Coming Soon: Resolute, Adventurer & Genius

After the flurry of work to get Warrior, Rogue & Mage ready, I had time to think about how the Wyrm system might be adapted to other genres. Mark Meredith is hard at work on a spy/technothriller adaptation which I am eagerly anticipating. Jason Cabral, a longtime friend, and I had poked around with doing cyberpunk, and we still may, but out of the blue one day not long ago Jason said to me, “You know what would really rock? Pulp.”

It hit me like a thunderbolt. My current favorite game is White Wolf’s Adventure!, which I am still slowly learning as a system. To have a pulp action-adventure game which I knew intimately from the start and would be even simpler to run and modify on the fly… ah, glory! And so we began.

Resolute, Adventurer and Genius is being built on the Wyrm system which powers WR&M. It will use three attributes based on character archetypes from the genre, but like its parent game will recognize that characters in the genre often blend the archetypes. For example, that famous whip-swinging raider of tombs and temples certainly embraces all three archetypes.

Talents will offer a broad array of genre-appropriate special abilities, from mentalist tricks, fists of iron and super senses to mystic arts and the opportunity to be among the world’s best with a particular skill. The skill list itself will be simple but broad, and contains two multifaceted skill collections in which characters must take individual specialties (think Knowledge skills in d20 or many other systems). Skills will now have ranked levels, based on an idea from Michael Wolf himself.

RAG will present new rules for vehicles and chases. It will utilize a new damage mechanic that ties damage more closely to the attack roll, and comes with new calculations for defense, hit points and luck (known in WR&M as “fate”) because of the new attribute spread.

Resolute, Adventurer and Genius will be a cooperative release between Stargazer Games and Blue Hex, my personal imprint for free games. I hope to have it released by the end of September, but after the primary writing is finished there will be a playtesting phase which may push the release back.