It’s definitely nice to actually get a project moving. I’ve uploaded the initial draft of Halo: The Covenant War, the aforementioned Fudge-powered RPG adaptation of Bungie’s Halo video games. It’s completely untested, but them’s the breaks. Any comments would be appreciated. New versions and new matieral will follow paytesting.

My artist friend also realized that I suck at inking and coloring, especially comapred to him (which was not a big revelation), and took it upon himself to re-do the coloring for the forthcoming paper minis:

Up next is an adventure scenario for Halo, then Thrash 2.0 (fighting game RPG), and then Tokyo Heroes (sentai RPG), and I have entirely too many ideas for what’ll come after that. Plus a 24-hour RPG mixed in there somewhere.

I should mention that the Halo minis are only the things that’ll be used in the scenario I’m working on (or not working on, since at the moment I’m too busy to seriously work on fun stuff). Hence the vehicles part has only thee (including the Shade turret). Note the different Warthog turrets.

Also, although the guys at halo.bungie.org liked the character minis enough to include them in the random pictures that show up in the upper left corner of the site (though they have hundreds, so it’s not like it shows up super often), my artist friend is going to give them a proper inking coloring job. Now I just need the game to go with them… ^_^;

My artist friend is doing up a art for paper minis for my Halo RPG thingy, and he’s completed the major ones (just a couple of vehicles to finish things up), but he left the inking and whatnot to me. So, that’s finally out of the way. Eventually we’ll put together a PDF or something, but in the meantime here’s what they look like:

I’m a big fan of his cartoony style (he does anime well too, as seen in the Mascot-tan illustrations, plus he’s doing a piece for Uresia). It’s a little weird to look at it just because unlike him I’ve played both games a whole lot, and the Covenant guys especially have a lot of weird details that you tend not to notice while they’re shooting at you.

My friend Thinh (who also did art for Mascot-tan) has started in on the paper minis for my Halo RPG. I saw the sketches he did for the Grunt and Jackal last night, and was (predictably) very happy. I need to find a digital camera so I can take pictures of the minis from our superhero game… The Halo scenario I want to run is likewise coming together, though it’s mostly a collection of set pieces for battles strung together. I need to get around to buying a bigger dry-erase battle mat thingy too…

I’m also working on putting together a “soundtrack” for the game. Since it’s based on a series of video games (with pretty damn good music to boot), I’ll be using a combination of the Halo and Halo 2 soundtracks, plus some of the fan-created music that’s out there. I’m still debating whether or not to go to the trouble of using HBO’s dialogue databank to include snippets of dialogue from the video games. It could be fun (especially for the Grunts), but a lot of extra work too.

For the actual game itself I mostly need to round out the combat rules and stat up things. Midterms are starting to kick in at school (and on top of that I have to rush to apply for grad school), so I don’t know how much time I’ll have for to work on RPG stuff.

One of the players in the T&J campaign I’m playing in has been going hog-wild making paper minis on cardstock and with original art (he happens to be IMO a pretty brilliant artist too), which were surprisingly helpful all around when we had a big battle against a bunch of mooks. For no apparent reason he made a Master Chief, and I wound up getting inspired to try and tackle an idea I’d been toying with for a looong time now — a Halo RPG. It seems like minis are at once underrated and overrated in RPGs. They make a really kickass visual aid, but they can also turn an RPG into a boardgame sometimes. Still, a lot of the fun of Halo is in the tactics, so it makes sense to include minis and maps in some capacity.

I’m kind of designing with a specific mini-campaign in mind, about a group of marines who, after endless weeks of boredom, find the planet they’re stationed on suddenly under attack by the Covenant. I’ll be using a highly customized flavor of Fudge–basically a simplified version of the stuff I was talking about for Ether Star, with templates and hit points–with character creation geared towards getting characters put together and into the action as quickly as possible. You pick a profession (just Marines for my first game) and a specialty (demolitions, sniper, ODST, etc.) to determine all of a character’s skills, one free Gift, three personal skills at Fair (+0), and a Quirk (Whiner, Ice Queen, Slick, etc.) to give some personality.

Fudge Points are definitely going to be an important part of the game; it’ll be not unlike Cinematic Unisystem how PCs use them to stay alive. Also, there’ll be an NPC Spartan whom the players can spend FP to give tactical direction, thereby giving them the collective tactical brain of the whole group (and the badass with the regenerating force field is someone you want to stay alive, after all).

The actual adventure is still a bit on the sketchy side, but between various Halo machinima series and entirely too many Megadeth songs (Return to Hangar, The Disintegrators, Crush ‘Em, Rust In Peace, Train of Consequences, etc.) I’m starting to put together what I hope will be a rocking experience. As usual, I’m going to put a lot of time into having a soundtrack for the game, in this case a mix of heavy metal, Halo OST selections, and whatever other soundtrack stuff seems appropriate. A lot of it will play out like an action movie (or god forbid an FPS) with a bunch of action sets where much asskicking happens, and some of these will definitely be based on Halo multiplayer stages.