Strange Lands

I started looking at Strange Lands again, aka Odyssey. My bud Andy Rau emailed me and asked me if I'd done any work on it, and I hadn't. But I'd been vaguely thinking of doing so since Joe bugged me about it at GenCon. "You could be pimping a game at the forge booth too, dude!"

So I got it out and looked at it. Started rewriting it in LyX, for ease of PDF creation. I'm not sure about this "writing it as a generic system for a certain kind of game" thing. It might really be better done with a default setting, esp. a grabby one. But we'll see how that goes. Rules first.

I was talking to (namedrop) Paul Czege on IM the other night and I realized -- just as he was about to suggest -- that I might already have too many rules in it. I was thinking that what I needed was to add some really good "conflict resolution" rules, maybe something spiffy like Dogs has, you know. But what if I only need the rules for the stuff that directly matters in the game -- Identity and Qualities and Distance and how they go back and forth, and what the Lands are.

What if I had something with the level of focus, and rules complexity, of something like Breaking the Ice?

Hmm.