Howdy

I'm in the midst of rewriting all of Drier Deserts, Hotter Suns with lessons learned from 3 years of playtesting, game design experience (both reading and writing rules) and generally thinking very critically about the game as a whole. I've now finished the Character rules.

DD/HS has evolved dramatically over the years. I've labelled it as rules light, OSR, new-school, and everything else. So much has gone into the game that it's identity is to some extent unknowable. The game is ultimately this: Sci-Fi RPG rules the way I want to run and play them. It's not Traveller, SWN, or Mothership. It's simply my ideal version of each of those games It orbits in my own personal goldilocks zone. The character rules (which include all of the basic rules, character creation, combat, character options, and gear) in particular are almost exactly as I'd like them to be. That's 60 pages done. This re-write will likely be the final version of the core rules. Minor tweaks from playtesting or re-balancing may follow, but at least for the core mechanics, I'm very satisfied. This will be 'v1'.

The remainder of work to be done on the core rules are all ship related. 1 chapter, about 15 pages. A major reason for this re-write, and IMO a massive improvement to the game as a whole, has been moving ship specific rules into the character section. Interacting with your ship is at the core of DD/HS. Your ship is your home, but it's also a million other things. The main reason why I even wrote DD/HS in the first place is because ships in sci-fi games so often feel either like an afterthought or overly complex. At times, DD/HS embraces that the complexity. A space ship is a complex thing. There's a bit of crunch there for those that want to engage with *mechanical* complexity, but the game is designed to remain accessible while still keeping the machinery of the ship close to heart.

More than ever, the shared responsibility of crewing a spacecraft is present in the rules themselves. Roles now function more like mini-classes: bundles of tools for player agency. Part of the reason I'm so thrilled at the new rules is because of how the rules are framed now. The game is structurally identical to how it was before, but the organization of it is so much better, simply because the focus is placed on showing players what they can do. The book practically screams at you like: HEY LOOK! YOU'RE AN ENGINEER! LOOK AT WHAT YOU CAN DO! YOU CAN INVENT NEW SHIP WEAPONS AND STUFF! Ships aren't an afterthought, and the v1 character rules make that abundantly clear.

The result is a version of DD/HS that feels more cohesive, more playable, and more fun than ever. It's a game I badly want to run even though I already have a dozen times over. I hope you do too

This post was originally a thread on twitter, but recently, my tweets haven't been reaching folks as well as they once have. So I've edited the thread here as a devlog.