Toward Ecosophy

I'm delighted to announce that the rulebook for Weird of Hali: Roleplaying the Other Side of the Cthulhu Mythos is now finished in working draft. It's kind of chunky -- 107,000 words, 500 pages in double spaced manuscript format -- but then that's what you get when a rulebook has to include three different systems of magic, not to mention rules for mad scientists, car chases, nervous breakdowns, and what happens when your character starts turning into something other than human. A first pass by the publisher, and by an old friend of mine who's played RPGs since D&D was this neat set of additions to Chainmail, turned up a few problems that were readily fixed, and now it's ready for the next stage of the process: playtesting. 

I have three Games Masters lined up to do the initial playtesting, but I'd be willing to see several more give it a spin, I want to make sure all the remaining bugs in the rules are caught in advance of publication, and playtesting to destruction is the best way to see to that. Interested? Let's talk. 

A couple of points: 

First, some things are fixed. The rulebook uses the Mythras system, and the license that allows me to use that system permits things to be added to the simplified Mythras Imperative rules but does not permit anything in those rules to be removed or changed. If you don't like d100 games, or some other aspect of Mythras aka RuneQuest 6 irritates you, that's unfortunate but it's not going to change. Similarly, the revaluation of all values central to the game (and the novels) -- the idea that the Great Old Ones are the old gods of nature and it's the people who are trying to destroy or banish them who are the real threat to all life on earth -- and a good deal of the setting details are also not going to change. 

Second, no, you don't have to have read any of the novels in my tentacular fantasy series The Weird of Hali in order to play, or playtest, this game. It's the same fictive world and the same broad situation, but the goal is to make the game an independent entrance to that fictive world, not just a derivative of the books. 

Third, I'm working on a mini-adventure module, The Tablet from Sarkomand, that I hope to include in the rulebook, and that will also need to be playtested, but it's got some weeks of hard work ahead before it's complete. I'd like to have the rules tested by Games Masters who can improvise or draw up their own adventures for Weird of Hali. One potential incentive is that the publisher has told me he's very interested in publishing adventure modules and supplements for Weird of Hali and other games of the Mythras family; if you're interested in turning your passion for roleplaying games into a source of pizza and beer money, this may be your entry...

So let the games begin. Ave, Cthulhu! Ludituri te salutant!