Book Launch! Pre-Orders!

Get your Pre-Orders here!

Trying my hand at an actual novel, I present to you: Dreaming of Atmosphere.

Book one of a science fiction series set in the universe of Galaxy's End, the story follows the adventures of Seth Donovan - a frontiersman and interstellar traveller. As the First Mate on the starship Dreaming of Atmosphere, Seth and the rest of the crew get dragged into a job they really didn't want to be a part of.

Years ago, during an ill-fated campaign against a savage alien menace, Seth was a Star Marine who got left behind when the Protectorate Forces withdrew. After months of fighting tooth and nail just to survive, Seth managed to escape, horribly wounded and scarred mentally.

Now, a crime boss is holding the ship to ransom, hiding bombs throughout the Dreaming to ensure they perform a dangerous mission. The catch? The job will take Seth right back into the heart of the alien menace!

A true adventure drawing upon the authors own naval experiences for an authentic taste of what life would be like travelling the stars. There's murderous aliens, killer robots, evil corporations and devious technologies!

Available from Amazon.com now on Pre-Order, launching on the 1st of November 2015.

Get your Pre-Orders here!

Updates!

Readers may have noticed a distinct lack of updates on the blog, I thought it was due an explanation. So. What’s been going on?

As many mature gamers will know, Real Life has a tendency to take precedence over many of our hobbies, and this has pretty much been the case, however I can’t blame it entirely. Work has been busy as hell, taking up more and more of my free time, and as a result my various projects have had to be shelved for later times. Does this mean I’m not producing gaming products? No it does not. Does this mean there are delays on getting projects through to completion? Yes it does. Can you expect more products to become available for Ample and Hands of Fate? Yes you can!

One project that has been a major focus lately is my writing. Although I’m not going to use this platform to promote it (haha yes I am!) I will keep this site a focus on gaming, and discussions around that.

So what have I been doing? Glad you asked! Early November will see the release of my first novel in a series based in my science fiction universe that I began to construct in the Exile’s End rpg. While the roleplaying game focuses on a period shortly after galactic civilisation is beginning to recover, the novel is set during an earlier time – the Epoch of human civilisation. So why did I choose to write in this period? My local gaming group and I have been gaming like crazy in this period using the Ample Basic Rules. What started out as a campaign guide, exploded into a fully-fledged description of the entire section of the galaxy the party plays in.

Several months ago I planned to recreate this guide as a saleable product, an addition to the Ample range of products, however with the novel taking up a lot of my time I’ve had the chance to put it down and look at it again with fresh eyes. My new plan is to work on it some more, integrating into it a whole slew of changes to the Ample system that make it unique to the setting. The core of the system will remain the same, but I wanted to express the space opera feel of the ‘Votus-Eridani Network’ and give it the grand sweeping vista that it deserves.

When can we expect this to be ready? The honest answer is ‘Don’t Know”. It’s in the works. The more I play, the more I write, the more material and inspiration I can draw upon to flesh out the setting.  I want there to be a connection between the game and the book, something that readers of both can read and go ‘Ah! I know this part!’.

TL:DR – Still Writing, Galaxy’s End in production, Dreaming of Atmosphere (the novel) to be released on Amazon.com early November, stuff.

Wealth of Ideas for the Wealth System

In the Ample Basic Rules Book we introduced what you could call a ‘cashless’ wealth system. Using the Wealth Advantage, we tracked individual character’s money without keeping track of every single coin or credit. While this may work for some games (especially games that have little need for money to be anything but an abstract) it doesn’t work for all genres. As stated in the BRB; each system offered up for use is optional, and games masters are encouraged to pick and choose which ones to include and which ones to modify or ignore. The first campaign setting offered by Audio Samurai Games – Atlas City Almanac - uses the Wealth System as written in the BRB, but future settings will use modified versions to show how they can tweaked.

In the fantasy setting (which is still a work-in-progress) we do away with the Wealth System all together and stick to a more traditional coin based system. What we’re going to discuss today though, is the modified Wealth System we’re using for the Sci Fi setting of Galaxy’s End.

Modified Wealth System

In this system, we combine individual credit ratings with the Wealth Advantage – characters keep track of their own credits and choose to invest Advantage points in Wealth. The Wealth Advantage represents an overall assessment of a character’s, or an organisation’s, financial standing. It represents their income and available assets, rather than how many credits they have in their pockets. The Advantage is used during character generation to determine how many credits a starting character has available, and is used during play once per game session to grant a cash injection to the character. Aside from these uses, Wealth is used during larger purchases and business transactions, such as Starship buying, shipping cargo and mining.

