Theo Dudek, Ultimate Game Master

Did you think I was dead? >_<;; First off, I am sorry for taking such a long time between posts! Now that it is summer, I am finding myself more busy than ever with roleplaying campaigns, particularly my new "Neo-Pegana" campaign in Glendale and revising/updating Scott Bennie's "Testament" for 4th edition. In the process I have been doing lots of research into ancient Mesopotamia, farming cultures, and whether they had the time to play roleplaying games and, if so, what animal's knucklebones they would be most likely to make dice out of.

I am also working on a new project which I will hopefully be able to release on this blog in the not too distant future-- a new standalone RPG!!! (ﾟ∀ﾟ) I am normally skeptical of "homebrew" systems, on the basis that the DM should speak to players in their own language and there is no reason "reinventing the wheel" if one of the preexisting RPG systems is suitable for your game style. A DM should express himself *through* the preexisting RPG framework, with subtlety, rather than making up new rules on the fly and going nuts all the time; I think I set a nice example of this moderation in my own games. But I think I have hit on something truly original here, so I hope you will all like it when it's finished! DMing and designing games is a full-time job, and I have spent a lot of time recently gathering playlists of music from boss battles from 8- and 16-bit JRPGs (for the final battles with the Four Dragons of Assyria in my new campaign), buying and making poster maps, statting up balanced encounters, sending miniatures to India to be painted, etc. I am only one person and, sadly, I can only DM 8 or 10 people at a time, but I hope that someday, blog readers, I will be able to be a personal DM for each and every one of you!

While trying to get satellite maps images of Iraq for the Mesopotamia game, I have also been thinking a lot about the tremendous amount of technological gaming resources available on the Internet. It is pretty fascinating that the entire world has now been satellite-mapped, and that even the smallest island or chunk of rocks in the sea somewhere has a Wikipedia entry. It reminds me of the old Ultima CRPG series that my friend Phanes used to tell me about. In Ultima IV, the first game set in the game’s main world of Brittania, the world seems vast and unexplored, but in later games set in the same world, the timeline advances and the technology level advances with it, and cities expand, until the whole map is pretty much covered with houses and suburbs and roads and farms. An even more extreme example of the same thing was seen in the Ultima Online MMO, which had unlimited player-generated housing, so that just weeks after the launch, every bit of open space was covered with endless mazes of houses. The eerie effect reminded me of the continuous city of Trude in Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. If a MMORPG reflects people’s deepest hopes and ambitions (naturally), is this what our own world will turn into, an infinite suburb?

On the one hand, it is depressing to realize that our world has been completely mapped and charted. No more games of exploration and colonization, no “7th Sea,” no “O Desafio dos Bandeirantes.” But on the other hand, this just means that the realm of exploration has gone entirely inside the infinite territory of the human mind. -_- Now, it is the artists, the gamers, people who work with the imagination, who are the explorers, the creators.

And now, back to designing Mystery Project “M******”! I’ll post again soon!