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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Welcome to the JAGS Blog

JAGS (Just Another Gaming System) is my generic/universal pencil and paper tabletop roleplaying game. We've won a couple of indie-rpg awards and come in second for every category we've entered. I'm reasonably proud of that.

It's been about 4 years since I've published anything for it and here's why: I realized after doing JAGS Revised (a published book of the original basic rules) that I needed to do the same thing (revise and refine) all the "unusual abilities" (so-called Archetype Abilities). When I begun this (around 2007 or late 2006) I had an idea that it might be complex. I, to be blunt, had no idea.

What happened over the next few years (of almost constant work--although it's not my day job) was a process of learning things about the system I'd (and others--it's not a one-man-show) had created. What happened was that we changed our whole concept of what the book was supposed to be. We went from "a bunch of cool powers" to a refined vision of what might be possible for us to achieve.

Now, years later, with hundreds of electronic pages created, imported into InDesign for layout, and even soft-published, I'm finding myself with a long way to go. I'll go into the history in later posts but I wanted to draw this introduction to a close with my intent.

In order to keep myself focused and keep my effort up, I think the best way is to capture my thoughts here, as I work on them--to have a daily journal about what we're working on so that I can track where I think I am.

I don't expect this to make a whole lot of sense to a casual reader: I'm going to do my best to properly frame discussions but I simply don't have time to go into detail on the big picture stuff. We'll see how it works out.

-Marco

2 comments:

  1. I've been interested in JAGS for some time, and I think the only thing that's kept me from seriously checking it out in a deeper sense is the fact that I can not find a blank character sheet to print out and fill in.

    Where in the Revised book can the sheet be found? I even used my PDF reader's search function for the words "Character Sheet" and apart from a few mentions of how it contains certain tables to fill out, there was, to my knowledge, no actual sheet.

    The site I got all this from:
    http://www.jagsrpg.org/
    doesn't have it, and the navigation buttons all point toward the Home page.

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  2. check the latest post. Would a java program work for you that generates characters in HTML even if it's in beta and maybe not very "user friendly" in some respects?

    ReplyDelete