The Advantage can be used as a group pool of resources available to the entire party, as well as funding for businesses and organisations.

Complexity

For this system, as well as the fantasy setting coin based system, this leaves a gap in one of the uses of the Craft Skill; normally the Cost and Availability of an item are added together to give the number of successes needed to create an item. Without a Cost value expressed as points of Wealth, however, this won’t work. Instead, we introduce ‘Complexity’ in place of the old Cost value. Add this to Availability to get the number of successes needed for a Crafting Skill check. In the case of the fantasy setting, where we aren’t using Availability either, Complexity can be used in place of both (and thus get a higher value – Cost + Avail).

Food for thought, at any rate, for any budding campaign creators out there using Ample.

New Setting, New Rules, New Ideas

Work is under way turning our local game of Ample RPG into something we can sell! We've been playing a Sci Fi themed RPG every other week at the local gaming store (Hall of Heroes) that's had so much campaign info added to it and enough tweaks and adages done that it would be foolish of us not to submit it as a viable campaign setting, much like the Atlas City Almanac. All that's needed is some nifty, and legal, artwork and some proof reading, editing and typesetting done and we're good to go.

So, if you're like me and get excited about Science Fiction Roleplaying genres, stay tuned for this little gem. We're playing in the universe that Exile's End explores but situated prior to the Collapse, during the epoch of mankind's technology and civilisation. The Destroyers were fought back, and haven't been seen for centuries, and the GEA is now a galaxy spanning civilisation called The Protectorate. The game so far focuses on a Network called the Votus-Eridani Network, which has plenty to do, tons of strife and potential trouble, ancient aliens, dirty politicians, mysterious factions and giant spaceships. There's enough far reaching issues that it has both a mixture of Space Opera and Hard Sci Fi.

Keep an eye out for more news regarding 'Galaxy's End'.

New Rule changes:

At the request of a few of our players we've gone back to have a look at the rules that govern automatic fire. The Burst Fire weapon Trait, which designates that a weapon can be used to make multiple attacks in a round, carries some guidelines in it's use. The current way to do it, is by allowing a character to make a number of extra attacks in a round equal to their Combat Skill, and all attacks suffer a Choke, while each subsequent attack suffers a cumulative Slide as with Secondary Actions. The complaint was that Burst Fire attacks were fairly ineffectual when used against someone who is using Active Defence. Their only purpose seemed to be to overwhelm someone who IS using Active Defence and get them to use up their allotted number of Defences each round (equal to their Combat Skill). Only through picking up the Auto Fire Advantage was Burst Fire achieving anything like what real short controlled bursts of gunfire were achieving.

So we revisited it and trialled a house rule where instead of a Choke, Burst Fire gave a Slide to the first attack, and then added more Slides as the attacks progressed. This seems to work better, and we'll look into updating the Basic Rules Book soon.

Printer Friendly Ample now available!

Printer friendly version of Ample Basic Rules now available as a download option when you purchase the BRB. Head over to RPGNow.com and pick it up! If you've already bought it, you can download the new version from within your Library on the website.

The only difference between the 2 version is that the large background images have been removed from the pages, so only the black and white pics remain on each page. It prints up nicely, and for extra presentation value print the cover in colour.

Printer Friendly Ample to come

As the title suggests, we'll be getting the Printer Friendly version of Ample Basic Rules Book ready as an additional download for anyone who buys the pdf. We'll most likely add it to the standard download as multiple files that purchasers can simply choose to download once their purchase has gone through on RPGNow.com/DriveThruStuff.com

Was going to have it done this weekend, except I got smashed by a particularly nasty bout of food poisoning, missed my regular gaming session and spent pretty much all weekend with either my face or my arse in a toilet bowl. Good times!

Stay tuned, fans!

---<Jim fails Saving Throw vs. Poison>---

Ample is LIVE!

Well, the Ample System RPG is now officially LIVE! The first week of release saw an excellent slew of sales, all thanks to RPGNow.com and we even hit the Hottest Titles list. I think we got as high as number 4 for about a day, but we held onto #6 for the better part of the week!

For a small indy developer I think that's bloody awesome, even if I say so myself :)

As it is, we also released the first Campaign Setting for the system, the Atlas City Almanac, and work has already started on two more settings; one Sci Fi, one Fantasy.

Stay tuned for more info regarding these two beauts!