introducing project “blue lightning”

As I mentioned in my last post, my brother and I are working on a new fantasy game. As I’ve been traveling for a bit over a month, our ability to collaborate has been somewhat hampered, but we’ve been e-mailing and google-docing and things have generally been moving forward. This post is devoted to introducing you to our fantasy game.

Why “Blue Lightning?”

I’d to explain the origin of our project’s code-name. It needs a code-name because we haven’t quite decided what to call it yet.

Back in the day, when my brother and I were first trying our hands at role-playing games, we mostly played D&D with his friends. From time to time during our campaigns, we would come across an undesirable situation: a player had to leave the game, or someone wanted to change a few facts about their character which had already affected the game. Sometimes we could easily address these issues “in-game.” At other times, however, we simply wanted to gloss things over and move on. Somehow the idea of “blue lightning” was born, or adopted from somewhere… at this point I’m not exactly sure of the origin of the term. In any case, “blue lightning” is what we used to alter the game world to our liking at times when coming up with a “good reason” was not worth the trouble. Characters, places, even past events would suddenly be altered and replaced in order to meet our needs. “Aw man, Hans moved to Germany! I guess Thogar the Paladin won’t be around any more. He never said much anyway… blue lightning, away he goes! Let’s move on.” or, “Hey Mike, is it okay if my character actually has a higher Wisdom but a lower Strength? I kind of want to take some levels in druid, but my Wisdom is only 9. Blue lightning, please?” Sure, I’d say. Why not? We would use blue lightning sparingly and only when necessary to keep the story moving and keep folks happy- it’s not as if everyone’s characers were constantly changing. It was simply the tool we used to alter the game and the setting in order to better fit our needs.

Our new fantasy game is, in many ways, simply the way D&D would look if my brother and I flipped through the rules (any addition you like) and threw bolts of blue lightning down willy-nilly until it looked and felt the way we wanted it to. We’ve never really liked saving throws, so our game doesn’t have them. (Yes, you can still be poisoned, burnt, crushed, charmed, drowned, and electrocuted.) There are some things from just about every edition of the game that we like (as well as countless other games), and we’ll be doing our best to meld them together into a cohesive, simple system. We like telling stories. We like cool characters. We like fantasy. We don’t like Hit Points. Blue lightning! Goodbye, hit points.

That’s all you get for now, as my time at the ‘net cafe is up. More later…