I have now finished work on the Hammercalled quick-start guide and adventure for my Hammercalled Roleplaying Game.
It features all the rules you need to play, a 3-5 hour adventure with some plot hooks for later adventures, and eight pre-generated characters.
Because I've been working on this pretty hard, I don't have a lot more that I can say that I didn't put in the foreword, so I'll just include that:
It has been almost a year since I was possessed by an idea: take the foundation of the games I've loved and played and turn them into a universal roleplaying system that focuses on telling stories without giving up on having solid mechanics.
My belief is that having a game system that encourages people to focus on the story, but lets characters be mechanically distinct, gives the best possible experience.
In Hammercalled, I've tried to do some pretty radical changes from the norm. It draws heavy inspiration from at least five other games, and has elements drawn from at least a dozen more. The story I weave in Aftermath and the Hammercalled universe is drawn from at least as many sources.
My first goal with Hammercalled is facilitating storytelling. My goal is that by the time that players play ten sessions, no more than 20% of the time in play should ever be spent worrying about dice and mechanics, even in sessions with heavy combat.
What I found in an early playtest is that with the right mindset to running the game, I was able to get below that, all without sacrificing the thrill of risk that comes from mechanical interactions.
We achieve this through a number of streamlining simplifications, but also through making things transparent and unified throughout the system.
We have a block of attributes that will be familiar to players of almost any roleplaying game on the planet, and serve as a skeletal foundation for the mechanical manifestation of a character, but the elements that make up the other parts of a test are tailor-made for each individual character.
The result turned out to be greater than I had even hoped. I had set out to create a system that minimized the need to reference rulebooks because the characters made the rules.
My players, long used to playing in systems with constraints on their characters, found that they could pursue options and characters that wouldn't even have been possible in other settings, as Mancha the talking dog and Baku the ape-man myconid shaman can attest to.
Hammercalled has been an adventure on many levels, but now that it has reached a state where it can be shown confidently to the world, not just in the bare-bones state of the Hammercalled Rules Reference (you can click on the link to see the most recent version), but in a self-contained, user-friendly package.
One of the goals of Hammercalled is also to make a philosophical point. Even before founding Loreshaper Games, I've been an advocate of the notion of free gaming, and with Hammercalled I am pursuing a radically open license. Anything you see in this book: the images, the text, and the rules themselves, is entirely free of any copyright restraint other than attribution. I use freely available fonts (Lato and Crimson Text) and freely available software for the majority of my work, so that others can follow in my footsteps if they so desire.
All we ask in return is that if you like this book and this game, you spread the word. Write a review. Play a game with your friends. If you want to give us money, you can on PayPal or by contributing on DriveThruRPG when our products go live there. We have social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Steemit (we update Steemit daily!).
You can also join us on our Discord server, where I am available to answer questions and address any concerns.
I hope you enjoy Hammercalled as much as I have. It's been a product of a lot of labor and a lot of love, and I'm happy to see what it's become with the help of my close friends and dedicated playtesters. There's a lot of room going forward for improvement, but there's also no reason not to celebrate where we've gotten.
