Haven

After nearly four years of procrastination, here’s my first stab at the 24-hour RPG challenge. Haven grew out of a desire to re-examine a setting that featured in a friend’s homebrew game back in the late ’80s. In the interests of simplicity, I used a coin-toss mechanic that I think serves its purpose pretty well. Unfortunately, I barely scratched the surface of the setting before running out of time, so I plan to go back and flesh this one out in the near future. This, then, is Haven: a collection of largely unrealized ideas, fairly traditional game mechanics, and unnecessarily spiffy layout.

The Premise
Haven takes place in the star system of Tau, containing many fantastic places and inhabited by several sentient species, and surrounded by an impenetrable barrier field. Several lifetimes worth of adventure await in Tau, but the ultimate mystery is this: who cut out the system from the rest of the galaxy – and why?


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3 Responses to “Haven”

  1. Dyson Logos Says:

    The position mechanic is interesting, but I find it awkward when dealing with melee combat – there is no mechanic to provide greater separation between yourself and an opponent who rolls a similar position to yours. You can roll for position again, but assuming you already had a position about as high as you could roll, the new roll won’t provide the positioning gap you need to escape the combat – effectively you would be better off in a worse position than you currently have.

    I’m going to stop dissecting the mechanic now, as I’ll probably try to use something like it in my own 24 hour RPG when I get a chance to sit down later this week.

    I like the coin toss mechanic and have ever since I picked up Prince Valiant, even though I’m a dice-lover.

    LOVE that the attribute pairs are a throw-back to Star Frontiers.

    I’d like to see where you go with this, especially with the addition of the hinted-at setting material.

  2. Tad Says:

    I have spent money on products much lower in quality than this. Nice

  3. Antti Hukkanen Says:

    Thanks for the comments, folks. I’m trying to get people together for some actual playtesting, plus I’ve already got a number of ideas about where I want to go with this.

    Dyson: That’s a good point about the Position mechanics in melee. (I expected it to have problems, since it’s just basically something I suddenly thought of – even though I’ve knocked around similar ideas for years.) If you want to stay in combat but get out of melee (and already have maximum position), what do you do? My quick fix would be to allow you to have a lower throw become the new position value. You sacrifice some ranged defence (position is mainly there to facilitate confused firefights) in order to get away from the guy hitting you. Granted, this could lead to some strange situations, like a low Agility actually helping you escape melee.

    Mein Gott, I hadn’t realised that Star Frontiers (of all games!) had a similar stat system. But there you have it. Nothing new under the sun.

    Tad: Thank you! That’s about the nicest thing I ever expected to hear about my creations.