I definitely hear you! As someone who ran 3 campaigns of it over the games many years of playtesting (the formatting for which would be a minor nightmare to update), it's a VERY prep heavy game and that's without having the backlog of units to pull from (something I already learned and am trying to tackle with current projects; playable content out of the box is key). WRT structure for gravities, this is another tricky thing to navigate in a game whose play is meant to be somewhere between the trad and OSR - I've yet to see adventures for this style of game that I'd use so I keep working on other stuff until something finally clicks. More generally a big reason I want to rework the core system is because there were SO many moving parts to keep track of (all of which could've been streamlined with more foresight) that made actually writing a module pretty rough in practice. This is to say nothing of percolating expectations of "balance" which further killed my desire to work on them. Overall the reason I want to start back from square one just as a solo project is because the game really got away from the vision I was hoping for and really outgrew being a labor of love into something I dreaded having to maintain, and even if I bring people on to help directing still takes time and energy during a time in my life where I'm still looking for secondary work to hopefully be able to afford a house eventually. I think designing with a fill-in-the-blank tools in mind is going to be key and I can say when/if Steel Hearts comes back it'll be bigger than ever BUT that's likely many years down the line.
I do have half a mind to take down the current Ver 0 page because I feel like more than a few people don't quite know what they're getting into when they see it, but also I think living with one's failures is important...










