Kingdom Gould: Developer Diary

Back to Work

2011-02-22T10:46:00.000Z

After a lapse in development (due to another of my hobbies taking over for a few months) I have returned to Kingdom Gould. A fair amount has changed on the technical side (mainly due to the loss of both a server and laptop in the same month), but I am now concentrating on putting together the introductory adventure. The reasoning behind this is that if I have enough rules to cover the adventure, then I have enough to start play testing. A major part of this is that I will also need an example party, so that people can just pick it up and have a go.

I have started by converting the existing, half-written, adventure for the previous edition to use the new rules.

Golden Rules

2010-11-09T13:15:00.000Z

While developing the system for Kingdom Gould I have developed a set of golden rules that I continually refer to to remind myself of what I am aiming for.

Kingdom Gould must:

Be quick to play
Have minimal rules
Be Heroic

Obviously, by themselves these are just some simple notes that mean something to me, but I'll try to explain the meanings.

Be Quick to Play

This may seem an obvious one, but the emphasis is on play. There are times when complexity is inevitable and time needs to be taken, but ideally, this should fall outside of a game session, it should certainly never happen in tense situations such as combat. The use of tables to look up results is a big thing to avoid, as in having to recall formulas or values. If such things are required, they should be determined out of game and recorded on the character sheet for easy reference.

Have Minimal Rules

The core rules for the game should be simple. Ideally all rules use a single mechanic that is easy to understand and (of course) quick to use. My goal in Kingdom Gould is to explain the core mechanics, with examples, in less that 2 pages of the rulebook. Minimal rules also applies to things like character sheets, the smaller the data required on the sheet, the easier it is to read.

Be Heroic

I have touched on this subject in a previous post, but the core book for Kingdom Gould is not called the "Hero's Guide" for nothing. The PCs in the game are heroic characters. They must be able to do fantastic feats and look good doing it. When it comes down to it, the odds are on the side of the PCs. Role-playing is about collaborative story-telling, in Kingdom Gould the PCs are the heroes who are destined to triumph (this doesn't mean they should have it easy, just that a fair fight for them might be 5 against 1).

Rules for the Uninitiated

2010-10-20T10:05:00.000+01:00

I have been re-writing some of the core concepts this week, following a slight redesign of the games core mechanics, and when I was proof reading what I had written it dawn on me I was using terms such as "character" with the assumption that everyone would know what I was talking about.
The problem is that, typically, my playtesters are all established role-players and probably would not have noted something like this as a problem. With this in mind I have started the process of proof reading the document again, but this time paying close attention to the terminology I use and adding in explanations for common RPG terminology when it is first used.

The problem with that is that it is very hard to explain terms that seem so basic to an established role player.

How do you concisely explain to a new player what a character is, as opposed to a player? With roleplaying a number of similarities can be made to acting, explaining that the player is the actor and the character is the, err..., character. Examples also help. I always intended to include examples for most of the rules, but using them to explain the core concepts of RPGs will no doubt be one of the ways forward in this case.

Making Heroes More Heroic

2010-10-12T12:11:00.000+01:00

(or how I am trying to streamline combat even more)

As I have been thinking about rules for combat recently, I had toyed with the idea of dropping turn and initiative based combat altogether. My initial plans were for an action and reaction based system. But, frankly, I couldn't get it to work. While combat is fast frantic and disorganised, you don't want too much of that at your gaming table. What I did decide on (at least for now) was a compromise, a fixed order in which characters act based on their stance of aggressive, passive or defensive, with the opportunity for those that have not yet acted to interrupt the actions of the current character. So aggressive characters will have the hard hitting attacks, passive characters more balanced attacks and some interrupts, while defensive characters tend to have more powerful interrupts.

To further simplify things, all heroes act before all NPCs, for each stance. So there is no need to wait for an ally to get out of the way as he rolled a 1 on initiative. Besides, it's just that bit more heroic for the heroes to dive into the action quicker than the enemies!

You're Not Thinking Forth Dimensionally!

2010-10-11T13:44:00.000+01:00

Erm. No. I'm not.
I am thinking three dimensionally though.

