything in the first launch :(

On the other hand, the back end for the website is coming along nicely. Thanks to my early beta-testers and account registrationers. I'm hoping to have the comments for the blog section up around the time I send out the spell book.

And, on that note, the raw podcast files will be up this weekend for those with access!

More stuff coming soon, check back!