This covers most of the bases:

Your breath fogs in the night air as you stop to rest. You stand on a mountainside staircase, not fifty feet from the grand balcony that admits visitors to the palace home of the dwarf prince Rabi Guratf. Through no small effort of climbing, conniving, and collusion, you have passed several guard stations to reach this final obstacle.
Somewhere within the palace, Prince Rabi prepares for his momentous speech to-morrow. After months of preparation, his armies stand ready, and he will declare open war on the neighboring kingdoms of humen and mountain dwarves. He has forbidden all visitors on this eve of war.
Some of you are friends of the prince. He has listened closer to his war council than to you, and turned a deaf ear to peace. You are here to make a final plea to avoid the bloodshed.
Some of you do not know the prince, but you know that war is not the answer. You are here to help the prince’s friends reach him, for your own reasons.
Your planning for this adventure yielded three final paths: scaling the palace wall, entering through the dungeon, or walking in the front door. Any route would be difficult for a full-size party, but you’ll be able to manage if you split into smaller groups. You’ve also decided that the overnight guard watch is of a manageable size (about fourteen guards plus a sergeant-of-the-guard), but if an alarm should be raised, you would be quickly overrun unless you can hide long enough for the reinforcements to go back to bed.
Choose a hero, choose a party, and prepare to make history.

Modos RPG will be appearing at Arizona Game Fest! Which means I have some adventure writing to do. No big deal – writing a four-hour adventure for up to eight completely random players? Just kidding; I’ll take all the advice you have to give!

Across the kingdom of Corath, several brave souls have received notice: the king has a quest for you. Beyond this, no information was given. But the royal seal on the message, and the two kingsmen who accompanied the messenger left no doubt; this is official business. Those summoned prepared what they needed for their journeys, and traveled to the king’s palace: Highcourt.

There, they will receive personal audience with His majesty King Renholder, answers to whatever questions they might have, and items to aid in their quest!

I’m dreaming up module rules for the crunchier version of Modos (more positions in combat, but still not a full battle grid), which emphasizes an important point: there’s a line between the story and the rules. A curtain, if you will. And I’m thinking that a good, opaque curtain can improve the game experience for players by helping them to remain immersed in story, and worry less about the rules, or the metagame.

Where to draw the line? The obvious point is at the character sheet; if it’s not on the character sheet, then players don’t need to know it. Another line is around the rulebook: one for the GM, one for the PCs.

Feasible? I’ll let it stew in my head…

I shared some Modos wisdom with another game designer today: there’s no excuse for failure. Not in the sense that people who fail are to blame. This is completely different: roleplaying games don’t need to include the concept of “failure.” Failure isn’t fun, and it’s not interesting. “You try, you fail.” Well, a player who hears that just wonders what he was wasting his time for. I’d much rather hear my GM ask me, “you got a Con. What happens?”

Let’s stick with this whole Con/Unfavorable thing instead of Failure, and see where it takes us.

I’ll be running my Roll20 game in the “present” now, so it’s a little more Game of Thrones themed and less Lord of the Rings. The technology levels don’t vary that much between stories, but Game of Thrones feels more socially advanced.

This doesn’t mean that previous societies didn’t have tech! All of those elven statues and dwarven mausolea must have been there for SOME reason…

https://app.roll20.net/campaigns/details/717572/the-empire-trembles

Real time roleplaying at the above link, Sundays. Swing by, check it out.

Wondering what it’s like to play Modos RPG? Stop by Roll20 and drop your name in the hat – we’ll be picking new players to join us each month.

https://app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/22250/survivor-imperial-edition

Whew! My head’s whirling from two big things: finishing the METROID module, and dreaming up campaign setting ideas. Taking a break from rules-writing seems like the best thing to do, and switching over to campaign/adventure writing.

So, Dark Amulet is on indefinite hold. Probably to be finished on a long weekend in the woods somewhere.

But I’ll still be writing, and spreading the good word. I’m thinking of a Survivor-style online game, where someone gets voted off the island each month – or when they miss a session. Keep an eye out for it on Roll20, and don’t miss your chance to make (campaign) history.

The Modular Exoskeleton Trans-Responsive Outfit, In Detail (or METROID) rules module is available on ENworld. Not really any hard-rules changes in it, but lots of good advice for running a space-video-game-style RPG. I threw in the full 1.4 rules catalog anyway. Check it out here:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1335