Nostalgia Returns: New Game Announcement

It’s been a while since the last game was added to my Nostalgia Games catalog. Before I spoil the big surprise and let you know what’s coming next, I wanted to take a brief stroll down memory lane…

Many years ago, while teaching summer school, I decided to make a Transformers RPG. This game was released in 2011 and has gone on to be viewed, downloaded, and dissected by thousands of people!

After that, I pushed on into another game, this time based on a significantly more obscure property, Visionaries. That game came out in late 2012, and while it has found a far smaller footing, I remain incredibly proud of that game. I look forward to using its system again in the future, albeit with a more robust set of parameters.

Thundercats came out in the summer of 2014, the result of a Game-in-a-Day experiment. Its system is the most fiddly of the four games I have written in this line, but I remain rather pleased with some of its innovations and the fact that the whole thing came together in 24 hours!

I cheated to get Care Bears out in early 2015–it was actually a much older project that I discovered was in a closer-to-complete state than I had originally thought. A quick polishing pass got that out into the world, but judging by the view count on that one, nobody was really waiting for it to exist… 🙂

That brings us to a now-three-year gap in releases. What was once a regular fixture of this blog, new game announcements, has gone dry. To be fair, so too has the rest of the blog. Once I started writing novels more full-time, I had less and less time for the fun stuff of the blog.

Early in 2017 I announced that I was going to be writing a dual-purpose game that would be skinned for both WWE (or rather, classic WWF) and Jem. Yes, I know, that sounds improbable. I still have a good idea for that! But the impetus for the project is a friend who life has kept rather busy and mostly removed from my life. Since he’s not here to egg me on, the project simmered and cooled and is now so far back on the mental stove that I wouldn’t be able to accurately say it is in a burner at all.

So what will we do for 2018 to get a new Nostalgia game into the world?

Well, as anyone who knows me knows all too well, there are a few projects left on my Holy Grail list. One of them, Gargoyles, deserves a more massive treatment. In fact, I can guarantee that when Gargoyles gets made, it will be the first ever Super-Nostalgia game. 120 pages and boat loads of awesomeness. So, that is NOT this year’s project.

(This is like counting down the winning carrot in Killer Bunnies. I like it.)

I also have a deep yearning to write a game based on the 1990s Cliffhanger comic book series Crimson by Humberto Ramos and Brian Augustyn. It’s fun and different and might be a nice way to roll out an updated version of the Scale system that was originally used for Transformers. But the thing of it is, that game lies a little outside of my cartoon-based Nostalgia line demographic. So, that is NOT this year’s project.

Silverhawks is an obvious place to re-implement the Trigger system from Thundercats. I also am desperately in need of a deep re-watch of that show in order to get my lore under control. So, that is NOT this year’s project.

There are several novel series (Eddings’ Belgariad/Mallorean and Butchers’s Codex Alera) that have caught my eye for simple RPG-ports, but again, not cartoons. So, those are NOT this year’s project.

So…

What’s really left? Depending on who you ask, there are a few lynchpin animated series from the 1980’s that I haven’t talked about.

Voltron is close to my heart and is a PERFECT place to re-implement Visionaries‘ Position system. But because the game-in-a-day project includes a requirement of making a new system, that won’t work. Not it.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never really rocked my world as hard as it did so many others. Until I start feeling it call to me, it won’t work. Not it.

G.I.Joe is in the same boat. Worse, I am only about 20% versed in the lore, so it will take a load of research. Not it.

So…

I mean, come on. How long have you known where this is going?

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe will be the game-in-a-day project for 2018. I will take my boundless love of MOTU and smash it into 60 pages in 24 hours. It will feature a new mechanical engine (in a simplified form, as these games always use), and it will feature the classic, FILMation-influenced mythology (which leaves the possibility of later editions that bring Princess of Power, New Adventures, 200X, and even MOTUC into the fold, just like the second edition of Transformers brought in Beast Wars/Beast Machines).

 

The date of this marvelous, terrifying experiment?

Why, I think it shall be March 13th. Why March 13th? Because I have a day off of work, and by that date I will be eager for a break from working on Next Alliance Book 3: Lashing Out (coming out in early June at Wizard World Des Moines)!