I find in many of the games I play these days, too much emphasis is placed on using miniatures on battlemats (or on computer) to track movement during combat and things start to get awkward when things start flying, or are on ledges...

These problems are never insurmountable but it seems that when the combat systems were designed, they were designed from a two dimensional perspective. Often in an adventure, the only maps you get are traditional top-down views, so even if the room contains multiple levels, they are not always clear about what's above and below. Slopes cause interesting issues, when you are part way up and want to jump onto some nearby stairs, working out distances can suddenly become quite complex.

All this waffling leads to my point for today. When designing the combat system for Kingdom Gould, I have one note underlined several times in the middle of my notepad.

Think 3D.

Try, Try and Try Again

2010-10-08T11:29:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I have had the time (and, if I'm honest, the inclination) to give any thought to Kingdom Gould, but with my recent musings on what will happen with the Star Wars RPG I started to think about cinematic combat.

In the Star Wars films, people are either hit by an attack and suffer a serious wound (or death for minor characters) or they are not hit. Translating this to role-play terms, one hit will take you down. This could make for a much simplified system than most of those I am used to where the tracking of hit points (or wounds) is key. With cinematic combat, there will be far less actual hits on the PCs, but a hit immediately causes wounds. By removing the concept of hit points, wounds can be more complex (especially as they will happen less often) and can lead to the more interesting "stuff" such as disabilities, trauma, etc...
For unnamed characters (you know who I mean) a single hit will kill. While PCs and named NPCs suffer severe setbacks. This also negates the need for hit point recovery "OK the fights over, time for bed" and instant healing "I've got a pill for that".

I'm seriously considering a system like this for combat in Kingdom Gould, this has the benefit of bringing attacks in line with skill checks with a single check and immediate success or fail.

Heroes and Secrets

2010-07-08T23:00:00.003+01:00

I decided some time ago to divide the books for the Kingdom Gould RPG into two sets; "hero's guide to..." and "secrets of...". The original intent was for the hero books to be for all players and contain new rules for PCs as well as expanded information of areas of common knowledge in the Kingdom. The secrets books were to be for the games master and contain lesser known details about the kingdom along with rules and advice for the GM.

I have recently come to the decision to change this slightly. Why should the players be unaware of the rules the GM is using? A role-play game is about all the players working together to tell a story, why should one of those players be following different, or secret, rules? I have read many role-play books that have the ominous line "If you are not the Games Master, stop reading now!" Why? Shouldn't all the players be aware of how, for instance, experience is awarded? Surely it would lead to a better game if all the players had an understanding of what being a GM involves, not just the guy at the head of the table.

With this in mind I am planning on putting all the rules together in the hero books.

Baronies Update

2010-05-23T17:26:00.000+01:00

I have been working on the Baronies of Kingdom Gould game for android for the past week and thought it was time for an update. The going is slow, as I am having to learn new APIs as I go along, but steady.

A map is created with a castle as a starting building, this map can be scrolled and zoomed using gestures. I have added a wood that replenish itself over time (as long as there is at least one tree left) and I have just finished implementing a building that goes from unbuilt to build in a number of turns.

A hut in mid-build (with debugging grid)

Now that these basics of the visuals are in place, I can start work on the game mechanics.

New Project: Baronies of Kingdom Gould

2010-05-14T17:29:00.000+01:00

I have always intended for Kingdom Gould to be more than just the role playing game. Well, yesterday I started on a new project to bring Kingdom Gould to android mobiles in the form of a resource management game called Baronies of Kingdom Gould (or BoKG for short).

It is still very early days and I am using this as an excuse to get to know the system more than anything else, but I hope to have a simple example that allows you collect wood and create a new building within a month.

Kingdom Gould Update

2010-04-11T14:57:00.001+01:00

The following is a summary of the latest changes made to Kingdom Gould:

I have just finished the first version of the skills chapter, which contains brief details of the core skills and the initial specialisations for each skill. The chapter will need to be expanded on with examples of skill usages and difficulties, but what is there should be good enough for play-testing.

