Yet Another Aside

One of the things I lament the most about Bishrook's passing is that I have come across soooooo many cool games that she would have loved, or that I think would have been majorly fun were she involved.  (We never did agree on S7S, used a Wushu derivative for most of our projects, but our last one was indeed PDQ#.  She liked Yesterday's Tomorrow by John Wick, and we had a sort of homebrew mashup with that and Wushu in the works.)

One of the little things I think she might have really liked, and one which I really enjoy as a concept is Anima Prime from Berengad Games.  (Not to be confused with Anima from Fantasy Flight Games, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax.)  Two of the things I enjoy most about AP are its flexibility (the core rules include material on building your own settings, after all) and the emphasis on an evocative setting rather than a comprehensive one.  In that, it's rather like Story Now or any of Ed's miniatures games, where book-keeping is minimal.

That, alas, seems to be AP's downfall.  Like Sorcerer and Mortal Coil, it's less a traditional game-with-official-setting and more how-to-play manual...and for reasons that puzzle me, a free creative commons set of rules that allows every group to enjoy mutual creativity sells less well and is never as popular as an increasingly expensive mountain of elaborate books.  Which is too darn bad, because AP is a whole heck of a lot of fun.  And that means, as usual, I find more inspirations than I can use.

Here's one setting bunny that has sunk its little fangs into my sensorium and refuses to turn me loose.  It's not an original concept, to be sure, so much as a thoroughly synthetic one, but I think it'd be a whole lot of fun.  And I'd like to think Bish would have had a blast with this one.  It's naught but a thumbnail, a loose gathering of related elements, but I think the idea is clear enough.

Huzzah!

Thumbnail of Setting: The Three Musketeers as done by Square Enix.  The St.  Germaine Legacy meets Final Fantasy.  The Princess novels by Jim Hines as animated by Rumiko Takahashi and Roosterteeth.  Airships, giant clockwork golems, conspiracies, grand balls, flair and flourishes, wheelocks and rapiers and broad brimmed hats with colorful plumes.

In the meantime, I'm off to console myself with the 'musketeer' version of Ed's swashbuckling rules with an eye to creating a little mayhem, being as I am more of a musketeer at heart than a black-hearted privateer sort.

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