1KM1KT Free RPG Community

This is an overview of my RPG I'm making called Smiffy, Rob Lang requested I write it... (I'm not actually sure this is the right area of the forum for this)

Anyway, it's a system like GURPS (that's pretty much my guiding thought when making it) except with a particular setting and without being made a copy of GURPS. I spent alot of time trying to find ways of accomplishing what GURPS' system did without actually having to steal GURPS' way of doing it.

I've been thinking about rethinking the Setting, but I'm not sure. Anyway, the setting for now is !881 (which I actually chose randomly originally cause I thought it'd be funny to have the year be palyndrome-like but it turned out to be an awesome year).

The following is an excerpt from Smiffy #1 Core Rules (the only one I'm working on)


The Setting: 1881
“It is essential for the successful operation of waste-heat boilers that ample provision be made for cleaning by the installation of access doors through which all parts of the setting may be reached.” - Steam, It's Generation and Use by the Babcock & Wilcox Company, New York.
The setting is 1881, London is the centre of the world. The bogeymen of folklore are still haunting children's closet. Trains can almost reach the other end of the world.
1881 is the year Union Station opened, it's the year Wyatt Earp met his future wife and stole her from the man who tries to become his boss, it's the year of the first Boer War in Africa, Alexander II of Russia is slain on this date which causes the creation of Okhrana, the Red Cross is founded, US President James Garfield is assassinated in this year, Billy the Kid dies during this year, this is the year of the gun fight at the O.K. Corrale. Frankly, everything that happened in the 19th century happens in this one year. Incidentally, P.G. Wodehouse, the writer of Jeeves and Wooster, is born on this year also.
Mortality is big in Smiffy. Smiffy assumes people are human (ish) that it is impossible to be superhuman or to be completely foreign to human existence (even undead can be effected by disease, they just have to roll really badly; because undead aren't really truly dead, not anymore, they've been reanimated, meaning their partially alive or at least akin to things that are alive). This assumption of humanity or near-humanity and also the lack of possibility for superhumanly power is part of the rules system (particularly the limitations on how high attributes and skills can be).

The setting should probably have a better name, like 'Adventure!' Except not 'Adventure!' [yeah that's actually in the except; it's like an editors note. 'Adventure!' was going to be the name of a campaign I was gonna do once.]


Now that I get back to thinking about it, this does sound like an awesome setting again.

It's looking very cool. What mechanics are you going to use to really bolster the setting?

I think the Victorian era is such a great period ripe for settings! Rob's own "cloud atlantis" is victorian steampunk. A great example of a mechanic bolstering a setting is "Big ideas in a big country" availible here on 1km1kt

I find the getting the mechanic right for my setting very difficult, due to my inexperience. however sometimes simple mechanics lead to a flowing story.

You could refer to the post on thefreerpgblog.com on how to set out your RPG. Its very good as a guide and notemaker. I've found that adding in bits and peices into the layout template helps grease the cogs a little. However ignore the stuff about tables and appendices, he's just being Uber Academic.

So far it sounds like a cross between Victorian England and American Old West. Might I suggest looking beyond the English-speaking world during 1881? Several games already focus on Victorian steam or Weird West; a few even do both. You could further integrate the two, or look more widely afield. A couple of events from Russia's history were mentioned. You could build on those. It might be fun to have a shchi-flavoured roleplaying game with steam, zombies, cultists, and gunslingers. Considering how expansionistic the Russian Empire was at the time, there are many opportunities for adventure. Call it The Trans-Siberian RPG. Later expansions could go into the rest of Asia or Africa, just for more flavour. I must confess though, I would make the artwork anachronistic by about three decades, and use Russian Futurism for inspiration.

Mechanically, Gurps is rather physics based. That affects a game, especially in more fantastic areas. That is, you could have two different magic systems. Take the arcane versus divine divide even further. Have one area be necromancy that is more Minovsky Particle than Applied Phlebotinum: have clear-cut rules and stick with them. The other area is elder magic as used by insane cultists with tentacle fetishes. This is more like, it probably won't work, and we don't know what's going to come through the rift if it does.

I'm not a big fan of point-based character creation schemes, but they do allow for the action heroes of literature of the era. The new Sherlock Holmes movie is a good example, as is the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The most extreme examples of these characters were Renaissance Man polymaths who stopped just short of being Batman. Characters who are bigger than life and good at many things (not just a narrow focus) could fit right in quite well.

I like the idea of betting your sanity. Do you take a little loss now and then, or risk your mind snapping in a big way later? If you do decide to run with any of these ideas, Russian mythos is rife with horrors just as terrible as the Lovecraftian ones, but sufficiently different so that few people would realise how much you are really cribbing from Call of Cthulhu.