It has been a few busy months since I completed my latest contracted work for Cubicle 7's Rocket Age. Prior to that I responded to a `Powered by the Vortex System' thread in their forum with this post.
I scratched my Agatha Christie itch in the Rocket Age work (for now). Ballard has been bouncing around in my brain and a game has started to coalesce.
Introducing: Mesh Dream.
Mesh Dream is inspired by the enormous gulfs of time and structure and the normalcy of the strange of J.G. Ballard. And the gigastructures and discrete civilizations of Tsutomu Nihei's Blame! The everyday isolated future of Spike Jonze's Her. The dystopian madness of Paranoia's Alpha Complex and the inevitable conclusion that it would all run so much smoother without the citizens. Brandon Graham is a major inspiration with his written and art work on Multiple Warheads, King City and Prophet - his work is a conceptual and visual compass for Mesh Dream.
Mesh Dream will run on a fleshed out and improved version of the system that I designed for Flower. I call it Revolver for now.
My game plan is to write, illustrate and publish Mesh Dream as my next project. I have plenty of other projects on the backburner; I want to edit and release Flower with some nice art. I want to do the same for Acceptance. I have a mostly finished campaign for STALKER that I would love to finish and give to Ville Vuorela, I have written before that I consider his game and the Flow system the cleverest and best realised emulation of fiction in a RPG bar none.
And there is Bandit Country. It is without a doubt the most challenging and radical game project that I have conceived and I have always known it will take time to complete it. Bandit Country is the project I retreat to when my main project is stuck or derailing and it benefits from lurking in my subconscious. All my best ideas for BC have emerged while I was working on another project so I have accepted and harnessed this as a method.
I have a lot of work to go with Mesh Dream. Most of what I have done to date has been tweaking Revolver and figuring out how character creation should work. I need to lay down some boundaries and I will write up my Pillars, Postcards and Palette for you to read.
I hope to test Mesh Dream in the next week or so and will put out a call for playtesting after that. Until then; never doubt the Structure, beware the Goal Tappers and report all signs of the Mesh Dream.
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