(This summary was automatically posted)

Kingdom Gould Update

2010-04-08T16:11:00.001+01:00

The following is a summary of the latest changes made to Kingdom Gould:

Today I have been working on the updated version of one of my favourite classes (now careers) the knight. With the new system of career experience it is now possible to tie the reward system directly to the expected role of a character following the career. In this case CX is awarded for following the code of chivalry and will also be lost for breaches.
So a knight is rewarded for protecting the weak and innocent and not for just killing monsters as in previous editions. On the flipside, the knight is punished for telling lies or retreating from the enemy in combat.

(This summary was automatically posted)

Gettin' Better All The Time

2010-04-06T16:33:00.000+01:00

In previous editions of Kingdom Gould I added the condition that a character must find a teacher and train in order to gain levels. This would mean that if a character were in the middle of an adventure, he could not go to sleep one night, only to wake the following morning more competent that he was before. I found this an awkward concept to get my head around, so I removed it.

In this edition I have performed a spectacular U-turn and am now allowing player's to spend XP to improve their character at any time. Yes, at any time. So why this change of heart? Well, it wasn't a planned addition to the rules, but this is how it came about.

I was writing up about gaining improvements and reviewing the rules for gaining levels used in the last edition and quickly realised that anything like these rules would be impractical. Finding a teacher and training to gain a level made sense when all benefits came from a level-based system, but my new rules are not level based. Players can pick and choose improvements for their characters, having the requirement for the character to have training each time XP was spent would mean that character's may spend more time training than adventuring. This raised a number of questions: How does the character come by the improvement? How long does it take to gain it? When does the character gain the benefit? Unlike D&D (on which the previous editions were based) there is no concept of long and short rests. I, personally, dislike the "between adventures" or "between sessions" as these can vary and often be far apart. In order to get what I was writing into a suitable state for the immediate future I simply wrote that XP can be spent to gain improvements "at any time", and continued with the rest of what I was working on.

Some time later, while making lunch, I started to think about the problems with "at any time". Would it mean, for example, that a character could attack a major NPC and do so badly that they spend XP to gain an ability to redraw an attack and then use it? Could the party face a challenge and realising that no-one has the correct skill quickly pay the XP for it? As rules go, this seemed to go against my natural instinct, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought "why not?". If players want to react to situations by spending XP in reaction to what is going on, that may be better than a playing buying a really expensive ability that they end up never using. From a story point of view it works just as well, a character can be considered to be trying something new when, low and behold, it works. A party who buys a combat manoeuvre just before using it can be considered to have come up with an attack plan and used it for the first time. A character who suddenly gains a skill specialisation is simply someone who has found a hidden talent or whose understanding has suddenly "clicked".

So what started out as a quick fix while I considered the options has become a core rule for the system and XP can now be spent to improve a character or party "at any time".

Kingdom Gould Update

2010-04-04T14:42:00.000+01:00

The following is a summary of the latest changes made to Kingdom Gould:

In today's changes I have been working on improving and extending the rules for the core mechanics. This includes the definition of the player roles, additional rules and clarifications for managing the deck and details on abilities and how to resolve rule conflicts arising between abilities.

(This summary was automatically posted)

Kingdom Gould Update

2010-04-02T14:32:00.001+01:00

The following is a summary of the latest changes made to Kingdom Gould:
In the latest set of changes to the core rules I have added details of using character careers as well as extending the definition of a character career. Character careers now include recommended combat and skill roles, how to gain career experience (or CX) and career completion bonuses.

The sample career, the Barbarian, has been updated to reflect these changes.

(This summary was automatically posted)

Kingdom Gould Update

2010-04-01T21:59:00.000+01:00

The following is a summary of the latest changes made to Kingdom Gould:
I have now created new chapters for Combat Manoeuvres, Spells, Party Abilities, Party Careers and Party Combat Manoeuvres. Each of these chapter has a placeholder example of each type of rule, but I doubt any of these will remain.
With the Party Combat Manoeuvres, I have started to make reference to the character combat roles, but the definitions have yet to be written.
(This summary was automatically posted)

Automatic Updates

2010-03-28T15:00:00.000+01:00

I have just finished setting up a process to automatically post a message to this blog whenever I update the source files for the rule books.

