Tuesday, August 15, 2023

Publishing Cold Iron Blackmarsh Adventures

 Over the past few years I have been promoting Cold Iron and gaining some interest. I had started running some play by post, including a samurai adaptation, and back at the end of 2022 I started to think I might actually be able to run a live game on Roll20, I chose to set the campaign in Robert S. Conley's Blackmarsh setting that he has been expanding thus the title Cold Iron Blackmarsh Adventures.

Recently I reached out to Mark Christiansen about publishing and he has given me a general go ahead to publish my efforts with attribution (of course!). I'm still working out some details, and it may take some time to bring this to fruition but I'm excited. I don't expect a huge response, but there is interest, and after nearly 20 years of talking about Cold Iron on various gaming forums, no one has ever said "Hey, did you know this game does that?" about any of the features I find the most compelling. Some things may be close. Other systems have ways of maintaining spells, and every system with magic/spell points specifies how they recover, but no other system does exponential growth or tapping the regeneration rate to maintain continuing spells. No other system uses the normal distribution, though plenty use 3d6 for a bell curve, though I did finally see someone suggest using d10s to roll digits of a random number between 0 and 1 but that was in the context of multiplying, dividing, or applying an exponent to a percentage chance (so you can exactly, for example, do 1/2 of 25% by reframing it as 0.25/2 = 0.125 and roll 3 ten sided dice to generate a 3 decimal place number between 0 and 1 to exactly map that 12.5% chance of success - that's half of Mark's innovation).

So if you're still watching this space, watch for more announcements...

Or better, reach out to me and maybe I'll invite you to my Discord server, or look for me on the RPG Pub ( https://www.rpgpub.com ).

Frank

1 comment:

rredmond said...

Please no Discord! ;)
Thanks for posting!