Meme-Free Zone

I've been very quiet about RPGs lately because things have been a bit stuck; sometimes things just don't want to be written. But I finally have some news.

For a while I've been trying to think of things to put in the next Flatland release. I have an adventure outline (a crossover with Forgotten Futures), some sample characters for it, and an article about religion in Flatland. That isn't enough to be worthwhile putting together as a PDF. However, I now have something better - a completely new game world.

The book is Charles Hinton's "An Episode of Flatland," which takes a different slant at 2D worlds, basing its physics much more on our own universe. Worlds are 2D disks, with 2D creatures living on the rim, in the same way that we live on the surface of a globe. The dimensions its inhabitants experience are Up-Down and East-West, rather than the NSEW of Flatland. There's never been a complete on-line version of the text - everyone seems to have scanned the Dover edition, part of a collection of Hinton's writings, which is heavily cut. I've been trying to get hold of a copy of the orginal book for the last couple of years, and finally acquired one last week on eBay. It reached me today, and I hope to start work on scanning etc. next week.

This is essentially going to be a separate game, but written in a similar style to Flatland and with some crossover potential. Again I'll be donating all proceeds to Doctors Without Borders. It'll include the Flatland / Forgotten Futures crossover adventure I mentioned above, which I'll rewrite so that it's usable with both systems - this will hopefully encourage people to buy both.

I'm still looking for a title for this - for various reasons "Coinworld" or "Rimworld" seem the most plausible, but if anyone has any better ideas let me know.

I should add that this is a long term thing - I hope to complete something for Forgotten Futures first, but for various reasons I don't want to say anything about that just yet. It probably won't be the clubland thing I discussed some time ago, that isn't coming together very well and I'm going to put it on hold pending a major rewrite, and work on something else instead. With luck I'll have more to say about this in a week or two.

As for the Dianaverse... well, I think I'm just going to have to leave it for a while; Dali's / Gandhi's Angels just isn't working, and again I think the best thing I can do is put it on hold and think about other things for a while, and hope that I come up with something better.

So hopefully things are starting to move, but fairly slowly. I doubt that I'll have anything to launch this year, but with luck 2008 will be interesting...