Hopefully, this will save me having to duplicate the information when I record summaries of changes for my own logs.

Wordsmithery

2010-02-18T13:29:00.000Z

When creating a set of rules, the choice of words you use is very important. When creating a new world not only is the choice of words important, but the formation of new words, or new uses for words, is also important.

An example of the choice of words when writing rules cam up recently. I was looking at the core statistics that define a character and had the tricky task of giving them names that are suitable. I had already used "abilities" to describe general benefits for a character, that allow the rules to be broken in specific ways. I original referred to these statistics as "aspects" of the character, yet I found the need to be more specific. In this new system I am developing, these aspects were to be represented as a 3x3 grid of numbers, with mental, physical and spiritual along one axis and agility, endurance and force along the other. When developing the rules, I found myself referring to these axes as aspects, or aspect types and the individual numbers as scores and generally getting confusing the terminology. If I get confused, what chance to people have reading the rules!
It's clear I need to give each of these things different names. But how many words are there for "attribute"?
Thank goodness for thesauruses and the web!
After just a couple of searches and a few clicks, I came up with 3 suitable words for the 2 axes and the numbers themselves: Attribute, Aspect and Trait.
In my current plan an attribute is the number itself. So each character has 9 attributes. Each attribute is a combination of a trait and an aspect. The traits are mental, physical and spiritual, while the aspects are agility, endurance and force.

When using words for the world itself, things are less about clarity and more about imagery, association and personal choice. A classic example from Kingdom Gould is the choice of the word Dæmon (and the interesting spelling). In the first versions of Kingdom Gould I used the simpler spelling of demon, I didn't really think about it. I later considered the spelling daemon, which I preferred (it looked more "authentic", if that makes any sense) and I then went about changing every reference to demon to use daemon instead. Some time later, I was talking about language and spelling to a friend when this came up. He mentioned the spelling that I now use, dæmon. While I was aware of the spelling, I had avoided it originally for technical reasons. My rule books are all written in structured text files and then run through a number of tools to produce the final PDFs. I was unsure as to how this process would cope with non-standard characters. But, after this discussion I decided to give it a go and was pleased (and relieved) to see that everything worked fine. So everything changed once more, this time to dæmon, and the world of Kingdom Gould became a little more colourful.

Character and Player Roles

2010-02-15T22:39:00.000Z

D&D 4E introduced Roles for characters, defining a character's position within the group. I'm looking at a way of doing something similar in Kingdom Gould. But rather than each character having a role defined by the class (or career in this case) the player simply chooses which role his character will fill.

The plan is for party classes (more on these in later posts) to define the roles within the party. Each character in the party can then take one of these roles. Specific bonuses, abilities and the like will be available for the characters in these roles.

As well character roles, I've also been thinking about player roles, a way of allocating some of the common tasks of the players in a more structured way, mainly for those new to role-playing. So, for example, in any given session, there is someone responsible for keeping notes on important finds and characters, someone else tracks the party loot for dividing up later, someone draw maps when needed and so on. There is no reason for the same person to do the same tasks all the time, there is also no reason one person cannot do more that one task, but by defining these roles it can be easier for new players to play the game without losing track of all that "stuff" that goes alongside the roleplaying.

"I am a great thief"

2010-02-14T10:59:00.000Z

No, I'm not going to talk about a thief career (although I'm sure there will be one), this is an obscure reference to a story from the Tao of Programming. Check it out here.

Yesterday I picked up a copy of the new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay by Fantasy Flight Games.
It's different.
The thing you can't fail to notice is that it comes in a big box and has lots of bits. FFG have taken a different direction from what has become the norm and have taken a lot of ideas from their board games. There are a lot of tokens and cards to track the state of a character, rather than a large character sheet. They have packaged things differently too, everything you need for a group of 4, 3 players and 1 GM, is in the box. From character sheets to dice and books, it's all there (except 4 pencils, but I'll let them off that one).

