Ooh! Shiny Toy!

First the general news... We have a buyer for the shop gear, and hopefully this one won't back out. We should know by Monday or so whether it's a done deal. Fortunately the landlady has given us an extra week to get squared away and out of there.

Next, the creative news. Yesterday I got my copy of the Serenity RPG. It'd be the Firefly RPG, except that one company owns the rights to the tv series and another owns the rights to the movie. Frankly, if there were any sense in the world the rights to both would belong to Joss Whedon, but this is America, the Land of Microscopic Contract Fonts. Upshot of it is that while the gamebook is officially based on just the movie, the other universe details are slipped in as long as there's no blatant copyright violations (no mention of episode titles, no theme song lyrics, no stills from the series, etc). It works, though it raises the irony value considerably.

The system seems pretty functional, though it seems based more around group storytelling than gung-ho hackenslash gaming. Considering the basis for it all, that's a good thing. For yet another gun drama, we'd watch John Woo instead of Firefly. The rules seem straightforward enough for a newbie to pick up at their core, but on some of the finer points it seems like the author was either rushing through or operating on a 'does it really matter' basis. Rather than give you a comprehensive list of weapons, they give you the basic model of each kind and then rules for spiffing them up as you like. You're given a handful of sample ships and then rules to make your own. Before you buy your character's attributes, you buy their quirks and flaws, so they start off being distinctive.

Anyhoo, it looks like it'll be a blast to play. Me being me, I'm already creating sample characters and scheming up stories. Maybe I'll even write one some day. If only I still had a gaming group...