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I'm thinking about doing something that I planned on doing for a while, just not starting with the main rules but with a supplement: The Eye of Argon RPG! Hailing from an alternative history, where poor teenage Jim Theis wasn't just put down by all the criticism for his short story, but went all out "Well, you do better then!" and thus invented the first RPG, with a lot less mechanical rigor than D&D, but more enthusiasm.

Now, a few years later, third party stuff is coming in, and this is what my fake product will be, one supplement for the Tales from the Emerald Orb game. 

My main goals are

  1. Classic Sword & Sorcery adventuring
  2. Rules references that don't look like just some OSR/D&D clone
  3. Capturing that Theisian enthusiasm
  4. Avoiding the S&S sexism part

I'm not doing this as a parody with badly spelled Thesaurus abuse. Big inspiration will be early adventures (e.g. Judges Guild) and what Christian Conklehas been doing with his take on Revolt on Antares or Encounter Critical.

My job workload has been a bit wobbly recently, so I hope I'll be able to finish this in time.

Sounds awesome! I was thinking a bit about Encounter Critical for this jam but hadn’t had a chance to work it into the convo yet so I’m glad you did! I think it fits the theme well, an alternate history “original rpg” is an idea just full of possibilities. 

There aren't that many games like this, but I'd regard EC as an existing game, albeit with a fictional history/background, and thus not applicable to this jam? If so, I'd encourage everyone to make something for Conkle's Mork Borg-derived new rules for the original setting, not EC directly, given who currently holds the rights to that.

Yeah EC doesn’t quite fit the jam, but it and a few others are related in spirit and I think can still give  inspiration for entry ideas