Now comes the bit about the thief. The main reason I bought this game is because it is different. Looking at how someone else has created their version of an RPG immediately prompts ideas of your own. I am now looking, for instance, at expanding on the idea of a party sheet (which grants bonuses to the party and is used to track party status) to having a party career with party abilities and morale. This then led on to a re-think on how XP is handled, but I'm still working on this one...

All I have to do now, is find the time to sit down and read the rules in full before running a game.

Swords and Sorcery

2009-09-30T22:14:00.002+01:00

Been a while since I added anything here, but I've been a little busy.
Having said that, I have just spent the past few days relaxing in the Lake District and writing up new ideas for both my current campaign and 3rd edition Kingdom Gould.
I have now developed a draft combat system for 3rd edition, though I have yet to define the attack actions that can be used and am working on some new ideas for magic.
Magic will be in the form of a certain type of ability called spells. The main difference between spells and standard abilities it that when spells fail bad things happen, what's more if spells succeed, there is a chance the effect of channeling magic can be too much and the character loses control. The more frequently a character calls on the magic, the more likely they are to lose control.

Draw!

2009-08-01T18:52:00.002+01:00

I gave some thought today to the basic mechanics of tests, or challenges, or getting things done. My initial thinking is that a card is drawn from the deck and a 7 or more is considered a pass, the better your abilities the more cards you draw, the harder the task, the more passes you require. Training in a skill will change the value needed for a pass down to a 5. This would mean that difficult tasks would not be possible for those without the required skills, for example a character with little ability can draw only 1 card, so a test requiring 2 or more passes is impossible. To counter this, I decided that the drawing of a joker results in an immediate success, regardless of difficulty.

I have also decided that the content of the deck will be limited for starting characters, removing all royal cards and using a single joker. Experience points can then be spent to add cards to the deck.

Third Edition? Already!?

2009-07-17T16:28:00.002+01:00

While it is true that I have only run one playtest session of 2nd edition Kingdom Gould, I have already started thinking about 3rd edition. The main reason for this is that I am now seriously considering breaking from D&D/d20 as the core rules.

While the OGL used in D&D 3.5 was easy to use and allowed for the reprinting of key content, D&D 4 does not.

The SRD for 4th edition is sadly lacking and the license is restrictive, for this reason I am looking at developing a new system for Kingdom Gould. I am also considering developing it under the OGL to allow others to use it if they so wish.

It is very early days yet, so it will take a while before anything solid appears for play testing. I won't say too much about the system I plan to use as these things are prone to change, but I am considering using a deck of playing cards instead of dice, like a game I worked on with some friends in the past.

What follows is a bit of a brain dump of my thoughts so far...

I am currently looking at character creation and statistics. I am thinking that the core stats for a character are the 9 aspects:

Mental Force
Mental Endurance
Mental Agility
Physical Force
Physical Endurance
Physical Agility
Spiritual Force
Spiritual Endurance
Spiritual Agility

Rather than classes and levels all abilities will be available for those that qualify and can pay the experience point cost. So you can have your warrior-wizard if you want.
I plan to have general skills available to all and specilisations of those skills for better performance in certain circumstances.

The main basis for a combat system will be action points, where each action taken involves spending a certain number of points. Each character will have a number of points to spend each turn. Characters can choose to train in a number of combat styles, though all will be able to use the most basic combat style.

Classes, Races and Prestige Classe

2008-07-08T16:39:00.002+01:00

I have now done a first pass at converting the races in Kingdom Gould and am now working my way through the classes and prestige classes.

Many of my changes for the base classes no longer apply (the base classes have changed enough that my changes were not needed).
Much of the features I had in prestige classes are now being made available as racial or class powers. A surprising number of my prestige classes have now been removed as they are no longer needed, many of they had little "unique" rules.
Some prestige classes are no being converted to paragon paths.

