August 2007: How I started

The creation of OpenQuest was a happy accident. My original plan was to write a scenario under the MRQ RQ Logo license and then release it via RPGnow.com.  Hence Life and Death was written and originally planned as a MRQ scenario. However to make sure I complied with the terms of the RQ Logo license, which allow you to release products with the RQ logo on them as long as you only use stuff in the MRQ System Resource Document (SRD) I downloaded it and started reading through it.  More I looked at it more it dawned on me that with a bit of tweaking here and there I could recreate the game the way I like to play RQ these days.

So in my lunch hour at work back in Aug 07 work began on the very first version of the game, SimpleQuest v1.

Here’s my original thoughts about and  aims  for the game posted on the D101 Development blog.

• So what is SimpleQuest?

Sept 2007: SimpleQuest version 1

So by September 07 I had produced a very basic first version as result of hacking the SRD, mainly the Core Rulebook and Companion SRD

The main differences from MRQ even at this stage were

1. Character gen was a points buy system, very much here’s 100 points to spend between skills.

2. Combat was more RQ3/Stormbringer 5th edition in nature. Gone were Hit Locations, back in where Total Hit Points and a Major Wound system, inspired by Stormbringer 5th. I also added a number of combat maneuvers to allow players to get out of the dreaded ‘Attack-Parry’ cycle that D100 combat sometimes gets into.

Then first games where played at the monthly meetings now defunct Go play Manchester and  Newtcon 1 (a all dayer round my gaff, which also saw the second outting of Wordplay) and seemed to go down well. I was quite confident that the game played well and got cracking with adding with writing the examples and descriptive text.

Aug 2008: SimpleQuest ZeroEdition

Inspired by the cheek of Chaosium releasing a Zero Edition of their  Basic Roleplaying I put together a free pdf Zero Edition of the game for Continuum, release of SQ Zero edition. We also played lots of games to happy players.

• SimpleQuest Zero Edition [Pdf, 578Kb]

Not much feedback came out the games, it was still all we had a good time, but since I released it via the ‘net that’s were I got some major feedback that was to really bring the game into the form it is today.

Sept 2008: Making the game less “RQ with the corners rounded off”

This thread over at Basic Roleplaying Central gave me lots of constructive feed back, which basically although people liked it they felt that it was ” RQ with corners rounded” and that I could go further in making it more streamlined and easier to play.

As a result of this and other feed back on SQ Zero I made the following  changes

• Simplify weapons. Tim Bancroft of Sceaptune games came up with a new weapons table, which reduced the sheer number of weapons in the MRQ to what I felt was a manageable amount.
• Simply skill lists, remove Advanced and Basic categories from MRQ and simplify and group skills to give a much smaller list of skills. Gone are the individual combat skills for each weapon, in their place skills three combat skills: Close, Unarmed, Ranged.
• Sorcery – Gone were all the manipulation skills and in their place a single Sorcery casting skill, that is the basis of Sorcery manipulation.

Oct 2008-June 2009: Staring into a black hole

There then followed a period of  quiet for a while. Needed to rework the game inc feedback from Zero Edition, add monsters (a big task) and write an introductory scenario and setting to make the game complete.

This took much longer than expected for a number of reasons;

• The sheer number of dependencies in the rules, which I was completely unprepared for. For example you take out Hit Locations you have to reflect it not only in obvious places such as the Combat and Damage rules but also in Magic and Monsters and Spot rules.
• I underestimated the amount of work needed on the Monsters chapter.
• Lots of last minute changes as a result of making the game more its own creature and less a simple rewrite of the MRQ SRD
• A big dose of sheer despondency “staring into a black hole” where the game never got finished.  I’m my own worst enemy for getting things done and I had a severe dose of self doubt in the last stages of developing OpenQuest, mainly due to the fact that I had spent a good two years solid working on it.
• Real life TM getting in the way, both on my part since I my wife was in the later part of her pregnancy with our second child and due to editors and contributors falling due to severe and unexpected changes in their circumstances.

July 2009: OpenQuest is here!

After a final name change that better reflected the nature of the game, OpenQuest was finally released via Lulu.com (an online print on demand company, who also provide you with simple online storefront in return for a small royalty on every copy sold via them).

I rushed release slightly to beat arrival of Newtlet #2 (Henry Brian Newport who arrived in early Sept), and editors disappearing due to Real Life TM issues meant it did ship with a few more typos and mistakes than expected but these were quickly spotted and feed back via the small but energetic group of people who gathered round the initial release of the game.

Initially I released the  fully laid out PDF for free,  a mistake that I don’t regret because it exposed the game to a huge number of people.  However I do need to make some money off it since I’m running D101 more a business these days (one of the big changes that happened as a result of the modest success of OQ). Charging even a low amount for the pdf means I can generate income to pay for future OQ projects. The game is still free in the sense that you can download the text only Developer’s kit.

To date just over 2000 people have downloaded the free version of the game, and sales although a tiny fraction of that they have already paid the costs of making the game. If you want to support future development of the game the best way to do this is buy either the print or pdf version   Saying that we’ve got three Setting/Adventure books in development and one self contained game based on OpenQuest, a Hard Sci-fi game called River of Heaven, in development, so we’re fired up and excited about OpenQuest for a good year or two

I’m glad I did get it done, OpenQuest has had a positive reviews and best of all I’ve had feedback that people are actually playing the game!  I’ve had a ton of fun both playtesting the game and playing it in its final form (I’m currently running the game playtesting the upcoming Savage North adventure book).  Best of all is all the lovely enthusiastic people who I’ve meet along the way

Not bad for something I started as as fiddling about in my lunch hour project.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.