Wednesday, September 9, 2020

What's So Innovative about Night Shift: VSW?

My NIGHT SHIFT co-author Jason Vey has a bit to say on the design and innovation of our Modern Supernatural RPG. 


You can read it about it all here: https://wastedlandsfantasy.blogspot.com/2020/09/whats-so-innovative-about-night-shift.html

Jason makes a lot of fantastic points. So many in fact that I do not feel the need to reiterate them here and now.  Save where I want to talk about why I wanted to make this game.  And even here I am going restate something Jason already said.

NIGHT SHIFT: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars was designed to be familiar. 

For me though not just in terms of game design, in terms of the types of games I have been playing over the last 20 some odd years.

In 1999 I was facing something of a crisis of my RPG playing. I had been playing D&D for 20 years solid by that point, with minor breaks due to college, grad school, and getting married.  I had bought a house and had a kid on the way. Plus in 1999 D&D was feeling tired and old.  I had played some other games, namely World of Darkness and other horror games. I had recently picked back up Chill, but none of these had lit the spark the way D&D had.

That is until I found CJ Carella's WitchCraft RPG.  Now here was a game I loved and it relit the long dormant fires of RPG creativity.  From here I picked up Kult, found more and more games. Soon I was freelancing at Eden. Then Jason and I were working together on Buffy, Angel, Army of Darkness, and more. But D&D was still that first love.   At the same time the d20 boon was happening and there were a lot of new great games coming out based on the d20 OGL and more still based on the principles of the OGL.  I went from a "dark time" to a new Golden Age in just a couple of years.

NIGHT SHIFT hooks into that familiarity. 

The rules are a streamlined version of the d20/OGC with an "old-school" bend. 
The situations are modern supernatural, so there feels like there is a "world continuity" with games I was playing using Chill, Kult, CoC, Mage, WitchCraft, and Buffy.

I want a game that can take me to the next 20 years of gaming and I truly think this one is it.

You can get hardcovers of NIGHT SHIFT from my publisher's webpage or PDFs via DriveThruRPG.

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