Kingdom Gould v2

2008-06-10T11:37:00.002+01:00

Well, 4E is out now and I've started work on a 4e compatible version of Kingdom Gould.
Now that everything has been standardised as a power, it is technically a lot easier.
However, some things don't fit this model very well and require a fair bit of re-work.

I have started with blood lines and will carry on through the rest of the rules in semi-alphabetical order.

Adventures Abound

2008-03-24T15:46:00.003Z

I am now in the process of writing two introductory adventures for the Secrets of Kingdom Gould book.
The first is a short adventure to introduce player to the threats within the kingdom, including bandits daemons and a fanatical faction known as the tin heads.

The second is a longer adventure, which may become a short campaign, meant to introduce the characters to various locations in the kingdom as the heroes embark on a tour of the kingdom.

I have never written an adventure in full before, let alone one of the size I am planning to do now. I have some difficulty in trying to provide enough information that a DM can cope when the players inevitably take an unexpected route, but not so much that the DM loses track of the adventure itself. The adventures I run are usually quite fluid in how they are organised, I move things around as I the need dictates. Trying to predict how the player's are most likely to react is a difficult task (especially with the players I have!) and writing alternatives to cover the next most likely reactions can mean a large amount of thought and writing.

Hero's Guide to Coxton

2008-03-22T11:57:00.002Z

Yesterday, I started work on a new book for Kingdom Gould.
The Hero's Guide to Coxton will provide new background information and rules for adventuring in the city of Coxton.

Issue Tracking

2008-01-29T11:04:00.000Z

As I previously mentioned, I have now set up an issue tracking system for Kingdom Gould (and a number of my other projects). However, the tracking system is designed for software development and is not the simplest of tools to understand.

So I'll use this post as a quick aside to explain the basics.

First, access the tracker here http://www.world-of-geoff.co.uk/bugzilla/

Next, create an account using the "New Account" link at the top of the page.

Having done this we'll start by looking at what needs to be done to the Hero's Guide.

Select Search existing bug reports
Click on the advanced search tab. (Wow, that's a lot of stuff!)
Select "Hero's Guide to Kingdom Gould" from the list of products as this is what we are interested in.
Hit the Search button
You should now see the list of problems yet to be solved.
Towards the bottom of the page is a "Remember Search" button and an "as" text box. If you plan to keep checking on the progress of these issues, type a suitable name in the text box and click the button. You will now be able to select the link in the Saved Searches at the bottom of the screen instead of going through the process every time.

A New Focus

2008-01-25T15:59:00.000Z

With what I consider to be the core rules in place, the time period set and the history updated, I will now be focussing on tidying up what I have rather than adding new things.
There are some areas I know need a lot of work still, Psionics being the main one, but I am now holding off adding anything new.
Having said that I am keeping track of any ideas I have and will be putting them towards expansions in the future.
I now have an online tracking tool to record any problems found in the book (though it is designed for software development an may be a little confusion).

My immediate concern is writing an adventure for 1st level characters suitable to be included in the "Secrets of Kingdom Gould". This adventure should cover all the things that are different from the base D&D ruleset and act as a good introduction to the land.
This will be the first significant amount of work I have done towards the Secrets book for some time as I have been spending most of my time on the Hero's Guide.

My hope is to expand this first adventure into a full-blown campaign. With the campaign having it's own Hero's and Secrets book and the outcome of playing it affecting the future history of the Kingdom.

One side issue that will come out of writing this adventure, is that I will have to come up with a standard format for presenting adventures.

2009: KG Release

2008-01-09T12:55:00.000Z

According to the latest news from Wizards of the Coast, I will be unable to release a 4.0-compatible version of Kingdom Gould until 1 January 2009 (unless I have $5,000 to spare).
Work will begin on converting from 3.5 to 4.0 on 6th June 2008 with the release of the new OGL and SRD.

Most of the new work I will be doing now, will concentrate on background material.

Year Zero

2007-12-11T13:32:00.000Z

I have finally managed to bring the history of Gould up to date in the main rule book.
The idea is that this is the point in time that the core rules will cover, just after the second demon incursion when Psionics is still very new.

