I started designing RPG & boardgames around the 6th grade and it became a passion that hasn’t diminished over the years. Now having designed over 2 dozen games and with hopes to publish a few of them through my QT Games company, I am as excited about boardgames and card games now as in my youth. That said, my cousin introduced me to D&D in 1979 and I fell in love with it!
My current focus is on roleplaying games, and the Cosmothea roleplaying game specifically. I am now on my 4th major revision of the game and am very excited about it. I opened up a website and have a small, but thriving forum (HERE)
The first version of the Cosmothea rpg was a percentile game with options to play superheroes, science fiction characters and with hopes to add fantasy rules one day. At that time, I had separately written my own DM’s Guide (with many of my own monsters and magic items, my own combat system, etc. as I had great difficulty getting a hold of an AD&D DMG (took me a year and a half – I was on a long list at my game store here in Las Vegas). So by the time I was able to get a hold of a DMG to actually play AD&D according to their rules, I had already caught the game designing bug and I was hooked for life!
Along the road, WotC posted a monster design contest in their Dragon magazine, and I won first place! That was very encouraging, especially after I had submitted a few boardgames to them, that didn’t get published (though one of them got as far as 3 levels of revisions requested by WotC (then called TSR so that was pretty gratifying!)
As for my design work on D&D and Cosmothea, I already had the makings of a new game system and ended up rolling my fantasy rules into Cosmothea (which went by a different name back then), and made a new version. A few years ago, I made Version 3, which was rebuilt from the ground up with an eye at simplicity and fast play and was more of a minis game with very strong roleplaying elements overlaid and all the fluff and began putting in it goodies long-time Cosmothea Players recognize – my own magic system, a new class system and other fun stuff. I never finished it though. See, while I really loved version 3 in many ways, it was tied to someone else’s product and their whims. I had wanted it to be compatible with the D&D Minis game (version 1) so I could use their minis cards and convert on the fly, hoping to one day make my own cards! The early playtesting went even better than I could have imagined.
In some ways I really miss that simpler game. But I would have to make a slew of cards and resimplify the latest version in order to do it again, and I’m very happy with this latest version so far. Still, I’m planning on including an ultra lite rules version of the new Cosmothea game as an alternative, for players who like lite rules.
Anyway, after a short period of time rushing like mad to finish version 3, it was announced that D&D Minis version 2 was coming, which meant that all future cards would be incompatible with Cosmothea, so I started trying to make Cosmothea compatible with version 2. The new minis game was supposed to be compatible with D&D 4E, but that hadn't come out yet. I only had a few sample cards to even know what it was like. It was fun converting my game, but exhausting work. Well, it wasn’t long before I discovered that D&D Minis v.2 wasn’t the direction I really wanted to go in, and I wasn’t sure I cared for 4E, if it was anything like the minis game. I was also being encouraged by others to publish Cosmothea and I couldn’t do that with Cosmothea v3.
Then I brainstormed and came up with some cool ideas for a complete revamp of Cosmothea. The fluff and setting was all the same, but the game mechanics were different. It only vaguely resembles the v3. game I showcased on the old WotC Gleemax blogs. I am in the middle of another ground up version, this one and any future versions are not compatible with D&D and are going their own way. So far, the game looks very promising, and I have a number of PbP games using the rules (some are using an ultra-lite version of the rules for faster PbP’s and others use the full version.
I’ve got a long road ahead of me, and am looking for others to join the team. I have a regular artist on board and she’s wonderful - Pippa, of course! I continue to brainstorm and am making steady progress. We just celebrated our 30th anniversary of the Cosmothea Campaign Setting in July of 2009, which will be included in the final product. We had contests and lots of fun. I keep brainstorming, designing, and things are looking good. No doubt it will go through a number of changes, and I’m thrilled that many have jumped on board to see it through, but I don’t want it to take forever, and two or more heads are better than one, so yeah, I’ve been looking to expand the team.
I’m also looking for others with similar interests (even those that don’t want to participate with Cosmothea). Iron sharpens iron, and I figure it’ll be fun to network, hang out, discuss industry trends, etc.
Thanks for visiting my blog!
Bob
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