Well, we didn't actually get any gaming done, but we played around with character generation. I'm rather excited about it, mostly because my friends seem interested in my own little game. The great part is that some of them are rules junkies like myself, most notably Alan, who will quite happily fill in any parts that I don't want to do, because I've done most of the work and can fill in anything that he doesn't want to do. Right now there's an awful lot of work to do with the system before character generation is good to go, but we got a great start with it, and did some things that I've been wanting to do for a while. Now I've just got to type what we did up and fill in the rest. Then we can really get into play testing and tweaking the rules.

For those who are curious, the premise is pretty much high fantasy. But I wanted a good fantasy game and started to work this up (this was before I was even introduced to D&D). Once I actually played D&D, I was disappointed in it. Its simplicity tends to retard flexibility. So I wanted to put the best parts of all the games I've played together into a system. On that topic, I should go back through my Palladium games and remind myself of what they do. Anyway, Phoenix Blood is currently showing strong influences of Shadowrun, largely because I respect that game system a great deal. It is also bound to incorporate parts of MechWarrior 2, since that was the first RPG I ever played and still features one of the best "weclome to GM'ing" sections I've found. The skill system has the feature that I've always wanted that using a skill more improves it faster. The magic system will be an interesting set of rules that is partly Shadowrun, partly D&D, partly GURPS, and partly something all its own. The thing Alan finds so fascinating is that it's a high magic gameworld, something he's wanted to play for a long time, but every attempt at making D&D into something like that didn't end as well as he'd have liked. In the end, Phoenix Blood will feature MUD-level quantities of playable character races, and it currently is doing that with professions (Phoenix Blood is classless, as I find classes unrealistic). Right now I've just got the base races of fantasy (human, dwarf, three varieties of elf, gnome, and orc), some races that I long ago decreed into Phoenix Blood (Kaami (cat-people), and Rao (wolf-people)), and another couple races that you never get to play in more traditional games, Centaurs and Lizardmen. Jonathan is all about the Centaurs. There's about a dozen and a half different schools of magic and I'm planning on having a religion system that actually allows the gods to interfere with the game. It should end up being a lot of fun if I can get everything worked out. And with all the help I've got, I'm not too worried about it.

If anybody has any suggestions or things they've always wanted to see in a fantasy game, feel free to suggest them. You never know, your little idea might make it into a game that other people play.

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