The kingdom is now a more dangerous place, with demons on the loose, the population decimated and much of the Kingdom in ruins.

Getting Closer

2007-11-02T10:24:00.000Z

Last night I managed to include Psionic items into the Heros Guide and rules for psicrystal once I found them (in the classes file of all places!).
So I have finally released a new version of the rulebook. It's been so long since the last one, I can't remember all the changes I've made. It is, however, over 120 pages longer and that is after I condensed the format, using the old format it would have been over 200 pages longer!

Remedy, Compacting and Psionic Feats

2007-10-22T10:14:00.000+01:00

I managed to get a fair bit done on Kingdom Gould this weekend (at least in comparison to the very little I have done recently).

I have finally finished putting in all the Psionic powers, including some new "Remedy" powers which have the same effect as "Cure" spells. Healing is now easier to access once more!
Once I added all these power the Hero's Guide was over 350 pages long! So I made some changes to the formatting to reduce the space between paragraphs and it is now back to a nice 200+ once more.
I have now started the process of adding Psionic feats to the Hero's guide and I'm about half way though already.

What Goes into a Hero's Guide?

2007-10-10T11:30:00.000+01:00

As development has slowed somewhat and all I am currently doing is copying Psionic Powers from the d20 SRD into the Hero's Guide, I thought I'd try and explain why I'm doing this and what the Hero's Guide actually is.

My initial decision was that the Hero's Guide should contain all the information required for a player to take part in a Kingdom Gould campaign. I always found in annoying that for a player to fully experience D&D they need both the PHB and the DMG as the DMG contains all the fun stuff like prestige classes, magic items and additional information like planar cosmology, epic levels and psionics. With Kingdom Gould I decided that players need only the PHB and the Hero's Guide to Kingdom Gould. Because of this, any of the SRD rules that appear in the DMG I have to duplicate into the Hero's Guide (hence the laborious job of copying all the psionic powers).
In the future I will also be including stats for animals to the Hero's Guide, so that when your character buys a horse, you don't need to buy the MM!

The next important thing to include in the guide was the gazetteer for Kingdom Gould, it's history, geography and important people. This information should cover that which is common knowledge to characters; so it will contain descriptions of people and creatures found in certain locations, but no stats. All stats that are not needed by the player are only found in the "Secrets of Kingdom Gould" for the DM to use.

One final thing, the reason for the name "Hero's Guide". For some strange reason, it is not possible for a product to contain the phase "Player's Handbook" in it's name if it wants to be a D&D product, so I needed something else. I was originally thinking of the rather dull title of "Player's Guide", but with the inclusion of the gazetteer I didn't think this was quite right. What I envisioned was essentially a "Player's and Character's Guide", but this didn't scan so well. I tried to come up with a term that would cover both the player and the character and settled on Hero. I thought "Hero's Guide" sounded good, so that's what I called it. I intend to produce more Hero's Guides and accompanying Secrets books, but I need to finish the core books first and the Secrets of Kingdom Gould has barely been started.

The Bigger Picture

2007-09-07T14:37:00.000+01:00

I have always hoped for Kingdom Gould to be bigger that just the Role-Playing Game.
It is after all a world, not just a set of rules.
To be able to have a community driven timeline (as I hope to, at some time) I need to make sure that the various media do not get in each others way.

To simplify this, when I think of other projects (none of which have ever got past the "wouldn't it be cool if..." stage of planning) I try to put them in the own distinct era. Some of these ideas have been used to backfill the history of Gould, others are to be used in future campaigns as they are based in the future.

The trouble with this approach is that the different media can begin to feel like different worlds, and characters from one will never meet with characters from another (with the possible exception of the immortal nymphs). So I change my mind (it happens a lot), especially since these other games/stories may never appear.

Maybe I'll just finish what I've got now and release other eras for the RPG as supplements, then anything else can simply exist in the timeline where it is is best placed.

Looks like I'm back where I started.

Anyway, this has all been kicked off by 3 projects that are in the aforementioned "wouldn't it be cool if..." stage. In chronological order: The Kings of Gould stories and/or novels, Baronies of Gould card game and finally Sky Knights of Kingdom Gould computer game.
All of these ideas have influence the direction of the RPG, but none have made it out of my head until now.

What I Did at Gencon

2007-09-03T11:28:00.000+01:00

I worked on Kingdom Gould for most of the time. There wasn't much call for me to do much at the convention and there was disappointingly little to do as a gamer, so I work on the laptop to update Kingdom Gould.

As I have stated before, I am working on a big addition to the rules that I was keeping secret from my playtest group. However, Matt Hart happened to look at my laptop while I was working and made the single word question "Psionics?".

So the secret is out, psionic powers are going to be in the Hero's Guide to Kingdom Gould. I have modified the core mechanics slightly so that there will be no psionic classes (though there will be psionic prestige classes) but psionics are available to all that want them through feats (and bloodlines). I am currently in the process of putting all the SRD psionic powers into the guide (tedious, but required).

Going Forth!

2007-08-18T09:18:00.000+01:00

Well from what little information that has been made available so far, it looks like there will be a fair amount of rework involved to the races and classes of Kingdom Gould. Classes will need to be expanded to the full 30 levels instead of 20. Not a huge problem as I can always come up with more "stuff", but it sounds like classes may also be moving toward talent trees or something similar (you're not just a fighter, but a sword fighter or an axe fighter). http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drdd/20070816b
Races sound like they may be less of an issue, but there will be some changes I need to take account of.
On another note, I'm now glad that I have been putting much of my content into it's own format for transformation to the final rulebook, this should allow for quick adoption of any new formatting for things like stat blocks or spells.

May 2008

2007-08-17T21:02:00.000+01:00

So May 2008 for 4th edition...
I would assume that a new version of the d20 SRD will follow soon after.
Bearing this in mind, I will be following the news carefully to see how many changes will be needed to Kingdom Gould.
Looks like the "release" will have to wait another year at least...

Mistakes and How to Make Them

2007-08-10T23:28:00.000+01:00

I made a mistake. It happens.
I've decided the best way to deal with it is to correct it as soon as possible, even though the fix may be detrimental to the current players.

You see, I messed up on the number of levels in most of the racial classes. Due to a misunderstanding a few of the races were far more powerful than they should have been.

I have now re-written the racial classes where needed, those with the biggest changes are the Dryad, Nymph and Troll. Each of these racial classes now has significantly more levels.

200 Strong!

2007-08-05T21:45:00.001+01:00

Wow! The Hero's Guide to Kingdom Gould has now reached a whopping 200 pages (206 to be precise). But there still seems to be so much more to do.

Anyway, here's a brief quote from page 206:
"Scott Mills. Socially Inept"
Heh-heh.
Sorry Scott!

New Version of Kingdom Gould

2007-08-04T13:23:00.000+01:00

OK, so I haven't actually release a version of Kingdom Gould yet, but my playtest group has the rules and it's about to change in a big way. Unfortunately I can't say how, I want that to be a surprise. However, I can comment on one of the smaller changes.

I have decided to change the way healing works. For a little background I should explain that Kingdom Gould has no deities and therefore no divine magic, as this will reduce the healing available to characters I decided to make the main setting a mildly positive plane granting everyone fast healing 2.
Since I implemented this, I have been unhappy with the results. The players would either forget all about it, or the trolls would never die due to the combination of fast healing and regeneration.
I realised early on it was a mistake, but couldn't come up with a way to fix it, so I left it in.
I do now have a way to fix it, so I am returning to the normal healing process. Healing will still be more difficult that in a normal D&D campaign, you can't just buy a healing potion or nip down the local temple, but it will be more readily available.

Hello

2007-08-04T13:18:00.000+01:00

Hi, thought I should make a quick first-blog to explain who I am and what I have to blog about.

Well, I'm Geoff Gibbs a computer programmer from Oxford, England. In my spare time a do a lot of role playing and other gaming.

Among other things I am currently writing my own campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons known as Kingdom Gould.

I intend to use this blog to record progress on Kingdom Gould I work on it.